The Jesus Conspiracy -- Excerpts from Chapter 4
- Over the last two millennia, a great robbery has been underway in western civilizations-identity theft-and you have been the victim. Your true identity has been systematically stolen so that the thieves can control you, thereby enjoying great prestige and a healthy income at your expense. And they left two decoys in place of your true identity-the myths of God and Jesus. What a brilliant and masterful ploy-hide the real truths and leave decoys in their place!
- About 2,000 years ago, Galilee was home to many competing Hebrew factions such as the Essenes, Saducees, Pharisees and Samaritans, all practicing their own brand of Judaism. Every sect of the day knew that they were in transit from the war-torn Age of Aries and brutal Roman Conquest to a hopefully more peaceful Age of Pisces. They also knew that a 400-year-old prophecy foretold that a messiah would be born who would lead the Hebrews out of oppression. Of course, each sect hoped that the messiah would be one of their members, because all members of the sect would then benefit from the kudos. As part of their bid to regain spiritual leadership, the members of one sect took matters into their own hands and decided to come up with their own messiah story. And they set it 100 years in the past so no one could contradict it.
- The Library of Alexandria gave the sect's scholars access to every ancient spiritual manuscript in existence that documented the great mythological characters in human history. Many of these myths have almost identical elements: virgin birth, precocious boyhood, conflict with elders, beginning a ministry about age 30, martyrdom for the sake of followers, and resurrection after three days. In an intellectual feeding frenzy in the library, the scholars wove together their own story from bits and pieces of all the others. They were determined that their messiah cult would push all others aside by having their account accepted as historical fact, whereas the source legends admitted to being only mythological. This sleight-of-hand was the beginning of the Jesus Conspiracy.
- They loosely based their messiah character on the life of a Gnostic teacher named Jeshua ben Joseph (a real character who, they claimed, had lived about 100 years earlier and, according to some sources, evaded persecution by the Sanhedrin (the Hebraic governing body, also charged by Rome with keeping the Jews in order) by fleeing to Gaul (now France) with his wife, Mary Magdalene, and their daughter.
- They also credited their messiah with the teachings of Apollonius of Tyana, a well-traveled and knowledgeable scholar. To give their messiah supernatural powers, they plagiarized the Persian sun cult of Mithra and the ancient legends of Horus and Osiris, myths that were already centuries or millennia older and based on the characters of the Anunnaki royal family. So, long after the deaths of Jeshua and Apollonius, a great legend emerged telling a remarkable story of miracles and wise teachings. And because their story was set almost a century earlier, it could not be contested by eye witnesses.
- The messiah story slowly caught on but caused a tremendous ruckus among the Jews in Judea. The common people wanted to believe that a messiah would free them from Roman occupation but the Sanhedrin was unwilling to displease Rome by embracing the new cult.
- Over the next 50 years, the Jesus Conspiracy grew as the scribes wrote down the oral stories and wove countless accounts, or "gospels," about the life of their messiah, with the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, written between 170 - 180 CE. Therefore, none of them could be eye-witness accounts.
- Again, borrowing from countless ancient salvation cults, their story included the notion that their savior had already been crucified to erase mankind's sins. (Note that, wisely, they did not predict a future coming, but claimed that he had already been and gone. Oddly, no accounts of the central character appear in Roman records even though they were meticulous record-keepers.)
- When the creators of the story released it to the people, most of the uneducated folk of Judea could not fathom the more esoteric teachings attributed to Jeshua, so the proponents of the messiah cult simplified the issue by telling them, "Jeshua died so that your sins would be forgiven. All you need to do is accept him as the messiah." This made their cult more palatable than all the other competing cults, but a few zealous preachers, desperate for numbers, crossed the line and promised "God's Wrath" on those who did not accept this messiah-a fire-and-brimstone mentality that is still seen today.
- As a marketing ploy, this worked and membership of many spin-off cults grew steadily between 200 - 300 CE. There was only one problem-whether or not to open the cults to non-Jews. Would gentiles accept a Jew as their messiah, too? And would the Sanhedrin allow into the temples gentiles who were not circumcised or who continued to eat non-kosher foods? The governing body firmly opposed the cults going outside Judaism and admitting gentiles, but when citizens of Rome joined the cults, the rabbis were powerless to prevent them, so it happened anyway.
- The savior angle of the cults grew over the next 100 years, and turned out to be a master stroke because the then Roman emperor, Constantine, had littered his road to power with the bodies of murdered relatives, and none of the other cults wanted anything to do with him. But here was a cult that would forgive him his sins with one quick-and-easy (but not cheap) absolution if he simply accepted Jeshua as the savior who had died to expunge man's sin. So, in 312 CE, he adopted the Jeshua story and promptly placed the Roman Empire behind it.
- Constantine looked to this Jesus Conspiracy story to unify his Empire, but all the different Jeshua cults were at war with each other, so he sought to unify them. In 325 CE, he convened the Council of Nicea, a group of leaders of the principal Jeshua cults of the day. He ordered them to rewrite the Jeshua stories into one teaching that unified (and hence silenced) the teachings of all the rival cults. The council was told to ignore any views that conflicted with Constantine's political agenda. This left out many fine manuscripts, some of which today make up the Apocrypha. Other writings not selected, such as the Gospel of Enoch, were sealed away in the Vatican so people would not know of any dissenting information that contradicted the new compilation of stories that would one day be called The Bible.
- Constantine was happy with the way the Council assembled an "all in one" universal (or catholic) doctrine around the Jeshua character, now being called Jesus. For example, in order to appease Judaism, they gave Jesus the honorary title of Christos, meaning "anointed one," hence the name Jesus Christ. The church then renamed itself the Roman Catholic Church and the religion became known as Roman Catholicism. Rome approved of the "obey Rome and pay your taxes" mandate and the one-God concept inherited from the ancient hibiri Yahweh cult, because it gave them two "big sticks" for controlling the peoples of the countries occupied by the Roman Empire. (Keeping armies stationed across the huge empire was costing a fortune, so Rome seized on any way to control his unruly subjects.)
- Joining the new Roman Catholic Church was a matter of personal choice until 391 CE, when emperor Theodosius proclaimed that all citizens of the far-flung Roman Empire must become Christians, or be guilty of the crime of heresy. Further, he knew the weakness of Christian dogma-that it had been fabricated-and ordered the destruction of all the bodies of knowledge on which the gospels had been based. Tragically this included the fabulous collection of writings in the Library of Alexandria, whose loss set back the evolution of human understanding by millennia.
- As the new Christianity drew further away from its Jewish roots, the Jesus Conspiracy further distanced itself by rewriting the Gospels to blame the Jews for murdering its central figure, a plague that would haunt Judaism throughout history, and lead to horrors such as the WWII holocaust. It would even resurface in 2004, with the release of Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion.
- So not only did the early Christian Church fabricate its dogma as a recruiting campaign, it also compounded the atrocity by destroying all evidence that could prove what they did. Gloating over the orgy of destruction, the fifth-century Archbishop Chrystostom said, "Every trace of the old philosophy and literature of the ancient world has vanished from the face of the Earth." So the Jesus Conspiracy was almost complete
- By sacking and burning all non-Christian schools and temples, the Roman Catholic Church made itself the only repository of books and historical records, which it then freely edited. The Church also built over any religious site to do with "pagan" worship, thus denying it to worshippers and further obliterating history. Holy days in older religions were also "covered over" with Christian religious observances, to become holidays (holy days).
- In 550 CE, Emperor Justinian went even further by declaring the death penalty for anyone who questioned Roman Catholic doctrine. Just three years later, he convened the Second Synod to remove the many references to reincarnation littered throughout the Bible. He did this to appease his new wife, an ex-prostitute, who was worried about future lives in which she would have to atone for her promiscuity. Reincarnation was a constant reminder of her ultimate comeuppance.
- The Church willingly dropped reincarnation from its doctrine because it was proving bad for business. The bishops reasoned that because the people knew they had plenty of lifetimes to "get it right," they were too laid back about sins and sinning. But, if they were told that their soul came into being at birth and had only one shot to impress God enough to get into heaven and enjoy everlasting salvation, they'd really pay attention … and tithes. The faithful would be desperate to erase their sins by paying money to the Church, and the business of selling indulgences would go through the roof. Thus, to even mention the pre-existence of the soul before birth was declared anathema, a state that usually required death by fire to purify one's soul and rectify one's erroneous thinking.
- Wherever it could, the Roman Catholic Church reinforced the Jesus Conspiracy by meeting any resistance with fire and the sword, or even worse atrocities, often involving deviant sexual torture of women who were perceived as temptresses of men and the cause of all ungodly behavior. In this way, the celibate priests could indulge their perverted sexual fantasies with any poor woman unfortunate enough to be accused of witchcraft. Evidence-gathering involved shaving the suspected witch's pubic area, and close examination for evidence of consorting with demons.
- Interestingly, Jeshua never had a problem with carnal pleasures and enjoyed a fruitful relationship with Mary Magdalene. The cult that sprang up around his name initially allowed its priests to marry, but insisted on celibacy for unmarried priests because of numerous scandals involving married female followers that threatened to bring the cult down.
- So does the Jesus Conspiracy mean that Jesus never existed? It's not a simple yes/no answer. On the physical plane, the character was largely fictitious, being a composite of Jeshua and Apollonius, both of whom did exist, plus countless mythological characters. However, on the astral plane, the answer is "sort of," and the astral and physical planes were almost interwoven back then. According to the Seth entity, as channeled by Jane Roberts, the Ascended Master hierarchy decided that the fictional Jesus character was a good vehicle for spreading compassion and wisdom, so they threw their weight behind it. Led by one of their number (Sananda), they induced mass dreams about Jesus in the population, which resulted in dreams and reality being interwoven. (Dreams were far more influential in those days and colored waking life, so the mass dream drove the myth of Jesus into the realms of historical fact and strengthened the religion's power base.)
- Does this erode the validity of Jesus' words? Not in the least. Great truths are always great truths, whether spoken by a flesh-and-blood teacher such as Jeshua, the Buddha, Lao-Tzu, or even a Shakespearean character. The words ascribed to Jesus still stand as unparalleled wisdom to live by … if only Christians would. As with the God concept, the Jesus myth was created for the benefit of younger souls who need support over and above advanced knowledge about soul. The concept of a savior to forgive their sins serves their needs well.
- Today, those on the soul plane report meeting Jesus, actually a projection by Sananda, and an incredibly wise and loving ascended master, but no one over there expects Jesus to "save them" because over there, no one believes they need saving.
- Over the two millennia of political wrangling, much of the real message of teachers such as Jeshua and Apollonius-God is within you, and love your neighbor as yourself-was lost. Deifying the messenger as the "Savior of Mankind" further obscured the message, but enough remains for us to get the point.
- Supporters of the Jesus story look to the Bible for their proof, but that is self-serving and circular because the New Testament was compiled for marketing and promotion, so we must look to contemporary accounts for validation. And since the Romans were prolific record-keepers, we should find plenty. However, not a single reference to the Jesus story exists outside the Bible. Not one, except for a brief passage in the works of Josephus, a Jewish historian, and even that is a clear forgery, added centuries later.
- If the doctrine of Christianity is fiction, written to elevate the status of one Hebrew sect , and then rewritten to control the unruly citizens of Judea, then Rome, and if the lead character of Jesus has no more historical credibility than a TV soap opera star, where does that leave us? Seeing through the Jesus Conspiracy leaves us FREE! Free of rigid church dogma. Free of rules about the way you should be and act. Free to follow your own spirituality, guided by your heart and inner teachers. And free of a submit-or-perish-in-eternal-damnation God based on ancient ET slave-masters.
- Does this mean throwing out the New Testament? Of course not, because its creators and the Council of Nicea called on all the world's great traditions and wove a rich tapestry of wisdom to live by. As for worshipping the character of Jesus, that is a valid step in a soul's growth early in its cycle of lifetimes when it needs a simplistic set of rules to live by. However, one is less likely to find Old Souls in church on Sunday morning.
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