Jesus, John, And The Making Of A Messiah

https://archive.org/details/jesusjohnandthemakingofamessiah/page/n1/mode/2up


Preface

Church attendance in developed nations has been on a
downward spiral for the best part of a century. The strong
likelihood is that it will continue to decline. In the past, almost
everyone was a churchgoer. But today, irrespective of whether or
not they believe in God, the majority of the population regards
organized religion as an anachronism.
Increased levels of education since the end of World War II
brought with them a greater demand for intellectual satisfaction.
Now, most people will only accept something as ‘true’ if it can be
explained by reason or else resonates with their experience.
Absolute ‘truths’ must pertain to reality. Not reality as perception,
but reality which is the same for everyone. Doctrines that insist on
faith in the irrational and unfamiliar no longer have mass appeal,
because by implication, they are not true.
Formerly, the Church could withdraw some of its erroneous
tenets, for example, that the sun orbits the earth, because they
were incidental to its central theology. In the modern era, as
potential embarrassments cropped up with increasing regularity,
the Church adopted the position that religion and science were
mutually incompatible. Therefore, any attempts to reconcile them
were futile.
The idea that life allowed for the existence of contradictory laws
did not impress Einstein, who famously stated that “God does not
play dice with the universe.” His comment that “science would
provide a surer path to God than religion,” reflects a widely held
opinion that religious institutions are paralyzed by the instinct for
self-preservation and reluctance to acknowledge error. As far as
most people today are concerned, the Church has not only ceded
to science the ability to interpret the physical world, but also the
world unseen, and all that that implies.
Despite public skepticism toward the Christian Church, the
indisputable fact of history is that Western civilization is a 
Judeo Christian legacy. The predominant culture is actually based on a
complex synthesis of Hebraism and Hellenism, but its catalyst was
provided by events in the life of one man -- Jesus. And we simply
cannot understand the modern world without first understanding
our Judeo-Christian past.
The phenomenal success of the movies, The Passion of Christ and
The Da Vinci Code, prove that the desire to know what happened
two thousand years ago has not diminished. Still, from whatever
point of view Jesus is presented, we don’t know who he was. For
traditionalists, the focal point of ‘genuine’ Christianity is Christ,
the risen God. ‘Christ’ transcends human attributes, so in the
grand scheme of things, the historical man Jesus is incidental. At
the opposite end of the spectrum, liberal academics cite a lack of
documentation to prove much of anything about Jesus, and being
good scholars they only go where the ‘facts’ lead.
Making sense of Jesus then, is not easy. Apparently, he was
rejected by those ‘in charge of religion’ as an ordinary man with
blasphemous delusions of grandeur. But now that he is regarded
as God, or as a character to be defined only on the limited basis of
a few prose narratives, Jesus cannot be legitimately considered as
an actual human being with normal physical, spiritual, emotional
and intellectual needs.
The Virgin and The Priest does not directly address the issue of
Jesus’ marital status, or even if he had children. Researching the
possibility of a surviving bloodline without first identifying Jesus’
parents, not only puts the genealogical cart before the horse, it
perpetuates the confusion over his status. Jesus’ ‘divinity’ has been
the foundation of Christian theology ever since Church councils
began, and still conditions public perception of him today. For that
reason, Jesus’ ancestors, rather than his descendants, ought
properly to be the starting point of any investigation of his life.
Officially, Protestant Churches do not insist on the virgin birth
doctrine as do Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Mary’s
miraculous conception, however, is taken for granted by most of
their membership, and by a large percentage of the general
population. Even non believers jump on the bandwagon when
Christmas comes around. Who can blame them? It is a beautiful
story. A young virgin conceives a child miraculously. She gives
birth to God’s only Son in a humble stable. Wise men travel from
afar to offer gifts to the newborn king. The word ‘miracle,’
however, can only be used legitimately when describing events
that lack a rational or scientific explanation, and as an absolute
principle, all forms of life are created by, and therefore preceded
by, a relationship or interaction between opposites: male/female or
positive/negative. So regardless of any theological claims, if Jesus
existed then he must have had biological parents. His birth,
therefore, was not a miracle. Moreover, if Jesus’ father were
identified it might help explain other aspects of his life, and inject a
dose of much-needed reality into the study of Christian origins.
To protect the early church, the gospel writers deliberately crafted
explanations of Jesus’ birth to mystify the uninformed and obscure
the truth from those deemed incapable of receiving it. To achieve
this, they used an ancient ‘messianic’ scribal code belonging to an
esoteric strand of Judaism. Later, as the church developed in the
Gentile nations, ignorance of this code proved disastrous.
Centuries of pointless and unnecessary theological argument
precipitated divisions in human society that led to centuries of
bloodshed, persecution, and suffering on a truly unimaginable
scale. In explaining the messianic code, The Virgin and The Priest
does not so much go where the facts lead, because hardly any exist.
The case presented is not one that would stand up in a modern
court of law. There are no sworn affidavits, no eye witness
testimonies, and no DNA paternity-test results. The argument
follows only where reason takes it, supported by a framework of
coherent and consistent logic, based on the Jewish traditions of the
biblical writers. Corroborative evidence is presented from
apocryphal gospels, writings of early Church Fathers, and the
Koran. The cryptic images of Renaissance masterpieces, so long a
source of confusion to ‘experts’ and bewilderment to the general
public, are deciphered to show that knowledge of Jesus’ biological
father was pivotal to an important and influential subversive
tradition.
That the name of Jesus’ father has never been publicly disclosed
attests to the existence of a controlling and pervasive conspiracy of
silence by those who knew it, both inside and outside the Church.
The perpetrators were aided and abetted by the suffocating power
of preconceived ideas, working hand in hand with history’s largest
ever propaganda campaign, incessantly and repeatedly broadcast
throughout the world for seventeen centuries. And, in common
with modern sales and marketing promotions, the message was
both deceptive and illusory, designed solely to benefit vested
interests. Deep down we knew it, but still bought the product.
Christianity’s sacred cows have been challenged many times
before, but never as comprehensively as in The Virgin and The
Priest. Perhaps above all else, the spotlight falls on the life of Saint
John the Baptist -- one of the most neglected areas of New
Testament studies and Dead Sea Scrolls research -- and the part he
played in Jesus’ tragic life. Hopefully, any errors along the way are
minor and thus peripheral to the book’s central arguments. For
readers raised on the tenets of traditional religious teaching, The
Virgin and The Priest will be a journey into unchartered waters. Bon
voyage!
Ubud, Bali November, 2007