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Shhh … Don’t tell anyone that Pope Benedict XIII (1394-1423)ordered the suppression of ‘the true name of Jesus Christ’.

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Tampered texts

Edward Reuss of Strasbourg published a description of different Bible versions issued up to 1869. He was able to identify a staggering eight hundred and fifty-three separate and variant editions, and other divergent editions have since been produced. Amazingly, there are over one thousand different readings of the Bible, and that enormous thesaurus of conflicting information is covered by at least seventeen different copyrights. That stage of the history of the transmission of the Bible was characterised by the huge number of variant readings of the Gospels in particular, now running into tens of thousands. Mr. B. A. Hinsdale (MA), the author of the book called the Genuineness and Authenticity of the Gospels, felt compelled to stress that, ‘There are 150,000 various readings of the New Testament manuscripts alone, the greater part of which must be corruptions since there can be but one original reading for any given passage’.

Telling the truth

This poem1 was written by the erudite Alexander Pope (1688-1744) and reflects his thoughts on the New Testament:

Some old words to fame have made pretence,Ancient in phrase, not modern in sense;Such labour’d nothings, in so strange a style,Amaze the unlearn’d, and make the learned smile.

1Essay on Criticism, Pt. ii, 1, 126

Temple Virgins

The Gospel of James describes how Mary was one of seven Temple Virgins maintained by the high priest of Jerusalem, and if those narratives reflect any truth, the deep mysteries of ancient Pagan rites buried within passages of the New Testament may be revealing themselves. Temple Virgins were

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not physical virgins in the sexual sense of the word, but ‘holy harlots’ or prostitute-priestesses. To qualify for entry into heaven in early Jewish tradition a sacrifice was necessary, and those so inclined availed themselves to the sexual favours offered by the Temple Virgins. No ‘virgin’ refused them, for in the sexual act she believed that she was performing the prestigious function of a heavenly Goddess on earth. After the qualifying ritual was complete, it became time for the purification and sacrifice … the removal of the penis of the participant by ‘the men of the city’ and the dedication of the severed phallus to the Temple Virgin.

© Angelica Kauffmann, Pinacoteca, Dresden; Photo by M. K. Beatrice, 1903

A Temple Virgin holding a vial to receive the severed phallus of the participant.

Advanced students of the New Testament may recognise here symbols of earlier religions and some features of the deeper, underlying Pagan beliefs in the Gospels, and associate this ritual with these words of Jesus: ‘And there were eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of

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the Kingdom of Heaven’.1 In the context of Temple Virgins as presented in the Gospel of James, it could be argued that the Temple ‘Virgin Mary’ mothered Jesus after normal sexual intercourse with a ‘participant’, yet was still considered a ‘virgin’ in the tradition of her time.

1Matt 19:12

Tertullian, Bishop (160-210)

Like all early presbyters, he was rough, rowdy and ‘a hot-headed and rash Roman … barbarous, uncouth’.1 He was the author of more than thirty curious writings, some of them being; Second Marriage a Species of Adultery, To His Wife, Adverse Haereses, Adverse Marcion, Against the Gentiles, Adverse Judeaus, On the Veiling of Virgins, Prescriptions of Tertullian and Scorpiace. His constant and bitter condemnation of early congregations is seen in this statement, where he pronounces the true spirit of the early church when he said of those who criticised the presbyter’s orations:

I hope to see them all in the fire of Hell. What shall be the magnitude of that scene! How shall I laugh. How shall I rejoice! How shall I triumph when I see so many illustrious kings who were said to have mounted into heaven, groaning with Jupiter, their god, in the lowest darkness of hell! Then shall those who have persecuted us burn in more cruel fire than any they had kindled for their enemies.2

In a document he wrote called The Confessions of Tertullian he revealedthat the authors of the Gospel of John applied ‘a liberal amount ofreligious license’ in the construction of that writing and said of the developing Jesus story: ‘It is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd; the fact is certain, because it is impossible’.3 However, he, like Bishop Irenaeus, denied both a virgin birth4 and a resurrection, claiming that Jesus was ‘stoned’, not crucified.5 Tertullian regarded women as ‘a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill’.6 To the embarrassment of

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the later church Tertullian abandoned the Christian faith and became aMontanist, and then labelled ‘a heretic’.7

1Catholic Encyclopedia, iv, 5832Despectae, Ch. xxx, Tertullian3De Carne Christi, ch. v, Ante-Nicene Fathers, iii, 5254New Catholic Encyclopedia, xiv, 6945Adverse Judeaus, C.IX, last paragraph6The Confessions of Tertullian7Catholic Encyclopedia, vi, 12

The good bishop

Church historian Sozomen relates at the Council of Tyre in 355, Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, was charged with breaking a mystical chalice, smashing an episcopal chair, false imprisonment, deposing a bishop unlawfully, placing him under military guard and torturing him,striking other bishops physically, obtaining his bishoprics by perjury, breaking and cutting off the arm of one of his opponents, burning his house, tying him to a column and whipping him, and putting him ina cell illegally; all this in addition to teaching a false doctrine. The venom employed in the church controversies reflects the fundamental instability of Christian belief during the early centuries.

The Ten Commandments

They were not new codes of conduct invented for the Israelites, but newly restated versions of the ancient pharonic confessions from Spell No. 125in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

The unexplained

In his lists of earlier bishops, Eusebius never spoke of Peter as everbeing the Bishop of Rome. However, he did say that Peter travelled to Britain1 and archaeological evidence confirms the church record.

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The discovery at Whithern in Lincoln of a headstone now called the‘Peter Stone’ supports Eusebius’ statement. It is a rough pillar,around four feet high and fifteen inches wide. An inscription indespoiled Roman capitals reads: LOE (VS) S (ANC) TI PETRI APVSTOLI, ‘The Place of Peter the apostle’. It seems that Peter was buried inBritain, not Rome.

1Metaphrastes ad 29 Junii, Menaloggi Graeceorum

They roared with laughter

With the stories and legends surrounding Osiris, Krishna, Buddha, Hesus, Prometheus, Baal, Mithra, Adonis and Pythagoras, it is possible to see the presence of a kind of universal religious mythos, the details of which slightly vary because they were composed in different ages and different countries around a variation of Kristos-type figures. The ancient picture of previous ‘saviours’ being ‘only a type of Christ’,1 is the explanation orthodox Christian apologists offer to account for the ‘extraordinary similarities of the Pagan stories’2. Justin Martyr, in his writing called Dialogue with Trypho, acknowledges the parallels and tries to explain them away by claiming that it was ‘the devil, to imitate the truth, who invented the stories of Bacchus, Hercules and Esculapius’. Trypho’s companions ‘roared with laughter’ at St. Justin’s trite comments in which he hardly denies the story that Bacchus ‘rose again’, Hercules ‘after his death, ascended into heaven’, or that Esculapius ‘cured diseases and made people rise from the dead’. Later apologists took the same line of blaming the devil for the existence of legends that subsisted centuries before the commencement of the Christian era with Bishops Eusebius and Augustine being two of them.3

1Catholic Encyclopedia, 1908 Ed., ‘Saviours’2Catholic Encyclopedia, Pecci Ed., ii, 117-1183Ecclesiastical History and City of God