Authors Note: The following represents an extract from my book Trinity, the Metamorphosis of Myth. On the occasion of this blighted season I thought it useful for some who may question the root of their delusion in light of the West’s overwhelming demonstrations of foolishness and plain old wickedness. Old Nick is indeed, ‘Old Nick’ and I pray some Christians may read this and come to their senses as did the Prodigal Son. As such, I dare not wish you a Merry Christmas but rather a pious repentance.
During the festive season of 2003, I took opportunity to preach on the origin of Christmas and the Hebrew names of both Yahweh (Elah or Allah) and Yahshua (Yeheoshua, Jesus/Isa), with respect to the true meanings of the adopted pagan appellations and their correlating feast days. After I finished the presentation, the pastor’s daughter ― also a Minister ― took the podium and assured the shocked congregation that everything I had said was indeed true. A few days later, I was relieved of my authority as a Christian Teacher for the entire Kuching SIB Christian Community in Sarawak E. Malaysia; a position I had enjoyed for nigh on three years. No word was said about the veracity of my teaching. It seems my presentation was too impassioned for the kind-hearted congregation whose tradition commands them to be politely tolerant of lies and liars! Such is the power of myth! Still perplexed a year later, by the grace of Allah I read the Koran for the first time in my life and became a Muslim in the privacy of my living room. All bafflement vanished!
I submit the following summaries from possibly the greatest historian of the 20th Century, Mr. Will Durant:
- “ … it is clear that there are many contradictions between one gospel and another, many dubious statements of history, many suspicious resemblances to the legends told of pagan gods, many incidents apparently designed to prove the fulfilment of OT prophecy, many passages possibly aiming to establish a historical basis for some later doctrine or ritual of the church … the conversations and speeches reported in the gospels were subject to the frailties of illiterate memories, and the errors or emendations of copyists.” [1]
- “Christianity did not destroy paganism, it adopted it. The Greek mind, dying, came to a transmigrated life in the theology and liturgy of the church … the Greek Mysteries passed down into the impressive mystery of the Mass. Other pagan cultures contributed to the syncretic result. From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity, the Last Judgment, and personal reward and punishment, the adoration of Mother and Child, monasticism, and the mystic philosophy that made Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism, obscuring the true Christian creed. From Phrygia came the worship of the Great Mother; from Syria the resurrection of Adonis; from Thrace the cult of Dionysus, the dying and saving god. From Persia Millenarianism and dualism of Darkness and Light in the fourth gospel. The Mythraic ritual so closely resembled the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass, that Christian fathers charged the Devil with inventing these similarities. Christianity was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.” [1]
The evidence for pagan contributions to Christian Theology and custom is, therefore, overwhelmingly clear and even acknowledged by many a Christian cleric and scholar. Why then, do they persist in preaching the accretion of myths so thoroughly digested and transformed to the present creed? The single plausible explanation is the conscious application of myth as a tool for pacific social conformity towards manageable norms; with the end purpose of malleable direction by puppet masters of illusion. This primordial sociologic principle of civilized politics is firmly grounded by the reality of Myth’s persuasive mesmerizing energy: myths readily achieve a penultimate metaphysical ascendancy within group frameworks of worldview as a substitute for moral truth: in other words, they more readily get the job done than does the personal accountability of thoughtful contemplation, which requires serious cogitation ― myth works ― always has, and will continue its enchantment until Judgment Day!
The Sacrifice of Reasoning
Prophets have spoken and written accounts of their revelations, but no original transcript or manuscript remains for scrutiny bearing an authentic signature, save that of Islam’s Prophet and perhaps the Gospel of Barnabas. Thanks to diligent discipleship and Divine protection, Al’Qur’an was perfectly collated within 20 years of his death and has remained unaltered! All other extant monotheist texts are copies made by scribes, priests, or ‘wanna-be’ prophets ― and many contain plagiarisms, significant errors, departures from established truth, interpolation, and even contradiction of what can be gleaned of original doctrines! For example, a minor passage of major consequence is Jeremiah 7: 21-24, of the Old Testament:
- “… for I spoke not unto your fathers, nor commanded them concerning burnt-offerings and sacrifices, in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, but I commanded them … walk in the way that I command you.”
Here, the Prophet proclaims that Moses gave no ordinances regarding the exasperating minutiae of sacrificial ritual and the text also confirms the contextual utilization of the word ‘way’ in regards to obedient discipleship! This is an absolute negation of substantial passages in the Old Testament which presage the New Testament’s explanation for the immolation of Isa (pbuh). However, if one compares the Christian myth with Hindu and Mesopotamian precedents, there are no contradictions in the fundamental doctrines of blood sacrifice, including the troublesome formulae. The greater portion of these tales relate immaculate conceptions of god-men, virgin births, divine paternity, Christmas birthdays, Easter resurrections, post-mortem apparitions, descents to Hell, ascensions, and indwelling holy-spirits! Furthermore, it is significant that Christians devotedly refer to the unsanctioned sacrificial ordinances of Jeremiah’s censure, as the prophetic prototypes for the central dogma of a god-man sacrifice! So many of the curious pagan stories lead to messianic immolation and Easterly resurrection as exclusive vehicles for temporal and eternal atonement, it is like reruns of a favourite TV Serial. And all promise salvation from divine wrath, or at least delivery of a decent meal!
Buddha repeatedly admonished contemporary prelates as pretentious opportunists and teachers of fable, and Isa castigated, with great vehemence, their Judaic facsimiles. These latter doctors of divinity were the scriptural guardians who removed over 3,000 direct references to the name of Yahveh from their Book? This same lot of Divines also lost the Book of Abraham, misplaced the Ark of the Covenant along with the original Mosaic monoliths, as well as the Little Book of Elijah (of which Barnabas relates they still feared whenever Isa referred to it)! What else did they lose (or hide) of value? What could be more valuable to Monotheism’s posterity than the Book of Abraham or the two monoliths of Moses? On the contrary: The Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead, their sister the Kabala, Hammurabi’s Codex, Xerxes’s Monoliths, Sumer’s clay library, Homer, and the profoundly beautiful works of Lao Tse and Confucius have all survived relatively intact! So we should ask: Why not the greatest archaic relics of Monotheist Revelation?
And what might these rabbis have inserted or changed when the unidentified Book of Law[1] was conveniently rediscovered in their own Temple during the reign of King Josiah ― or when the Hellenically charged Septuagint[2] translation of the now suspect Old Testament was finally pieced together in a mere 72 days in 300 BCE (along with its incredibly faulty grammar) ― more than one thousand years after Moses? Isa is also known to have quoted several OT books for which there are no references, and not one of the surviving Massoretic Texts (all copies) of the Hebrew Torah agree from copy to copy! Where are the missing books or their impeccably holy copies, and if we have copies of what is supposed to be genuine, why do we not know what happened to the authentic documents? What happened? Are the Jews really so careless? ― Though it appears they were a bit slipshod with the sacred texts, they were inordinately scrupulous stewards of their own traditional records! How then, can students of legitimacy, place trust in such a priest-hood?
As for the Christian Canon:
- not one of its oldest Copies dates beyond the 3rd to 4th centuries A.D., and even these contradict each other as well as all later copies
- it is thought by the best scholars that the synoptic Gospels were all taken from the Book of Isa’s Sayings, which also has been lost!
- it is acknowledged that over 300 extant original Gospels―many of which were in Aramaic & Hebrew―were destroyed, ignored, or purposely suppressed after Trinitarian Doctrine was officially adopted during the same period in which the oldest manuscripts were inscribed!
- To make matters worse, these canonized Gospels have Isa quoting OT scriptures from the same faulty grammar of the Septuagint, word for word, when it is known the man spoke Aramaic and studied the Massoretic Texts kept in Jerusalem which were in Hebrew!
As for Paul’s work: the oldest copies date from 200 A.D., and he also quoted the inaccurate Septuagint word for word fifty per cent of the time, but departed with his own OT interpolations for the other half and for which there exist no references! Please note the following scholarly declaration:
- It is not too much to say that in its literary form and expression, the New Testament would have been a widely different book had it been written by authors who knew the Old Testament only in the original, or who new it in a Greek version, other than the Septuagint. [3]
The difference inferred is a matter of the greatest import, and yet Trinitarian exponents say this highly suspect Canon was divinely inspired! Well then, does Holy Spirit not know the original language well enough to dictate it to his chosen NT Mediums? Unfortunately, this extremely fault ridden Septuagint became the chief reference of Old Testament Scripture for the next 2,300 years! Now ― for the sake of consequent scrutiny, would it not stand to reason that were Isa God, as is claimed by the Pauline faction, would He not have quoted the original rather than be moved to assuage the grammatical ignorance of the very scribes and Pharisees he rebuked, in order to preserve unblemished Truth for disciples and thus, provide accurate references for his own Words? Would the ‘spotless lamb’ not offer un-blemished testimony?
Now for some scientific facts:
It was thought until recently that Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization, but this has been shown to be another of the Aryan-cum-Semite myths. The oldest remains of urban development are found in the Hindus Valley of what is now Pakistan, and are attributed to the Dravidian Culture; which appears to have preceded Ur of the Chaldees (Abraham’s City) by thousands of years, perhaps as early as 7,000 years BCE―that is to say, 7,000 to 9,000 years ago![1] This nation had hundreds of cities, several with paved streets, indoor plumbing, aqueducts, irrigated fields, exquisite pottery and statuary, as well as a far flung trade industry which depended on a capable merchant fleet. They possessed highly developed metal works for the era, and the first evidence of pure copper jewellery is now dated to 9,000 BCE from Northern Iraq. Traces of this culture have been found as Far East as the Polynesians, and some researchers think the inexplicable idols of Easter Island may be the handiwork of their descendants.
This culture also had a rather curious matriarchal religion, whose dominant black-skinned mother goddess was a polyandrous lady named Shakti. For those of you familiar with the Prophet’s Triumph in Mecca (pbuh) this should be significant, as an incident specifically related to a Shakti ‘look-a-like’ occurred at that time. The shrine of al’Uzza held pre-eminence among Quaresh pagans because of her oracles. Al”Uzza was a Black Female Idol, part of a Trinity of three eminent shrines outside of Mecca.[2] Khalid was sent to destroy the shrine and did so after the idol typically failed to defend itself, but on returning to the Prophet he discovered the mission was incomplete! The Prophet sent him back, and out of the ruins of the temple came a ‘naked black woman’ who filled Khalid with such dread that his ‘spine shivered’, yet he slew her where she stood, much to the Prophet’s satisfaction.[3]
This Dravidian goddess, Shakti, is womb not only for al ‘Uzza, but also for the cult of the Black Madonna, so popular among the Catholic and Orthodox Trinitarians. The latter goddess cult was exported to Europe from Ethiopia by the ‘Knight’s Templar’ during the 11th-12th Centuries AD. [4] There are various forms of the cult, predominately Catholic; replete with weeping idols, miracles, visionaries and prophets, and most are given papal benedictions. They have elevated Mary to co-equal status with God as ‘Queen of Heaven’: official regal consort and mediatrix. The Black Madonna plays a significant role in the Freemasonic occult theosophy, having to do with decadent legends of the Solomonic Queen of Sheba; their obsession with finding the Ark of the Covenant; and the fantastic legends of the Holy Grail which suddenly sprang to life in Europe immediately after the Templars left Ethiopia. This is not to mention their fetish with the Egyptian black-goddess: Isis.
The Harrapan Civilization of the Hindus Valley either supplanted or inherited the more archaic Dravidian nation, but not before the Dravidian religion and cultural influence had been exported and absorbed by the Mesopotamian importers. Harrapan merchant colonies, essentially contiguous with the more ancient Dravidian satellites, are known to have existed in Ur of the Chaldees as early as the 3rd to 4th millennia BC, and were well established in Yemen and Ethiopia by the 1st and 2nd; and a massive Yemeni cum Harrapan migration to Ethiopia took place around 920 BC, followed by Arabians in 550 BC. This implies a continuum of archaic Hindu civilization for some 4-5,000 years, possibly longer, which is respectably remarkable! For those who do not know, the Dravidians were a black race of unknown origin that appears to be unrelated to the African Negro. Their progeny later became the pariahs known as ‘Untouchables’ on the expedient suggestion of the Aryan Brahmans[5] who conquered the Harrapans around 1500 BC.; and it is clear the Brahmans did not invent Hinduism, but rather adapted it to their own myths; a fitting talent that has served them well ― clever guys!
The significance of this brief Dravidian excursion is the ‘Queen of Heaven’ cult associated with Shakti, which appears to be the origin of institutionalized human sacrificial ritual. Shakti is recognized by both occultists and Professors of Antiquity as the Mother of all goddess cults. Not discounting further discoveries in the archaeological-anthropologic record, it seems that goddesses from the Yellow River to New York harbour owe their genesis to Shakti, and she in turn owes her genesis to Lilith, the archetypal jinn, or Harpy,[6] called the Serpent or Leviathan, whom Satan utilized to seduced Adam and Eve, and who then absconded with Cain.
A noteworthy Shakti generated vixen was adopted by Israel after the days of Solomon: the cult of Tammuz and Semiramis―the virgin wife of Nimrud,[7] who founded the ancient city of Babil, later called Babylon. Semiramis is recognized as one of the earliest Mesopotamian ‘Queens of Heaven’, and her saviour cum god-man son,[8] Tammuz, is the messiah for whom women of Israel wept on the very steps of the Temple of Solomon, as related in the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel.[9] Tammuz and his mother became the Madonna & Son Mesopotamian archetype, from which all other similar sun-god cults evolved. Her recorded legends were already ancient by 4,000 BC, and there is clear evidence that Tammuz was exported to Babil from the Sumerian culture, who received the original myth from Dravidian missionaries in search of holy affluence. One legend has it that after the death of her miraculously born son, an evergreen sprouted overnight from the soil on which his blood was shed by a wild boar.[10] From that day forth, on every Dec. 25th, Queen Semiramis would sit under a lighted and gilded evergreen-tree, dispensing gifts and prophecy to her worshipful subjects. This is the earliest mention of a Christmas Celebration.
NOTES
[1] Justin Martyr says that Messiah was first prophesied 7,000 years ago in his second apology. I wonder what book he was reading?
[2] All ancient pagan civilizations had three pre-eminent shrines among their pantheons: the paternal creator, maternal earth goddess, and sun-god hero or messiah: the Trinity.
[3] Muhammad, Martin Lings, 1983, A.S. Noordeen, KL, Malaysia
[4] The Sign & The Seal, Graham Hancock, William Heinneman, GB, 1992; also: Revisioning Sheba, Mary Hunter Rurauch, 1998
[5] Brahmans were initially leading families of the conquering warriors
[6] Greek & Roman Mythology: a rapacious monster described as having a woman’s head and body and a bird’s wings and claws; or is depicted as a bird of prey with a woman’s face. Isa, in the Gospel of Barnabas, clearly differentiates the Serpent of Paradise from Satan, lending further credence to the various traditions which have come to us.
[7] Nimrud is most likely the King with whom Abraham contended and embarrassed through his discourse, as related in the Qur’an after his ordeal of fire. Babylonian Legend has it that Nimrud was killed in single combat by the Prophet Shem. See: The Two Babylons, by Alexander Hyslop
[8] Nimud was dead, Semiramis divinely conceived Tammuz, the primal sun-god who was born on Christmas day.
[9] See Ezek 8: 9-17 for a description of ancient Israel’s sun-god and goddess worship in the Temple itself, with clear inference to current Freemasonic ritual, which Allah calls an ‘abomination’.
[10] The Two Babylons, Alexander Hyslop … unfortunately out of print, but copies are available at major metro and University Libraries.
[1] To my knowledge there is no OT Text identified as the Book of Law. Furthermore, the fact that the Torah was re-written in several different version after the death of Solomon, is conclusively demonstrated by the Harvard trained Biblical Scholar, Richard Friedman, in Who Wrote the Bible (Harper and Row, 1989). The Gospel of Barnabas also relates that a Levitical Disciple of Jesus admitted reading a text in the House of the High Priest, in which Ishmael was named as the Child of Abraham’s sacrifice, along with references to the Kaba and the annual Pilgrimage of Abraham to Mecca, which he kept with Ishmael and Isaac after the Kaba’s restoration.
[2] HERITAGE & HELLENISM – The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition, Eric S Gruen, University of California Press, 1998
[3] E.M.Blaiklock, Zondervan Encyclopedia of The Bible, 1976
[1] Ibid. pp. 557 & 595; Before writing this history, Mr. Durant was a Divinity Student and lecturer in the ancient classics, and had also written a superb History of Philosophy.
[1] THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION Part III, Will Durant, Simon & Schuster, 1944.