The Shattered Mirror

A fascinating eye-opener epic courageous enough to explore the misconceptions surrounding the Crucifixion, challenging the generally accepted version with convincing clues exonerating the Chosen People and, unlike The Passover Plot, stressing the selfless spirituality of Jesus in addition to His physical anguish.

A man is murdered and there are repercussions for centuries! Who was this man? Why was he murdered? Was it a spontaneous act or premeditated? Who was the murderer or murderers, and was it a plot?

All these factors are carefully examined and delineated in this beautifully flowing 200-page alliterative prose-poem epic surrounding the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth — endorsed by both the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, HaRav Israel Meir Lau, and His Holiness, the late John Paul II.

In the last paragraph of the Preface to The Shattered Mirror, Dr. Alfred W. Gaudron, Australian Dead Sea Scrolls researcher, sums up the prose-poem as “universal in its appeal to the ordinary reader, but academic individuals might be well advised to look into this piece of writing, because it has a ring of authenticity about it which is fully justified. I congratulate Dr. Papert for her professional presentation of a story so well known that it is not easy to reproduce it in the form that she has achieved.”

Some 2,000 years ago in December, the Roman Augustus, fearing rumors that a Holy Jewish Child would be born who would threaten his empire and way of life, orders a census of all pregnant Jewish women and a massacre of Jewish males born shortly before, during, and after this period. Mary and Joseph escape to Bethlehem and Jesus is born in a manger.

They return to Nazareth for the circumcision and, once again they, the Infant, and their contemporaries disappear for forty days, for Herod has ordered a thorough search for the newborn who might have survived. After this period, they return to Nazareth and Jesus develops into a brilliant, divinely inspired young Man. Some Jewish followers, His disciples, join Him in an attempt to offer a milder form of the Holy Torah to the pagan world by healing the ill and disabled.

The majority of Jews reject this budding religion for its desecration of the Sabbath and eating of non-kosher food. However, despite the ‘stiff-necked arrogance’ of the Sanhedrin who resent his preaching, uninvited, in the synagogues and look upon the increase of the number of Jews abandoning the old traditions as a threat, for three years — for some inexplicable reason — they merely restrict his venue and bring Him in for questioning from time to time.

According to the Gospel, the situation boils on the evening of the Passover Seder when families are occupied with their festivities; and culminates in a ‘roaring vindictive mob’ that condemns Jesus as a traitor, demanding his immediate crucifixion — this on the morning of the First Day of Passover, a Sabbath, when it is forbidden to travel! A double sacrilege!

Another startling accusation is that the ram’s horn was blown in celebration following the crucifixion — the ram’s horn for centuries, until this very day, being blown only on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur and, even then, never on the Sabbath!

These accusations are carefully examined and a logical explanation sought. A full chapter is devoted to the Trial of Jesus where seemingly the Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate, suddenly turns into a ‘concerned friend’ who tries in vain to save Him, despite the threat to the Roman Empire and its mythology! Or was Pilate a wily manipulator who hoped for the survival of that mythology at the expense of the Chosen People, inaugurating ages of Crusades, Inquisition, pogroms, and Holocaust?

There is no denying that death by crucifixion is physically horrifying — and this has been spotlighted throughout the ages, resulting in exile, pogroms, and inevitably the Holocaust — but was there no spiritual reason for Jesus to have accepted this possibility without trying to escape during His three-year reprieve? Was this courageous, divinely inspired Jewish Man prepared to accept the excruciating pain in exchange for Immortality — so that His Mission of Love be remembered and followed; and if so, is not any form of anti-Semitism a desecration of Christianity itself and its Founder?

The Shattered Mirror is also designed to eradicate the existing taboo against Jesus among the Chosen People and to replace it with pride at their Gift to Christianity in its rainbow denominations.

Read the first chapters of The Shattered Mirror.

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All text and illustrations copyright © by Edith Helen Papert. All rights reserved.

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