Tag Archives: judaism

Divine Quandaries

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Divinity, at least according to followers of Abrahamic religions, involves five essential attributes: eternal existence, the divinity must have always existed and will always exist; omnipresence, i.e., the divinity must be ubiquitous, concurrently everywhere; omniscience, the divinity must have permanent and eternal knowledge concerning absolutely everything not only with respect to the past and the present, but also the future; omnipotence, the divinity must necessarily be all powerful, capable of anything and everything without reservation; and, the divinity must be omnibenevolent, all good without a trace of evil or negativity.

Other religions, more ancient religions as well as contemporary religions have been more realistic.  Deities, where they existed, were just more powerful than humans albeit not omnipotent, especially when they were plural.  If not ubiquitously omnipresent, they were perhaps not bound by the rules concerning time and space that apply to us and could show up when least expected.  Omniscient?  Not at all, although perhaps they, or some of them, were more cognitively gifted, at least sometimes.  Eternal?  Nope, they somehow came into being, usually sequentially, and in most cases, eventually expired, although the expiration was sometimes temporary.  And omnibenevolent?  Hell no!  They were willful and selfish and prone to emotional outburst.  Hmmm, that all sounds a great deal like the Abrahamic YHWH.

Still, to be fair, omniscience and ubiquitous omnipresence would seem possible if one eliminates time and space, treating them as illusions.  If time did not exist, then eternity would be either irrelevant or merely a natural state.  Perhaps in that context, since nothing would really exist, omnipotence might also be possible although not all that potent. But omnibenevolence is subjective although, in the absence of time and space and anything at all (other than perhaps, a sentient singularity), it might well be either irrelevant or natural, there being no choices to make.  In the foregoing context, an idealized divinity such as that imagined in Abrahamic religions might be possible, but only until time and space arrived, only until decisions became, not only possible, but necessary, even if any such decisions were merely illusions.

So, where does that leave us? 

Perhaps pondering on the nature of quantic phenomena and how they might impact the foregoing.  As I understand it, everything and anything is possible at a quantic level, sort of like the concept of chaos where, rather than consider it a negative, chaos is merely the confluence of every possibility; however, quantic activation would require an observer which would create a sort of bootstrap cosmogony.  Kind of like the ones were it is the worshippers who create the worshipped.

Or would that involve cosmology?

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on Thanksgiving Day 2025

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I am drawn to the concept of giving thanks rather than asking for boons from the divine.  It was something I felt strongly at times of spiritual longing while I was still more of a traditional believer, times long gone.  I am still drawn to the concept, albeit in a more generic form while concurrently more specifically.  While reflecting on towards what and towards whom my thanks should be directed.

A deity is evoked by most for purposes of giving thanks on this holiday, at least in the parts of the world where I’ve lived, in Europe and in the Americas.  It is an Abrahamic deity worshipped by three antagonistic branches, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and that deity is purported to possess five principle unique attributes.  He (the deity is identified as masculine for the most part) is eternal, he has always existed and will always exist; he is omnipresent, i.e., he is ubiquitous, concurrently everywhere; he is omniscient, knows absolutely everything not only with respect to the past and the present, but also the future; he is omnipotent, all powerful, capable of anything and everything without reservation; and, he is omnibenevolent, all good without a trace of evil or negativity. 

I guess, if we humans did not exist, if our world did not exist, the concurrence of such attributes might conceivably be possible.  But we do exist, our world exists, and evil certainly exists and, on this Thanksgiving Day, evil seems to predominate, especially in the so called Western World.  And that evil seems to emanate directly from the purported Abrahamic Holy Land in the Middle East.

Today and for many years, decades really, It has been difficult, actually, impossible for me to be thankful to that incoherent complex of attributes that purportedly constitute “our” deity.  Or to believe that such an entity exists.  The three attributes most impossible for me to reconcile are the “omnis”: omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence.  When effective, logic, a premise based form of analysis that purports to lead to accurate conclusions, could accept an evil or amoral omniscient, omnipresent omnipotence; or, it could accept an omnibenevolent, omnipresent and omniscient but impotent reality.  But not the confluence of all three attributes.  In general, the logical exercise in which we claim to believe and which we use, or more accurately, misuse and abuse, rarely works because, when its conclusions are put to the test and fail, rather that reexamine the premises and the analysis which led to the deficient conclusions (as tested against reality), we rationalize and make excuses.  We do so with respect to our Abrahamic concept of divinity by introducing the concept of purported “free will”, an oxymoronic absurdity when its exercise is subject to horrific and perpetual punishment.

The Abrahamic faiths are, not surprisingly given the forgoing, fratricidal, albeit usually sequentially so.  And hypocrisy reigns among at least two of them, Christianity and Judaism, the polar aspects of Abrahamic religion with Islam, strangely, being the bridge between them but, frequently, the most despised, belittled and calumnied by the other two. 

Take Christianity for example.  It was purportedly founded by followers of a gentle and loving Hebraic Palestinian from the small town of Nazareth during its Roman era but in reality, the religion as it has almost always existed was the creation of a misogynistic Hellenized Jew, Saul of Tarsus who eventually used a more politically convenient Roman name, Paulus.  The original Nazarene variant was centered in a small communist community in Jerusalem led by a certain James, cognamed “the Just” and comprised of the original disciples and apostles of his brother, a certain Yešu (today Latinized to its Hellenic variant, Jesus). The bastard Pauline variant quickly deformed into a traditionalist hierarchical control mechanism used to accumulate wealth and power, so much so that it eventually became the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Today, “evangelical and other so called Christians have completely rejected the communist economic premises of the original followers of Yešu, in part, because of the distortion of a statement by the founder of modern communism, an atheistic Jew, Karl Marx, to the effect that “religion was the opiate of the masses”, a statement contextually related to Marxian dialectic theory concerning economic evolution rather than to criticism of religion by which he meant that, at a certain point in economic history, religion was essential to survival making terrible conditions tolerable in the way that modern medications and medical treatments aid in our survival.  Through distortion and manipulation, modern Christianity, at least in the United States, has become the opposite of what Yešu espoused.  It has become a selfishly capitalistic, xenophobic philosophy apparently enamored of mass murder under the guise of capital punishment and perpetual war.  Judaism has also undergone drastic devolution with a significant component splitting off into an atheistic political Zionist variant espousing genocide, ethnic cleansing and even rape as a legitimate control mechanism for dealing with non-Zionist dissidence.  To those Abrahamic variants, Thanksgiving Day has become a de facto celebration of injustice, inequality and inequity, but that is something the original celebrants of the holiday in New England, the religiously intolerant Puritans would likely have ascribed.

That version of the Thanksgiving Day holiday, the one celebrated today, Thursday, November 27, 2025, is not one I can subscribe to, although I do enjoy some of its incidentals, like football games designed to draw our attention and energy away from our quotidian problems.  Thus, while in my moments of most intensely positive feelings towards divinity during a time long ago when I accepted the traditional Abrahamic version of divinity as possible, back when I gave thanks to “whatever gods may be” (a phrase from the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley), today, my attitude is profoundly different.  Today, my thanks are limited to more tangible subjects.  To people I’ve known and to people I’ve never met but admire.  To those among the subjected and abused and downtrodden and tortured and maimed and killed who struggle to protect those they love and to stand for principles of equity and justice and compassion and generosity and peace, today something that applies most clearly to the Palestinian victims of Zionist genocide as it once stood for the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide, or to the Armenian victims of Turkish genocide, or to the indigenous victims everywhere of European genocide.  To all the economically deprived parents who work constantly to provide for their families as best they can.  To the Quixotic who struggle for “the right” against invincible odds, knowing that they themselves will never see the fruits of their labors.  But also to those who, for whatever reason, earned or not, I just love.  Those special people who were my classmates at the Citadel, and those fellow Citadel graduates who preceded and followed me, the same being true with respect to the now long departed Eastern Military Academy.  But also to my former students and colleagues everywhere. 

Today I give thanks to and for my family, especially my late mother Rosario and my late grandmother Juanita and my late aunt Carola.  To the many fellow travelers in the quest for a more equitable, more just, more peaceful, more compassionate, more peaceful and more loving world; those I know and who I can call friends as well as those with whom I am only acquainted and those who I’ve never met but who I know exist, have existed or will exist.

That seems a great deal for which to be thankful, even in these truly terrible times where orchestrated polarization for fun and profit regardless of the cost is the rule.  When the United States I love, indeed most of the Global North, is ruled from abroad by an ethics free elite.  Perhaps it always been this way.  But perhaps, the wonderful has always coexisted with the horrendous among the strange life forms who now refer to ourselves as humans.

So, … about the poem “Invictus”, one of my favorites.  It seems appropriate to close out these reflections by sharing it, albeit reformatted into a more narrative, rather than verse format:

Out of the night that covers me, black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.   In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud.   Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.   Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the Horror of the shade, and yet, the menace of the years finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

 
Thank you William Ernest Henley (1849 – 1903).

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on a Conceivably Inept Creator

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Reflecting on religion this morning, specifically on the Abrahamic variants to which most of my religious friends adhere, friends I profoundly respect and generally find to be genuinely good people, it came to me that they appear to consider their creator inept. 

They obviously, albeit respectfully, consider the creator to have been incapable of creating a decent product.  Indeed, their worship is full of lamentations concerning how terrible they are and acknowledging that their deficiencies are inherent and unavoidable. Indeed, purportedly not a single one of the creator’s creations have been free from defects except, perhaps, for himself, as incarnated, but then again, can one really be one’s own creation?

Perhaps.

Don’t know why but Ford Edsels come to mind.

Anyway, “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” is an obligatory refrain by his creations when engaged in formal worship although, of course, logically, the “culpa” should really be ascribed to the entity, divine or otherwise, who designed such creations, especially if it was omniscient and omnipotent at the time.  Perhaps the refrain should more accurately be: “tua culpa, tua culpa, tua maxima culpa”.

Every time we criticize human fallibility, human frailty, the human proclivity to err against the divine will, we are criticizing, not only ourselves (the divine creation) but also the angelic supervision to which we are purportedly subject.  That concept of divinity posits not only an inept creator but one so full of hubris that it blames its errors on its creations, whether on us directly or on his angelic host, some of which also proved, let’s say … “deficient”.  Nephilim come to mind, as do their fathers.

Perhaps that explains the world in which we live, one where one branch of the Abrahamic faiths, the one involving the creator’s purportedly chosen people, engage, in the creator’s name, in genocide, massive and constant theft, justified rape, etc., (and not only recently, it’s a historical trend), and his more recent adherents in another branch, the Christians (originally Nazarenes and then Cristers) look the other way like the three famous simians who see no evil, hear no evil and certainly don’t expose any evil except with respect to whatever minor transgressions they themselves have engaged in, which they bemoan and chastise, … mainly on Sundays.

My reflections are, of course, blasphemous and heretical and somehow or other, probably evil.  Or, perhaps, the creator would agree that its followers are, perhaps inadvertently, being too critical of their creator.  Being very sensitive to any criticism (consider how it purportedly dealt with its archangel Hel-el, subsequently mistranslated by the abysmally ignorant St. Jerome as “Lucifer”; or how it dealt with almost all of its creations when, in a fit of temper, it drowned them all), … it may be worth reconsidering those aspects of its worship.  Just saying, …..

Still, as Elphaba Thropp, the purported wicked witch of the west, perhaps reflecting on YHWH or perhaps just on water, exclaimed with her dying breath in the 1930s version of the Wizard of Oz (the foregoing name is, however, as envisioned many decades later by author Gregory Maguire): …

“What a world, what a world!!!!”

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Reflections on Evolutive Monotheism

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Prior to the advent of egotistical monotheism in the Arabian peninsula, the goddesses Al-lāt, Al-‘Uzzá, and Manāt were believed, as once portrayed in Salman Rushdie’s infamous Satanic Verses, to have been the daughters of Allah and back then, before the rise of Islam, Allah was one among many members of the caste of the divine, as was supreme Canaanite divinity El and as was El’s errant son, YHWH, and as were YHWH’s sixty-nine brothers and their Sumerian cousins and many, many others.  And they cohabited, not quite in peace, but neither in a state of perpetual genocidal animosity, as, all too soon, came to be.  Came to be, if not the norm, at least the custom among those ghoulishly gullible Abrahamic humans who chose to follow and emulate ghastly YHWH.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Syncretic Evolutionary Accretion in Human Spirituality

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I recently commented on an academic colleague’s article contrasting Christian and Jewish perspectives concerning the disgraced apostle Judas Iscariot, perhaps unfairly criticizing her observations based on the Jewish Toledot Yeshu as shallow[1].  The article described Christian attitudes with respect to Judas as reflecting the most extreme example of evil and betrayal possible, an attitude indeed shared by many, but not one universally shared among more modern Christians, especially in light of twentieth century efforts to rehabilitate Judas and ameliorate the perception of the Jewish role in the arrest, torture and execution of Yešu[2], given the climactic horrors of antisemitism during the Second World War seeking to treat both in a more neutral manner. 

The Jewish attitude towards Judas, as reflected in the Toledot Yeshu (as well as in both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmud), predictably regard him as a hero, albeit as a hero without ethical boundaries, and as the savior of Judaism in the face of encroachment by Yešu-inspired heretics (not yet misnamed “Christians” by Saul of Tarsus[3]).  My point in criticizing (too strong a word really) the authors’ description of related Christian perceptions concerning Judas was that, to an increasing number of Christians, rather than an arch-villain, Judas Iscariot is a tragically complex figure who faced irresolvable conflicts of interest between his aspirations seeking a messianic Jewish liberator and the otherworldly idealism attributed to the victim of his betrayal, a conflict complicated by the reality that, at any rate, he was irrevocably bound to the fate decreed for him by the always strange Abrahamic deity which both he and Yešu believed they served. 

For some reason, the forgoing led me to reflect on the accretive nature of Abrahamic religions and then, to reflect on the reality that most if not all religions seem accretive.  A strange leap but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Consider:

The roots of all Abrahamic religions lie in the city of Uruk in ancient Sumer.  They all start with a certain Sumerian, ironically given subsequent beliefs, the son of an idol maker.  That Sumerian’s original name was phonetically Abiramu but has reached us as Abraham.  Based on the foregoing it seems clear that most of the stories in the Hebrew Book of Genesis, e.g., the Garden, the Flood, etc., have Sumerian roots, but as Abiramu and his sister-wife Sarai and their descendants fled though Egypt into Canaan, and Judaism slowly evolved as a religion, cultural borrowing was heavy and included Akhenaton’s monotheism, the Midian religion wholesale, and from Canaan, its divinity, YHWH, one of the seventy sons of the chief Canaanite god, El.  Somewhere along the line however, for reasons unknown, Judaism shed its female deities, the numerous wives of YHWH including Anat-Yahu, Aholah and Aholibah , Asherah, Anatha of the Lions and Ashima of the Doves, not to mention the Shekinah, a process largely rejected for centuries by the common people until Hebrew women were reduced to objects bereft of rights and a religious, civic and social patriarchy, purportedly divinely ordained, was established, history having been reformulated and recorded, as necessary.  Of course, all of the foregoing also forms the predicate for both Christianity and Islam, although Christianity added a number of Hellenic religious and philosophical concepts via Saul of Tarsus (Islam has always been much closer to Orthodox Judaism, ironic given today’s genocidal antipathies).  Wow!!!  What a journey in every sense.

Syncretism is a term used to describe the dialectic process through which accretion leads to religious evolution and it was certainly evident among the religions of the country the ancient Hebrews referred to as “Mizraim” (which we call Egypt) where gods from diverse regions were added to a growing common pantheon where they eventually tended to meld.  The same seems true with respect to divinities and their respective cults in the Indian subcontinent and to the divinities prominent in ancient Greece and Rome.  It may well be true of religions in the Americas as well. 

As a young academic many, many decades ago, I taught a course on comparative religions which I elected to divide into three major segments, the first dealt with primitive spiritual concepts such as animism and totems, the second with mythologies which my students denominated “other peoples’ religions” and finally, to the enormous diaspora of spiritual and religious concepts that have become prevalent during the past three millennia.  Through it all I sensed a fount of religious instincts sprouting from somewhere in central Asia, perhaps somewhere in what is today modern day Mongolia, the place from which, periodically, waves upon waves of refugees turned invaders seemed to erupt, waves that included the Huns, the Mongols and those to whom we refer as Indo-European, Hindus, Achaeans, Aryans, etc.  I visualized the foregoing as a crescendo of peoples and beliefs, perhaps sharing a common origin, then diffracting and subsequently reassembling in differing configurations.  However, all too soon, as tends to occur, the young academic I once was found his academic pursuits deflected into first history, then political science, then law, and my quest for “a unified theory of socio-spiritual evolution” returned to the ether from which it had apparently once sprung, … until recently.  Until when, after semi-retiring to pursue personal interests and research, I returned to old roots exploring the “legends” of Gilgamesh and the origins of YWHW and of the myriad faces of Yešu, which, somehow or other, after reading the article by Ora Limor and Israel Jacob Yuval (“Judas Iscariot: Revealer of the Hidden Truth”), led me back to this introspective reflection concerning the diametrically opposed perspectives concerning both Judas Iscariot and Yešu that have subtlety but profoundly impacted our history during the past two millennia, and that has led me to reflect on how much our socio-religious perspectives are changing as time goes by, as our values change and as our memories evolve. And of how long-held traditional religious beliefs are being considered by some among our new generations as mere myths, a sort of inversion of how the students in my class on comparative religion once considered mythology, while others seem willing to accept and espouse new hypotheses concerning intergalactic aliens as the sources of our civilizations and even, of the possibility that our remote biological ancestors from the Mesozoic Era, the dinosaurs, in fact survived and merely went underground, literally, where they await in their own civilizations for a chance to return to the surface once, in our arrogance, we arrange for our own extinction.

Chaos to me is not a negative but rather, the primal state where once upon a time everything at all was a possibility and contradictions comfortably cohabited as compliments.  Strangely, modern theories of physics involving both minimalist quantic phenomena and omniversal string theories seem filled with echoes of that primordial chaos, the chaos that seems to have existed before the Big Bang or the divine seven days of creation, take your pick. 

Today, as I write, confusion appears to reign, happily enthroned and smiling, as we impatiently seek to untangle the confused webs we’ve woven and somewhere perhaps, echoes from Elphaba Thropp’s refrain at the conclusion of the 1930’s movie, the Wizard of Oz, as she slowly melted, laid low by water, “… what a world, what a world” happily resonate, and perhaps, somewhere outside the bounds of time and space, Yešu and Judas dispassionately debate.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] Limor, Ora and Israel Jacob Yuval (2011): “Judas Iscariot: Revealer of the Hidden Truth” in Peter Schäfer, Michael Meerson, and Yaacov Deutsch, eds., Toledot Yeshu (The Life Story of Jesus) Revisited: A Princeton Conference; pp. 197-220; Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen available at https://www.academia.edu/43624042/Ora_Limor_and_Israel_Jacob_Yuval_Judas_Iscariot_Revealer_of_the_Hidden_Truth_in_Peter_Sch%C3%A4fer_Michael_Meerson_and_Yaacov_Deutsch_eds_Toledot_Yeshu_The_Life_Story_of_Jesus_Revisited_A_Princeton_Conference_T%C3%BCbingen_Mohr_Siebeck_2011_197_220.

[2] “Yešu” is the correct Aramaic phonetic pronunciation of the Hellenized name of the principle protagonist of the diverse Christian faiths usually referred to as “Jesus”.

[3] According to some versions of the Toledot Yeshu, Saul of Tarsus whose Roman name was Paulus and who is referred to by Christians as St. Paul, was really a Jewish infiltrator into the evolving Yešu heresy whose role it was to sunder the movement from Judaism in order to decelerate and minimize conversion.