Read any good books lately? Well I can assure you that your Church does not want you to read certain books because if you do then you will become aware of the deceptions within the New Testament of which I continually speak.
As many men and governments before and after the time of the fourth century had learned, if a dictatorship is to control an entire people it is essential to first control education. In other words, to be successful a dictatorship needs to maintain a murderous grip over what their people hear, read and think. Just look at the Communist dictatorship of the former Soviet Union for your example in your own life time. But you don't need to look just at the Soviet Union; lets look closer to home beginning with the Christian Church of the earliest centuries who controlled knowledge. Following a proven method, the main objective of the Roman Empire's new Christian dictatorship beginning with Constantine became the destruction of books and a monopoly on education.
Calling it a "service to God," Christianity's venerable church fathers caused an unfathomable amount of historical materials to be forever lost to the world, such as the entire contents of the ancient Palatine Apollo Library which were burned on the orders of Pope Gregory the Great (AD 540-604). His decree stated that the library was to be burned "lest its secular literature distract the faithful from the contemplation of heaven" (Smith, Man and His Gods, pp. 228, 253). Knowing that the library contained thousands of scrolls from the pre-Christian mystery religions—whose doctrines and customs had been recently absorbed by the Christian Church—Pope Gregory might just have well said "lest its secular literature expose the origin of the Christian Church!" This was the real reason why anything remotely connected to the old pagan religions was savagely attacked by the church! The whole of Roman authority as well as Christian Imperial influence would be severely damaged if it was shown that the core teachings of Christianity, a religion espoused as given by God from Heaven, could be shown to be nothing more than the retelling of pagan mythology as applied to a Jewish Rabbi named Yeshua. Such damaging documents exposing Christian Roman religious lies passed off as Divine Truth as well as their document, the New Testament, had to be destroyed whenever found in order to preserve and protect the Church-State of the Roman Empire. Failure to censer the truth when found could only lead to the enlightenment of the people whereby Rome could no longer use fear and ignorance to control the masses through religion. Rome you must remember saw too it that there was "no salvation" outside the Bishop of the Roman Church; thus it was easy to see how Rome used ignorance of the truth and fear of the loss of one's salvation to control the masses to do the bidding of the Roman Church-State which could be seen in her political and financial desires to propagate herself. If the masses were to learn that salvation as taught by Rome was only pagan ideas recast through a Jewish Rabbi and that their salvation was in doubt, then rebellion to such a religious and political hierarchy would be the guaranteed outcome. All evidence revealing Rome's religious duplicity had to be destroyed whenever and wherever it was encountered.
Every book in the Gnostic Basilides, Porphyry's thirty-six volumes and an additional 27,000 papyrus rolls of the Gentile mystery religions were all burned by order of the church. Concerning the great ancient library of Alexandria, built by Ptolemy, Joseph Wheless writes: "This Library became the most extensive and celebrated of the ancient world, containing some 700,000 manuscript books at the time it was savagely destroyed, in 391 AD, by the benighted Christian zeal and fury of Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria and his crazy monks of Nitria, as related in Kingsley's Hypatia or any history of the times" (Wheless, Forgery in Christianity, p. 58) These events are simply summed up by Edward Carpenter, who writes, that "the Christians took special pains to destroy the pagan records and so obliterate the evidence of their own dishonesty" (Graham, Deceptions and Myths of the Bible, p. 444).
The official Christian zeal for the destruction of books continued unquenched over the coming centuries. For instance, when the Spanish invaders arrived in South America one of the first acts of the accompanying priests was to order the mass destruction of the ancient libraries of the Aztecs. This action became imperative when the priests discovered that the natives had a pagan religion that virtually mirrored their own. With native religious customs like a virgin-loom crucified savior g-d, a Eucharist, a clergy that essentially consisted of a pope, priests and virgin nuns, and adoring a golden cross as the symbol of their salvation on which their savior g-d was crucified, the Catholic priests had ample reason to be zealous in their actions.
The above example is startling when you think about it. These Catholic missionaries travel half-way around the world and these "ignorant" natives have the same religion that they had in Catholic Europe?
Answer for yourself: How is that possible?
Well the answer is not hard but it is involved and a complete understanding of how the residue of "sun worship" became worldwide will explain a lot; not the least of it the ministry and later success of Paul in the New Testament among the Gentiles. Again I warn you that this information is not pretty but very unsettling but necessary if the New Testament believer truly desires to know and return to "the faith" once given to the saints. I have devoted one entire website to this problem of how the faith and religion of Yeshua, a Jew, was paganized and passed off as just another modification of prior sun-worship and you can see how it was done in detail and the doctrines taken from it as found in the New Testament by visiting this website: http://paganizingfaithofyeshua.netfirms.com.
The ancient Indians of South America worshipped a trinity of g-ds, the chief g-d, or father, being Icona. His son, called Bacob, was born of a virgin mother, named Chibirias, who dwelled in heaven with the holy spirit. The son, Bacob, born of a virgin, came to earth as a human and was tied or nailed to a cross, where he both died for the sins of humanity and the fertility of the earth, after which he was raised back to life (Yucatec Trinity in South America quoted in The Mythology of All Races, Volume Xl, p. 143. See also, Hislop, The Two Babylons, pp. 18-19.). T.W. Doane writes: "Sometimes Quetzalcoatle or Bacob is represented as tied to the cross and at other times he is represented in attitude of a person crucified, with impressions of nail holes in his hands and feet..." (op. cif, p. 200.) These native pagan crosses corresponded, as T.W. Doane writes, "in every particular with those delineated on Babylonian monuments;" but it was also distinguished by the Catholic designation, "the tree of subsistence", "the wood of health", "the emblem of life," etc. (op. cit., p. 347.)
In his renowned histories of South America, James Prescott relates how the Spanish missionaries, when they first arrived in Mexico, ". . . could not suppress their wonder as they beheld the cross, the sacred emblem of their own faith, raised as an object of worship in the temples . . . [they] were not aware that the cross was the symbol of worship of the highest antiquity in Egypt and Syria; and that rite, resembling those of communion and baptism, were practiced by pagan nations on whom the light of Christianity had never shone." (Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, Volume 111, pp. 368, 371.) In fact, the Christian priests found in Palenque, Mexico a heathen temple known as the "Temple of the Cross." This temple, almost 3,000 years old, preserved a cross that is identical to the modern form now being used in the Catholic Church. With such discoveries the priest at first thought that the land had been reached by other Christian missionaries, yet when they finally understood the antiquity of the native religion they were confused as to why legends and symbols so close to their own Catholicism should be found there (The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume X, p. 252.). Traveling into what would one day become Vera Cruz, Mexico, they found a marble cross, identical to their own sacred symbol, topped with a crown of gold. The natives told the astonished priests that "one more glorious than the sun died upon the cross!" (Murray-Ayosley, Symbolism of the East and West, p 70.)
Answer for yourself: Did you notice the above author described the crucifixion as the "sun" and not the "son" that dies upon the cross? This is just the beginning of how sun-worship is tied to the story of Jesus in the Gentile's New Testament!
These Catholic priests would soon find themselves even more confused, as Prescott notes: "Their surprise was heightened, when they witnessed a religious rite which reminded them of Christian Communion." The communion in the form of the Aztec sun-g-d deity ". . . was made of the flour of maize, mixed with blood, and after consecration by the priest, was distributed among the people, who, as they ate it, "showed signs of humiliation and sorrow, declaring it was the flesh of the deity." (Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, Volume 111, p.369.)
Don DeSolis, a Catholic writer in the eighteenth century, tries to explains these obvious "Christian" counterparts within the pagan customs of South America: ". . . it seems that the Devil . . . was ambitious to imitate Baptism . . . and even the Sacraments of the Catholic Church, since he introduced among the Barbarians the Confession of Sins . . . and Communion which the priest administered on certain days. They had likewise Jubilees, processions, offerings of incense and other forms of divine worship; Nay, they even gave their Chief Priest the title of Pope in their language:" "Satan, . . . whether with a design to abuse and profane the Sacred Mysteries and Ceremonies by mingling them with his Abominations, is still aspiring to imitate the Most High." (De Solis, The History of the Conquest of Mexico, Volume 1, p. 355-6.)
We can add to these examples that of the Christian Crusaders who destroyed every book and scroll they could find when they entered the so-called holy land. You may not be aware of this but this action was, in fact, one of the main objectives of the Crusades. But with all this destruction there was still another outstanding problem—the bible itself, especially the New Testament, the contents of which are most revealing to the critical eye.
Answer for yourself: The church could destroy all existing extra-Biblical pagan mystery religious documents which reveals the plagiarized New Testament, but what were they to do about the New Testament itself, since knowledgeable people who would possibly read it could recognize such copying of pagan myths as passed-off Roman "Divine truths"?
Remember that there is nothing new under the sun says Solomon. The problem of an informed church was so damaging and obvious that Pope Gregory, who had denounced "all secular education as folly" and who had burned a few hundred tons of pre-Christian scrolls to erase the past and protect Rome's plagiarism of pagan myths, finally commanded that the common people should not read the bible (Graham, Deceptions and Myths of the Bible, p. 444). This command meant that the ordinary Christian man and woman could only hear selected bits and pieces of the bible as interpreted by their priests in his Sunday sermon. The Catholic Christian Church was spared embarrassment and ensured their continued domination of the people who would never know different or the facts behind the New Testament. Finances would continue to be collected forever to ensure the longevity of the Church-State as long as the people never learned the truths behind the dogmas and doctrines Rome borrowed from their pagan past and included in their "infallible" New Testament. It also meant that the "protectors of the faith of Christ" could keep their holy book from close scrutiny and critical assessment. The paganism of the New Testament they hoped could never be found out by the masses. The Catholic Church had destroyed almost all existing pagan religious documents which mimicked the New Testament in religious concepts and ideas and now they had limited the people from ever reading it. They were safe they thought and their positions of influence safe-guarded. The people were to be kept in the "dark" concerning the truth and the Dark Ages were about to begin. Ignorance was bliss to the leaders of the Catholic Church.
Answer for yourself: Today one might wonder "why didn't the average Christian protest the pope's command"?
The answer lies in the absolute control the church wielded over both king and commoner, which perhaps is easily demonstrated in the title of the powerful and notorious pope, Innocent III (1198-1216). In 1198 he was crowned "FATHER OF PRINCES AND KINGS, RULER OF THE WORLD, VICAR OF CHRIST and G-D". DeRosa says that this pontiff "…never doubted this blasphemy was his due" (DeRosa, Vicars of Christ, p. 67). Innocent, whose name is a historical joke because he is credited as the father of the infamous "holy" Inquisition, added to his power by claiming that "All things on earth and in heaven and in hell are subject to the Vicar of Christ" (Halley, Halley's Bible Handbook, p. 776). Innocent's g-d-like attitude was bequeathed to his successors, an example being Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) who openly declared that, "We hold upon this earth the place of God Almighty" (Leo XIII, The Great Encyclical Letters of Leo XIII, 3rd ed. P. 304, extracted from The Reunion of Christendom, 20 June, 1894).
In the coming centuries Pope Gregory's orders against bible reading were backed by the threat of death: "In 1234, the Synod of Taragona declared that anyone was a heretic, who, having in his possession a copy of the Scriptures in the vernacular [i.e., in their own language], refused to surrender it to be burned within eighty days" (Barrett, While Peter Sleeps, p. 223). In other words, after 1234 A.D. anyone possessing a bible that he or she could read was guilty of heresy, and the fate of an unrepentant heretic, after the initial routine torture sessions, was being burned alive.
The prohibition against bible reading was further assured by the fact that the Christian Church had essentially eliminated education in the Holy Roman Empire. By the Middle Ages ninety-nine percent of all Europeans couldn't read or write—a number that usually included most ruling kings and princes. For those few who could read, the study of any subject that might call into question the "truth" of the bible was a perilous undertaking, the most dangerous being a study of the sciences.
Even though the ancient scientist Eratosthenes of Alexandria had measured the circumference of the earth in the third century BC, and his colleague Hipparchus invented longitude and latitude in the second century BC, and even though the ancient Phoenicians had sailed and explored most of the world a thousand years before the time of Jesus—establishing colonies as far away as South America—the Christian Church declared that the earth was flat. It was an "infallible" declaration went unopposed because the church controlled all avenues that might call into question their brand of scientific" reasoning—this and the fact that they had already burned every book of science in existence, including those of the ancient scientists Democritus and Leucippus, who taught the atomic theory of matter in the fifth century BC, and all of the books of the ancient mathematician and geographer Eratosthenes of Alexandria (Eartosthenes of Alexandria:, The Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., Vol. 13, p. 526).
In contrast, and at the time most Christian kings and princes in Europe couldn't read or write, a Moorish king had a library of 600,000 books available to his subjects. The Moorish city of Cordova, Spain had eight hundred public schools, while only one percent of Europe was literate. Religious historian Lloyd Graham writes: "It was difficult to encounter even a Moorish peasant who could not read and write.... In Christian Europe scholars were burned at the stake; in Moorish Europe they were the highest paid men in the realm. One Moorish king gave his leading scholar forty thousand pieces of gold each year, while in Christendom, Roger Bacon, credited with inventing the camera, clock, telescope and lens, gunpowder and steam power, was imprisoned fourteen years as a sorcerer and heretic" (Graham, Deceptions and Myths of The Bible, pp. 457-458). True to their own stated objectives, once the Spanish had driven the Moors out of Europe a hateful Cardinal Ximenes "delivered to the flames in the square of Granada eighty thousand Arabic manuscripts" to be burned " (Graham, Deceptions and Myths of The Bible, pp. 444).
Indeed, the church's hatred of science was so intense that its hierarchy even went so far as to bring charges against Pope Sylvester II. Desiring something more than a religious education, and because there were no universities in Christian Europe that taught anything other than theology, Sylvester, when he was a cardinal, went to a Moorish university in Spain and received an education in medicine. It was putting this education to practical use that ran him afoul of the church hierarchy. After being accused of sorcery, historians note that it was only because of his high office that Pope Sylvester escaped prosecution and the horrors of the Inquisition.
Such an attitude towards the sciences meant that the Christian Church can be held directly responsible for catastrophes like the so-called Black Death, the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages that killed between one-third to one-half of Europe's population.
Now I want you to pay attention to the next quote from a rather well respected church father; Augustine. Remember when you read this quote that many of your Christian Doctrines today are directly attributable to this man. Now after reading the quote think to yourself if you should follow any reasoning coming from such a man and how much of your Christianity today is absolute foolishness. During this deadly sickness of Europe, called the Black Death, the church still agreed with the "wisdom" of its venerated St. Augustine, who declared: "All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons; chiefly do they torment first-baptized Christians, yea, even the guileless newborn infant" (Graham, Deceptions and Myths of The Bible, pp. 458).
At the same time the church was torturing and burning scientists as heretics, one of their most often recommended remedies for illness was driving out the offending demon by the use of "holy water" or by touching a "blessed" relic, which is to say by touching the bones of a saint, or vials of Jesus' blood, pieces of the "true Cross" or, in one instance, a piece of the wing of the archangel Gabriel, which, the church said, he left behind when he came to tell the virgin Mary that she was with child. All of these so-called cures were, of course, for sale from the Christian church.
Throughout Christendom local churches offered cures for just about any type of ailment, all effected by their own local relics. Any "holy" relic dipped into well water, could, as the church advertised far and wide, cure tumors, baldness, impotence, infertility, bad teeth, heart, liver and stomach ailments, broken bones, difficult pregnancies, sores, lepers . . . !
The selling or use of holy bones (or relics) became so profitable that a special papal corporation was founded in Rome to discover, sell, and transport, holy relics to all parts of Europe. The greed became so great that Joe Nickell, in his book, Inquest on The Shroud of Turin, writes: "The living bodies of likely future saints were covetously watched by relic mongers; when Thomas Aquinas fell ill and died at a French monastery, his body was decapitated and his flesh boiled away by monks greedy for his bones. It is said that St. Romnald of Ravenna heard during a visit to France that he was in mortal peril because of the value of his bones and fled homeward . . ." (p. 51.) "Rome, says Gregorovius, was like a moldering cemetery in which hyenas howled and fought as they dug greedily alter corpses." (Woodrow, Babylon Mystery Religion, p. 54.)
One of the most famous examples of relic profiteering is that of Saint Nicholas. He is supposedly buried in the city of Bari, Italy, where his remains were brought after being supposedly discovered by some merchants in Myra. According to the story when these merchants found St. Nicholas' body it was flowing in holy oil, and after his re-burial in Bari this "holy oil" miraculously continued to exude from his bones. Claiming that the oil had miraculous healing powers, the monks began one of the biggest money making schemes in the history of the Italian Church. Unless there were a failure in the local olive oil crop, this "holy" oil was sold by the Christian clergy of Bari, gallon after gallon, century after century to the ill and dying. (McKnight, St Nicholas, p. 147. See also, Walsh, The Story of Santa Klaus, pp 45-46).
Notably the superstition of relics as means of magical cures continues today by the wearing of holy medals or the use of icons. Every Catholic book store, or other related business, sells millions of medals and icons of the church's many different saints for protection against a host of threats. Noting that the ancient pagans wore the same kind of charms, or believed in the power of religious icons of their g-ds or saints, T.W. Doane makes the connections of the ancient custom to the present-day: "The Christians also used amulets with the name or monogram of the g-d Serapis engraved thereon.... even the charm which is worn by the Christians at the present day, has none other than the monogram of [the g-d] Bacchus engraved thereon, i.e., I H S." Bible Myths, p. 405.)
With such "divine" cures bringing a steady flow of money-paying faithful patients to the church, that same church certainly had no need for medical science, and least of all for the "heretics" that promoted scientific experiments. This attitude is why some of the most famous scientists in European history, Leonardo Da Vinci included, had to often work in secret and in fear for their lives!
As yet one more example of the church's relentless war on secular education, early in the seventeenth century one of history's greatest scientists was put on trial for his life charged in an ecclesiastical court with heresy. Despite his reputation and his advanced age, before the mock trial he had been tortured relentlessly by the disciples of Jesus Christ. His heretical crime was to challenge the church's position that the earth was the center of the universe and that the universe revolved around the earth.
After he could no longer endure the torture, and remembering that his colleague Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake for conducting the same research, this broken old man recanted. Being led before a group of pious Christian priests and clerics the great Galileo admitted the following: "1, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees, and before your Eminences, having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, curse, and detest the error and the heresy of the movement of the earth." And thus the church, that had already declared the earth to be flat because that is what the bible teaches, was secure in its belief that the earth did not move but stood stationary at the center of the universe. Galileo published his work, Dialogo in 1632. Essentially building upon the theory of Copernicus, he was able to demonstrate the fallacy of the church's teaching that the earth was the center of the universe and everything revolved around it.
Perhaps all this madness is best summed up by one historian who wrote that within the Christian Church of the Middle Ages a heretic was a man with an opinion! (Reinach, Orpheus, p. 318).
It would not be until 1865 that the major crack came in the strict domination of Christianity over education. Up until that time virtually all universities appointed religious authorities to supervise all fields of scientific inquiry. In 1865 Cornell University was founded and, under a great deal of protest, became the first major school in Christendom to appoint a non-cleric as its dean. However, when the academic world finally broke free of the murderous grip of fanatic Christian ignorance, intellectual freedom was far from being a reality.
Even after the clergy could no longer arrest, torture and burn people for thinking, questioning, or for reading a forbidden book, they still waged a relentless war on secular education by using their considerable influence with the uneducated masses forever in fear of eternal damnation. Notice again the same tactics used by the Church who controlled not only knowledge but salvation as well. In the majority of Christian churches members were and still are told either directly not read certain materials, or they are warned away through more subtle means, such as sermons ridiculing and discrediting a particular work or author. We at Bet Emet encounter such a blindness to the facts and fear of truth occasionally as our articles are sent to others but we cannot be deterred from the quest and calling we have received from God. God is sacred and not a book which can be shown to be lies; lies that have replaced God's Truth no less for millions who never do their own study to see if "they be in the faith"…"the faith once given to the saints".
Both the Catholic Church and her Protestant Sister still dictates to their members what they can and cannot read. In 1515 the church, alarmed by the number of "heretical" books being published, moved to put an end to this danger. Thus was born the Imprimatur, the official Vatican stamp of approval received by works that are in line with Catholic dogma. The office is still in operation and any good Catholic book will contain this stamp of approval on the title page. (Lea, A History of the Inquisition, Volume 111, p. 615.)
For any fundamentalist who finally works up the courage to get outside the carefully screened and recommended reading of their church the reasons for these warnings become painfully obvious. No where is this more true than in a critical study of the New Testament. Such a critical study of the New Testament will reveal to you gross distortions of the Old Testament for purposes of indoctrination by anti-Semitic Gentiles. The process really began with the corruption of the translation of the Jewish Scriptures by the Essenes of Egypt when they were also involved in sun-worship: http://bennoah1.freewebsites.com. In their never-ending quest for religious legitimacy and status, the writers of the New Testament have not hesitated to twist, distort, pervert, and concoct Old Testament verses as expediency dictated. Examples of their dishonest display of propagandistic propensities are abundantly evident to anyone with a reasonably critical eye. Such deceptions and distortions by the writers of the New Testament fall into three broad categories: misquotations, nonquotes, and misinterpretations. A misquotation is defined as deliberately misquoting an Old Testament passage; a nonquote consists of quoting a non-existent Old Testament passage, and a misinterpretation consists of correctly quoting an Old Testament passage while distorting the meaning intended. The New Testament is guilty on all the counts in hundred of places and only a reasonably critical eye and knowledge of Old Testament Scripture as take from the Jewish Bible and not the altered Christian Old Testaments is necessary to spot such perversions in the New Testament.
If one is interested in individual examples of such New Testament distortions of the Old Testament and the Jewish Scriptures one needs only to examine our web pages at : http://returningtofaithofyeshua.freeservers.com and http://paulproblem.faithweb.com as they contains ample evidence to prove our point. But you must see it for yourself. This is the purpose of not only this series of articles but Bet Emet Ministries; to reveal the truth for New Testament believers by exposing the unsoundness of such a document in hopes one will repent of such false beliefs once he sees the truth for himself. We must always remember that with every lie exposed and repented of one takes a closer step toward the God of Truth.
More to follow.