Note: "During the later part of the Early Dynastic period, the inhabitants of Ur expended considerable energy to construct tombs for their deceased elites," according to the Penn Museum. "Though we do not know their identities with certainty, written evidence suggests that these elites were the city-state’s kings and queens, who may have fulfilled a number of important roles in life. We do not know whether the burial pits were dug and tomb chambers constructed before the death of their occupants or whether they were hastily prepared afterwards, the more likely alternative. But the considerable wealth in the tombs, including the animals and attendants buried with Ur’s kings and queens, testify to the power or pretensions to power of these elites and their ability to intimidate."
Note: "Excavations from 1922 to 1934 were funded by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania and led by the archaeologist Sir Charles Leonard Woolley. A total of about 1,850 burials were uncovered, including 16 that were described as 'royal tombs' containing many valuable artifacts, including the Standard of Ur [see next video]. Most of the royal tombs were dated to about 2600 BC. The finds included the unlooted tomb of a queen thought to be Queen Puabi—the name is known from a cylinder seal found in the tomb, although there were two other different and unnamed seals found in the tomb. Many other people had been buried with her, in a form of human sacrifice." (Wikipedia)
Comment: It's not too surprising that early Christians already viewed the pagan gods as demons. This outlook didn't suddenly come into existence when Christianity became the official religion of Rome. It should be pointed out, though, that the early Christians believed in demons (as do a lot of modern Christians). In other words, they believed that these demons were real. In fact, an argument can be made that Christianity in all of its various forms is itself a polytheistic religion since it believes in a hierarchy of supernatural deities ranging from Satan to demons and angels and a tripartite god, not to mention all of its miracle-performing semi-divine figures like the saints and the Virgin Mary.
As for Judaism, it was originally a polytheistic and animistic religion itself, according to the Jewish Virtual Library. The early Jews practiced animal sacrifice and magic, for instance, and worshiped "graven images" like the Golden Calf in the Bible. These tribes were pagan themselves until the rise of the Yahweh Cult and in the beginning Yahweh was still in competition with foreign gods until after the Babylonian exile. That's the traditional history, anyway, and it's not surprising at all that Christianity, which is presumed to have originated as a Jewish sect, would have inherited the Jewish hostility towards other gods. This intolerance led inevitably to the Christian war against paganism which destroyed the classical world once the Christians got their hands on secular power.
Gobekli Tepe is a prehistoric site in southeastern Turkey, "a series of circular and oval-shaped structures set on top of a hill." (Gobeklitepe.info) "What makes Gobekli Tepe unique in its class is the date it was built, which is roughly twelve thousand years ago, circa 10,000 BC."
Note: The age of Gobekli Tepe varies from source to source, sometimes by as much as a thousand years or so, but everybody agrees that it is extremely ancient.
This animation is supposed to be based on site maps, but I'm not sure how accurate it is.
"There are a number of unsettling things about Göbekli Tepe. It’s estimated to be eleven thousand years old—six and a half thousand years older than the Great Pyramid, five and a half thousand years older than the earliest known cuneiform texts, and about a thousand years older than the walls of Jericho, formerly believed to be the world’s most ancient monumental structure." Source: The New Yorker (2011)
Whatever its exact age, Gobekli Tepe is one of the oldest megalithic sites in the world, if not the oldest. It was apparently built during "two phases of use, believed to be of a social or ritual nature by site discoverer and excavator Klaus Schmidt, dating back to the 10th–8th millennium BCE. During the first phase, belonging to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), circles of massive T-shaped stone pillars were erected – the world's oldest known megaliths." (Wikipedia)
"More than 200 pillars in about 20 circles are currently known through geophysical surveys. Each pillar has a height of up to 6 m (20 ft) and weighs up to 10 tons [1]. They are fitted into sockets that were hewn out of the bedrock. In the second phase, belonging to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), the erected pillars are smaller and stood in rectangular rooms with floors of polished lime. The site was abandoned after the PPNB. Younger structures date to classical times."
[1] Some sources describe stones weighing up to 60 tons. I have no idea how reliable any of these numbers are.
Stone tools, at least one cave inscription and the ruins of what is thought to have been a Roman watchtower have been found on the site.
The site covers an area of around 1000 feet, I think, but it could be much larger than that (?) According to Wikipedia, only about five percent of the complex has been excavated. I don't know how accurate that is now, but new structures are still being discovered. Note: I'm not sure if the Wikipedia article on Gobekli Tepe reflects the finds described in the next video.
Video from 2018.
The purpose of the site is still unclear. Schmidt, the German archaeologist who led the excavations at Gobekli Tepe (1996 - 2014), argued that the megalithic complex was a "Stone Age mountain sanctuary," possibly for some kind of prehistoric cult of the dead, a pilgrimage site that drew people from all over the region. "Butchered bones found in large numbers from local game such as deer, gazelle, pigs, and geese have been identified as refuse from food hunted and cooked or otherwise prepared for the congregants." (Wikipedia)
Most of the sources I've seen echo Schmidt's conclusions, describing Gobekli Tepe as a temple. I'm not sure if this has ever been proven conclusively, however. Wikipedia states that "[t]he details of the structure's function remain a mystery."
Almost everything about Gobekli Tepe is a mystery. For example, it's still unclear who built the complex. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he inhabitants are presumed to have been hunters and gatherers who nevertheless lived in villages for at least part of the year," but if that's accurate they obviously weren't ordinary hunter-gatherers who were just starting to shift into a more settled existence. It would have required a lot of engineering knowledge to quarry, shape, transport and position these massive stones.
"Construction techniques vary but in the most elaborate there is a ring of T-shaped monolithic columns with a pair of larger, carved T-columns at the centre up to five metres tall. These not only supported a roof (for at least some of their life) but also represented abstracted human figures that were part of a belief system that is not yet understood. They are sculptural as well as structural, with animal figures in relief. " Source: The Art Newspaper.
Ordinary hunter-gatherers wouldn't have had the skills required to construct Gobekli Tepe. Whoever they were, they obviously had previous experience building megaliths. According to Wikipedia, " [i]f indeed the site was built by hunter-gatherers as some researchers believe then it would mean that the ability to erect monumental complexes was within the capacities of these sorts of groups, which would overturn previous assumptions. Some researchers believe that the construction of Göbekli Tepe may have contributed to the later development of urban civilization, or, as excavator Klaus Schmidt put it, 'First came the temple, then the city.'"
The next video describes one researcher's theory that Australian aborigines (or a people descended from them) built the complex.
Video from 2017.
This is an interesting theory, though not exactly mainstream. If Australian aborigines or their descendants built Gobekli Tepe, why aren't similar megalithic structures found in Australia? As it turns out, this is an extremely murky question. There are a few stone circles and alignments in Australia -- see the Megalithic Portal for details -- and one site has been called "Australia's stonehenge," but it was apparently "all but destroyed" around 1940 and "the exact location has never been disclosed for fear the little that remains could be trashed," according to news.com.au (2015). That doesn't exactly fill me with confidence that the site actually exists, to say the least. Ancient Origins made a short documentary about "Australia's stonehenge," mostly notable for the fact that the video doesn't actually show any standing stones. Their 2017 article about the alleged site seems to fall into the "lost ancient exotic high technology" category.
We may never know who built Gobekli Tepe or why. The site is so mysterious that it acts like a magnet, attracting all kinds of speculation. According to Wikipedia, this fantastic megalithic complex "appears to raise more questions for archaeology and prehistory than it answers," but if nothing else it proves that prehistoric humans were a lot more advanced than commonly believed.
"Containing six lines of cuneiform script, and roughly the size of an adult thumb, [this tablet] was donated to the [Cambridge] University Library in 1921 but then lost to sight for many years before its rediscovery in 2016, during research for the Curious Objects exhibition, held as part of the University Library’s 600th anniversary." Source: Cambridge University Library.
"The full translation of the laconic text runs as follows: 18 jars of pig fat – Balli. 4 jars of pig fat – Nimgir-ab-lah. Fat dispensed (at ?) the city of Zabala. Ab-kid-kid, the scribe. 4th year 10th month."
Note: The words Balli, Nimgir-ab-lah, etc., are thought to be personal names. According to Cambridge, "[t]he man named Balli turns up regularly in other texts from the same area during the same period of history, and seems to be an official in charge of a wide range of oils: from pig fat and butter to sesame oil and almond oil."
This clay tablet is apparently the oldest written object held at Cambridge. A 3D animation and more information about the tablet can be found here.
"The Teutonic Order was formed to aid Christians on their pilgrimages to the Holy Land and to establish hospitals. Its members have commonly been known as the Teutonic Knights, having a small voluntary and mercenary military membership, serving as a crusading military order for protection of Christians in the Holy Land and the Baltics during the Middle Ages."
"The order was led by a Grand Master ... who was chosen by an electoral college and who was expected to consult his senior officers and commanders. In the 15th century CE, there was a second master in Livonia who became increasingly independent from the order based at its then headquarters in Prussia. It did sometimes happen that a master was ousted by his officers, indeed there was one case of murder of a particularly unpopular master. The order controlled many lands across Europe and the Middle East, the territories split into administrative provinces or balleien, each governed by a landmeister." Source: Ancient History Encyclopedia.
Notes: These fantastic old manuscript pages are from a 2010 (?) exhibit at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. According to the Jewish Magazine (2010), "Jews [in the ancient and medieval worlds] were reputed to possess much knowledge about magic: amulets and spells to heal from sickness or harm one’s enemies, mystical incantations to ascend to heaven or bring angels down to earth, and information about the beneficent angels who assisted humans in their fight against the demons of illness and madness. Jewish magic has been part of folk Jewish knowledge and elite rabbinic practice through the years."
Jewish magical papyri and inscriptions have been discovered which date back to the Second Temple Period. The Bible forbids the practice of magic, but at the same time "the text of the Bible could be used as a source book for potent curses," according to Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (p.185). For example, "the Jewish gravestones from Acmonia ... invoke 'the curses in Deuteronomy' upon anyone who should violate the burial site."
The Bible isn't the only source of information on Jewish magic. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, "more abundant information is found in post-Biblical literature, especially in the Babylonian Talmud, where the great number of the passages alluding to magic furnishes incontrovertible evidence of its wide diffusion. It was, however, only the practice of witchcraft which was prohibited, for a knowledge of magic was indispensable to a member of the chief council or of the judiciary, and might be acquired even from the heathen. The most profound scholars were adepts in the black art, and the Law did not deny its power."
Magical techniques are also found in some of the esoteric teachings of the Kabbalah. According to Wikipedia, "the Magico-theurgical tradition of Practical Kabbalah (in often unpublished manuscripts) endeavors to alter both the Divine realms and the World. While some interpretations of prayer see its role as manipulating heavenly forces, Practical Kabbalah properly involved white-magical acts, and was censored by kabbalists for only those completely pure of intent. Consequently, it formed a separate minor tradition shunned from Kabbalah." This Kabbalistic tradition has been described by some Christians as "black magic" and Kabbalah in general has become popular with celebrities and the New Age movement.
Ancient Jewish magical teachings probably originated in the pagan world. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, "The diversity existing within ancient Jewish magic and the essential contradiction between witchcraft and monotheism are in themselves evidences of foreign influence on the system. The scholars of the first centuries of the present era refer frequently and unanimously to Egypt as the original home of magic arts ... In the Bible the real homes of all varieties of witchcraft are given as Egypt ... and Babylon ... It is very probable that in this respect both countries influenced Israel, and their political power and high civilization made it inevitable that that influence should be deep, although the lack of historical data renders it impossible to determine its extent or trace its course."
Judaism has its own roots in polytheism, however, so some of its magical teachings could have been passed down from very ancient times, but there was so much cross-fertilization that the ultimate source of any specific teaching probably can't be identified with any certainty. Egypt and Babylon weren't the only foreign influences at work in Palestine over the centuries. Persians, Egyptians, Jews, Phoenicians, Macedonians, Arabs and Romans all came together in the Near East at one time or another, leading to a fantastic mix of religious, philosophical and cultural ideas. Mystery schools, dying-and-resurrected gods, mystical symbolism, ancient deities, eastern magic, Hellenism, Egyptian cultic practices -- all came together on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.
Jewish magic is a classic example of what I guess you could call occult syncretism.
"Jerash is the site of the ruins of the Greco-Roman city of Gerasa, also referred to as Antioch on the Golden River. Ancient Greek inscriptions from the city support that the city was founded by Alexander the Great and his general Perdiccas, who allegedly settled aged Macedonian soldiers there during the spring of 331 BC, when he left Egypt and crossed Syria en route to Mesopotamia. However, other sources, namely the city's former name of 'Antioch on the Chrysorrhoas', point to a founding by Seleucid King Antiochus IV, while still others attribute the founding to Ptolemy II of Egypt." Source: Wikipedia.
Note: According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, the city was "probably a Seleucid foundation."
"After the Roman conquest [of the region] in 63 BC, Jerash and the land surrounding it were annexed to the Roman province of Syria, and later joined the Decapolis league of cities. The historian Josephus mentions the city as being principally inhabited by Syrians, and also having a small Jewish community. In AD 106, Jerash was absorbed into the Roman province of Arabia, which included the city of Philadelphia (modern day Amman). The Romans ensured security and peace in this area, which enabled its people to devote their efforts and time to economic development and encouraged civic building activity." (Wikipedia)
"Jerash is considered one of the largest and most well-preserved sites of Roman architecture in the world outside Italy."
Note: According to Wikipedia, "The earliest Arab/Semitic inhabitants, who lived in the area during the pre-classical period of the 1st millennium BCE, named their village Garshu. The Romans later Hellenized the former name of Garshu into Gerasa. Later, the name transformed into the Arabic Jerash."
Before the Roman conquest, Gerasa / Jerash was captured by Alexander Jannaeus (103 - 76 BC), the second Hasmonean king of Judaea. The city "remained in Jewish hands until in 63 BC it became part of Roman Syria and of the Decapolis," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised). "It's prosperity, dependent on caravan trade, increased later when Trajan annexed Nabataea[1]. Gerasa, having become part of the Arabian province, enjoyed a 'golden age' under the Antonines."
[1] "Nabataea remained independent from the 4th century BC until it was annexed by the Roman Empire in AD 106, which renamed it Arabia Petraea." (Wikipedia)
"One particularly important temple in the city of Gerasa was the Temple to Artemis, built during the reign of the Emperor Antoninus Pius (138-161 AD). The temple was built on a prominent hill. The major temple for which the city is known was built during the reign of Antoninus Pius, circa 150 AD, but there is evidence of an earlier, smaller sanctuary to Artemis that existed as early as 79 AD. This indicates that the veneration of Artemis was already important in the city before the Antonine period. In addition to the temple to Artemis, there is also a temple to Zeus, another important deity in the city, to the south." Source: Ancient Origins.
"The city of Jerash went through many changes during its long existence, going from a Semitic village to a Greco-Roman metropolis, and eventually to an Arabized metropolis. The city however remained inhabited and was able to adapt to each epoch in which it found itself. It is for this reason that it could be considered an everchanging city."
Jordan's environment must have been radically different back then. According to Live Science, "[t]he petroglyphs, or rock art, show images of lions, gazelles, horses and large birds that may be ostriches." The site itself has been under study for several years now and may provide evidence for the rise of agriculture in the region.
"In the Black Desert of eastern Jordan, an impressive collection of stone buildings constructed over 7,000 years ago was unknown until a few years ago. Built with very large, heavy slabs of basalt, some weighing over 1000 pounds, these are not flimsy huts of hunters or pastoralists, but sturdy buildings. We now believe many date to the Late Neolithic (c. 7,000 – 5,000 BC). We suggest that hunter-pastoralists lived in these arid lands, perhaps as part of a major shift in population and settlements." Source: Experiment (2016?).
The obscure origins of the Christian religion make it a natural subject for "hidden history" conspiracy theories. Dozens, if not hundreds of books have been written over the years, arguing, among other things, that Jesus was a magic mushroom, a solar deity, an Essene or a guerilla fighter sanitized to make him more palatable to the Romans. Some authors claim that Jesus was actually the deified Julius Caesar or that the gospels were propaganda written by the Flavian emperors to help pacify a rebellious province. Whatever the argument, the scarcity of original sources and the ambiguous nature of the evidence leave a lot of room for entertaining speculation.
Very little is known about the original Jesus cult during the first few centuries of its existence. No one really knows when the "official" canonical gospels were written, but the general consensus is that they appeared sometime after the middle to late first century, at least thirty or forty years after Jesus's death. Matthew and Luke were apparently written from an earlier account commonly referred to as the "Q document," which as far as I know has never been discovered. Its existence is assumed based on similarities in the manuscripts.
As for Jesus himself, the only independent documentary evidence (from the first few centuries AD) that he even existed consists of a handful of references in Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, and a few others. Most of these references, however, are about the Christians as a group, so they don't really support the existence of a historical Jesus. As far as I can tell, the only direct references to Jesus are found in "Jewish Antiquities" by Josephus and the Annals of Tacitus, but their authenticity has been challenged and Tacitus refers to a Christus rather than a Jesus. They could be insertions made by later Christian writers -- when it comes to ancient sources, you can't take anything for granted. Classical writers weren't very reliable to begin with and the church wasn't above forging references, gospels, apocalypses, epistles and martyr stories in order to market their new religion. For an interesting and extremely detailed description of the "Christian Forgery Mill," see "Forgery In Christianity: A Documented Record Of The Foundations Of The Christian Religion," by Joseph Wheless.
Christian origins get even more complicated when you consider all the parallels that exist between Christian doctrine and various Near Eastern fertility cults, Zoroastrianism, astrology, Roman and Egyptian mystery religions and Jewish ascetic, messianic and apocalyptic groups in existence at the time. These parallels aren't very surprising because all of these different movements appeared in the same general landscape, but they provide fertile ground for alternate histories.
Almost everything we know about the rise of Christianity comes from texts and there are a lot of missing sources and "secret doctrines" so popular with conspiracy theorists. Besides the books in the "official" New Testament, there's a huge body of apocryphal literature which reflects the existence of dozens of "heretical" groups like the Gnostics which were gradually suppressed, often by violent means, as the Roman Catholic Church consolidated its control and standardized Christian dogma. More recent discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls fill in some of the historical context, but the general picture is still hazy and confused. "Suppressed gospels" and alternate histories have inspired books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the inspiration for the bestselling Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
If Jesus was a real person, he lived during an extremely turbulent period of history. Rome conquered Judea in the first century BC, allying itself with the Maccabees and later using the Herodians as client kings. The Jews revolted in 66 AD and Jerusalem was eventually destroyed around 70 AD by the future emperor Titus, son of Vespasian. Titus took over the suppression of the Jewish revolt, a bloody conflict documented by Josephus in his great book "The Jewish War," after Vespasian returned to Rome to stake his claim to the throne during the Year Of The Four Emperors in 69 AD.
It was a chaotic time of civil wars and bloody revolutions. The Jewish population in Jerusalem was either massacred, enslaved or scattered around the world (the Diaspora) and the temple was destroyed. The Jews were in almost constant rebellion against the Romans and their puppet rulers in Judea during Jesus' lifetime and the desert was crawling with self-proclaimed messiahs. The idea that a religion like Christianity, preaching peace, forgiveness and universal brotherhood, would appear in this context is surprising, to say the least. "Render unto Caesar" could be seen as treason and collaboration to a population living under a brutal occupation. The Jews were waiting for a military messiah, a descendant of King David who would lead them out of bondage, not some hippy claiming to be the Son of God, which they would have considered blasphemy.
This secular background has inspired a series of books arguing that the real Jesus was actually a military messiah, a guerrilla fighting the Roman occupation. I read several of these books years ago, but I can't remember their titles. The best summation of the argument can probably be found in two chapters written by the anthropologist Marvin Harris in his book "Cows, Pigs, Wars And Witches". Both chapters ("Messiahs" and "The Secret Of The Prince Of Peace") fill in the historical context and argue that Jesus was a revolutionary transformed into a peaceful messiah by later writers in order to protect their underground resistance movement from the Romans. This is plausible enough as far as it goes, but the theory discounts the actual message of the gospels. If there's a hidden message in the New Testament, there's also a surface message which can't simply be dismissed as a kind of cover story designed to conceal an ancient conspiracy.
Speaking of conspiracies, Joseph Atwill's book "Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy To Invent Jesus" argues that Christianity was actually the invention of the Flavian Emperors--Vespasian, Titus and Domitian--the same Romans who crushed the Jewish rebellion. Faced with the problem of Jewish resistance in the province, the Flavian court (which included the turncoat Josephus) invented the story of a "peaceful messiah" as a form of counter-propaganda to the more militant religious doctrines causing so much trouble in Judea. According to Atwill, the gospels also include a coded message which reveals that the figure of Jesus in the New Testament is actually Titus--a kind of Roman inside joke. This hidden message can supposedly be unraveled by reading the gospels together with Josephus' account of the war and deciphering the parallels. Atwill's book makes an interesting read and I particularly like his idea that the gospels were a form of early propaganda designed to pacify a rebellious population. Unfortunately, his argument depends on the numerous parallels which are supposed to exist between the gospels and Josephus and these are obscure, to say the least.
"Jesus Was Caesar" by Franceso Carotta also uses parallels to make its argument that Jesus Christ is actually "the historical manifestation of Divus Julius," i.e., the Divine Julius Caesar. I couldn't finish this monstrous tome, but the basic idea is that the Christian religion is a modified version of the cult of the Divine Caesar and that the gospels are a mythologized biography of Caesar from the time of the Roman Civil War to his assassination. In other words, the gospels are once again a kind of code which can only be interpreted by reading them in conjunction with other books. Caesar was made an Imperial God after his death, but his cult disappeared around the time that Christianity emerged. "On the one hand, an actual historical figure missing his cult, on the other, a cult missing its actual historical figure: intriguing mirror images." Intriguing, yes, but is it actually true? Who knows? Like Atwill's book, whether you accept it or not depends on how strong these "mirror images" actually are.
"The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross" by John Allegro takes a different approach. This is a fascinating, scholarly and difficult book. Allegro believes that Christianity (through Judaism) originated in a very ancient Near Eastern fertility cult centered around the use of the hallucinogenic mushroom amanita muscaria. If I understand Allegro's argument correctly, Christianity evolved out of Judaism, which was invented as a "false front" to protect the truth about the cult and its practices from the Romans, and the sacred texts of both religions are supposed to be full of references to the magic mushroom. Once again, Christianity is seen as a code to be deciphered, an esoteric, multi-layered conspiracy. This is an excellent book, but Allegro bases his theory almost entirely on linguistic arguments, "deciphering the names of gods, mythological characters...and plant names..." by tracing them back to their Sumerian roots, and the average reader will have a hard time verifying or even following his arguments. Still, if there's nothing to this, how do you explain the mushrooms in Christian iconography? The photograph in this paragraph, for example, shows Adam and Eve standing next to a giant mushroom on a fresco in the Chapel of Plaincourault, France.
Hidden Christian history covers a huge amount of territory. I've only summarized three books, but there are literally hundreds of them available and I've only scratched the surface. For example, "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" by Acharya S argues that Christianity was "created by members of various secret societies, mystery schools and religions in order to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion." Her book "Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled" explores the use of solar symbolism in world religions, arguing that Jesus is actually a sun deity. Whether you buy any of these various theories is irrelevant. The whole period is so interesting that they're worth reading just for their wealth of background information.
Trying to separate truth from fiction in these theories is an almost impossible task unless you want to spend the rest of your life tracking down sources and doing your own research. The problem comes when you step back and look at all the books that are out there--all the different theories. One book, taken by itself, can be very convincing, but when you take them all together, it's obvious that they contradict each other in hundreds of different ways and the net effect is literary white noise--a flood of information, speculation, questionable evidence and mutually exclusive conclusions. In this sense, the hidden history of Christianity is like the JFK assassination: an intractable mystery. The record's too sketchy and complex to come to any solid conclusions, but it doesn't really matter. Most people, as usual, will end up believing exactly what they want to believe and what they were raised to believe.
Still, you've got to wonder--what is that mushroom doing on a church fresco in France?
"Some 3,500 years ago, a brisk trade in fish on the shores of the southeastern Mediterranean Sea had already begun. This conclusion follows from the analysis of 100 fish teeth that were found at various archeological sites in what is now Israel." Source: Science Daily
Jesus Cult Conspiracy Theories
Very little is known about the original Jesus cult during the first few centuries of its existence.
No one really knows when the "official" canonical gospels were written, but the general consensus is that they appeared sometime after the middle to late first century, at least thirty or forty years after Jesus's death. Matthew and Luke were apparently written from an earlier account commonly referred to as the "Q document," which as far as I know has never been discovered. Its existence is assumed based on similarities in the manuscripts.
As for Jesus himself, the only independent documentary evidence (from the first few centuries AD) that he even existed consists of a handful of references in Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, and a few others. Most of these references, however, are about the Christians as a group, so they don't really support the existence of a historical Jesus. As far as I can tell, the only direct references to Jesus are found in "Jewish Antiquities" by Josephus and the Annals of Tacitus, but their authenticity has been challenged and Tacitus refers to a Christus rather than a Jesus. They could be insertions made by later Christian writers -- when it comes to ancient sources, you can't take anything for granted. Classical writers weren't very reliable to begin with and the church wasn't above forging references, gospels, apocalypses, epistles and martyr stories in order to market their new religion. For an interesting and extremely detailed description of the "Christian Forgery Mill," see "Forgery In Christianity: A Documented Record Of The Foundations Of The Christian Religion," by Joseph Wheless.
Christian origins get even more complicated when you consider all the parallels that exist between Christian doctrine and various Near Eastern fertility cults, Zoroastrianism, astrology, Roman and Egyptian mystery religions and Jewish ascetic, messianic and apocalyptic groups in existence at the time. These parallels aren't very surprising because all of these different movements appeared in the same general landscape, but they provide fertile ground for alternate histories.
If Jesus was a real person, he lived during an extremely turbulent period of history. Rome conquered Judea in the first century BC, allying itself with the Maccabees and later using the Herodians as client kings. The Jews revolted in 66 AD and Jerusalem was eventually destroyed around 70 AD by the future emperor Titus, son of Vespasian. Titus took over the suppression of the Jewish revolt, a bloody conflict documented by Josephus in his great book "The Jewish War," after Vespasian returned to Rome to stake his claim to the throne during the Year Of The Four Emperors in 69 AD.
It was a chaotic time of civil wars and bloody revolutions. The Jewish population in
Jerusalem was either massacred, enslaved or scattered around the world (the Diaspora) and the temple was destroyed. The Jews were in almost constant rebellion against the Romans and their puppet rulers in Judea during Jesus' lifetime and the desert was crawling with self-proclaimed messiahs. The idea that a religion like Christianity, preaching peace, forgiveness and universal brotherhood, would appear in this context is surprising, to say the least. "Render unto Caesar" could be seen as treason and collaboration to a population living under a brutal occupation. The Jews were waiting for a military messiah, a descendant of King David who would lead them out of bondage, not some hippy claiming to be the Son of God, which they would have considered blasphemy.
This secular background has inspired a series of books arguing that the real Jesus was actually a military messiah, a guerrilla fighting the Roman occupation. I read several of these books years ago, but I can't remember their titles. The best summation of the argument can probably be found in two chapters written by the anthropologist Marvin Harris in his book "Cows, Pigs, Wars And Witches". Both chapters ("Messiahs" and "The Secret Of The Prince Of Peace") fill in the historical context and argue that Jesus was a revolutionary transformed into a peaceful messiah by later writers in order to protect their underground resistance movement from the Romans. This is plausible enough as far as it goes, but the theory discounts the actual message of the gospels. If there's a hidden message in the New Testament, there's also a surface message which can't simply be dismissed as a kind of cover story designed to conceal an ancient conspiracy.
"Jesus Was Caesar" by Franceso Carotta also uses parallels to make its argument that
Jesus Christ is actually "the historical manifestation of Divus Julius," i.e., the Divine Julius Caesar. I couldn't finish this monstrous tome, but the basic idea is that the Christian religion is a modified version of the cult of the Divine Caesar and that the gospels are a mythologized biography of Caesar from the time of the Roman Civil War to his assassination. In other words, the gospels are once again a kind of code which can only be interpreted by reading them in conjunction with other books. Caesar was made an Imperial God after his death, but his cult disappeared around the time that Christianity emerged. "On the one hand, an actual historical figure missing his cult, on the other, a cult missing its actual historical figure: intriguing mirror images." Intriguing, yes, but is it actually true? Who knows? Like Atwill's book, whether you accept it or not depends on how strong these "mirror images" actually are.
Hidden Christian history covers a huge amount of territory. I've only summarized three
books, but there are literally hundreds of them available and I've only scratched the surface. For example, "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" by Acharya S argues that Christianity was "created by members of various secret societies, mystery schools and religions in order to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion." Her book "Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled" explores the use of solar symbolism in world religions, arguing that Jesus is actually a sun deity. Whether you buy any of these various theories is irrelevant. The whole period is so interesting that they're worth reading just for their wealth of background information.
Trying to separate truth from fiction in these theories is an almost impossible task unless you want to spend the rest of your life tracking down sources and doing your own research. The problem comes when you step back and look at all the books that are out there--all the different theories. One book, taken by itself, can be very convincing, but when you take them all together, it's obvious that they contradict each other in hundreds of different ways and the net effect is literary white noise--a flood of information, speculation, questionable evidence and mutually exclusive conclusions. In this sense, the hidden history of Christianity is like the JFK assassination: an intractable mystery. The record's too sketchy and complex to come to any solid conclusions, but it doesn't really matter. Most people, as usual, will end up believing exactly what they want to believe and what they were raised to believe.
Still, you've got to wonder--what is that mushroom doing on a church fresco in France?
Posted at 07:00 AM in Ancient Literature, Ancient Middle East, Books, Christianity, Commentary, Culture, Psychedelic Plants, Religion | Permalink | Comments (2)