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Biggest home router maker, TP-Link, facing potential ban in U.S.

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Leonard Sengere

Openwrt, Unblock Netflix US BBC iPlayer

If you have shopped around for WiFi home routers then you’ve come across TP-Link. The Chinese company has the biggest market share in that segment, even surpassing Huawei which I see all over the place in Zimbabwe. 

TP-Link is killing it with over 20% global market share. Even more impressively, some research says they have over 60% of the North American market, up from 10% in 2019. They are even more dominant in WiFi 7 mesh systems, with 80% market share. 

TP-Link routers are good but not necessarily that much better than the competition to get this kind of market share. Aggressive pricing is to thank for this. Some actually claim they are undercutting the competition. 

The U.S. is not having it. The U.S. Commerce, Defense, and Justice Departments are investigating TP-Link over security concerns related to its ties to Chinese cyberattacks, potentially leading to a ban on its routers in 2025.

What’s this cybersecurity business? TP-Link gained attention this year partly due to the Volt Typhoon APT, which exploited routers to infiltrate sensitive infrastructure. 

Volt Typhoon is a hacking group supported by China. They focus on spying and targeting important systems like power grids, water supplies, and communication networks in the U.S. and other countries. 

They also hack small office and home routers (from brands like NetGear, Cisco, and TP-Link) to hide where their attacks are coming from. Their goal is to gather information and prepare for possible future cyberattacks during conflicts, rather than causing immediate damage.

Volt Typhoon exploited TP-Link routers in 2024, however, most compromised routers were outdated NetGear and Cisco devices no longer receiving updates. 

So, it doesn’t make sense that TP-Link could be banned for this. 

It all boils down to TP-Link being Chinese. While TP-Link routers have been involved in high-profile cyberattacks, experts suggest that the risks are more about the corporate structure of Chinese companies rather than specific vulnerabilities in TP-Link devices.

The U.S.-Chinese shenanigans are set to only ramp up. Trump is coming in promising tariffs and both parties are equally suspicious of Chinese companies. 

If the U.S. is right in saying the Chinese government uses Chinese companies, through its rigorous reporting requirements, to spy on other countries, I shudder to think how much Zimbabwean stuff they know in Beijing. 

We are all in on Chinese tech, Huawei and ZTE are major players in our mobile networks, among other things. 

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  1. MYST🀄

    This seems more about politics than about cyber security but who is to know? When Elephants fight, the grass gets trapped on. NUST surely we can stitch up routers here and send them.

    I wasn’t going to share the issue below, but it seems to important not to share with my countrymen.

    Dossiers secrets, in capital letters:
    ONE DAY THE DESCENDANTS OF BENJAMIN LEFT THEIR
    COUNTRY; CERTAIN REMAINED; TWO THOUSAND YEARS LATER
    GODFROI VI [DE BOUILLON] BECAME KING OF JERUSALEM AND
    FOUNDED THE ORDRE DE SION.Z
    At first there appeared to be no connection between these apparent non
    sequiturs. When we assembled the diverse and fragmentary references in
    the
    Dossiers secrets, however, a coherent story began to emerge. According
    to this account’ most Benjamites did go into exile. Their exile
    supposedly took them to Greece, to the central Peloponnese to Arcadia,
    in short, where they supposedly became aligned with the Arcadian royal
    line. Towards the advent of the Christian era, they are then said to
    have migrated up the
    Danube and the Rhine, intermarrying with certain Teutonic tribes and eventually
    engendering the Sicambrian Franks the immediate forebears of the Merovingians.
    According to the “Prieure documents’, then, the Merovingians were
    descended, via Arcadia, from the Tribe of Benjamin. In other words
    the
    Merovingians, as well as their subsequent descendants the bloodlines of Plantard and Lorraine, for example were ultimately of Semitic or Israelite origin. And if Jerusalem was indeed the
    hereditary birthright of the Benjamites, Godfroi de Bouillon, in
    marching on the Holy
    City, would in fact have been reclaiming his ancient and rightful heritage.
    Again it is significant that Godfroi, alone among the august Western princes who
    embarked on the First Crusade, disposed of all his property before his departure -implying
    thereby that he did not intend to return to Europe.
    Needless to say, we had no way of ascertaining whether the Merovingians were of
    Benjamite origin or not. The information in the “Prieure documents’, such as it was,
    related to too remote; too obscure a past, for which no confirmation, no records of any sort
    could be obtained.
    But the assertions were neither particularly unique nor particularly
    new. On the countrary they had been around, in the form of vague
    rumours and nebulous traditions, for a long time. To cite but one
    instance, Proust draws upon them in his opus; and more recently, the
    novelist jean d’Ormesson suggests a Judaic origin for certain noble
    French families. And in 1965 Roger
    Peyrefitte, who seems to like scandal ising his countrymen, did so with resounding eclat in
    a novel affirming all French and most European nobility to be ultimately Judaic.
    In fact the argument, although unprovable, is not altogether
    implausible, nor are the exile and migration ascribed to the Tribe of
    Benjamin in the “Prieure documents’. The Tribe of Benjamin took up
    arms on behalf of the followers of Belial a form of the Mother Goddess
    often associated with images of a bull or calf. There is reason to
    believe that the Benjamites themselves revered the same deity. Indeed,
    it is possible that the worship of the Golden Calf in Exodus the
    subject, significantly enough, of one of
    Poussin’s most famous paintings may have been a specifically Benjamite ritual.
    Following their war against the other eleven tribes of Israel, Benjamites fleeing into exile
    would, of necessity, have had to flee westwards, towards the Phoenician coast. The
    Phoenicians possessed ships capable of transporting large numbers of refugees. And
    they would have been obvious allies for fugitive Benjamites for they, too, worshipped the
    Mother Goddess in the form of Astarte, Queen of Heaven.

    If there was actually an exodus of Benjamites from Palestine, one
    might hope to find some vestigial record of it. In Greek myth one does. There is the
    legend of King Belus’s son, one Danaus, who arrives in Greece, with his daughters, by
    ship. His daughters are said to have introduced the cult of the Mother Goddess, which
    became the established cult of the Arcadians. According to Robert Graves, the Danaus
    myth records the arrival in the Peloponnesus of “colonists from Palestine’.”
    Graves states that King Belus is in fact Baal, or Bel or perhaps Belial
    from the Old
    Testament. It is also worthy of note that one of the clans of the
    Tribe of
    Benjamin was the clan of Bela.
    In Arcadia the cult of the Mother Goddess not only prospered but
    survived longer than in any other part of Greece. It became associated
    with worship of Demeter, then of Diana or Artemis. Known regionally as
    Arduina, Artemis became tutelary deity of the Ardennes; and it was from
    the Ardennes that the Sicambrian Franks first issued into what is now
    France. The totem of
    Artemis was the she-bear Kallisto, whose son was Arkas, the bear-child and patron of
    Arcadia. And Kallisto, transported to the heavens by Artemis, became the constellation
    Ursa Major, the Great Bear. There might thus be something more than coincidence in the
    appellation “Ursus’, applied repeatedly to the Merovingian bloodline.
    In any case there is other evidence, apart from mythology, suggesting
    a
    Judaic migration to Arcadia. In classical times the region known as
    Arcadia was ruled by the powerful, militaristic state of Sparta. The
    Spartans absorbed much of the older Arcadian culture; and indeed, the
    legendary
    Arcadian Lycaeus may in fact be identified with Lycurgus, who
    codified
    Spartan Law. On reaching manhood, the Spartans, like the Merovingians,
    ascribed a special, magical significance to their hair which, like
    the
    Merovingians, they wore long. According to one authority, “the length
    of hair denoted their physical vigour and became a sacred symbol. ‘4
    What is more, both books of Maccabees in the Apocrypha stress the link
    between
    Spartans and Jews. Maccabees 2 speaks of certain Jews “having embarked
    to go to the Lacedaemonians, in hope of finding protection there
    because of their kinship.”5 And Maccabees 1 states explicitly, “It has
    been found in writing concerning the Spartans and the Jews that they

    are brethren and are of the family of Abraham.”6 We could thus
    acknowledge at least the possibility of a Judaic migration to
    Arcadia so that the “Prieure documents’, if they could not be proved
    correct, could not be dismissed either. As for Semitic influence on
    Frankish culture, there was solid archaeological evidence. Phoenician
    or
    Semitic trade routes traversed the whole of southern France, from Bordeaux to Marseilles
    and Narbonne. They also extended up the Rhone. As early as 700-600 B.C.” there were
    Phoenician settlements not only along the French coast but inland as well, at such sites as
    Carcassonne and Toulouse. Among the artefacts found at these sites were many of
    Semitic origin. This is hardly surprising. In the ninth century B.C. the Phoenician kings of
    Tyre had intermarried with the kings of Israel and Judah, thus establishing a dynastic
    alliance that would have engendered a close contact between their respective peoples.
    The sack of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and the destruction of the Temple,
    prompted a massive exodus of Jews from the Holy Land. Thus the city
    of
    Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, included a Jewish community.
    Certain cities in southern France Arles, for example, Lunel and Narbonne provided a
    haven for Jewish refugees around the same time.
    And yet the influx of Judaic peoples into Europe, and especially
    France, predated the fall of Jerusalem in the first century. In fact
    it had been in progress from before the Christian era. Between 106 and
    48 B.C. a Jewish colony was established in Rome. Not long after
    another such colony was founded far up the Rhine, at Cologne. Certain
    Roman legions included contingents of Jewish slaves, who accompanied
    their masters all over
    Europe. Many of these slaves eventually won, purchased or, in some other fashion,
    obtained their freedom and formed communities.
    In consequence there are many specifically Semitic place names
    scattered about France. Some of them are situated squarely in the Old
    Merovingian heartland. A few kilometres from Stenay, for example, on
    the fringe of the
    Forest of Woevres where Dagobert was assassinated, there is a village
    called Baalon. Between Stenay and Orval, there is a town called
    Avioth. And the mountain of Sion in Lorraine “la colline inspiree’ was
    originally….

    Comment: Zimbabwe is regarded by some historians as the land of Orphir were King Solomon got most of his wealth. When cornered by the other 11 tribes of Israel, the Benjamites went into exile supposedly using Phoenician ships. Phoenician ships had the potential to reach the southern African coast and not just Europe, that is how the Gold from Ophir could be transported to modern day Israel. If some of the refugees decided not to go to Europe, where did they go, perhaps to a familiar place. If people living at Great Zimbabwe are found to have Cohen or Jewish bloodline DNA, which tribes does the DNA belong to? Long ago people traveled and traded across vast distances, pottery from China has been found at Great Zimbabwe and Spanish gold coins have been found to contain gold from Nyanga in Zimbabwe, I leave you to make the conclusions because this is what our Universities should be seized with, what is our place in the World.

    God’s chosen people🇿🇼🙏🌀

    Reply
  2. Anonymous

    The Tech war version 1.5

    Reply
  3. Sparta 🔰

    Calling representatives of the twelve tribes to witness, the Levite
    demands vengeance for the atrocity; and at a council, the Benjamites are instructed to
    deliver the malefactors to justice. One might expect the Benjamites to comply readily. For
    some reason, however, they do not, and undertake, by force of arms, to protect the “sons
    of Belial’.
    The result is a bitter and bloody war between the Benjamites and the
    remaining eleven tribes. In the course of hostilities a curse is
    pronounced by the latter on any man who gives his daughter to a Beni
    amite. When the war is over, however, and the
    Benjamites virtually exterminated, the victorious Israelites repent of their malediction
    which, however, cannot be retracted:
    Now the men of Israel had sworn in Mizpeh, saying, There shall not any
    of us give his daughter unto Benjamin to wife. And the people came to
    the house of God, and abode there till even before God, and lifted up
    their voices, and wept sore; And said, O Lord God of Israel, why is
    this come to pass in
    Israel, that there should be today one tribe lacking in Isreal?
    (Judges 21:1-3)
    A few verses later, the lament is repeated:
    And the children of Israel repented them for Benjamin their brother, and said, There is one
    tribe cut off from Israel this day. How shall we do for wives for them that remain, seeing
    we have sworn by the Lord that we will not give them of our daughters to wives? (Judges
    21:6-7)
    And yet again:
    And the people repented them for Benjamin, because that the Lord had
    made a breach in the tribes of Israel. Then the elders of the
    congregation said,
    How shall we do for wives for them that remain, seeing the women are
    destroyed out of Benjamin? And they said, There must be an inheritance
    for them that be escaped out of Benjamin, that a tribe be not destroyed
    out of
    Israel. Howbeit we may not give them wives of our daughters: for the
    children of Israel have sworn, saying, Cursed be he that giveth a wife
    to
    Benjamin. (Judges 21:15-18)
    Confronted by the possible extinction of an entire tribe, the elders quickly devise a solution. At Shiloh, in Bethel, there is to be a
    festival shortly; and the women of Shiloh -whose menfolk had remained neutral in the war
    are to be considered fair game. The surviving Benjamites are instructed to go to Shiloh
    and wait in ambush in the vineyards. When the women of the town congregate to dance
    in the forthcoming festival, the Benjamites are to pounce upon them and take them to wife.
    It is not at all clear why the Dossiers secrets insist on calling
    attention to this passage. But whatever the reason, the Benjamites, so
    far as
    Biblical history is concerned, are clearly important. Despite the devastation of the war,
    they quickly recover in prestige, if not in numbers. Indeed, they recover so well that in 1
    Samuel they furnish Israel with her first king, Saul.
    Whatever recovery the Benjamites may have made, however, the Dossiers
    secrets imply that the war over the followers of Belial was a crucial
    turning point.

    Reply
  4. Prosper

    Musengabere 🙊😅

    Reply
  5. MYST🀄

    Tiger Woods said if you want to get the thing into the thing, you need to practice 10,006 shots.

    Fly half, first to practice last to leave. That’s how we started kicking torpedos. I missed a couple in crucial games, against Mazowe and Cranborne, but I also have two drop kicks over in competitive rugby, and on Owen Davies in Lil Fordia I was putting them in from the halfway life then someone said gumbo rake rini power then the passes for Legends dwindled when former players who had retired came back to join, then I made a friend Moyo from Mzururu, good football player, miss you lads, Cham, Dhaja, Dali, Murehwa, Chimbetu,Odza, King Shango, Lenny, Squire, 🏉

    Penalties in football I missed I Grade 7 when the boarders played each other. Shingarai Kokerai was the other Captain, then it came to sudden death. I missed, staring to the keeper. Then I said I hate this feeling, then I started practicing penalties, then All Stars at UCT knew no matter the time, Dzidzai will take it, I didn’t miss many.

    Basketball players 10,006 shots

    Reply
    1. Timmy John

      TP-Link’s dominance in the global and North American router market is undeniable, with impressive growth in recent years and a commanding lead in WiFi 7 mesh systems. However, the potential ban in the U.S. could disrupt this trajectory, raising concerns for users relying on their innovative solutions. For those seeking robust alternatives or managing their current setups, consider using NetMirror—a reliable tool to enhance your network performance and ensure a seamless browsing experience. Download NetMirror today to stay connected effortlessly!

      Reply
  6. DJD 💀

    Sean Kingston ft Nicki Minaj – Letting go (Dutty

    Reply
  7. Gyalis 2 Gyalis ✊

    Freeman HKD – Pombi

    Reply
  8. MYST🀄

    TP Link we have an African Free Trade Area.

    Share some technology and we will share a big market. MENASSA

    Reply
  9. DJD 💀

    Big Thingz Riddim Mix

    Levels Fantan Rhibe, Cymplex, JYard Studios, PTK, Studios, Producers, Writers, Mixers, Librarians, Script and Screenplay writers, Boom operator, cast, camera crew, executive producers, grip, visual effects team, Apple Mac software users, and others, Merry Christmas🎄

    Reply
  10. Sipho

    The spam in these comments lately is out of this world

    Reply
  11. MYST🀄

    Why I cannot have a girlfriend in Zimbabwe🇿🇼

    They will come for you too, even as Jehovah’s Witness, as a civilian you will be totally unprepared, this is the burden I must bear.🐻

    Reply
  12. MYST🀄

    I just spoke to my kids, they took me for a tour of the Pretoria Manor, I took them for a tour of Vamrey Sports Bar.

    Happy☺️

    They took me for a tour, WhatsApp facetime thank you.

    Reply
  13. MYST🀄 de

    Beforward accept Bitcoin but you don’t aaah. Kkkkk

    Reply
  14. MYST🀄

    What Happened to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang?

    https://www.joblo.com/what-happened-to-kiss-kiss-bang-bang/

    🙏

    Reply
  15. MYST🀄

    I’m looking at a guy called Gator on Tiktok.

    Airsoft. He has a tactical helmet, skull face mask, skull cloves, banana clips, tactical helmet and comms.

    Fun for the lads.

    Reply
  16. MYST🀄

    Nezuro ndakasanga na Makanje pa DYard. Ndikamu’udza kuti Inini ndiri kamwimwi. I’m looking at Gule videos on TikTok @illusion mandebvu.

    Bwanji Bwanji Nyau Nation. Ine ndiri bwino. 🇿🇼🇿🇲🇲🇼

    Gule Wamkulu.👹

    Reply
  17. MYST🀄

    Hanzi naQueen Elizabeth, Boxing day haaisi yekutamba tsiva.

    Reply
  18. MYST🀄

    Guys my other side hustle is erotic stories…….kkkkk🙊😅☺️🍆🍑

    So, she had never been with a billionaire or anyone for that matter. What drew her to him was not his cash, but the freedom he had, his zest for life and off course that 911 Carrera GT X. A special edition of Porsche he used to bang on about, there are only 6 of these in the world and yes they have cup holders.🚔

    She didn’t quite understand why it was so important , but when he shifted the manual gears she was thrust in her seat.

    She wondered why her boss would take so much liking to her since she had a modest background. All the other girls seemed prettier, smarter and more articulate.

    But when he looked at he there was a sincerity in his eye, an almost childish innocence,but when he spoke he spoke with such authority. He loves ice cream and we made any excuse to do a wheelie in front of an ice cream and donut shop.🍩

    He was taking me to Dunolly Farm were he grew up. He actually calls in dhinori. The entire time were playing Pengaudzoke and he was at pains to tell me that these lads grew up here.

    Oh my God, I loved when we overtook other cars, and made way for other cars on the strip road. He made me feel completely safe with the racing seats and the two strap seat belts.

    He always said to me speed doesn’t kill, but speed in the wrong areas. Sometime you need to exserareti from an danger. In the wet keep it under 70km/h, keep racing to Donny Brooke and Victoria Falls, Mosi Oa Tunya Aerodrome.

    Just then she fell in love, he parked just as we got into the gate. Babes, check that out. Those are Mr. Dorwards gum trees, or what’s left of them. Sha, ngatifambe, I know a shortcut. Rosita mota pano. Will it be safe. Sha we are in Zimbabwe🇿🇼

    Hande so. Barbed wire, pinda. He gets his bag and we start walking in the bush. Then the smell of the Muhacha tree. It’s not it’s you😅

    Come this way, there is a little steam. For her this was like extended foreplay. Then he came behind her, then she reached out to hold his…..

    Reply
  19. MYST🀄

    As in Chretien’s Grail 312 romance, Anfortas, for Wolfram, is
    Parzival’s uncle. And when, at the end of the poem, the curse is lifted and Anfortas can at
    last die, Parzival becomes heir to the Grail castle.
    The Grail, or the Grail family, calls certain individuals into its service from the outside
    world individuals who must be initiated into some sort of mystery. At the same time it
    sends its trained servitors out into the world to perform actions on its behalf and
    sometimes to occupy a throne.
    For the Grail, apparently, possesses the power to create kings:
    Maidens are appointed to care for the Grail .. . That was God’s decree, and these maidens
    performed their service before it. The Grail selects only noble company. Knights, devout
    and good, are chosen to guard it. The coming of the high stars brings this people great
    sorrow, young and old alike.
    God’s anger at them has lasted all too long. When shall they ever say yes to joy? .. . I will
    tell you something more, whose truth you may well believe. A twofold chance is often
    theirs; they both give and receive profit. They receive young children there, of noble
    lineage and beautiful.
    And if anywhere a land loses its lord, if the people there acknowledge
    the
    Hand of God, and seek a new lord, they are granted one from the company
    of the Grail. They must treat him with courtesy, for the blessing of
    God protects him.z’
    From the above passage, it would seem that at some point in the past
    the
    Grail family somehow incurred God’s wrath. The allusion to “God’s
    anger at them’ echoes numerous medieval statements about the Jews. It
    also echoes-the title of a mysterious book associated with Nicolas
    Flamel The
    Sacred Book of Abraham the Jew, Prince, Priest, Levite, Astrologer
    and
    Philosopher to that Tribe of Jews who by the Wrath of God were Dispersed amongst the
    Gauls. And Flegetanis, who Wolfram says wrote the original account of the Grail, is said
    to be descended from Solomon. Could the Grail family possibly be of Judaic origin?
    Whatever the curse formerly visited upon the Grail family, it has unquestionably come, by
    Parzival’s time, to enjoy divine favour and a great deal of power as well.

    And yet it is rigorously enjoined, at least in certain respects to
    secrecy about its identity.
    The men [of the Grail family] God sends forth secretly; the maidens leave openly .. . Thus
    the maids are sent out openly from the Grail, and the men in secret, that they may have
    children who will in turn one day enter the service of the Grail, and serving, enhance its
    company.
    God can teach them how to do this .25
    Women of the Grail family, then, when they intermarry with the outside world, may
    disclose their pedigree and identity. The men, however, must keep this information
    scrupulously concealed so much so, in fact, that they may not even allow questions about
    their origins. The point, apparently, is a crucial one, for Wolfram returns to it most
    emphatically at the very end of the poem.
    Upon the Grail it was now found written that any templar whom God’s
    hand appointed master over foreign people should forbid the asking of
    his name or race, and that he should help them to their rights. If the
    question is asked of him they shall have his help no longer .26
    From this, of course, derives the dilemma of Lohengrin, Parzival’s son, who when queried
    on his origin, must abandon his wife and children and retire into the seclusion from
    whence he came. But why should such stringent secrecy be required? What “skeleton in
    the closet’, so to speak, might conceivably dictate it? If the Grail family were, in fact, of
    Judaic origin, that for the age in which Wolfram was writing might constitute a possible
    explanation. And such an explanation gains at least some credence from the Lohengrin
    story. For there are many variants of the Lohengrin story, and Lohengrin is not always
    identified by the same name. In some versions, he is called Helios implying the sun. In
    other versions, he is called Elie or Eli 17 an unmistakably Judaic name.
    In Robert de Boron’s romance and in the Perlesvaus, Perceval is of
    Judaic lineage the ‘holy lineage’ of Joseph of Arimathea. In Wolfram’s
    poem this status, so far as Parzival is concerned, would seem to be
    incidental. True,
    Parzival is the nephew of the wounded Fisher King and thus related by

    blood to the Grail family. And though he does not marry into the
    Grail family he is, in fact, already married he still inherits the Grail castle and becomes its
    new lord. But for Wolfram the protagonist’s pedigree would seem to be less important
    than the means whereby he proves himself worthy of it. He must, in short, conform to
    certain criteria dictated by the blood he carries in his veins. And this emphasis would
    clearly seem to indicate the importance Wolfram ascribes to that blood.
    There is no question that Wolfram does ascribe immense significance to a particular
    bloodline. If there is a single dominant theme pervading not only Parzival, but his other
    works as well, it is not so much the Grail as the Grail family. Indeed the Grail family
    seems to dominate Wolfram’s mind to an almost obsessive degree, and he devotes far
    more attention to them and their genealogy than to the mysterious object of which they are
    custodians.
    The genealogy of the Grail family can be reconstructed from a close
    reading of Parzival. Parzival himself is a nephew of Anfortas, the
    maimed Fisher
    King and lord of the Grail castle. Anfortas, in turn, is the son of
    one
    Frimutel, and Frimutel the son of Titurel. At this point the lineage
    becomes more entangled. Eventually, however, it leads back to a
    certain
    Laziliez which may be a derivation of Lazarus, the brother, in the
    New
    Testament, of Mary and Martha. And Laziliez’s parents, the original progenitors of the
    Grail family, are named Mazadan and Terdelaschoye.
    The latter is obviously a Germanic version of a French phrase, “Terre
    de la
    Choix’ – “Chosen Land’. Mazadan is rather more obscure. It might
    conceivably derive from the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda, the dualist
    principle of Light. At the same time, it also, if only phonetically
    perhaps, suggests
    Masada – a major bastion during the Judaic revolt against Roman occupation in A.D. 68.
    The names Wolfram ascribes to members of the Grail family are thus
    often provocative and suggestive. At the same time, however, they told
    us nothing that was historically useful. If we hoped to find an actual
    historical prototype for the Grail family, we would have to look
    elsewhere. The clues were meagre enough. We knew, for example, that
    the Grail family supposedly culminated in Godfroi de Bouillon; but that
    did not cast much light on
    Godfroi’s mythical antecedents except, of course, that (like his real

    Reply
  20. MYST🀄

    In the first place there is a “great cry’
    from the tomb before
    Jesus rolls the rock aside or instructs the occupant to come forth. This strongly suggests
    that the occupant was not dead and thereby, at a single stroke, contravenes any element
    of the miraculous. In the second place there would clearly seem to be something more
    involved than accepted accounts of the Lazarus episode lead one to believe. Certainly
    the passage quoted attests to some special relation between the man in the tomb and the
    man who “resurrects’ him. A modern reader might perhaps be tempted to see a hint of
    homosexuality. It is possible that the Carpocratians – a sect who aspired to
    transcendence of the senses by means of satiation of the senses discerned precisely such
    a hint. But, as Professor Smith argues, it is in fact much more likely that the whole
    episode refers to a typical mystery school initiation a ritualised and symbolic death and
    rebirth of the sort so prevalent in the Middle East at the time.
    In any case the point is that the episode, and the passage quoted above, do not appear in
    any modern or accepted version of Mark.
    Indeed, the only references to Lazarus or a Lazarus figure in the New
    Testament are in the
    Gospel ascribed to John. It is thus clear that Clement’s advice was accepted not only by
    Theodore, but by subsequent authorities as well.
    Quite simply the entire Lazarus incident was completely excised from
    the
    Gospel of Mark.
    If Mark’s Gospel was so drastically expurgated, it was also burdened
    with spurious’ additions. In its original version it ends with the
    Crucifixion, the burial and the empty tomb. There is no Resurrection
    scene, no reunion with the disciples. Granted, there are certain
    modern Bibles which do contain a more conventional ending to the Gospel
    of Mark an ending which does include the Resurrection. But virtually
    all modern Biblical scholars concur that this expanded ending is a
    later addition, dating from the late second century and appended to the
    original document.5
    The Gospel of Mark thus provides two instances of a sacred document supposedly
    inspired by God which has been tampered with, edited, censored, revised by human
    hands. Nor are these two cases speculative. On the contrary, they are now accepted by
    scholars as demonstrable and proven.

    Reply
  21. MYST🀄

    Can one then suppose that Mark’s Gospel was unique in being subjected
    to alteration? Clearly if Mark’s
    Gospel was so readily doctored, it is reasonable to assume that the
    other
    Gospels were similarly treated.
    For the purposes of our investigation, then, we could not accept the
    Gospels as definitive and unimpugnable authority, but, at the same time
    we could not discard them. They were certainly not wholly fabricated,
    and they furnished some of the few clues available to what really
    happened in the
    Holy Land two thousand years ago. We therefore undertook to look more closely, to
    winnow through them, to disengage fact from fable, to separate the truth they contained
    from the spurious matrix in which that truth was often embedded. And in order to do this
    effectively, we were first obliged to familia rise ourselves with the historical reality and
    circumstances of the Holy Land at the advent of the Christian era. For the Gospels are
    not autonomous entities, conjured out of the void and floating, eternal and universal, over
    the centuries. They are historical documents, like any other like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the
    epics of Homer and Virgil, the Grail romances. They are products of a very specific place,
    a very specific time, a very specific people and very specific historical factors.
    Palestine at the Time of Jesus
    Palestine in the first century was a very troubled corner of the globe.
    For some time the Holy Land had been fraught with dynastic squabbles,
    internecine strife and, on occasion, full-scale war. During the second
    century B.C. a more or less unified Judaic kingdom was transiently
    established as chronicled by the two Apocryphal Books of Maccabees. By
    63
    B.C.” however, the land was in upheaval again, and ripe for conquest.
    More than half a century before Jesus’s birth, Palestine fell to the
    armies of Pompey, and Roman rule was imposed. But Rome at the time was
    over-extended, and too preoccupied with her own affairs, to install the
    administrative apparatus necessary for direct rule. She therefore
    created a line of puppet kings to rule under her aegis. This line was
    that of the

    Herodians who were not Jewish, but Arab. The first of the line was
    Antipater, who assumed the throne of Palestine in 63 B.C. On his death in 37 B.C.” he
    was succeeded by his son, Herod the Great, who ruled until 4 B.C. One must visualise,
    then, a situation analogous to that of France under the Vichy government between 1940
    and 1944. One must visualise a conquered land and a conquered people, ruled by a
    puppet regime which was kept in power by military force. The people of the country were
    allowed to retain their own religion and customs.

    Reply
  22. MYST🀄

    In A.D. 6 the situation became more critical. In this year the country was split
    administratively into two provinces, Judaea and Galilee.
    Herod
    Antipas became king of the latter. But Judaea the spiritual and
    secular capital -was rendered subject to direct Roman rule,
    administered by a Roman
    Procurator based at Caesarea. The Roman regime was brutal and autocratic.
    When it assumed direct control of Judaea more than three thousand rebels were
    summarily crucified. The Temple was plundered and defiled.
    Heavy taxation was imposed. Torture was frequently employed, and many
    of the populace committed suicide. This state of affairs was not
    improved by
    Pontius Pilate, who presided as procurator of Judaea from A.D. 26 to
    36. In contrast to the Biblical portraits of him, existing records
    indicate that
    Pilate was a cruel and corrupt man, who not only perpetuated, but intensified, the abuses
    of his predecessor. It is thus all the more surprising at least on first glance that there
    should be no criticism of Rome in the Gospels, no mention even of the burden of the
    Roman yoke.
    Indeed the Gospel accounts suggest that the inhabitants of Judaea were placid and
    contented with their lot.
    In point of fact very few were contented, and many were far from placid.
    The Jews in the Holy Land at the time could be loosely divided into
    several sects and sub sects There were, for example, the Sadducees a
    small but wealthy land-owning class who, to the anger of their
    compatriots, collaborated, Quisling-fashion, with the Romans. There
    were the Pharisees – a progressive group who introduced much reform
    into Judaism and who, despite the portrait of them in the Gospels,
    placed themselves in staunch, albeit largely passive, opposition to Rome.
    There were the Essenes an austere, mystically oriented sect, whose
    teachings were much more prevalent and influential than is generally
    acknowledged or supposed. Among the smaller sects and sub-sects there
    were many whose precise character has long been lost to history, and
    which, therefore, are difficult to define. It is worth citing the
    Nazorites, however, of whom
    Samson, centuries before, had been a member, and who were still in
    existence during Jesus’s time. And it is worth citing the Nazoreans or
    Nazarenes a term which seems to have been applied to Jesus and his
    followers. Indeed the original Greek version of the New Testament
    refers to Jesus as “Jesus the
    Nazarene’ which is mistranslated in English as “ esus of Nazareth’.
    “Nazarene’, in short, is a specifically sectarian word and has no connection with Nazareth.
    There were numerous other groups and sects as well, one of which proved
    of particular relevance to our inquiry. In A.D. 6, when Rome assumed
    direct control of Judaea, a Pharisee rabbi known as Judas of Galilee
    had created a highly militant revolutionary group composed, it would
    appear, of both
    Pharisees and Essenes. This following became known as Zealots. The
    Zealots were not, strictly speaking, a sect. They were a movement,
    whose membership was drawn from a number of sects. By the time of
    Jesus’s mission, the
    Zealots had assumed an increasingly prominent role in the Holy Land’s
    affairs. Their activities formed perhaps the most important political
    backdrop against which Jesus’s drama enacted itself. Long after the
    Crucifixion, Zealot activity continued unabated. By A.D. 44 this activity had so intensified
    that some sort of armed struggle already seemed inevitable. In A.D. 66 the struggle
    erupted, the whole of Judaea rising in organised revolt against Rome. It was a desperate,
    tenacious but ultimately futile conflict reminiscent in certain respects of, say, Hungary in
    1956.
    At Caesarea alone 20,000 Jews were massacred by the Romans. Within
    four years Roman legions had occupied Jerusalem, razed the city, and
    sacked and plundered the Temple. Nevertheless the mountain fortress of
    Masada held out for yet another three years, commanded by a lineal
    descendant of Judas of
    Galilee.

    The aftermath of the revolt in Judaea witnessed a massive exodus of
    Jews from the Holy Land. Nevertheless enough remained to foment
    another rebellion some sixty years later in A.D. 132. At last, in 135,
    the Emperor Hadrian decreed that all Jews be expelled by law from
    Judaea, and Jerusalem became essentially a Roman city. It was renamed
    Aelia
    Capitolina.
    Jesus’s lifetime spanned roughly the first thirty-five years of a turmoil extending over 140
    years. The turmoil did not cease with his death, but continued for another century. And it
    engendered the psychological and cultural adjuncts inevitably attending any such
    sustained defiance of an oppressor. One of these adjuncts was the hope and longing for
    a Messiah who would deliver his people from the tyrant’s yoke. It was only by virtue of
    historical and semantic accident that this term came to be applied specifically and
    exclusively to Jesus.
    For Jesus’s contemporaries, no Messiah would ever have been regarded as
    divine. Indeed the very idea of a divine Messiah would have been
    preposterous if not unthinkable. The Greek word for Messiah is
    “Christ’ or
    “Christos’. The term whether in Hebrew or Greek -meant simply “the
    anointed one’ and generally referred to a king. Thus David, when he
    was anointed king in the Old Testament, became, quite explicitly, a
    “Messiah’ or a “Christ’. And every subsequent Jewish king of the house
    of David was known by the same appellation. Even during the Roman
    occupation of Judaea, the Roman-appointed high priest was known as the
    “Priest Messiah’ or
    “Priest Christ’.”
    For the Zealots, however, and for other opponents of Rome, this puppet priest was, of
    necessity, a “false Messiah’. For them the “true Messiah’ implied something very different
    the legitimate roi perdu or “lost king’, the unknown descendant of the house of David who
    would deliver his people from Roman tyranny. During Jesus’s lifetime anticipation of the
    coming of such a Messiah attained a pitch verging on mass hysteria. And this anticipation
    continued after Jesus’s death.
    Indeed the revolt of A.D. 66 was prompted in large part by Zealot
    agitation and propaganda on behalf of a
    Messiah whose advent was said to be imminent.
    The term “Messiah’, then, implied nothing in any way divine. Strictly

    defined, it meant nothing more than an anointed king; and in the
    popular mind it came to mean an anointed king who would also be a
    liberator. In other words, it was a term with specifically political
    connotations something quite different from the later Christian idea of
    a “Son of God’. It was this mundane political term that was applied to
    Jesus. He was called “Jesus the Messiah’ or translated into Greek
    “Jesus the Christ’. Only later was this designation contracted to
    “Jesus
    Christ’ and a purely functional title distorted into a proper name.
    The History of the Gospels
    The Gospels issued from a recognisable and concrete historical reality. It was a reality of
    oppression, of civic and social discontent, of political unrest, of incessant persecution and
    intermittent rebellion. It was also a reality suffused with perpetual and tantalising
    promises, hopes and dreams that a rightful king would appear, a spiritual and secular
    leader who would deliver his people into freedom. So far as political freedom was
    concerned, such aspirations were brutally extinguished by the devastating war between
    A.D. 66 and 74. Transposed into a wholly religious form, however, the aspirations were
    not only perpetuated by the Gospels, but given a powerful new impetus.
    Modern scholars are unanimous in concurring that the Gospels do not date from Jesus ;s
    lifetime. For the most part they date from the period between the two major revolts in
    Judaea – 66 to 74 and 132 to 135 although they are almost certainly based on earlier
    accounts. These earlier accounts may have included written documents since lost for
    there was a wholesale destruction of records in the wake of the first rebellion. But there
    would certainly have been oral traditions as well. Some of these were undoubtedly
    grossly exaggerated and/or distorted, received and transmitted at second, third or fourth
    hand. Others, however, may have derived from individuals who were alive in Jesus’s
    lifetime and may even have known him personally.
    A young man at the time of the Crucifixion might well have been alive when the Gospels
    were composed.

    The earliest of the Gospels is generally considered to be Mark’s,
    composed sometime during the revolt of 66-74 or shortly thereafter
    except for its treatment of the Resurrection, which is a later and
    spurious addition. Although not himself one of Jesus’s original
    disciples,
    companion of
    Saint Paul, and his Gospel bears an unmistakable stamp of Pauline thought.
    But if Mark was a native of Jerusalem, his Gospel as Clement of
    Alexandria states was composed in Rome, and addressed to a Greco Roman
    audience. This, in itself, explains a great deal. At the time that
    Mark’s Gospel was composed, Judaea was, or had recently been, in open
    revolt, and thousands of
    Jews were being crucified for rebellion against the Roman regime. If
    Mark wished his Gospel to survive and impress itself on a Roman
    audience, he could not possibly present Jesus as anti-Roman. Indeed,
    he could not feasibly present Jesus as politically oriented at all. In
    order to ensure the survival of his message, he would have been obliged
    to exonerate the
    Romans of all guilt for Jesus’s death to whitewash the existing and entrenched regime and
    blame the death of the Messiah on certain Jews.
    This device was adopted not only by the authors of the other Gospels,
    but by the early Christian Church as well. Without such a device
    neither Gospels nor
    Church would have survived.
    The Gospel of Luke is dated by scholars at around A.D. 80. Luke himself appears to have
    been a Greek doctor, who composed his work for a high-ranking Roman official at
    Caesarea, the Roman capital of Palestine.
    For Luke, too, therefore, it would have been necessary to placate and
    appease the Romans and transfer the blame elsewhere. By the time the
    Gospel of Matthew was composed approximately A.D. 85 such a
    transference seems to have been accepted as an established fact and
    gone unquestioned. More than half of Matthew’s Gospel, in fact, is
    derived directly from Mark’s, although it was composed originally in
    Greek and reflects specifically
    Greek characteristics. The author seems to have been a Jew, quite
    possibly a refugee from Palestine. He is not to be confused with the
    disciple named
    Matthew, who would have lived much earlier and would probably have known only
    Aramaic.
    The Gospels of Mark, Luke and Matthew are known collectively as the
    “Synoptic Gospels’, implying that they see “eye to eye’ or “with one

    eye’ which of course, they do not. Nevertheless there is enough
    overlap between them to suggest that they derived from a single common source -either
    an oral tradition or some other document subsequently lost. This distinguishes them from
    the Gospel of John, which betrays significantly different origins.
    Nothing whatever is known about the author of the Fourth Gospel.
    Indeed there is no reason to assume his name was John. Except for John
    the
    Baptist, the name John is mentioned at no point in the Gospel itself, and its attribution to a
    man called John is generally accepted as later tradition. The Fourth Gospel is the latest of
    those in the New Testament composed around A.D. 100 in the vicinity of the Greek city of
    Ephesus. It displays a number of quite distinctive features. There is no nativity scene, for
    example, no description whatever of Jesus’s birth, and the opening is almost Gnostic in
    character. The text is of a decidedly more mystical nature than the other Gospels, and the
    content differs as well.
    The other Gospels, for instance, concentrate primarily on Jesus’s
    activities in the northern province of Galilee and reflect what appears
    to be only a second- or third-hand knowledge of events to the south, in
    Judaea and Jerusalem including the Crucifixion. The Fourth Gospel, in
    contrast, says relatively little about Galilee. It dwells exhaustively
    on the events in Judaea and Jerusalem which concluded Jesus’s career,
    and its account of the Crucifixion may well rest ultimately on some
    first-hand eye-witness testimony. It also contains a number of
    episodes and incidents which do not figure in the other Gospels at all
    the wedding at Cana, the roles of
    Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, and the raising of Lazarus (although
    the last was once included in Mark’s Gospel). On the basis of such
    factors modern scholars have suggested that the Gospel of John, despite
    its late composition, may well be the most reliable and historically
    accurate of the four. More than the other Gospels, it seems to draw
    upon traditions current among contemporaries of Jesus, as well as other
    material unavailable to
    Mark, Luke and Matthew. One modern researcher points out that it
    reflects an apparently first-hand topographical knowledge of Jerusalem
    prior to the revolt of A.D. 66. The same author concludes, “Behind the
    Fourth Gospel lies an ancient tradition independent of the other
    Gospels.” This is not an isolated opinion.

    Reply
  23. MYST🀄

    The Marital Status of Jesus
    It was not our intention to discredit the Gospels. We sought only to winnow through them
    to locate certain fragments of possible or probable truth and extract them from the matrix
    of embroidery surrounding them. We were seeking fragments, moreover, of a very
    precise character fragments that might attest to a marriage between Jesus and the
    woman known as the Magdalene.
    Such attestations, needless to say, would not be explicit. In order to find them, we
    realised, we would be obliged to read between the lines, fill in certain gaps, account for
    certain caesuras and ellipses. We would have to deal with omissions, with innuendoes,
    with references that were, at best, oblique. And we would not only have to look for
    evidence of a marriage. We would also have to look for evidence of circumstances that
    might have been conducive to a marriage. Our inquiry would thus have to encompass a
    number of distinct but closely related questions. We began with the most obvious of them.
    1) Is there any evidence in the Gospels, direct or indirect, to suggest that Jesus was
    indeed married?
    There is, of course, no explicit statement to the effect that he was.
    On the other hand, there is no explicit statement to the effect that he
    was not and iris is both more curious and more significant than it
    might first appear. As Dr. Geza Vermes of Oxford University points

    out, “There is complete silence in the Gospels concerning the marital
    status of Jesus .. . Such a state of affairs is sufficiently unusual in
    ancient Jewry to prompt further enquiry.”9
    The Gospels state that many of the disciples Peter, for example were married. And at no
    point does Jesus himself advocate celibacy. On the contrary, in the Gospel of Matthew he
    declares, “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male
    and female .. . For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his
    wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?” (19:4-5J Such a statement can hardly be
    reconciled with an injunction to celibacy. And if Jesus did not preach celibacy, there is no
    reason either to suppose that he practised it.
    According to Judaic custom at the time it was not only usual, but almost mandatory, that a
    man be married. Except among certain Essenes in certain communities, celibacy was
    vigorously condemned. During the late first century, one Jewish writer even compared
    deliberate celibacy with murder, and he does not seem to have been alone in this attitude.
    And it was as obligatory for a Jewish father to find a wife for his son as it was to ensure
    that his son be circumcised.
    If Jesus were not married, this fact would have been glaringly conspicuous.
    It would have drawn attention to itself, and been used to characterise
    and identify him. It would have set him apart, in some significant
    sense, from his contemporaries. If this were the case, surely one at
    least of the
    Gospel accounts would make some mention of so marked a deviation from custom? If
    Jesus were indeed as celibate as later tradition claims, it is extraordinary that there is no
    reference to any such celibacy. The absence of any such reference strongly suggests
    that Jesus, as far as the question of celibacy was concerned, conformed to the
    conventions of his time and culture -suggests, in short, that he was married. This alone
    would satisfactorily explain the silence of the Gospels on the matter. The argument is
    summarised by a respected contemporary theological scholar:
    Granted the cultural background as witnessed .. . it is highly improbable that Jesus was
    not married well before the beginning of his public ministry.
    If he had insisted upon celibacy, it would have created a stir, a

    reaction which would have left some trace. So, the lack of mention
    of
    Jesus’s marriage in the Gospels is a strong argument not against but for the hypothesis of
    marriage, because any practice or advocacy of voluntary celibacy would in the Jewish
    context of the time have been so unusual as to have attracted much attention and
    comment.”
    The hypothesis of marriage becomes all the more tenable by virtue of the title of “Rabbi’,
    which is frequently applied to Jesus in the Gospels. It is possible, of course, that this term
    is employed in its very broadest sense, meaning simply a self-appointed teacher.-But
    Jesus’s literacy his display of knowledge to the elders in the Temple, for example strongly
    suggests that he was more than a self-appointed teacher. It suggests that he underwent
    some species of formal rabbinical training and was officially recognised as a rabbi. This
    would conform to tradition, which depicts Jesus as a rabbi in the strict sense of the word.
    But if Jesus was a rabbi in the strict sense of the word, a marriage would not only have
    been likely, but virtually certain. The Jewish Mishnaic Law is quite explicit on the subject:
    “An unmarried man may not be a teacher.””
    In the Fourth Gospel there is an episode related to a marriage which
    may, in fact, have been Jesus’s own. This episode is, of course, the
    wedding at
    Cana – a familiar enough story. But for all its familiarity, there are certain salient questions
    attending it which warrant consideration.
    From the account in the Fourth Gospel, the wedding at Cana would seem to be a modest
    local ceremony a typical village wedding, whose bride and groom remain anonymous. To
    this wedding Jesus is specifically “called’ which is slightly curious perhaps, for he has not
    yet really embarked on his ministry. More curious still, however, is the fact that his mother
    “just happens’, as it were, to be present. And her presence would seem to be taken for
    granted. It is certainly not in any way explained.
    What is more, it is Mary who not merely suggests to her son, but in
    effect orders him, to replenish the wine. She behaves quite as if she
    were the hostess: “And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus with
    unto him,

    They have no wine. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do
    with thee? mine hour is not yet come.” (John 2:3-4) But
    Mary, thoroughly unperturbed, ignores her son’s protest:
    “His mother saith unto the servants, “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.” (5) And the
    servants promptly comply quite as if they were accustomed to receiving orders from both
    Mary and Jesus.
    Despite Jesus’s ostensible attempt to disown her, Mary prevails; and
    Jesus thereupon performs his first major miracle, the transmutation of
    water into wine. So far as the Gospels are concerned, he has not
    hitherto displayed his powers; and there is no reason for Mary to
    assume he even possesses them. But even if there were, why should such
    unique and holy gifts be employed for so banal a purpose? Why should
    Mary make such a request of her son? More important still, why should
    two “guests’ at a wedding take on themselves the responsibility of
    catering a responsibility that, by custom, should be reserved for the
    host? Unless, of course, the wedding at
    Cana is Jesus’s own wedding. In that case, it would indeed be his responsibility to
    replenish the wine.
    There is further evidence that the wedding at Cana is in fact Jesus’s own.
    Immediately after the miracle has been performed, the “governor of the feast’ – a kind of
    majordomo or master of ceremonies tastes the newly produced wine, “the governor of the
    feast called the bridegroom, And saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth
    good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept
    the good wine until now.” (John 2:9-10; our italics.) These words would clearly seem to be
    addressed to Jesus. According to the Gospel, however, they are addressed to the
    ‘bridegroom’. An obvious conclusion is that Jesus and the ‘bridegroom’ are one and the
    same.
    The Wife of Jesus
    2) If Jesus was married, is there any indication in the Gospels of the
    identity of his wife?
    On first consideration there would appear to be two possible candidates

    two women, apart from his mother, who are mentioned repeatedly in the
    Gospels as being of his entourage. The first of these is the Magdalene or, more precisely,
    Mary from the village of Migdal, or Magdala, in Galilee. In all four Gospels this woman’s
    role is singularly ambiguous and seems to have been deliberately obscured. In the
    accounts of Mark and Matthew she is not mentioned by name until quite late.
    When she does appear it is in Judaea, at the time of the Crucifixion,
    and she is numbered among Jesus’s followers. In the Gospel of Luke,
    however, she appears relatively early in Jesus ‘s ministry, while he is
    still preaching in Galilee. It would thus seem that she accompanies
    him from Galilee to
    Judaea or, if not, that she at least moves between the two provinces as readily as he
    does. This in itself strongly suggests that she was married to someone. In the Palestine
    of Jesus’s time it would have been unthinkable for an unmarried woman to travel
    unaccompanied -and, even more so, to travel unaccompanied with a religious teacher and
    his entourage. A number of traditions seem to have taken cognisance of this potentially
    embarrassing fact.
    Thus it is sometimes claimed that the Magdalene was married to one of
    Jesus’s disciples. If that were the case, however, her special relationship with Jesus and
    her proximity to him would have rendered both of them subject to suspicions, if not
    charges, of adultery.
    Popular tradition notwithstanding, the Magdalene is not, at any point in any of the
    Gospels, said to be a prostitute. When she is first mentioned in the Gospel of Luke, she is
    described as a woman “out of whom went seven devils’. It is generally assumed that this
    phrase refers to a species of exorcism on Jesus’s part, implying the Magdalene was
    “possessed’. But the phrase may equally refer to some sort of conversion and/or ritual
    initiation. The cult of Ishtar or Astarte the Mother Goddess and “Queen of Heaven’
    involved, for example, a seven-stage initiation. Prior to her affiliation with Jesus, the
    Magdalene may well have been associated with such a cult. Migdal, or Magdala, was the
    “Village of Doves’, and there is some evidence that sacrificial doves were in fact bred
    there. And the dove was the sacred symbol of Astarte.
    One chapter before he speaks of the Magdalene, Luke alludes to a woman
    who anointed Jesus. In the Gospel of Mark there is a similar

    anointment by an unnamed woman. Neither Luke nor Mark explicitly
    identify this woman with the
    Magdalene. But Luke reports that she was a “fallen woman’, a “sinner’.
    Subsequent commentators have assumed that the Magdalene, since she apparently had
    seven devils cast out of her, must have been a sinner. On this basis the woman who
    anoints Jesus and the Magdalene came to be regarded as the same person. In fact they
    may well have been. If the Magdalene were associated with a pagan cult, that would
    certainly have rendered her a “sinner’ in the eyes not only of Luke, but of later writers as
    well.
    If the Magdalene was a “sinner’, she was also, quite clearly, something more than the
    “common prostitute’ of popular tradition. Quite clearly she was a woman of means. Luke
    reports, for example, that her friends included the wife of a high dignitary at Herod’s court
    and that both women, together with various others, supported Jesus and his disciples with
    their financial resources. The woman who anointed Jesus was also a woman of means.
    In Mark’s Gospel great stress is laid upon the costliness of the spikenard ointment with
    which the ritual was performed.
    The whole episode of Jesus’s anointing would seem to be an affair of
    considerable consequence. Why else would it be emphasised by the
    Gospels to the extent it is? Given its prominence, it appears to be
    something more than an impulsive spontaneous gesture. It appears to be
    a carefully premeditated rite. One must remember that anointing was
    the traditional prerogative of kings and of the “rightful Messiah’,
    which means ‘the anointed one’. From this, it follows that Jesus
    becomes an authentic
    Messiah by virtue of his anointing. And the woman who consecrates him in that august
    role can hardly be unimportant.
    In any case it is clear that the Magdalene, by the end of Jesus’s
    ministry, has become a figure of immense significance. In the three
    Synoptic Gospels her name consistently heads the lists of women who
    followed Jesus, just as
    Simon Peter heads the lists of male disciples. And, of co use she was
    the first witness to the empty tomb following the Crucifixion. Among
    all his devotees, it was to the Magdalene that Jesus first chose to
    reveal his
    Resurrection.

    presence necessarily have prevented the man’s death? But the incident
    is significant because Martha, when she greets Jesus, is alone. One
    would expect Mary, her sister, to be with her. Mary, however, is
    sitting in the house and does not emerge until Jesus explicitly
    commands her to do so. The point becomes clearer in the “secret’
    Gospel of Mark, discovered by Professor Morton Smith and cited earlier in this chapter. In
    the suppressed account by Mark, it would appear that Mary does emerge from the house
    before Jesus instructs her to do so. And she is promptly and angrily rebuked by the
    disciples, whom Jesus is obliged to silence.
    It would be plausible enough for Mary to be sitting in the house when
    Jesus arrives in Bethany. In accordance with Jewish custom, she would
    be “sitting
    Shiveh’ sitting in mourning. But why does she not join Martha and rush to meet Jesus on
    his return? There is one obvious explanation. By the tenets of Judaic law at the time, a
    woman “sitting Shiveh’ would have been strictly forbidden to emerge from the house
    except at the express bidding of her husband. In this incident the behaviour of Jesus and
    Mary of Bethany conforms precisely to the traditional comportment of a Jewish man and
    wife.
    There is additional evidence for a possible marriage between Jesus and
    Mary of Bethany. It occurs, more or less as a non sequitur, in the
    Gospel of
    Luke:
    Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain
    woman named Martha received him into her house.
    And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word.
    But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and
    said,
    Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that
    she help me.
    And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled
    about many things:
    But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken
    away from her. (Luke 10:38-42)
    From Martha’s appeal, it would seem apparent that Jesus exercises some
    sort of authority over Mary. More important still, however, is Jesus’s

    reply. In any other context one would not hesitate to interpret this
    reply as an allusion to a marriage. In any case it clearly suggests that Mary of Bethany
    was as avid a disciple as the Magdalene.
    There is substantial reason for regarding the Magdalene and the woman
    who anoints Jesus as one and the same person. Could this person, we
    wondered, also be one and the same with Mary of Bethany, sister of
    Lazarus and
    Martha? Could these women who, in the Gospels, appear in three different contexts in
    fact be a single person? The medieval Church certainly regarded them as such, and so
    did popular tradition. Many Biblical scholars today concur. There is abundant evidence to
    support such a conclusion.
    The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John, for example, all cite the Magdalene as being
    present at the Crucifixion. None of them cites Mary of Bethany.
    But if Mary of Bethany was as devoted a disciple as she appears to be,
    her absence would seem to be, at the least, remiss. Is it credible
    that she not to mention her brother, Lazarus -would fail to witness the
    climactic moment of Jesus’s life? Such an omission would be both
    inexplicable and reprehensible unless, of course, she was present and
    cited by the Gospels as such under the name of the Magdalene. If the
    Magdalene and Mary of
    Bethany are one and the same, there is no question of the latter having been absent from
    the Crucifixion.
    The Magdalene can be identified with Mary of Bethany. The Magdalene can also be
    identified with the woman who anoints Jesus. The Fourth Gospel identifies the woman
    who anoints Jesus with Mary of Bethany. Indeed, the author of the Fourth Gospel is quite
    explicit on the matter:
    Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of
    Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. (It was that Mary which anointed the
    Lord with ointment, and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick.)
    (John 11:12)
    And again, one chapter later:
    Then Jesus six days before the passover came to
    Bethany, where Lazarus was which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead

    Reply
  24. MYST🀄

    for tradition is quite explicit about what became of Lazarus.
    According to tradition, as well as certain early Church writers,
    Lazarus, the Magdalene,
    Martha, Joseph of Arimathea and a few others, were transported by ship
    to
    Marseilles.”6 Here Joseph was supposedly consecrated by Saint Philip and sent on to
    England, where he established a church at Glastonbury. Lazarus and the Magdalene,
    however, are said to have remained in Gaul.
    Tradition maintains that the Magdalene died at either Aix-en-Provence
    or Saint Baume, and Lazarus at Marseilles after founding the first
    bishopric there. One of their companions, Saint Maximin, is said to
    have founded the first bishopric of Narbonne.*
    If Lazarus and the “beloved disciple’ were one and the same, there would thus be an
    explanation for their joint disappearance. Lazarus, the true “beloved disciple’, would seem
    to have been set ashore at Marseilles, together with his sister who, as tradition
    subsequently maintains, was carrying with her the Holy Grail, the “blood royal’. And the
    arrangements for this escape and exile would seem to have been made by Jesus himself,
    together with the “beloved disciple’, at the end of the Fourth Gospel.
    The Dynasty of Jesus
    4) If Jesus was indeed married to the Magdalene, might such a marriage have
    served some specific purpose? In other words, might it have been something more
    than a conventional marriage? Might it have been a dynastic alliance of some
    kind, with political implications and repercussions? Might a bloodline
    resulting from such a marriage, in short, have fully warranted the appellation “blood
    royal’?
    The Gospel of Matthew states explicitly that Jesus was of royal blood a
    genuine king, the lineal descendant of Solomon and David. If this is
    true, he would have enjoyed a legitimate claim to the throne of a
    united
    Palestine and perhaps even the legitimate claim. And the inscription
    affixed to the cross would have been much more than mere sadistic
    derision, for Jesus would indeed have been “King of the Jews’. His
    position, in many respects, would have been analogous to that of, say,
    Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745. And thus he would have engendered the

    opposition he did precisely by virtue of his role the role of a priest
    king who might possibly unify his country and the Jewish people, thereby posing <i serious
    threat to both Herod and Rome.
    Certain modern Biblical scholars have argued that Herod’s famous “Massacre of the
    Innocents’ never in fact took place. Even if it did, it was probably not of the garish and
    appalling proportions ascribed to it by the Gospels and subsequent tradition. And yet the
    very perpetuation of the story would seem to attest to something some genuine alarm on
    Herod’s part, some very real anxiety about being deposed. Granted, Herod was an
    extremely insecure ruler, hated by his enslaved subjects and sustained in power only by
    Roman cohorts. But however precarious his position might have been, it cannot,
    realistically speaking, have been seriously threatened by rumours of a mystical or spiritual
    saviour of the kind with which the Holy Land at the time already abounded anyway. If
    Herod was indeed worried, it can only have been by a very real, concrete, political threat
    the threat posed by a man who possessed a more legitimate claim to the throne than his
    own, and who could muster substantial popular support. The “Massacre of the Innocents’
    may never have occurred, but the traditions relating to it reflect some concern on Herod’s
    part about a rival claim and, quite possibly, some action intended to forestall or preclude it.
    Such a claim can only have been political in nature. And it must have warranted being
    taken seriously.
    To suggest that Jesus enjoyed such a claim is, of course, to challenge
    the popular image of the “poor carpenter from Nazareth’. But there are
    persuasive reasons for doing so. In the first place it is not
    altogether certain that Jesus was from Nazareth. “Jesus of Nazareth’
    is in fact a corruption, or mis translation of “Jesus the Nazorite’ or
    “Jesus the
    Nazorean’ or perhaps “Jesus of Gennesareth’. In the second place there
    is considerable doubt as to whether the town of Nazareth actually
    existed in
    Jesus’s time. It does not occur in any Roman maps, documents or
    records. It is not mentioned in the Talmud. It is not mentioned,
    still less associated with Jesus, in any of the writings of Saint Paul
    -which were, after all, composed before the Gospels. And Flavius Josephus the
    foremost chronicler of the period, who commanded troops in

    either. It would seem, in short, that Nazareth did not appear as a town until sometime
    after the revolt of nD. 68-74, and that Jesus’s name became associated with it by virtue of
    the semantic confusion accidental or deliberate which characterises so much of the New
    Testament.
    Whether Jesus was “of Nazareth’ or not there is no indication that he was ever a “poor
    carpenter’. 17 Certainly none of the Gospels portrays him as such. Indeed their evidence
    suggests quite the contrary. He seems to be well educated for example. He seems to
    have undergone training for the rabbinate, and to have consorted as frequently with
    wealthy and influential people as with the poor Joseph of Arimathea, for instance, and
    Nicodemus.
    And the wedding at Cana would seem to bear further witness to Jesus’s status and social
    position.
    This wedding does not appear to have been a modest, humble festival conducted by the
    “common people’. On the contrary it bears all the marks of an extravagant aristocratic
    union, a “high society’ affair, attended by at least several hundred guests. There are
    abundant servants, for example who hasten to do both Mary’s and Jesus’s bidding. There
    is a “master of the feast’ or “master of ceremonies’ who, in the context, would have been a
    kind of chief butler or perhaps even an aristocrat himself. Most clearly there is a positively
    enormous quantity of wine. When Jesus “transmutes’ the water into wine, he produces,
    according to the “Good News Bible’, no less than six hundred lit res which is more than
    eight hundred bottles! And this is in addition to what has already been consumed.
    All things considered, the wedding at Cana would seem to have been a sumptuous
    ceremony of the gentry or aristocracy. Even if the wedding were not Jesus’s own, his
    presence at it, and his mother’s, would suggest that they were members of the same
    caste. This alone would explain the servants’ obedience to them.
    If Jesus was an aristocrat, and if he was married to the Magdalene, it is probable that she
    was of comparable social station. And indeed, she would appear to be so. As we have
    seen she numbered among her friends the wife of an important official at Herod’s court.
    But she may have been more important still.

    Reply
  25. MYST🀄

    As we had discovered by tracing references in the “Prieure documents’,
    Jerusalem the Holy City and capital of Judaea had originally been the
    property of the Tribe of Benjamin. Subsequently the
    Benjamites were decimated in their war with the other tribes of Israel,
    and many of them went into exile although, as the “Prieure documents’
    maintain, “certain of them remained’. One descendant of this remnant
    was
    Saint Paul, who states explicitly that he is a Beni amite. (Romans 11:1)
    Despite their conflict with the other tribes of Israel, the Tribe of
    Benjamin appears to have enjoyed some special status. Among other
    things, it provided Israel with her first king Saul, anointed by the
    prophet
    Samuel and with her first royal house. But Saul was eventually deposed
    by
    David, of the Tribe of Judah. And David not only deprived the Benjamites of their claim to
    the throne. By establishing his capital at Jerusalem he deprived them of their rightful
    inheritance as well.
    According to all New Testament accounts, Jesus was of the line of David and thus also a
    member of the Tribe of Judah. In Benjamite eyes this might have rendered him, at least in
    some sense, a usurper. Any such objection might have been surmounted, however, if he
    were married to a Benjamite woman.
    Such a marriage would have constituted an important dynastic alliance,
    and one filled with political consequence. If would not only have
    provided
    Israel with a powerful priest-king. It would also have performed the symbolic function of
    returning Jerusalem to its original and rightful owners. Thus it would have served to
    encourage popular unity and support, and consolidated whatever claim to the throne
    Jesus might have possessed.
    In the New Testament there is no indication of the Magdalene’s tribal affiliation. In
    subsequent legends, however, she is said to have been of : oyal lineage. And there are
    other traditions which state specifically that she was of the Tribe of Benjamin.
    At this point, the outlines of a coherent historical scenario began to be discernible. And,
    as far as we could see, it made sound political sense.
    Jesus would have been a priest-king of the line of David, who possessed
    a legitimate claim to the throne. He would have consolidated his
    position by a symbolically important dynastic marriage. He would then
    have been poised to unify his country, mobilise the populace behind

    him, drive out the oppressors, depose their abject puppet and restore
    the glory of the monarchy as it was under Solomon. Such a man would
    indeed have been “King of the
    Jews’.
    The Crucifixion
    5) As Gandhi’s accomplishments bear witness, a spiritual leader, given
    sufficient popular support, can pose a threat to an existing regime.
    But a married man, with a rightful claim to the throne and children
    through whom to establish a dynasty, is a threat of a decidedly more
    serious nature. Is there any evidence in the Gospels that Jesus was in
    fact regarded by the
    Romans as such a threat?
    During his interview with Pilate, Jesus is repeatedly called “King of
    the
    Jews’. In accordance with Pilate’s instructions, an inscription of
    this title is also affixed to the cross. As Professor S. G. F. Brandon
    of
    Manchester University argues, the inscription affixed to the cross must be regarded as
    genuine as much so as anything in the New Testament. In the first place it figures, with
    virtually no variation, in all four Gospels.
    In the second place it is too compromising, too embarrassing an episode for subsequent
    editors to have invented it.
    In the Gospel of Mark, Pilate, after interrogating Jesus, asks the assembled dignitaries,
    “What will ye then that I shall do unto him whom ye call the King of the Jews?” (Mark
    15:12) This would seem to indicate that at least some Jews do actually refer to Jesus as
    their king. At the same time, however, in all four Gospels Pilate also accords Jesus that
    title.
    There is no reason to suppose that he does so ironically or derisively. In the Fourth
    Gospel he insists on it quite adamantly and seriously, despite a chorus of protests. In the
    three Synoptic Gospels, moreover, Jesus himself acknowledged his claim to the title: “And
    Pilate asked him. Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answering said unto him, Thou
    say est it.” (Mark 15:2) In the English translation this reply may sound ambivalent –
    perhaps deliberately so. In the original Greek, however, its import is quite unequivocal. It
    can only be interpreted as “Thou hast spoken correctly’. And thus the phrase is
    interpreted whenever it appears elsewhere in the Bible.

    The Gospels were composed during and after the revolt of A.D. 68-74,
    when Judaism had effectively ceased to exist as an organised social,
    political and military force. What is more, the Gospels were composed
    for a Greco-Roman audience for whom they had, of necessity, to be made
    acceptable. Rome had just fought a bitter and costly war against the
    Jews. In consequence it was perfectly natural to cast the Jews in the
    role of villains. In the wake of the Judaean revolt, moreover, Jesus
    could not possibly be portrayed as a political figure a figure in any
    way linked to the agitation which culminated in the war. Finally the
    role of the Romans in
    Jesus’s trial and execution had to be whitewashed and presented as
    sympathetically as possible. Thus Pilate is depicted in the Gospels as
    a decent, responsible and tolerant man, who consents only reluctantly
    to the
    Crucifixion.” But despise these liberties taken with history, Rome’s true position in the
    affair can be discerned.
    According to the Gospels, Jesus is initially condemned by the Sanhedrin
    the Council of Jewish Elders who then bring him to Pilate and beseech
    the
    Procurator to pronounce against him. Historically this makes no sense
    at all. In the three Synoptic Gospels Jesus is arrested and condemned
    by the
    Sanhedrin on the night of the Passover. But by Judaic law the
    Sanhedrin was forbidden to meet over the Passover.”9 In the Gospels
    Jesus’s arrest and trial occur at night, before the Sanhedrin. By
    Judaic law the Sanhedrin was forbidden to meet at night, in private
    houses, or anywhere outside the precincts of the Temple. In the
    Gospels the Sanhedrin is apparently un authorised to pass a death
    sentence and this would ostensibly be the reason for bringing Jesus to
    Pilate. However, the Sanhedrin was authorised to pass death sentences
    by stoning, if not by crucifixion. If the
    Sanhedrin had wished to dispose of Jesus, therefore, it could have sentenced him to
    death by stoning on its own authority. There would have been no need to bother Pilate at
    all.
    There are numerous other attempts by the authors of the Gospels to transfer guilt and
    responsibility from Rome. One such is Pilate’s apparent offer of a dispensation his
    readiness to free a prisoner of the crowd’s choosing.
    According to the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, this was a “custom of
    the
    Passover festival’.

    Reply
  26. MYST🀄

    In fact it was no such thing.z Modern authorities agree that no such policy ever existed on the part of the Romans, and
    that the offer to liberate either
    Jesus or Barabbas is sheer fiction. Pilate’s reluctance to condemn
    Jesus, and his grudging submission to the bullying pressure of the mob,
    would seem to be equally fictitious. In reality it would have been
    unthinkable for a
    Roman Procurator and especially a Procurator as ruthless as Pilate to bow to the pressure
    of a mob. Again, the purpose of such fictionalisation is clear enough to exonerate the
    Romans, to transfer blame to the Jews and thereby to make Jesus acceptable to a Roman
    audience.
    It is possible, of course, that not all Jews were entirely innocent.
    Even if the Roman administration feared a priest-king with a claim to
    the throne, it could not embark overtly on acts of provocation acts
    that might precipitate a full-scale rebellion. Certainly it would have
    been more expedient for Rome if the priest-king were ostensibly
    betrayed by his own people. It is thus conceivable that the Romans
    employed certain Sadducees as, say, agents provocateurs. But even if
    this were the case, the inescapable fact remains that Jesus was the
    victim of a Roman administration, a
    Roman court, a Roman sentence, Roman soldiery and a Roman execution an execution
    which, in form, was reserved exclusively for enemies of Rome.
    It was not for crimes against Judaism that Jesus was crucified, but for
    crimes against the empire.z’
    Who Was Barabbas?
    6) Is there any evidence in the Gospels that Jesus actually did have children?
    There is nothing explicit. But rabbis were expected, as a matter of course, to have
    children; and if Jesus was a rabbi, it would have been most unusual for him to remain
    childless. Indeed, it would have been unusual for him to remain childless whether he was
    a rabbi or not.
    Granted, these arguments, in themselves, do not constitute any positive
    evidence. But there is evidence of a more concrete, more specific
    kind. It consists of the elusive individual who figures in the Gospels
    as Barabbas, or, to be more precise, as Jesus Barabbas for it is by
    this name that he is identified in the Gospel of Matthew. If nothing else, the coincidence is striking.
    Modern scholars are uncertain about the derivation and meaning of
    “Barabbas’. “Jesus Barabbas’ may be a corruption of “Jesus Berabbi’.
    “Berabbi’ was a title reserved for the highest and most esteemed rabbis and was placed
    after the rabbi’s given name. “”Jesus Berabbi’ might therefore refer to Jesus himself.
    Alternatively, “Jesus Barabbas’ might originally have been “Jesus bar Rabbi’ – “Jesus, son
    of the Rabbi’. There is no record anywhere of Jesus’s own father having been a rabbi.
    But if Jesus had a son named after himself, that son would indeed have been “Jesus bar
    Rabbi’.
    There is one other possibility as well. “Jesus Barabbas’ may derive
    from
    “Jesus bar Abba’; and since “Abba’ is “father’ in Hebrew, “Barabbas’
    would then mean “son of the father’ – a fairly pointless designation
    unless the “father’ is in some way special. If the “father’ were
    actually the
    “Heavenly Father’, then “Barabbas’ might again refer to Jesus himself. On the other hand,
    if Jesus himself is the “father’, “Barabbas’ would again refer to his son.
    Whatever the meaning and derivation of the name, the figure of Barabbas is extremely
    curious. And the more one considers the incident concerning him, the more apparent it
    becomes that something irregular is going on and someone is attempting to conceal
    something. In the first place Barabbas’s name, like the Magdalene’s, seems to have been
    subjected to a deliberate and systematic blackening. Just as popular tradition depicts the
    Magdalene as a harlot, so it depicts Barabbas as a “thief’. But if Barabbas was any of the
    things his name suggests, he is hardly likely to have been a common thief. Why then
    blacken his name? Unless he was something else in reality something which the editors
    of the New Testament did not want posterity to know.
    Strictly speaking the Gospels themselves do not describe Barabbas as a
    thief. According to Mark and Luke he is a political prisoner, a rebel
    charged with murder and insurrection. In the Gospel of Matthew,
    however,
    Barabbas is described as a “notable prisoner’. And in the Fourth
    Gospel
    Barabbas is said to be (in the Greek) a les tai (John 18:40) This can
    be translated as either “robber’ or “bandit’. In its historical
    context, however, it meant something quite different. Lestes was in fact the term habitually applied by the Romans to the Zealots23 the
    militant nationalistic revolutionaries who for some time had been fomenting social
    upheaval. Since Mark and Luke agree that Barabbas is guilty of insurrection, and since
    Matthew does not contradict this assertion, it is safe to conclude that Barabbas was a
    Zealot.
    But this is not the only information available on Barabbas. According
    to
    Luke, he had been involved in a recent “disturbance’, “sedition’ or “riot’ in the city. History
    makes no mention of any such turmoil in Jerusalem at the time. The Gospels, however,
    do. According to the Gospels, there had been a civic disturbance in Jerusalem, only a few
    days before when Jesus and his followers overturned the tables of the money-lenders at
    the Temple.
    Was this the disturbance in which Barabbas was involved, and for which he was
    imprisoned? It certainly seems likely. And in that case there is one obvious conclusion
    that Barabbas was one of Jesus’s entourage.
    According to modern scholars, the “custom’ of releasing a prisoner on
    the
    Passover did not exist. But even if it did, the choice of Barabbas
    over
    Jesus would make no sense. If Barabbas were indeed a common criminal, guilty of
    murder, why would the people choose to have his life spared?
    And if he were indeed a Zealot or a revolutionary, it is hardly likely
    that
    Pilate would have released so potentially dangerous a character, rather than a harmless
    visionary who was quite prepared, ostensibly, to “render unto Caesar’. Of all the
    discrepancies, inconsistencies and improbabilities in the Gospels, the choice of Barabbas
    is among the most striking and most inexplicable. Something would clearly seem to lie
    behind so clumsy and confusing a fabrication.
    One modern writer has proposed an intriguing and plausible explanation.
    He suggests that Barabbas was the son of Jesus and Jesus a legitimate
    king.z4
    If this were the case, the choice of Barabbas would suddenly make sense.
    One must imagine an oppressed populace confronted with the imminent extermination of
    their spiritual and political ruler the Messiah, whose advent had formerly promised so
    much. In such circumstances, would not the dynasty be more important than the
    individual? Would not the preservation of the bloodline be paramount, taking precedence
    over everything else

    Reply
  27. MYST🀄

    In actual fact, however, Constantine did no such
    thing. But in order to decide precisely what he did do, we must examine the evidence
    more closely.
    In the first place Constantine’s “conversion’ if that is the appropriate word does not seem
    to have been Christian at all but unabashedly pagan.
    He appears to have had some sort of vision, or numinous experience, in
    the precincts of a pagan temple to the Gallic Apollo, either in the
    Vosges or near Autun. According to a witness accompanying
    Constantine’s army at the time, the vision was of the sun god the deity
    worshipped by certain cults under the name of “Sol Invictus’, “the
    Invincible Sun’. There is evidence that Constantine, just before his
    vision, had been initiated into a Sol
    Invictus cult. In any case the Roman Senate, after the Battle of
    Milvian
    Bridge, erected a triumphal arch in the Colosseum. According to the
    inscription on this arch, Constantine’s victory was won “through the
    prompting of the Deity’. But the Deity in question was not Jesus. It
    was
    Sol Invictus, the pagan sun god. z
    Contrary to tradition, Constantine did not make Christianity the
    official state religion of Rome. The state religion of Rome under
    Constantine was, in fact, pagan sun worship; and Constantine, all his
    life, acted as its chief priest. Indeed his reign was called a “sun
    emperor ship and Sol
    Invictus figured everywhere including the imperial banners and the
    coinage of the realm. The image of Constantine as a fervent convert
    to
    Christianity is clearly wrong. He himself was not even baptised until
    337 when he lay on his deathbed and was apparently too weakened or too
    apathetic to protest. Nor can he be credited with the Chi Rho
    monogram. An inscription bearing this monogram was found on a tomb at
    Pompeii, dating from two and a half centuries before.3
    The cult of Sol Invictus was Syrian in origin and imposed by Roman
    emperors on their subjects a century before Constantine. Although it
    contained elements of Baal and Astarte worship, it was essentially
    monotheistic. In effect, it posited the sun god as the sum of all
    attributes of all other gods, and thus peacefully subsumed its
    potential rivals. Moreover, it conveniently harmonised with the cult
    of Mithras which was also prevalent in Rome and the empire at the time,

    and which also involved solar worship. For Constantine the cult of
    Sol Invictus was, quite simply, expedient. His primary, indeed obsessive, objective was
    unity unity in politics, in religion and in territory. A cult, or state religion, that included all
    other cults within it obviously abetted this objective. And it was under the auspices of the
    Sol Invictus cult that Christianity consolidated its position.
    Christian orthodoxy had much in common with the cult of Sol Invictus;
    and thus the former was able to flourish unmolested under the taller’s
    umbrella of tolerance. The cult of Sol Invictus, being essentially
    monotheistic, paved the way for the monotheism of Christianity. And
    the cult of Sol
    Invictus was convenient in other respects as well -respects which both modified and
    facilitated the spread of Christianity. By an edict promulgated in A.D. 321, for example,
    Constantine ordered the law courts closed on ‘the venerable day of the sun’, and decreed
    that this day be a day of rest. Christianity had hitherto held the Jewish Sabbath Saturday
    as sacred. Now, in accordance with Constantine’s edict, it transferred its sacred day to
    Sunday. This not only brought it into harmony with the existing regime, but also permitted
    it to further dissociate itself from its Judaic origins. Until the fourth century, moreover,
    Jesus’s birthday had been celebrated on January 6th.
    For the cult of Sol Invictus, however, the crucial day of the year was
    December 25th the festival of Natalis
    Invictus, the birth (or rebirth) of the sun, when the days began to grow longer. In this
    respect, too, Christianity brought itself into alignment with the regime and the established
    state religion.
    The cult of Sol Invictus meshed happily with that of Mithras so much
    so, indeed, that the two are often confused.4 Both emphasised the
    status of the sun. Both held Sunday as sacred. Both celebrated a
    major birth festival on
    December 25th. As a result Christianity could also find points of convergence with
    Mithraism the more so as Mithraism stressed the immortality of the soul, a future judgment
    and the resurrection of the dead.
    In the interests of unity Constantine deliberately chose to blur the distinctions between
    Christianity, Mithraism and Sol Invictus deliberately chose not to see any contradiction
    between them. Thus he tolerated the deified Jesus as the earthly manifestation of Sol
    Invictus….

    Reply
  28. MYST🀄

    Thus he would build a Christian church and, at the same time, statues
    of the Mother
    Goddess Cybele and of Sol Invictus, the sun god the latter being an
    image of himself, bearing his features. In such eclectic and
    ecumenical gestures, the emphasis on unity can be seen again. Faith,
    in short, was for
    Constantine a political matter; and any faith that was conducive to unity was treated with
    forbearance.
    While Constantine was not, therefore, the “good Christian’ that later tradition depicts, he
    consolidated, in the name of unity and uniformity, the status of Christian orthodoxy. In
    A.D. 325, for example, he convened the Council of Nicea. At this council the dating of
    Easter was established.
    Rules were framed which defined the, authority of bishops, thereby paving the way for a
    concentration of power in ecclesiastical hands.
    Most important of all, the Council of Nicea decided, by vote,5 that
    Jesus was a god, not a mortal prophet. Again, however, it must be
    emphasised that
    Constantine’s paramount consideration was not piety but unity and
    expediency. As a god Jesus could be associated conveniently with Sol
    Invictus. As a mortal prophet he would have been more difficult to accommodate. In
    short, Christian orthodoxy lent itself to a politically desirable fusion with the official state
    religion; and in so far as it did so Constantine conferred his support upon Christian
    orthodoxy.
    Thus, a year after the Council of Nicea, he sanctioned the confiscation
    and destruction of all works that challenged orthodox teachings works
    by pagan authors that referred to Jesus, as well as works by
    “heretical’
    Christians. He also arranged for a fixed income to be allocated to
    the
    Church and installed the bishop of Rome in the Lateran Palaces Then,
    in
    A.D. 331, he commissioned and financed new copies of the Bible. This constituted one of
    the single most decisive factors in the entire history of Christianity, and provided Christian
    orthodoxy the “adherents of the message’ with an unparalleled opportunity.
    In A.D. 303, a quarter of a century before, the pagan Emperor
    Diocletian had undertaken to destroy all Christian writings that could
    be found. As a result Christian documents especially in Rome all but
    vanished. When Constantine, commissioned new versions of these documents, it enabled
    the custodians of orthodoxy to revise, edit and re-write their material
    as they saw fit, in accordance with their tenets. It was at this point
    that most of the crucial alterations in the New
    Testament were probably made, and Jesus assumed the unique status he
    has enjoyed ever since. The importance of Constantine’s commission
    must not be underestimated. Of the five thousand extant early
    manuscript versions of the
    New Testament, not one pre-dates the fourth century.” The New Testament, as it exists
    today, is essentially a product of fourth-century editors and writers custodians of
    orthodoxy, “adherents of the message’, with vested interests to protect.
    The Zealots
    After Constantine the course of Christian orthodoxy is familiar enough and well
    documented. Needless to say it culminated in the final triumph of the “adherents of the
    message’. But if “the message established itself as the guiding and governing principle of
    Western civilisation, it did not remain wholly unchallenged. Even from its incognito exile,
    the claims and the very existence of the family would seem to have exerted a powerful
    appeal an appeal which, more often than was comfortable, posed a threat to the
    orthodoxy of Rome.
    Roman orthodoxy rests essentially on the books of the New Testament. But the New
    Testament itself is only a selection of early Christian documents dating from the fourth
    century. There are a great many other works that pre-date the New Testament in its
    present form, some of which cast a significant, often controversial, new light on the
    accepted accounts.
    There are, for instance, the diverse books excluded from the Bible, which comprise the
    compilation now known’ as the Apocrypha. Some of the works in the Apocrypha are
    admittedly late, dating from the sixth century. Other works, however, were already in
    circulation as early as the second century, and may well have as great a claim to veracity
    as the original Gospels themselves One such work is the Gospel of Peter, a copy of which was first
    located in a valley of the upper Nile in 1886, although it is mentioned
    by the bishop of Antioch in A.D. 180. According to this “apocryphal’
    Gospel, Joseph of Arimathea was a close friend of Pontius
    Pilate which, if true, would increase the likelihood of a fraudulent
    Crucifixion. The Gospel of Peter also reports that the tomb in which
    Jesus was buried lay in a place called “the garden of Joseph’. And
    Jesus’s last words on the cross are particularly striking: “My power,
    my power, why hast thou forsaken Me? 18
    Another apocryphal work of interest is the Gospel of the Infancy of
    Jesus
    Christ, which dates from no later than the second century and possibly from before. In
    this book Jesus is portrayed as a brilliant but eminently human child. All too human
    perhaps for he is violent and unruly, prone to shocking displays of temper and a rather
    irresponsible exercise of his powers. Indeed, on one occasion he strikes dead another
    child who offends him. t1 similar fate is visited-upon an autocratic mentor. Such incidents
    are undoubtedly spurious, but they, attest to the way in which, at the time, Jesus had to be
    depicted if he were to attain divine status amongst his following.
    In addition to Jesus’s rather scandalous behaviour as a child, there is
    one curious and perhaps significant fragment in the Gospel of the
    Infancy. When
    Jesus was circumcised, his foreskin was said to have been appropriated
    by an unidentified old woman who preserved it in an alabaster box used
    for oil of spikenard. And “This is that alabaster box which Mary the
    sinner procured and poured forth the ointment out of it upon the head
    and the feet of our Lord Jesus Christ.”9
    Here, then, as in the accepted Gospels, there is an anointing which is
    obviously more than it appears to bean anointing tantamount to some
    significant ritual. In this case, however, it is clear that the
    anointing has been foreseen and prepared long in advance. And the
    whole incident implies a connection albeit an obscure and convoluted
    one between the
    Magdalene and Jesus’s family long before Jesus embarked on his mission at the age of
    thirty. It is reasonable to assume that Jesus’s parents would not have conferred his
    foreskin on the first old woman to request it even if there were nothing unusual in so
    apparently odd a request…..The old woman must therefore be someone of consequence and/or someone
    on intimate terms with Jesus’s parents. Aad the Magdalene’s subsequent possession of
    the bizarre relic -or, at any rate, of its container suggests a connection between her and
    the old woman. Again we seem to be confronted by the shadowy vestiges of something
    that was more important than is now generally believed.
    Certain passages in the books of the Apocrypha the flagrant excesses
    of
    Jesus’s childhood, for example were undoubtedly embarrassing to later
    orthodoxy. They would certainly be so to most Christians today. But
    it must be remembered that the Apocrypha, like the accepted books of
    the New
    Testament, was composed by “adherents of the message’, intent on
    deifying
    Jesus. The Apocrypha cannot therefore be expected to contain anything that might
    seriously compromise the “message’ which any mention of Jesus’s political activity, still
    more of his possible dynastic ambitions, manifestly would. For evidence on such
    controversial matters as those, we were obliged to look elsewhere.
    The Holy Land in Jesus’s time contained a bewildering number of
    diverse
    Judaic groups, factions, sects and sub sects In the Gospels, only two
    of these, the Pharisees and Sadducees, are cited, and both are cast in
    the roles of villains. However, the role of villain would only have
    been appropriate to the Sadducees, who did collaborate with the Roman
    administration. The Pharisees maintained a staunch opposition to Rome;
    and
    Jesus himself, if not actually a Pharisee, acted essentially within
    the
    Pharisee tradition.”
    In order to appeal to a Romanised audience, the Gospels were obliged to
    exonerate Rome and blacken the Jews. This explains why the Pharisees
    had to be misrepresented and deliberately stigmatised along with their
    genuinely culpable countrymen, the Sadducees. But why is there no
    mention in the
    Gospels of the Zealots the militant nationalistic “freedom fighters’
    and revolutionaries who, if anything, a Roman audience would only too
    eagerly have seen as villains? There would seem to be no explanation
    for their apparent omission from the Gospels unless Jesus was so
    closely associated with them that this association could not possibly
    be disowned, only glossed over and thereby concealed.

    Reply
  29. MYST🀄

    It is thus not particularly surprising that unmistakably Semitic names Bera, for
    instance occur among Visigoth aristocracy and royalty. Dagobert II married a Visigoth
    princess whose father was named Bera. The name Bera recurs repeatedly in the Visigoth
    Merovingian family tree descended from Dagobert II and Sigisbert IV.
    The Roman Church is said to have declared that Dagobert’s son had converted to
    Arianism,z and it would not be very extraordinary if he had done so.
    Despite the pact between the Church and Clovis, the Merovingians had always been
    sympathetic to Arianism. One of Clovis’s grandsons, Chilperic, made no secret of his
    Arian proclivities.
    If Arianism was not inimical to Judaism, neither was it to Islam, which
    rose so meteorically in the seventh century. The Arian view of Jesus
    was quite in accord with that of the Koran. In the Koran Jesus is
    mentioned no less than thirty-five times, under a number of impressive
    appellations including “Messenger of God’ and “Messiah’. At no point,
    however, is he regarded as anything other than a mortal prophet, a
    forerunner of Muhammad and a spokesman for a single supreme God. And
    like Basilides and Mani, the
    Koran maintains that Jesus did not die on the cross, “they did not kill him, nor did they
    crucify him, but they thought they did. “I The Koran itself does not elaborate on this
    ambiguous statement, but Islamic commentators do. According to most of them, there
    was a substitute generally, though not always, supposed to have been Simon of Cyrene.
    Certain Muslim writers speak of Jesus hiding in a niche of a wall and watching the
    Crucifixion of a surrogate which concurs with the fragment already quoted from the Nag
    Hammadi Scrolls.

    Reply
  30. MYST🀄

    The Jesus of the Gospels, and of established Christianity, is
    ultimately incomplete a God whose incarnation as man is only partial. The Jesus who
    emerged from our research enjoys, in our opinion, a much more valid claim to what
    Christianity would. have him be.
    On the whole, then, we do not think we have compromised or belittled Jesus.
    We do not think he has suffered from the conclusions to which our
    research led us. From our investigations emerges a living and
    plausible Jesus a
    Jesus whose life is both meaningful and comprehensible to modern man.
    We cannot point to one man and assert that he is Jesus’s lineal descendant.
    Family trees bifurcate, subdivide and in the course of centuries
    multiply into veritable forests. There are at least a dozen families
    in Britain and
    Europe today with numerous collateral branches who are of Merovingian
    lineage. These include the houses of Habsburg-Lorraine (present
    titular dukes of Lorraine and kings of Jerusalem), Plantard, Luxembourg
    Montpezat,
    Montesquieu and various others. According to the “Prieure documents’,
    the
    Sinclair family in Britain is also allied to the bloodline, as are the various branches of the
    Stuarts. And the Devonshire family, among others, would seem to have been privy to the
    secret. Most of these houses could presumably claim a pedigree from Jesus; and if one
    man, at some point in the future, is to be put forward as a new priest-king, we do not know
    who he is.
    But several things, at any rate, are clear. So far as we personally
    are concerned, Jesus’s lineal descendant would not be any more divine,
    any more intrinsically miraculous, than the rest of us. This attitude
    would undoubtedly be shared by a great many people today. We suspect
    it is shared by the Prieure de Sion as well. Moreover the revelation
    of an individual, or group of individuals, descended from Jesus would
    not shake the world in the way it might have done as recently as a
    century or two ago. Even if there were “incontrovertible proof’ of
    such a lineage, many people would simply shrug and ask, “So what?” As
    a result there would seem to be little point in the Prieure de Sion’s
    elaborate designs -unless those designs are in some crucial way linked
    with politics.

    Reply
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