Interpolation

The Restored New Testament is composed of several sections. The first is titled "The Anointing of Iesous," which is a combination of the synoptic gospels into linear order, excluding all mention of Jewish religion, with commentary. Next is the "Crowning of Jesus," a metrical re-telling of the gospels, again only retaining the portions that Pryse sees as obviously Hellenic. (Pryse states that he feels the Mystery document "stolen" by the Jewish priests was a poem; therefore, he feels that the gospels themselves should be poems.) Pryse follows this with a summation and study of parts of the fourth gospel.

Next Pryse goes over the letters of Paul that he finds to be genuine (again, Pryse's estimation of which Paul letters were and weren't genuine are amazingly in keeping with today's scholarship), and once again covers the Apocalypse, though in this book he re-writes it in metrical form. He ignores Acts, as he finds it to be complete fabrication. The book concludes with literal translations of the Synoptic gospels, including the Jewish "additions," with commentary explaining why Pryse finds the Jewish religion parts to be interpolations to the original, Hellenic text.

This part is great, as Pryse's detestation of fundamentalist Christianity is full of acidic wit. This was my favorite part of the book, and I think the first-time reader should start off with this section, before diving into Pryse's re-writing of the Jesus story, the "Anointing of Iesous." I feel that it gives a better reasoning behind Pryse's theory; you understand more fully why he chose to edit out the Jewish parts of the gospels in his rewrite. Also, it points out obvious mistakes and forgeries in the gospels (most of which I'd never even realized) that, if read by an intelligent person, should put the final nail in the coffin of one's fundamentalism.

Again, though Pryse takes many liberties with the texts and makes many assumptions, his findings will prove to be on the mark for fans of Freke/Gandy/Doherty, and all who ponder the existence of a historical Jesus. I found Apocalypse Unsealed to be the more Earth-shaking book (Christendom owes Pryse many thanks for the writing of that book, as it gave freedom from the doom and gloom, mistaken idea that Revelations offers a future history of the world's end), but the Restored New Testament will provide insightful reading for those interested in the subjects it covers. Though James Morgan Pryse seems to have been forgotten by the modern reading public, his books are still relevant, possibly more relevant than ever. Let's hope a legitimate publisher brings this book back on the market; all we have now is this Kessingner edition, which is cheaply photocopied from an early printing, and, even worse, is split into two volumes.

James Morgan Pryse (1859-1942), founder of the Gnostic Society of Los Angeles in 1928, wrote several books on classical mysticism in the early 20th century. Among them was "The Apocalypse Unsealed," published in 1910, an esoteric dissection of Revelations. In 1914 Pryse published an even more ambitious work, the mammoth Restored New Testament. Once again Pryse attempted to unveil the Hellenic origins of Christianity, while at the same time revealing the esoteric aspect of the texts.

A noble effort, and all those who seek to understand or discover the rumored "hidden meanings" of Christianity should look no further. Whereas most books on mystical Christianity only mention that the New Testament can be read allegorically, but never explain how exactly this can be done, Pryse does all the work for you; this book clearly defines the allegorical interpretations. In doing this, Pryse utilizes research similar to that of modern historians; only Pryse veers off into a more mystical direction.

It is Pryse's theory that the Jesus myth was "stolen" by Hellenized Jews who came across a document that contained the secret teachings of a Pagan Mystery cult, one devoted to Dionysus, Mithra, or the like. These "exoteric priests," who were nothing more than "thieves" who wrote in "uncultured Greek," took this secret document and changed it, replacing the "Sun God" (i.e. Dionysus, Mithra, etc) with a Jew named Iesous, aka Jesus. These forgers then grafted onto the Pagan Mystery document Judaic fragments, such as references to the Old Testament and a lineage that made Iesous appear to be a descendant of David, in order to make the story acceptable to their Jewish target audience.

There are several problems apparent with Pryse's thesis, of course. One, there is no evidence of any stolen Mystery document. (Or is there? Could this be the long-rumored "Q" document??) Secondly, Pryse blames the forgery on a nameless group of Jews who had gained access to the hidden secrets of a Mystery cult. But on closer inspection, this is no different from the theory advanced by modern scholars, most of whom have proven how severely the gospels have been edited over the ages. And three, Pryse veers into speculation by claiming to know, just from reading, what parts of the Testament gospels are genuine, and which have been mutated by the forgers. Pryse offers no notes, and can give no testimonials to the accuracy of his claims. All he has is his classical education and considerable knowledge of Pagan religions, astrology, and Indian metaphysics.

That being said, it is uncanny how accurate much of Pryse's scholarship turns out to be. His theory, that Jesus was a nonexistent character based on dying and resurrecting Pagan godmen such as Dionysus, is much in line with the theories of such authors as Earl Doherty, Timothy Freke, and Peter Gandy, who wrote their own, similar books nearly a hundred years later. But whereas these modern writers just offer speculation that the Jesus myth was "lifted" from the Pagan Mysteries, Pryse proves it; quite believably, I should add.

As a matter of fact, this book served as a lightning bolt to my senses. I had just read Robert Eisenman's "James the Brother of Jesus," a weighty tome on the existence of an historical Jesus. Eisenman makes clear in his opening that ALL of his research stands on one assumption: that some (certainly not all) of the gospel accounts, epistles, Dead Sea scrolls, and Acts of the Apostles document are based on historical truth. Pryse, however, theorizes (and goes about proving) that all of the characters in these documents are fictional creations. In fact, The Restored New Testament can be seen as the opposite image of Eisenman's book. Both authors make the same assumptions: that names have been changed in the gospels to fit the whims of Literalist editors (i.e., Judas being replaced by "Peter," etc), but whereas Eisenman takes the documents at face value, Pryse takes them with a large dose of salt. And, if you go with Pryse's theory, it makes Eisenman's work seem like a big book about nothing at all.

James Morgan Pryse does just as his title suggests in that he restores or rather frees the New Testament of interpolations both deliberate and ignorant and returns it for us to its original structure and content. Not just as a language scholar but also as a person conversant with ancient Greek culture and mythology he has been able to write a most interesting and convincing work.

The tenet of the book is that the story of Iesus as told in the New Testament is a corruption of a Greek mystery play and that the true message is one of the perfecting rite of initiation.

The introduction is particularly informative and logical detailing his arguments about wilful and otherwise alterations of the New Testament, shedding, I think, a profound new (old?) light.

This is the book of tables that I originally trained with, so I suppose that it will always be my favorite. It is based on the Placidus system of house division, but I have never seen any flaw with this model. If you use any of the other house division systems you will no doubt find these tables to be of limited usefulness. Otherwise, you have all the well laid out and easy to read tables that you need for locating house cusps: tables of houses for 0 to 60 degree north, solar-siderial time correction, time correction for longitude, diurnal motion of the sun and planets, semidiurnal motion of the moon, etc. There is even a convenient table of longitudes and latitudes for major cities in both the U.S. and the rest of the world.

There is even a clearly written introduction on how to cast a natal horoscope with included examples. Of course you are also going to need a good ephemerides for planet location. I recommend the Rosicrucian ephemerides in conjunction with this book.

Sure, you can do it all with a computer now--but will you know what it is you've done? With this book, you'll be able to accurately figure house cusps (Placidus or Koch) for virtually any birth time and place (extreme latitudes excepted). If you also buy a decent ephemeris, you'll be able to cast horoscopes like a pro. I definitely think knowing how to do it by hand adds something to the experience.

This is an excellent piece of scholarship and a very readable translation. No collection of primary sources of the period is complete without it.

There are two principal reasons to recommend this book. First, it is one of the rare books in approximation theory that covers complex analytic functions. Second, the selection and presentation of the material is unusually clear and full of useful examples. The author balances the level of generality against the usefulness of the result. In other words, he avoids the trap of stating the result in such a high level of generality that the usefulness of the result is completely obscured. Another good book in this area at a slightly higher level of difficulty is "Theory of Approximation" by Achieser. This book is suitable for self study by a graduate student in the first year or a very advanced undergraduate.

Classical and modern.
The "interpolation" part of the title refers to a classical result of G. Pick [1916], and R. Nevanlinna [1919]. They did it independently. Since the disk D (in one complex variable)is a model of a hyperbolic metric space, interpolation can't be done by just drawing straight lines. If two finite sets of points in D are given(same number of points in the two sets), the issue is to find an analytic function mapping D into itself, which at the same time matches up the points in one set with those in the other. The necessary and sufficient condition for the existence, and the solution, when it exists, is the classical issue. Since this, the framework has offered a wonderful testing ground for main trends in modern analysis, such as the theory of operators in Hilbert space, and for modern techniques in systems theory of engineering, and of scattering theory. The material is wonderfully presented, and the book serves as a lovely introduction to the subject. It is written by two authorities in the field, and helps grad students get entry into an exciting, modern, and very active research area.

Several chapters are not easy to read because of the material, also is not comprehensive about kriging; but despite that,
it has a lot of interesting results and it is worth of reading.

Michael Stein got his Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University under the direction of Paul Switzer. I also studied at Stanford years earlier and also learned about kriging from Switzer. Kriging is a very popular technique for interpolation of spatial data between measurement points. It is an optimal linear technique when the spatial covariance structure is known. It has many practical applications to pollution data, geological data etc. Stein develops the theory as far as he can for the case when the covariance structure is unknown and must be estimated based on the measurement data.

The theoretical development requires some advanced mathematical knowledge on the part of the reader including advanced probability, Fourier analysis and Hilbert spaces. The second order properties of random fields and results on Gaussian measures needed for the development of key results are covered in Chapter 2. Those interested in the practical aspects of kriging can omit the proofs and just concentrate on the results. Chapter 6 provides important practical information.

Although difficult to digest, a careful reading of the book will provide insight into what is good and what is bad about the way kriging is commonly implemented. The bootstrap approach to assessing the accuracy of kriging predictions is briefly discussed in section 6.8 page 202.

This text concentrates on Stein's development of fixed domain asymptotics. It does not provide a broad overview of kriging. That can be found in Noel Cressie's book. It also does not deal with other aspects of interpolation such as nonlinear interpolation, estimation for non-Gaussian processes or the connections with splines.

Nevertheless this is a landmark text that should be on the shelf of any statistician interested in spatial data.

hypertext novel - excellent text read and enjoy

Good book, but..... "Remark: The subroutines can be obtained on diskete from the author for a cover charge!"