Devasura

The story of the Adulteress chased by a crowd is one that has captivated imaginations and stimulated ethical ruminations for centuries. It is, however, found only in a Johannine pericope (John 7:53-8:11). Called the Pericope Adulterae . And most scholars now agree, based on its literary and contextual peculiarities as welll as comparisons of early manuscripts, that it is a late interpolation into the fourth gospel-that is, the Gospel of John, when originally written, did not have this story . The oldest surviving Johannine manuscripts do not seem to have it. Nevertheless, it still continues to be printed in all versions of the bible. Somebody in the third century was still busy reading Buddhist sources! And he saw it necessary to force fit yet another Indian story into a Jewish context. The result is highly dramatic! The interpolator of this passage has made full use of the space yielded by the stage shift. O “ The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in ad...

Sometime around 305 BCE, Seleucus Nicator, the general of Alexander, tried to wrest back control of North West India. He came into contention with the young Chandragupta Maurya. The same Maurya whose grandson Asoka would play the second most critical role in Buddhism after the Tathagata himself. His Indian ambitions thwarted, Seleucus had to settle for a peace treaty with loss of the eastern Satrapies. Turning his attention back to the Mediterranean, Seleucus went on to fight many wars and built many new cities. Including Antioch in Anatolia, Edessa and Seluicia in Mesopotamia. Also, around 300 BCE, he built the city of Dura Europos in present day Syria, on what would later be a hotbed of imperial contentions and hotpot of cultural hybridization. On the ephemeral borderlands of the Seleucid, Roman, Parthian and Persian empires. A city that was lost to the sands in 257 CE until excavated in the 20th century. It has revealed, among many things, substantial syncretism. A synagogue,...