---

(continued from last post) Before the message could be successfully disseminated from Palestine to Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Egypt, Rome and western Europe, the new religion had to be made acceptable to the people of those regions, and it had to be capable of holding its own against already established creeds. The new god needed to be comparable in power, majesty, and in his repertoire of miracles, to those he was intending to displace. If Jesus were to gain a foothold in the Romanized world of his time, he had to become a full-fledged god. Not a Messiah in the old sense of the term, not a liberator, not a priest-king, but God Incarnate, a god, like Orpheus, Tammuz and especially Mithras, who passed through the underworld and the harrowing of Hell, and emerged, rejuvenated, with the spring. It was at this point that the idea of the Resurrection first assumed such critical importance, and for a fairly obvious reason, to place Jesus on a par with all the other dying and resurrected gods who populated both the world and the consciousness of their time. Most importantly, the story of Jesus would have to dovetail with the popular cult of Mithras, the unconquered son of the sun. For precisely this reason the doctrine of the virgin birth was promulgated, a virgin birth like that of Mithras. And the Easter festival, the festival of the death and resurrection of the God-man Jesus Christ, was planned to coincide with the spring rites of the Mithraeum, and of other contemporary cults and mystery schools. Given the need to deify Yehoshua, the political struggles and court intrigue involved in the attempt to install him on the throne would have to be soft-pedaled, if not entirely exised from his life's story. Important connections with the Essenes and the Zealots would have to be stripped from the account as well. In the transition from the man Yehoshua to the Deity-figure Jesus Christ, the whole dynastic struggle would have to fall by the wayside. In its place came the familiar myth of the God of the Jews leaving Heaven and incarnating in the womb of the Virgin Mary, a God eventually sacrificed to himself like Odin on the World-tree, but in this case the sacrifice was for the benefit of sinful creation, not for some quasi-shamanic quest for knowledge. The familiar Bible is almost exclusively an expression of the mythic Christ, with hardly a trace left of the real Yehoshua. Of special interest, however, is the Book of Revelation. This was apparently a book written much later than either the Gospels or the Epistles, and written for the express purpose of discrediting the burgeoning Gnostic movement and any descendant of Yehoshua that might come down the pike to try to claim the thrones of Judah and Israel for himself. For the anti-Gnostic messages, one need only look as far as the letters to the Seven Churches. The churches in Pergamon and Thyatira are both accused of "holding to the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which thing I hate," and "suffer(ing) that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and seduce my servants to commit fornication." Nicolai, or Nicholas, may have been a Gnostic or a Manichean, and at the point at which the book may have been written the fight between the Gnostics and those Christians that followed Saul-Paulos' teachings might have begun in earnest. And since the Gnostics had ties to the original Judaic mystery school of Yehoshua, the added mission of discrediting any heir of the "son of the Widow Lady" may have been part of the condemnation of Nicolai. Moving further in, you hear tales of plagues and persecution of the Pauline Christians. There seems to be resonances within of the persecutions of Christians under Nero and other Roman emperors...in fact, after rendering the name Nero Augustus Imperator into Hebrew and using traditional Jewish numerology, Gematria, the name breaks down into the infamous number 666, the Number of the Beast. Then the references to an "anti-Christ" begin. "And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea..." begins the 13th chapter of Revelation. According to legend, the first Merovee, the first king of the Merovingian line, was fathered not merely by a human father, but also by a fabulous sea monster. This may have something to do with the conjecture that Miriam ha'Migdal was pregnant when she was spirited away from Roman Palestine. It becomes obvious that this "beast" that the passage warns against is really any descendant of Yehoshua that might attempt to retake the throne. And the author of Revelation identifies him with a land over a sea...perhaps Gaul?

---

The views and opinions stated within this web page are those of the author or authors which wrote them and may not reflect the views and opinions of the ISP or account user which hosts the web page. The opinions may or may not be those of the Chairman of The Skeptic Tank.

Return to The Skeptic Tank's main Index page.

E-Mail Fredric L. Rice / The Skeptic Tank