Recently I’ve been receiving queries about the discovery of what is alleged to be the tomb of Jesus et al in Jerusalem. Since one of the people involved was also concerned in the production of the movie Titanic it’s clear that there will be tremendous publicity about it whatever the merits of the case.

Since I have already done four decades of work on the topic of Jesus I am posting a slightly modified extract from the first letter I wrote to my stepson Bill in the early 80’s after he asked me who I thought Jesus really was. The letter writing took two years and eventually resulted in the book Who was Jesus Really, after being published in sections for local pagan audiences. Press the My Books button further down on the right to find out how to get hold of the whole thing.

The book is based on the assumption that IF Jesus actually was an historical figure, which is pretty doubtful, then we can find out more about who he really was by studying all the material in the first centuries up to the fourth when the gospels were produced. By taking the history of the Jews and the Romans into account as well as the New Testament propaganda of the present day gospels it is possible to get a coherent picture of a very remarkable person. But he is not the Jesus of the Church dogmas. Here then is the extract:

In this first letter we'll have a brief survey of how the present gospels came to be in their present form. I shall make a few comments about the editorial changes that have been demonstrably made. If after this you find that you still want to know more then let me know and I shall continue writing letters about the matter until the end of the life of the man Jesus in his late seventies or early eighties.

We are going to deal with the historical Jesus, and not with the Cosmic Christ who has been inextricably mixed up with the man Jesus by the followers of Paul

From the point of view of demonstrable historical fact the King James version (KJV) of the New Testament (NT) just doesn't contain much that is verifiable. The average Christian believes that we have in the NT the story of Jesus and his mission and the beginnings of the Church that he founded. We don't have the story of Jesus in the gospels. We do have a small, heavily edited collection of carefully cherry picked fragments from a huge selection of the gospels and letters of the time.

The compilation authorized by the deal that the Church made with the Emperor Constantine is so full of contradictions and errors that any history book containing them would be the laughing stock of serious readers, or educated people. The account of the Early Church has serious problems because the Church that arose from the missionary efforts of Paul was NOT the Early Christian Church organized by the genuine followers of the teachings of Jesus.

The differences between the first three gospels and the gospel of John are so enormous that harmonizing them is out of the question, except by dogma which is done frequently, or by an appeal to the Dead Sea Scrolls material, which is done very infrequently. The layman usually knows nothing at all about the dozens of gospels, revelations and Acts read by Christians during the first two centuries. It is unlikely that he has read the gospels of Paul, Peter, Thomas, or the Hebrews, or has even heard of them. He doesn't know of the Acts of Paul, John, Peter and Andrew, all of which were sacred to various groups of Christians.

To the layman the matter is very simple. The gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The NT is the Word of God for the salvation of souls, and that's it! No thought needed. No questions possible.

Though it is a fact that the layman knows next to nothing about the history of his scriptures the same cannot be said of the priests and ministers who tell the layman what to believe. Much of what I am going to tell you is known by priests and ministers from their seminary studies but it never gets into the sermons or the instructions given to the faithful. The congregations are asked to believe in what the priest and minister often know to be false. In a sense the clerics have no option. They know that much of what they say is untrue; but the continuous fabric of lies and interpretations amassed over the centuries by the Church leaves them little room for maneuver. If one card is taken away the whole castle might well collapse and then where would they be?

The main problem we shall encounter is not that the gospels are unhistorical. The problem is that it is extremely difficult to untangle the parts that are historical from all the additions and emendations that have accumulated at the hands of monkish editors. In several important instances the monks merely deleted material in a sentence, leaving us with two things next to each other that had previously been separated. The meaning of the final manuscript was changed totally by such tricks.

The story of the Magi is practically an article of faith around Christmas time. Everybody knows that there were three of them don’t they. Nowhere in the scriptures does it say the number. Try that on a believer to see whether he has read the scriptures or is just repeating folk constructs. The minister of the believer you deal with is unlikely to mention the theory that the story could possibly be a version of the historically verifiable visit of Tiridates of Parthis, who actually did come to visit Nero with three magi bearing gifts. They came to worship him as a god. Lord God Mithras, to be precise. Then there is the story of the boy Jesus in the Temple which is duplicated almost exactly in Josephus, except that he was talking about his own precocious brilliance as a young boy.

Now I’m not saying that the gospel stories were adapted from these historical stories, but I am saying that the seminary trained minister probably knows all this basic historical stuff and is keeping mum, for reasons not unlikely to be concerned with self-interest.

Whenever I talk to Christians about their scriptures I am always met with what they consider to be the unchallengeable argument of the original scriptures, from which, under God’s guiding hand, their own version was translated. In fact, the earliest copies of the current gospels that we have date back to the fourth century, for reasons that I will go into later. All have been amended to include the theology held by the most powerful group at the time, or to exclude material which that group held to be heretical.

To put it bluntly, there aren’t any originals. It has always been a source of amazement to me that so many brilliant scholars have spent their lives digging around in the Greek fragments and finding out exactly what this or that word meant to the Greek speakers of that period, while leaving almost untouched the Aramaic scriptures. Jesus did not speak to the people in Greek. He used a northern Galilean dialect of Aramaic. You probably remember the scene just before the crucifixion where Peter’s accent gave him away as a Galilean.

Just suppose this scenario for a moment. A collector of folk tales from Mexico came to a very Southern State about the time of the Civil War and did his best to translate some of the better known folk stories into Spanish, idioms and all. His book didn’t sell very well because nobody in Mexico was really interested, the Southerners didn’t have the money after the War, and the North couldn’t care less about Southern stories in English, let alone Spanish.

Some of his books, in pretty bad shape fell into the hands of a German scholar about the time of the assassination of Kennedy. He did his best to get up a 20th century version in German of the 19th century Spanish translation from possibly illiterate folk from the rural South of the 19th century. If that version was translated into American English, what chance would there be that the stories sounded now as they did when related to the original Mexican? Not much!

And this is obviously so even if the translators were all perfectly multilingual and were trying their best to convey exact shades of meaning. Neither of these circumstances were true of the early gospel writers. The KJV translation has made a lot of people think that the Bible is one book, because the sonorous language is the same throughout. If people could compare the really poor Greek of Mark with the fine Greek of Luke, they would see that their idea was false. It’s pretty clear that the believer who insists that the scriptures are word perfect is not standing on very firm ground.

The stories about Jesus were folk memories from the Aramaic, put into Greek decades, or even centuries after the incidents they report. Certain of them were carefully selected before being put into Greek and Latin, and we have translations from those languages. And the people who prepared after 325 the gospels that we now use were not concerned with accuracy either, only with making sure that what came out of the translation process fit all the correct theological and political criteria.

Now, almost two thousand years later, the scholars nit-pick at the Greek words. The damage has been done. They are too late and wrongly directed.

Then there is the matter of the great qualitative different between Greek and Aramaic. Aramaic is a poetic language full of images and allusions. Greek is a very left brained type of language, and not at all suitable to be a medium of translation from such a source. The Syrians and the Palestinians were the first Christians. Their gospels were in Aramaic. The Aramaic scriptures are still used by Syrian Christians because their church severed relations from Rome in the 5th century and was not twisted into conformity.

So much for the possibilities of knowing what was originally said and done. Now let's look at a typical couple of incidents of propaganda from Matthew. Historically it cannot be demonstrated that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, either of Judea or Galilee. Indeed there have been scholars who claim that it is not possible from historical records to prove that Jesus even existed. If Herod did slaughter the Innocents he did it in an historical vacuum. Nobody mentioned it in any of the current histories. Josephus was no fan of Herod and dredged up all the dirt he could, which was a considerable amount, but he didn't mention the slaughter. True, it would have been in character. But nowhere was it mentioned except in Matthew.

Whoever wrote the gospel of Matthew was digging all over to find prophecies that Jesus could be seen to have fulfilled. It was the kind of propaganda done by all religious movements. People are still doing it now with Nostradamus.

I think that he put in this story and others, so that he could use the prophecies about Bethlehem, Rachel weeping for her children, and the trip to Egypt. This last he could correlate with “Out of Egypt did I call my Son.” He probably had a check list of prophecies that he tried to include somehow. It is thanks to Matthew, his Greek and his need for fulfilled prophecies that we have all the nonsense about the virgin birth. But more about that later.

That ever-present average Christian believes that the doctrines of Christianity are original. It certainly doesn’t occur to him that most of the doctrines came from sources other than the Bible.

There were many Saviors among the pagan deities of the time. Attis, Mithras, Tammuz, Osiris, and Adonis are examples that you can check in any good encyclopedia.

The original group of disciples were all Jews, and therefore did NOT think of Jesus as a Son of God (a divine being) but as a man who was going to bring a very mundane salvation to the Jews, freedom from the Romans, and in Jerusalem. Son of God was a name the Jews used for their kings. Both David and Saul were Sons of God in title, not in historical and literal fact.

Only when Paul took his particular version of double-speak to the pagans did Jesus become the Savior. The idea was patterned on the examples of Attis and Mithras, among others. And it was the birthday of Mithras (Dec. 25th), and the day of the All-conquering Sun (Sunday), that were taken over by the Christians. Neither the Redeemer nor the sacrificial Lamb of God were part of the Early Church. They arrived with Paul as he made his brilliant synthesis of Judaism, the regional pagan religions, and Hellenistic thought.

The concept of the Virgin Mother and her dying Son was widespread throughout the Mediterranean area at the time of the Early Church. The Earth was the virgin goddess, and her son was the fruit of the earth. He was born every spring, only to die and return to earth in preparation for his resurrection. It is worth noting that the previously mentioned Attis was one of those gods. He hung bleeding on the tree before his death and resurrection.

One of the major centers of Attis worship was Tarsus, where Paul was born and raised. It was from such vegetation gods as these that the concept of the Savior God and the Mater Dolorosa originated. It was the familiarity with such concepts that made them acceptable to the people to whom Paul preached. It was not their uniqueness, as some Christians claim.

If you want to read about dozens of these salvation cults and check on what I am saying just read a few hundred pages of The Golden Bough by Fraser, or the Five Stages of Greek Religion by Murray. These are classics of scholarship, not secret documents.

Early beliefs had their reflections, if not their origins in the heavens. The constellation Virgo represented the virgin goddess. It rose in the east at the moment when Sirius was heralding the new birth of the Sun. The horizon line through Virgo symbolized the impregnation of the virgin by the Sun. Sky myth and Earth myth were blended in such concepts in those days. It was because of stories and beliefs of this nature that Redeemer stories arose all over the Mediterranean area.

The sacraments that are unique to Christianity, as far as the believer is concerned, were also derived from the Redeemer and Sacrificial cults of the time. The Eucharist came from the blending of a Mithraic ceremony with the sacred meal of Palestinian Judaism, as is shown in the Dead Sea Scrolls material.

I was in London when a Roman temple to Mithras was unearthed. It still had the pit in which the initiate stayed while the sacred bull was sacrificed on a grill over the pit. The initiate came out washed in the blood of the Bull, a new man, reborn and free from the past. The Christians use the Lamb instead of the Bull. And like the followers of Mithras they still eat his body and drink his blood in their rituals.

Under Paul's influence Jesus the Teacher disappeared in the golden glow of Jesus the Savior. When the Church Fathers made their deal with the Emperor Constantine, a worshipper of Mithras, in 325 the differences between the Lord Mithras and the Lord Jesus disappeared. They were mingled discretely and politically correctly in the doctrine of redemption, the sacraments and much else. All from Mithraism to keep Constantine happy.

In passing I should note that it wasn't until the majority vote at the Council of Nicaea in 325 that it was an obligatory article of the Christian faith that Christ was the Savior God. Much more about that later on.

This little summary about the uncertainty of the area we are about to explore, and the misconceptions of the average believer was necessary because if you want to continue after this first letter I am going to try to apply whatever history is available to the gospel stories, edited and distorted though they are.

By looking carefully at what is left after all the editing and alterations it is going to be possible to pull out quite a bit of the story of Jesus the man. And his story is fascinating in itself, even before it becomes blurred with the fog from the Jesus is God area

In effect we can summarize the historical aspects of the gospel story in a single paragraph.

Jesus did something which was against Roman law and carried the death penalty. For some reason he surrendered himself to the authorities in exchange for what was described as a 'notable prisoner'. From the story of the crucifixion and resurrection it is clear that Jesus entered the tomb alive and left it alive.

What is more than this is almost all padding or diversions from the real story due to the theology of Nicaea and the intellectual gymnastics of the Church Fathers in ensuing centuries.

The essential story is still there in the KJV if we take the history of Palestine, the customs of the Jews and the circumstances of the Roman occupation into account. This usually isn't done, as you know. The whole gospel story is treated as if it took place in a vacuum, isolated from the rest of the world.

The most important assumption of present day Christianity is that Jesus died on the cross and emerged alive from the tomb. This resurrection concept was the nucleus of early Christianity in several centers outside Judea decades before the first gospel was written and before Paul died. Since so much of present day Protestant Christianity seems to depend on "The Word" it is important for those trying to think clearly about these matters to realize that early Christianity didn't even have The Word.

The Epistles of Paul were the only literature around at first, and they did their indoctrination in the pagan world. It was the distorted, non-Jewish and thoroughly pagan emphasis put on the resurrection of Jesus by the fanatical self serving of Paul that made Christianity separate away from Judaism and colored all the early Christian writings as well. It is well to remember that EVERY gospel now in the NT was written after years of Paul's influence had been at work.

The only writings unaffected by him were those of the Ebionites who believed as did the Nazarenes, the original Jewish sect of the followers of Jesus. Their comments on Paul's biographical details and mission were deemed scurrilous propaganda by the Church that had already succumbed to the religion invented by Paul, and had tasted of its power.

The Early Church were the followers of Jesus, headed by Peter and James (the brother of Jesus). They were orthodox Jews, of a sect known as the Nazarenes and were treated as orthodox by the authorities. Their only major difference with orthodox Judaism was that they thought that Jesus was the Messiah, that there was no real evidence that he was dead, and that he would be returning shortly to bring freedom to the Jews. They did not actively seek followers but accepted them if they were circumcised and became Jews. Neither they nor Jesus actively sought followers from among the non-Jews.

As the gospels arrived in the years following the death of Paul they reflected not only what was remembered about Jesus but also what was believed about him by the Church at the time of the writing. What was believed, and what was allowed to be written varied from time to time. It is because of this juxtaposition of sometimes contradictory stuff that we can still deduce from the KJV who the real biological father of Jesus was, who Jesus married, and what was the name of his son,

To those embedded in the Paul based mythology of Jesus that last sentence would come as a shock. It would be immediately disputed without any investigation of the reasons or data that I will put before you.

I trust that you are not in that state of conditioning because it is a fascinating story about a remarkable person whose transformation into a wimp to be admired under pain of excommunication has been a great tragedy of history for millions of persecuted people. I shall have chapter and verse for the historical and speculative statements I shall make, and if you want them I shall make notes of my sources for you………..

Here ends the extract. For those who may be interested I also show Biblical and historical evidence that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children by her, and why he gave himself up to the Romans, and how he escaped death on the cross. Many people believed these things decades ago but had no popular media mention until The Da Vinci Code arrived just at the time when many people were beginning to doubt the relevance of the Church in the modern world.