The Dead Sea Scrolls make no mention whatsoever of Jesus, John the Baptist
or Mary Magdalene, nor should we expect them to do so. They were
the product of a Jewish separatist sect called the Essenes who inhabited
the Qumran area of the Dead Sea from about 200 B.C. to 100. A.D. and who
wished nothing to do with "apostate" Jerusalem nor anything that came from
it (such as the early Christian church).
The Nag Hammadi Gnostic Gospels found in Egypt in 1945 date anywhere from
decades to more than a century after the composition of the canonical Gospels
that appear in the Christian New Testament and reflect the gnostic agenda
of those who created them.
The canonical Gospels show no evidence of wholesale alterations in the
transmission of their texts from the earliest known papyri fragments dating
from centuries before the Council of Nicea to the codices published in
the centuries afterward.
As opposed to the very human Jesus who appears in the canonical Gospels,
the Jesus of the Gnostic Gospels is so otherworldly as to seem more at
home in the world of "Star Wars" than in that of the early centuries of
the Christian church. Also, the "liberated" Gnostic Jesus proclaims
that women will be made ready for the kingdom of heaven by being transformed
into men.
The Muratorian Canon, an ancient manuscript listing the 27 books of the
New Testament as being the books accepted as canonical by the church, predates
Constantine and the Council of Nicea by more than a century.
The "extremely close" vote by which the nature of Jesus' divinity (not
whether he was divine; that was already long accepted by the church) was
decided at Nicea in 325 A.D. was by the "extremely close" margin of 316-2.
Mitochondrial DNA analysis of the foot bone of a known Merovingian queen
from the seventh century A.D. (the Merovingian line being alleged to preserve
the alleged bloodline of Jesus) found no Middle Eastern genetic markers
in the DNA, only European ones, indicating that there was no Middle Eastern
blood (and thus no bloodline of Jesus) in her ancestry.
The "ancient" Priory of Sion didn't even exist until 1956 when Pierre Plantard,
long known to French authorities as a charlatan and con artist with delusions
of grandeur, invented the organization out of whole cloth and back-filled
its roster of alleged "grand masters" with famous personages from history.
He went so far as to proclaim himself the true king of France (of Merovingian
ancestry, of course). He finally admitted under oath in 1993 that
the whole thing was a hoax and died in obscurity in Paris in 2000.
The very same character in Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code who
decries the church as being a liar, a cheat, a thief, a mass murderer and
a master manipulator throughout its whole history is himself revealed
at the end of the novel to be a liar, a cheat, a thief, a mass murderer
and indeed the master manipulator of the whole story... so why would
you believe anything that a character like that has to say about church
history? (There. I just spoiled the whole movie for you.
Sue me.)
Speaking of the movie, Tom Hanks' hair looks hideous.
Dan Brown has goddess worship coming out the yin-yang.
If you're going to write a historical novel, at least try to get
the history right.
There is no such thing as "an historical novel"; it's "a historical novel,"
as I wrote above. Would you say that a woman had had "an hysterectomy"
or that you lived in "an house"?
Factually speaking, this is a long list of facts.
And
now that these matters of fact are out of the way, join me in the thrilling
story of the discovery of the true holy grail in...
Click here
to read Chapter 1!
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