[Chapter Eleven: Sargon, Naram-Sin, and the Egyptian Seventh Dynasty]

Chapter Twelve: Tangled Bloodlines

All these geographical, chronological, political, and philological perplexities,
are such as never could have crossed the path of straight-forward narrative;
but are such exactly as would occur to Eclectic [plagiarists],
engaged in the business of setting forth in order a tale of the then olden time;
fitting new names and new scenery to the characters
and catastrophes of an antiquated plot;
and endeavoring to put an appearance of history and reality
upon the creations of fictions and romance.
—Rev. Robert Taylor, The Diegesis

208 BC—The Mystery of Mithras

As I began to realize that the global events recorded in the rings of trees could be used to calibrate the ancient avatar cycle of which I had become aware in my investigation of the alignment of Hebrew and Egyptian chronologies, it occurred to me that the events of 208 BC should be fairly easy to recover and to examine in an attempt to understand just precisely what had been happening over a period of at least 4000 years. At a time after the rise and then fragmentation of the empire of Alexander that, according to some historians, marked the boundary between the ancient and modern worlds, I was fairly certain that there would be more than enough data to finally catch a glimpse of the historical, geophysical, and cosmological foundations of this latest series of large scale environmentally determined human experiences on this planet. What I had not counted on was the active attempt to eradicate all memory of the religion that grew out of the events surrounding the year 208 BC, now so clearly recorded by the new science of dendrochronology, by the adherents of a couple of later dispensations.

My first instinct was to run the date 208 BC through a popular search engine. What I discovered among the multiple citations of the dendrochronological evidence was an obscure reference to someone named Mithras who, it was claimed by a scholar named M. (Mahmad) Moghdam at a conference in Tehran in 1975, was the real person behind what has been thought of until recently as simply a Western adaptation of a Mithraically oriented version of the religion of the Persian Zoroaster that spread across the Roman Empire before being absorbed into Christianity at the time of Constantine. The Mithra or Mitra of this earlier religion was simply the Persian Sun God, or so it was generally supposed.

According to Professor Moghdam, the new Mithras was born during the evening of December 24 or the early morning of December 25, 272 BC, near Lake Hamin. Moghdam points out various references in the works of Islamic historians that appear to distinguish between a "Lord Messiah" and "Jesus of Nazareth." Moghdam's sources are fragmentary, and to some extent vary one from another, but it is possible to extract a fairly coherent picture from the various elements available.

Apparently sometime around 323 BC, in what is now northeastern Iran, a son of one Ashkan (or a descendant of his, or a member of a tribe that drew their name from such an eponymous ancestor) named Ashk (or Afghur Shah) became "king" of what would later become the Parthian Federation. Ashk died about 313 and was replaced by Shabur Shah (or Sabur Shah). Shabur's rule overlapped that of Antiochus I Soter of the Seleucid Empire, the political heirs of Alexander of Macedon in that area, that ruled to the west of the Parthians. During the reign of these two gentlemen a son was born, supposedly miraculously and to a virgin in the region of Sistan. The mother's name was Mary. Her father was Amran, hearking back to Miriam and her father Amram, suggesting that Joshua, whose father was Nun, was the son of Miriam, the sister of Moses. According to Ahmed Osman, in Jesus in the House of the Pharaohs, the Koran specifically identifies Mary, the mother of Jesus, with Miriam the sister of Aaron:

"Oh sister of Aaron! Thy father was not a man of evil, nor thy mother a woman unchaste!"

In this case the Koran identifies Mary, the mother of Jesus, as being the same person as Mary, the sister of Aaron and Moses.

Faced with this seemingly complete contradiction of the Gospel account, Muslim scholars have tried to find a logical explanation. Some have said that the real meaning of this passage is that it is as if Mary were a sister of Aaron, while others have attempted to relate the mother of Jesus to the tribe of Aaron. Neither of these approaches is convincing, however, since the Koran itself confirms the brother-sister relationship between Mary and Aaron by saying that they had the same father, Imram (Sura 3:35).

Much of the vast trove of material presented by Godfrey Higgins in his Anacalypsis relates to the origins of Christianity in the religion of Zoroaster and the confusion of the elements of the two systems. In this regard, he describes the prophesy of the birth of a "sacred personage":

The reader will recollect what was said before by the well-known oriental Christian, Abulfaragius or Bar Hebræus, that there was a prophesy in the oracles of Zoroaster, "That a sacred personage should issue from the womb of an immaculate Virgin, and that his coming would be preceded by a brilliant star, whose light would guide them to the place of his nativity." It is pretty clear that this is a copy from the Gospel histories, or that the Gospel histories are copies from it, or both from a common mythos. And it must be observed here that the story of the Magi is contained in a part of the Gospel history which the Nazareens, Ebionites, Marcionites, Socinians, and most of the modern Unitarians, maintain to be spurious. If one be a copy from the other, which is copied must be left to the reader. After all that he has seen he will probably find little difficulty. This prophecy is evidently alluded to in the Gospel of the Infancy, which says, speaking of the Magi guided by a star, Quemadmodum prædixerat Zorodustht—as Zoroaster had predicted. This Gospel was received by the Nestorians, of whom Buchanan says, there are now about 50,000 in Malabar. It is a striking circumstance that the gifts brought by the Magi, gold, frankincense, and myrrh, were what were always offered by the Arabian Magi to the sun.

In fact, as G. A. Wells says in Who Was Jesus?, "The emperor Constantine the Great 'pursued the deliberate policy of uniting the worship of the sun with that of Christ', for he favoured Christianity because 'its organization made it best able to unite the Empire' [O. Cullman]."

As Moghdam says,

Keeping in mind the fate of the religion of Mithra in the West and its utter absorption in Christianity, and the similar fate it had, even more severely, under the Sasanian neo-Zoroastrianism and later under Islam, we would naturally expect in Moslem historians a total identification of Mithra with Jesus, the only Messiah allowed in orthodox Islam.

The confusion may extend to a statement found in the History of Prophets and Kings, by Hazma, that "Shabur fought Rum," by which is apparently meant Rome, so that Hazma may have confused Antiochus I with the Roman Emperor at the time of Jesus of Nazareth, referred to by the Arab historians as "Ishu Nasiri." Mithras was "al-Sayyid al-Masih." However, Rum was also an early Arabic name for Byzantium, a city founded by the Greeks as Byzantion as early as the 7th century BC, so that there is a possibility that the entire encounter with Roman power in the New Testament simply mirrors an earlier encounter with Byzantion during the early years of Mithras. The city fell under the control of Lysimachus in 302 BC, as did the entire southern coast of the Black Sea.

In the case of Jesus of Bethlehem (as distinguished from Jesus of "Nazareth"), the place of his birth is instructive. As Godfrey Higgins wrote,

It is impossible to move a step in the examination of the rites and ceremonies of this religion without meeting with circumstances of greater or less importance connected in some way or other with the religion of Mithra or the Sun. Ænon, where John baptized, was sacred to the sun, and had a temple dedicated to it. Again, when Christ was born, he was sought for and worshiped by the Magi, who had seen his star in the East. Here is an evident allusion to astrology, properly so called, as distinguished from astronomy—the calculation of nativities by the stars, which in all ages has been closely connected with magic and necromancy. The magi having arrived at Bethlehem, directed not by A star but by HIS star, made their offerings, and celebrated with pious orgies, along with the angels that appeared at the same time, the nativity of the God, the Saviour, in the stable where he was born: but the stable was a cave, and it is still more remarkable, though it has never been pointed out by priests to their gaping congregations, that at THAT very time, the 24th of December, at midnight, throughout all the Mithraic caves of Persia, and in the temples throughout all the world, the same orgies were really in the act of being celebrated to the honour of the God Ιαω—the Saviour....

... Clarke tells us that the Christian ceremonies in the church of the nativity at Bethlehem are celebrated to this day in a CAVE, and are undoubtedly nearly the same as they were celebrated in honour of Adonis in the time of Tertullian and Jerom; and as they are yet celebrated at Rome every Christmas-day very early in the morning.

In regard to Moghdam's assumption that there is little left of the religion of Mithras, it would not lie beyond the realm of possibility to suggest that this gaping void in the history of theology under the Roman Republic and later Empire may be little more than a result of the above-mentioned total absorption of this wildly popular religion into Christianity at the time of its official recognition during the reign of Constantine, for if we identify the most primitive level of the latter religion with the belief system of the Gnostics, then what remains when we subtract that earlier Gnostic doctrine from the later system of the Christians must be those elements that were adopted wholesale from the followers of Mithras, especially considering that those who held the position of Father in the Mithraic hierarchy were known to have held some of the higher administrative positions of other religions, so that we are forced to consider the possibility that the Christianity of the emperors and their legions was little more than Mithraism renamed and repackaged, with the events of the life of Mithras brought up to date so that Antiochus I became Augustus of Rome, and the background of the tale became Roman dominated Judea rather than Seleucid occupied Persia, which is not to say that there was not a later, Nazarite affiliated avatar by the name of Jesus.

There was, in fact, a gentleman named Yeshu (Jeshu), sometimes called "the Nazir" (ha Notzri) ben Pandera (the son, or grandson, of Pandera [or Pantera or Panther]—though other interpretations have been suggested, including a corruption of the Greek parthenos, meaning "virgin"), who was stoned to death and then hung from a tree in 70 BC for various "crimes" including sorcery, by which was apparently meant the practice of an unsanctioned form of the healing arts, learned probably at Alexandria.

Timeline of Events Related to Mithras, Yeshu the Nazir, and John the Baptist

102 BC—Yeshu the Nazir

An actual historic person may or may not have been connected
with the doctrine [of the sacrificed God-man].
There is, for example, the elusive figure of a Jesus
who appears to have been put to death by stoning or hanging
about a century before the death of Herod.
On the other hand, the name in its Hebrew and Aramaic forms
had probably an ancient divine status,
being borne by the mythical Deliverer, Joshua,
and again by the quasi-Messianic high-priest of the Restoration.
—J. M. Robertson, Pagan Christs

Had Reuchlin stood absolutely alone
he would have been overwhelmed by the first onrush of his countless foes;
but to their lasting credit there rallied to his banner
a chosen band of enlightened and courageous friends,
the Humanists, who, though they were dubbed "Talmutphili,"
declared themselves to be "Knights of the Holy Ghost,"
and the "Hosts of Pallas Athene,"
fighting for the credit of Christianity and not for the Talmud as Talmud.
—G. R. S. Mead, Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?

Keeping in mind that my primary interest in this subject is chronological, the question of the historical validity of the early history of Christianity is important enough to our investigation and our satisfactory elucidation of the data to warrant a sidewards glance and even a quick examination of the essential character and origins of the Christian religion that Godfrey Higgins so insistently derived from his hypothetical global, primordial secret doctrine that he believed found but one of its many manifestations in the story of the god, or demigod, or prophet, or simply traveling practitioner of the Egyptian healing arts from Bethlehem. However, the most important proponent in the early years of the 19th century of the notion that Christianity was ultimately derived from earlier religious systems and that its God was but an echo of earlier deities was not Godfrey Higgins but the Reverend Robert Taylor. Taylor's ideas were so negatively received by the British authorities that his master work, the Diegesis, was written in jail. Whereas Higgins at least makes a show of his ultimate belief in the validity of the Christian doctrine (or at least his posthumous editor and publisher manages to make it appear that he does so), Taylor is clearly not to be placed in the position of pretending to take any of his earlier beliefs at all seriously and he spares no one in his demolition of the biblical storyline.

Taylor presents a vast array of evidence of the similarities and identities between earlier incarnations of the godhead and the central figure of Christianity. His intent is to show that Christianity cannot be valid because its doctrines preceded it by hundreds and thousands of years. What Taylor misses, as does Higgins and even many modern commentators, is that the underlying belief system that ultimately led to the founding of Christianity had less to do with the random and disingenuous borrowing of the aspects of earlier religions than with the consistent and quite systematic recognition of the continuing re-incarnation of a single unitary godhead. Thus, the similarity between the name Christna and the position or role of Christ; that between the name Joshua and that of Jesus and those of their mothers Miriam and Mary; the obvious similarities among Iacchus and Bacchus, Yahweh and Yao, Zeus and Sosos; in fact, the whole series of analogies and identities that pervade the lives of the various avatars enumerated in Chapter Eight are not due exclusively to borrowing but also result from recognition, within the confines of the various aspects of this belief system, of the traits of the earlier members of this most exclusive of clubs in the actions and abilities and defining characteristics of the later ones. It is in this light that we must examine the elements that make up the religion of the earliest Christians, a light that shines most brightly from the persons and personalities of the last three pre-Christian members of the series.

Ancestors of Jesus According to Matthew and Luke

There is a mass of evidence that points to earlier versions of the protagonist of the New Testament. According to G. A. Wells, in Who Was Jesus?,

... Those of the canonical epistles which the majority of scholars date earlier than the gospels do not corroborate the gospels' portrait of Jesus. These epistles know him only as a supernatural personage who adopted human flesh to come to earth in unspecified circumstances at an unspecified time in the past, who was crucified there in obscure circumstances and then was raised from the dead and returned to heaven.... Paul elsewhere refers to Jesus as "the image of the invisible God ...." Such a description does not suggest a familiar or recent historical personage.

Later, Wells writes that,

... the earliest Christian documents ... say nothing of any item in his biography except his crucifixion and resurrection (both in unspecified circumstances).

Further,

... the earliest Christians will simply have asserted that Christ died and was raised, and will have embodied these convictions in the kind of preaching formula that Paul . . . quotes.

Wells argues

... elsewhere that the earliest Christians regarded Jesus as a supernatural personage who had come down to Earth in a human form long (one or two centuries) ago, had lived quite obscurely, been crucified in circumstances about which nothing was any longer known, and had risen from the dead.

According to The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906,

The references to Yannai [Jannaeus], Salome [Helena] Alexandra, and Joshua b. Perahyah indicate that according to the Jewish legends the advent of Jesus took place just one century before the actual historical date; and some medieval apologists for Judaism, as Nahmanides and Salman Zebi, based on this fact their assertion that the "Yeshu" mentioned in the Talmud was not identical with Jesus; this, however, is merely a subterfuge.

This contention is supported by Gerald Massey in the chapter "Typology of Equinoctial Christolatry" in The Natural Genesis, where he also notes that the Toledoth Jehoshua has him as a relative of Alexandra.

Godfrey Higgins took note of this Yeshu ben Panther, though there is no indication of his awareness of the appearance that Yeshu was hanged in 70 BC. Higgins was more interested in identifying Jesus with Bacchus:

The name of Jesus also was Jesus ben Panther. Jesus was a very common name with the Jews. Stukeley observes that the patronymic of Jesus Christ was Panther; and that Panthers were the nurses and bringers up of Bacchus; and adds, " ’Tis remarkable that Panther was the sirname [sic] of Joseph's family, our Lord's foster-father. Thus the Midrashkoheleth, or gloss upon Ecclesiastes: 'It happened that a serpent bit R. Eleasar ben Damah, and James, a man of the village Secania, came to heal him in the name of Jesus ben Panther.' This is likewise in the book called Abodazara, where the comment upon it says, This James was a disciple of Jesus the Nazarene."

Here, in this accidental notice of Jesus, by these two Jewish works, is a direct and unexceptionable proof of his existence; it is unexceptionable because, if it be not evidence of unwilling witnesses, it is the evidence of disinterested ones.... And as the persons who brought up Jesus were called panthers, the name of an animal, so Bacchus was brought up by the same kind of animal, a panther.... The circumstance of Joseph's family name being supposed to be panther is remarkably confirmed by Epiphanius, who says that Joseph was the brother of Cleophas, the son of James, sirnamed Panther. Thus we have the fact both from Jewish and Christian authorities. [Commas before restrictive clauses, here and elsewhere, have been removed to improve readability.]

The identification of Yeshu as a healer is by no means inconsequential. The Reverend Taylor describes at great length the relationship between the earlier Essenes or Therapeutæ and the early Christians:

Eusebius has fully shown that the monastic life was derived from the Essenes; and, because many Christians adopted the manners of the Essenes, Epiphanius took the Essenes in general for Christians, and confounded them with the Nazarenes ....

"It was in Egypt," says the great ecclesiastical historian, Mosheim, "that the morose discipline of Asceticism (i.e. the Essenian or Therapeutan discipline) took its rise; and it is observable, that that country has in all times, as it were by an immutable law or disposition of nature, abounded with persons of a melancholy complexion, and produced, in proportion to its extent, more gloomy spirits than any other parts of the world. It was here that the Essenes dwelt principally, long before the coming of Christ.

This admission of the great ecclesiastical historian ... will serve as the Pythagorean theorem ... ever to be borne in mind, always to be brought in proof .... "Bind it about thy neck, write it upon the tablet of thy heart"—EVERY THING OF CHRISTIANITY IS OF EGYPTIAN ORIGIN....

All the most valued manuscripts of the Christian scriptures are Codices Alexandrini. The very first bishops of whom we have any account, were bishops of Alexandria. Scarcely one of the more eminent fathers of the Christian church is there, who had not been educated and trained in the arts of priestly fraud, in the University of Alexandria....

In those early times, the professions of Medicine and Divinity were inseparable. We read of the divinity students studying medicine in the School, or University of Alexandria, to which all persons resorted, who were afterwards to practice in either way, on the weak in body or the weak in mind, among their fellow creatures. The Therapeuts, or Essenes, as their name signifies, were expressly professors of the art of healing—an art in those days necessarily conferring the most mystical sanctity of character on all who were endued with it, and the most convenient of all others for the purposes of imposture and wonderment....

"These sages were of opinion that true philosophy, the greatest and most salutary gift of God to mortals, was scattered, in various portions, through all the different sects; and that it was, consequently, the duty of every wise man to gather it from the several corners where it lay dispersed, and to employ it, thus re-united, in destroying the dominion of impiety and vice." The principle seat of this philosophy was at Alexandria; and "it manifestly appears," says Mosheim, "from the testimony of Philo the Jew, who was himself one of this sect, that this (Eclectic) philosophy (of this Essenian or Therapeutan sect) was in a flourishing state at Alexandria when our Saviour was upon earth."

Massey elaborates on the relationship of Yeshu ben Pandira (as he spells it) to the biblical Jesus:

There being but one history acknowledged or known, it follows that the Jesus of the gospels (plus the mythical Iesu) is the Jehoshua of the Talmud. This shifts the historic basis altogether; it antedates the human history by more than a century, and destroys the historic character of the gospels, together with that of another Jesus. In short, the Jewish history of the matter corroborates the mythical; and both combine to show that the Jesus of the gospels is the mythical Iesu=Jesus. Jehoshua ben Pandira was a mage and an adept in the mysteries, a mental Thaumaturge, and what in our day would have been termed a spiritualistic medium. His death was in strict accordance with the Jewish laws and customs. He was first stoned and then hung on a tree to become accursed, which is in agreement with the description that occurs twice over in the "Acts," of him who was slain and hung from a tree, and consequently not crucified after the Roman fashion....

This reading will account for the total absence of contemporary testimony or recognition, and explain how it is that no voice breaks the blank silence outside the gospel narrative, save one or two forgeries that may be laughed into oblivion.... It becomes possible even for Paul to have made his second journey to Jerusalem ... to carry the offerings of the faithful to those who had suffered from the great famine in the year 44 A.D.; and for his conversion to have occurred either in the year 30, or 27, as the two different statements imply; because it did not depend upon the death of an historical Jesus.

This view alone enables us to understand the position of Paul, or comprehend the mystery of his gospel, which was opposed to that of the Christ made flesh, the "other Jesus" of the gospel preached by the Sarkolatræ, who were his deadly enemies. A difference the most radical divided Paul and the historical James, John, and Cephas. They had nothing in common with him from the first, and never forgave him to the last. They did not preach the same gospel, nor set forth the same Christ.

The most detailed scholarly attempt to understand the documents and implications of the Talmud Yeshu stories was G. R. S. Mead's Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.? published in 1903 by the Theosophical Publishing Society of London and Benares. It is in the sources of this publication that we will find further chronological evidence for an early 1st century BC element of the biblical account of the life of Jesus.

The most significant parts of the Yeshu stories, from our chronological point of view, are those in which they generally place the major events of Yeshu's life during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus a century before the time of the biblical account. This is rather peculiar in that the early Church fathers, as well as later Church authorities throughout the Middle Ages, saw these accounts as feeble attempts by the Jewish religious authorities to demean their belief in an incarnated saviour. Why, then, place this refutation at the wrong time in the history of Judea and Galilee? But then, as Mead points out, Celsus, who wrote The True Word, a criticism of Christian "history" written in the 2nd century and destroyed by the Church but reproduced in part by Origen in Contra Celsum,

categorically accuses the Christians (ii. 27) of changing their gospel story in many ways in order the better to answer the objections of their opponents; his accusation is that some of them, "as it were in a drunken state producing self-induced visions, remodel their gospel from its first written form in a threefold, fourfold and manifold fashion, and reform it so that they may be able to refute the objections brought against it."

This may be taken to mean either that the Christians were engaged in doing so in Celsus's day, or that such redacting was habitual.... It is ... more simple to regard the statement as meaning that the external gospel story had been continuously altered and reformulated to meet objections—in brief, that the latest forms of it were the product of a literary evolution in which mystic experiences played a prominent part.

Hence, it would not be difficult to believe that these redactions had been going on so long that they had managed to change the entire environment of the stories from that of the time of Jannaeus to that of Pontius Pilate, and it might even be argued that the Talmud Yeshu stories were closer to the original truth than the later, modified, biblical account, a position in line with that of Massey above. In fact Mead points out that the introduction of Yehoshua ben Perachya as the teacher of Yeshu is an anachronism, and "how on earth an apparently so ludicrous anachronism could have held its own for so many centuries is a psychological puzzle of the greatest interest . . . ." so that the birth of Yeshu near 120 BC may be replaced by something on the order of the 102 BC date mentioned by Massey:

The personal existence of Jesus as Jehoshua Ben-Pandira can be established beyond a doubt. One account affirms that, according to a genuine Jewish tradition “that man (who is not to be named) was a disciple of Jehoshua Ben-Perachia.” It also says, “He was born in the fourth year of the reign of the Jewish King Alexander Jannæus, notwithstanding the assertions of his followers that he was born in the reign of Herod.” That would be more than a century earlier than the date of birth assigned to the Jesus of the Gospels! But it can be further shown that Jehoshua Ben-Pandira may have been born considerably earlier even than the year 102 B.C., although the point is not of much consequence here.

The birth of Yeshu in the "fourth year of . . . Jannaeus" goes a long way toward explaining the origin of the 30-year-old executed Jesus of the New Testament, his birth in the year AD 1 of the Christian Era, and his death in the 17th year of Tiberius. Interestingly enough, 102 BC was another one of those years when Typhon was close to the earth, that "star in the east" having foretold the birth of Julius Caesar somewhere near 100 BC as well as that of Yeshu. Gathering together these clues, and knowing that Jannaeus actually began his rule in 103 BC, we can now offer the hypothesis that Yeshu ha-Notzri lived from 100 BC until 70 BC, so that the transposition to AD 1 amounted to a shift of exactly 100 years.

This is about all that we can extract at this point from the story of Yeshu as found in the Talmud and related documents. It is not that we are in need of an avatar at 102 BC, for Julius Caesar was born about this time and his birth was marked by the appearance of a star, apparently the same "star" that punctuated the lives of all of the avatars that we have identified in Chapter Eight. What we have been trying to determine here is whether the line of Jewish kings that makes up a significant portion of that sequence survived into the 2nd century BC or whether it had already died out and been replaced by analogous series at Rome and in Parthia, in which case the stories of a Jewish messiah at this late date were simply a fictional attempt to extend that Judean-based line beyond its actual lifespan. This supposition is supported by the fact that as Mead successively peels back the layers of the onion that is the story of Yeshu, he does not seem to get any closer to the core of the question of just who exactly this person really was and why exactly it was so important that he had supposedly been hanged for his importation of the Alexandrian magical arts into Judea. For example, Mead relates an incident involving Joshua ben Perachia that takes place in an inn. I will not go into the details of the story but I will note that he manages to find an earlier version of the story that involves Jehuda ben Tabbai, one of the third pair of what Mead calls the "Guruparampara chain . . . of Talmudic tradition," the Eshcalath, or president and vice-president, of the Sanhedrin, and not ben Perachia who belonged to the second pair. Yeshu is not mentioned by name. The story only refers to an unnamed student of Tabbai.

It is my subjective impression that what we are looking at here is indeed a failed attempt of the Alexandrian school of Judaism to maintain an unbroken line of Jewish incarnations of the sun, no matter how vehemently the orthodox priesthood railed against just such a concept from their perch at Jerusalem. And whether or not there actually was an incarnate Yeshu ha Notzri is fairly immaterial, since his attempted elevation to the position of earthly representative of the sun was a failure. Even as the story was dragged kicking and screaming forward another celestial cycle to the beginning of the Common Era, it remains a recollection, a backward glance, at an event that was supposed to have installed a new all conquering Jewish king at Jerusalem—just as his namesake Joshua conquered the lands of the Canaanites a millennium earlier—but didn't. This is the fundamental problem at the root of Christianity, for it worships a purported son of God who behaves, not like such an exalted and victorious personage should have and previously did, but like some kind of peculiar self-destructive pacifist like Akhnaton, even as his followers seem to revel in the blood and gore of his destruction as if it somehow proved his superiority, all the while using that self-destruction as an excuse to persecute the very descendants of his original co-religionists over many hundreds of years. Even his Roman equivalent at this point in time, the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, managed, according to one of his biographers, to overthrow the dictatorial regime of Nero and aided in the installation of Vespasian as emperor of Rome while maintaining his stance as a philosopher in the mold of Pythagoras. Meanwhile elsewhere in the Roman Empire the not-yet-Christians were already looking forward to a future time when their unsuccessful savior would return again, this time managing to accomplish what he had failed to do in the first place.

Yet Epiphanius, that well-known heresiologist of the 4th century, through the medium again of G. R. S. Mead, sheds further light on the notion that Yeshu was a descendant of the Jewish royal line with a legitimate claim to the throne, not during the reign of Pontius Pilate, but at the close of the kingship of Jannaeus:

"Now the throne and kingly seat of David is the priestly office in Holy Church; for the Lord combined the kingly and high-priestly dignities into one and the same office, and bestowed them upon His Holy Church, transferring to her the throne of David, which ceases not as long as the world endures. The throne of David continued by succession up to that time—namely till Christ Himself—without any failure from the princes of Judah, until it came unto Him for whom were 'the things that are stored up,' who is Himself 'the expectation of the nations.' For with the advent of the Christ, the succession of the princes of Judah, who reigned until the Christ himself, ceased. The order [of succession] failed and stopped at the time when He was born in Bethlehem of Judæa, in the days of Alexander, who was of high-priestly and royal race; and after this Alexander this lot failed, from the times of himself and Salina, who is also called Alexandra, for the times of Herod the King and Augustus Emperor of the Romans; and this Alexander, one of the anointed (or Christs) and ruling princes placed the crown on his own head.... After this a foreign king, Herod, and those who were no longer of the family of David, assumed the crown." [brackets in original]

... Here we have the Bishop of Salamis categorically asserting, with detailed reiteration, so that there is no possibility of escape, that Jesus was born in the days of Alexander and Salina, that is of Jannai and Salome; not only so, but he would have it that it needs must have been so, in order that prophecy, and prophecy of the most solemn nature, should be fulfilled that there should be no break in the succession of princes from the tribe of Judah, as it had been written. There is no possible way of extricating ourselves from the crushing weight of the incongruity of this statement of Epiphanius by trying to emend the reading of the text; for not only does the whole subject of his argument demand such a statement, but he supports it by a number of subsidiary assertions. . . .

When, moreover, Epiphanius says that Alexander placed the crown on his own head, we are at a loss to understand him; some MSS., however, read "his" simply and not "his own" head, and this would mean, presumably, that Alexander placed the crown on the head of Jesus; that is to say, at his death the succession passed to Jesus. [my emphasis]

"... Judea was made subject and became tributary to [the Romans], its rulers having ceased from Judah, and Herod being appointed [as ruler] from the Gentiles, being a proselyte, however, and Christ being born in Bethlehem of Judea, and coming for the preaching [of the Gospel], the anointed rulers from Judah and Aaron having ceased, after continuing until the anointed ruler Alexander and Salina who was also Alexandra; in which days the prophecy of Jacob was fulfilled: 'A ruler shall not cease from Judah and a leader from his thighs, until he come for whom it is laid up, and he is the expectation of the nations' " ... The point that interests us is that Epiphanius repeats categorically his puzzling statement about Jannaeus and Salome and the date of Jesus, and again brings this into the closest relation with what he regards as a most solemn prophecy and promise in "Genesis." There is no possible escape from the conclusion that Epiphanius is arguing most deliberately that the kingly and high-priestly offices were transferred immediately from Jannai to Jesus, so that there should be no break in the succession....

... We have seen that in the Jewish legends, based on earlier tradition, Miriam the mother is said to have been related to Helene (Salome), and we know that Simeon (ben Shetach) [vice-president of the Sanhedrin under Tabbai] was the brother of Salome (Alexandra). Can it then be that here again Epiphanius is influenced by Jewish tradition? If so, it would be a strong confirmation of our hypothesis with regard to the Helene puzzle, for here in Epiphanius we find that the name Salome appears undisguised. [my brackets]

... Epiphanius is dazzled with his own exegesis of prophecy; the Church was the legitimate heiress of the royal and high-priestly dignities of Jewry, bequeathed to her by Jesus Himself! A brilliant idea had come to him, and he would work it out for the greater glory of the Church. He accordingly sets out to argue the unbroken line of succession of the princes from Judah, in the face of all history, for the Hasmonæan or Maccabæan dynasty was not from Judah at all, since Mattathias himself was the son of John, a priest of the order of Joarib, and long before then the kingly line had ceased....

Despite Mead's problem with the entire notion of Yeshu as descendant of an unbroken line of kings from the time of David and earlier, this is almost as close as we can reasonably expect to get to the historical reality behind the idea that Jesus was "king of the Jews," an idea supported by the close relations among Yeshu, Miriam, Salome, and ben Shetach. Clearly this Yeshu had some serious reason to claim the throne of the Maccabees. Whether in fact Jannaeus actually intended Yeshu to succeed him as king of Judea we may never know. What we do know is that those wishes were never honored. Unless, of course, there was an even earlier claimant to the throne of Solomon who really did become king of the Jews, crowned by a different Alexander.

But before we examine the life of that earlier Alexander, there is another unexplored relationship possibly hinted at by the actions of Jannaeus, one that even the likes of Mead did not suspect. It involves the notion of a virgin birth and the real meaning of this concept within the confines of the physical, non-mystical, world, especially that world as it existed in Egypt and Israel as early as the birth of Amenhotep III mentioned in Chapter Two. In short, we must ask ourselves what exactly the Egyptians and Judeans were saying when they used this term.

The first thing that is clear from the Judean evidence is that this notion has to do first and foremost with the fact that the newborn son was not the biological son of the mother's husband. Whatever this idea meant in Egypt, where the wife of Thutmosis IV supposedly gave birth to Amenhotep III by one of the Egyptian gods, in Judea it meant that Joseph was not the father of Yeshu. Thus, it is clear that any claim on the part of the latter to the kingship of Judea could not have been based upon the male line of Joseph. This problem has stymied the Church for millennia—even Epiphanius could not answer the question: Why would Jannaeus have crowned Yeshu at all? So then we must ask, if he was not the son of Joseph, just exactly who was he the son of? The theologically correct answer, of course, is that he was the son of "God." But remember, in Egypt, where this notion existed many hundreds of years earlier, one of their gods, in this case the god Ra, was believed to be incarnated as the king himself. For all practical purposes, the pharaoh was God. If we transfer this equation to Judea of the 1st century BC, we encounter a striking possibility. Could it not be that Alexander Jannaeus, acting as representative of Yahweh on earth, was the real father of Yeshu? This is only a possibility at present, but it goes a long way toward making sense of the king's actions. Within this context, it is not difficult to imagine Jannaeus playfully and proudly placing his crown on the brow of his son Yeshu. The very thought elicits a certain feeling of sadness for what might have been, but wasn't.

The Synthetic Avatar

The express declaration of Eusebius,
that the Therapeutæ described by Philo were Christians,
and that their sacred scriptures were our Gospels,
after having lain dormant for fourteen hundred years,
now at length rises, upon the admissions of these learned divines,
into the dimensions of its real importance....
"Bind it about thy neck, write it upon the tablet of thy heart"—
EVERY THING OF CHRISTIANITY IS OF EGYPTIAN ORIGIN.
—Rev. Robert Taylor, The Diegesis

Under Amenophis III [ruled 1396–1358] ....
the glorious star which caused the universe to live
was now designated by a name which was not new,
but was given a singular importance—
Aten of the day, that is, the Solar Disk,
from which the light of day proceeds,
a name which in its form recalls Adonai,
the "Lord" of the Syrian cities, the Adonis of Byblos.
—Alexandre Moret, The Nile and Egyptian Civilization

Concluding this excursion into the notion of a 1st century BC Jesus, we will present a table of the similarities among the lives of seven of the individuals who were used to construct the seemingly synthetic Roman "Jesus" or IE-Zeus (IE being the Delphic equivalent of the Hebrew Yah, the Greek Apollo) and the story of his life found in the Christian bible. On chronological grounds, the quotation from Reverend Taylor clearly points to Amenhotep III, though he never elaborates upon the identification nor cites his sources. Moret identifies Amenophis (Amenhotep) III with the Hebrew Adonai, thus adding another dimension to the 14th century BC avatar and reinforcing the supposition of Eusebius that Christianity had Egyptian foundations.

Various Elements of the Story of Jesus in Those of Other Avatars

 It would be difficult to flesh out the similarities of the religion of Akhnaton with that of Christianity, the details of Aton worship having been virtually eradicated by the Amon priesthood. The only practical way to approach the problem would be to eliminate from the Christian narrative all of those elements of the Roman religion that have clearly been borrowed from other avataric religions. For example, Godfrey Higgins notes that the cave under the church at Bethlehem was an early center of Mithra worship, his temples having been located underground, either in natural or artificial caves. Adding to this residue what little we know from the tomb of Amenhotep III and the monuments of Akhnaton, we would be left with what could reasonably be assumed to be a crude reconstruction of the original elements of the religion. For example, the virgin birth and three gift-bearing visitors are both found on the walls of the tomb of Akhnaton's father, the presumed son of Joseph, thus validating those two elements of Christianity.

to be continued

333 BC—Alexander on the way to Jerusalem

In 333 Alexander had just conquered Halicarnassus at great expense in lives and treasure only to have the Persians under Memnon sail away as he took the city. As he proceeded to the east through Lycia in southern Anatolia, after settling on a plan to conquer all of the Phoenician territories in the Levant to prevent further access by the Persian fleet to ports in the region, the waters of the Mediterranean began to recede in front of him. The historians laugh at this description from Callisthenes of Olynthus, his court historian, but, as the reader will see from the table in Chapter Eight, 333 was another of those years when Typhon, whatever that object ultimately turns out to be, would have been close enough to the earth to cause any number of peculiar geophysical effects including large scale tidal variations; in 1403 this same object had literally blown the lid off of the island of Thera in the Aegean. As Plutarch tells it,

While [Alexander] was thus deliberating what to do, it happened that a spring of water near the city of Xanthus in Lycia, of its own accord, swelled over its banks, and threw up a copper plate, upon the margin of which was engraven in ancient characters that the time would come when the Persian empire should be destroyed by the Grecians. Encouraged by this accident, he proceeded to reduce the maritime parts of Cilicia and Phoenicia, and passed his army along the sea-coasts of Pamphylia with such expedition that many historians have described and extolled it with that height of admiration, as if it were no less than a miracle, and an extraordinary effect of divine favour, that the waves which usually come rolling in violently from the main, and hardly ever leave so much as a narrow beach under the steep, broken cliffs at any time uncovered, should on a sudden retire to afford him passage. Menander, in one of his comedies, alludes to this marvel when he says—

Was Alexander ever favoured more?
Each man I wish for meets me at my door,
And should I ask for passage through the sea,
The sea I doubt not would retire for me.

Josephus mentions this same event in justifying his account of the Exodus:

... For the sake of those that accompanied Alexander, king of Macedonia, who yet lived comparatively but a little while ago, the Pamphylian Sea retired and afforded them a passage through itself, when they had no other way to go ....

His early translator, William Whiston, successor in the Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge to Isaac Newton, gives the following footnote to this passage:

Take here the original passages of the four old authors that still remain as to this transit of Alexander the Great over the Pamphylian Sea: I mean of Callisthenes, Strabo, Arrian, and Appian. As to Callisthenes, who himself accompanied Alexander in this expedition, Eustathius, in his Notes on the third Iliad of Homer, (as Dr. Bernard here informs us,) says, That "this Callisthenes wrote how the Pamphylian Sea did not only open a passage for Alexander, but, rising and elevating its waters, did pay him homage as its king." Strabo's account is this (Geog. B. XIV. p. 666): "Now about Phaselis is that narrow passage, by the sea-side, through which Alexander led his army. There is a mountain called Climax, which adjoins to the Sea of Pamphylia, leaving a narrow passage on the shore, which, in calm weather, is bare, so as to be passable by travelers, but when the sea overflows, it is covered to a great degree by the waves. Now then, the ascent by the mountains being round about and steep, in still weather they make use of the road along the coast. But Alexander fell into the winter season, and committing himself chiefly to fortune, he marched on before the waves retired; and so it happened that they were a whole day in journeying over it, and were under water up to the navel." Arrian's account is this (B. I. p. 72, 73): When Alexander removed from Phaselis, he sent some part of his army over the mountains to Perga, which road the Thracians showed him. A difficult way it was, but short. However, he himself conducted those that were with him by the sea-shore. This road is impassable at any other time than when the north wind blows; but if the south wind prevail, there is no passing by the shore. Now at this time, after strong south winds, a north wind blew, and that not without the Divine Providence, (as both he and they that were with him supposed,) and afforded him an easy and quick passage." ....

Shortly after this, Alexander was involved in the incident at Gordium. The year was still 333 BC and the effects of Typhon had begun to escalate from relatively minor tidal variations to wholesale effects on the rotation of the earth.

Though most historians claim that Alexander used his sword to slice the knot that held the yoke of the wagon of Gordius, the father of King Midas of Phrygia, the minority opinion is that he removed the pin and thus freed the wagon from the yoke. It is the conclusion of Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in their Hamlet's Mill that this is a metaphor for the precession of the equinoxes, the cart being the Little Bear or Little Dipper and the pin being the pole star, Alexander having taken on the role of the archaic Gilgamesh. Here, the authors have fallen into the same trap as the Reverend Taylor, seeing the stories about Alexander as distant echoes of earlier tales rather than legendary accounts of repeated events that shifted the pole star, not gradually as a result of the precession, but precipitously due to the presence of an extremely massive comet-like body near the earth. The shift must have been relatively minor, just enough to be apparent to the astronomers at Heliopolis, where Alexander would later visit in 331, and to nullify any chronological conclusions based on eclipses and the heliacal rising of Sirius before the 4th century BC.

By 331, Alexander's army was marching down the Mediterranean coast. None of the ancient Greek or Roman authors place him inland at Jerusalem at this time. Only Josephus tells part of the tale of his meeting with the high priest Jaddus after conquering the city of Gaza. Modern historians tend to disregard this account because it appears to derive from a misplaced respect on the part of Alexander for the Hebrew God under the name Yahweh. But as we have seen, the Pythagoreans knew this name in a slightly altered form, and Alexander may have encountered it during his classical education with Aristotle. Josephus describes the arrival of Alexander at Jerusalem as follows:

Now Alexander, when he had taken Gaza, made haste to go up to Jerusalem; and Jaddua the high priest, when he heard that, was in an agony, and under terror, as not knowing how he should meet the Macedonians, since the king was displeased at his foregoing disobedience. He therefore ordained that the people should make supplications, and should join with him in offering sacrifice to God, whom he besought to protect that nation, and to deliver them from the perils that were coming upon them; whereupon God warned him in a dream, which came upon him after he had offered sacrifice, that he should take courage, and adorn the city, and open the gates; that the rest should appear in white garments, but that he and the priests should meet the king in the habits proper to their order, without the dread of any ill consequences, which the providence of God would prevent. Upon which, when he rose from his sleep, he greatly rejoiced, and declared to all the warning he had received from God. According to which dream he acted entirely, and so waited for the coming of the king.

And when he understood that he was not far from the city, he went out in procession, with the priests and the multitude of the citizens. The procession was venerable, and the manner of it different from that of other nations. It reached to a place called Sapha, which name, translated into Greek, signifies a prospect, for you have thence a prospect both of Jerusalem and of the temple. And when the Phoenicians and the Chaldeans that followed him thought they should have liberty to plunder the city, and torment the high priest to death, which the king's displeasure fairly promised them, the very reverse of it happened; for Alexander, when he saw the multitude at a distance, in white garments, while the priests stood clothed with fine linen, and the high priest in purple and scarlet clothing, with his mitre on his head, having the golden plate whereon the name of God was engraved, he approached by himself, and adored that name, and first saluted the high priest. The Jews also did all together, with one voice, salute Alexander, and encompass him about; whereupon the kings of Syria and the rest were surprised at what Alexander had done, and supposed him disordered in his mind. However, Parmenio alone went up to him, and asked him how it came to pass that, when all others adored him, he should adore the high priest of the Jews? To whom he replied, "I did not adore him, but that God who hath honored him with his high priesthood; for I saw this very person in a dream, in this very habit, when I was at Dios in Macedonia, who, when I was considering with myself how I might obtain the dominion of Asia, exhorted me to make no delay, but boldly to pass over the sea thither, for that he would conduct my army, and would give me the dominion over the Persians; whence it is that, having seen no other in that habit, and now seeing this person in it, and remembering that vision, and the exhortation which I had in my dream, I believe that I bring this army under the Divine conduct, and shall therewith conquer Darius, and destroy the power of the Persians, and that all things will succeed according to what is in my own mind." And when he had said this to Parmenio, and had given the high priest his right hand, the priests ran along by him, and he came into the city. And when he went up into the temple, he offered sacrifice to God, according to the high priest's direction, and magnificently treated both the high priest and the priests. And when the Book of Daniel was showed him wherein Daniel declared that one of the Greeks should destroy the empire of the Persians, he supposed that himself was the person intended. And as he was then glad, he dismissed the multitude for the present; but the next day he called them to him, and bid them ask what favors they pleased of him; whereupon the high priest desired that they might enjoy the laws of their forefathers, and might pay no tribute on the seventh year. He granted all they desired. And when they entreated him that he would permit the Jews in Babylon and Media to enjoy their own laws also, he willingly promised to do hereafter what they desired. And when he said to the multitude, that if any of them would enlist themselves in his army, on this condition, that they should continue under the laws of their forefathers, and live according to them, he was willing to take them with him, many were ready to accompany him in his wars.

As we saw earlier, in the account of Epiphanius, it is Alexander Jannaeus who is in possession of the crown of the king of Judah and it is he, therefore, who is in a position to place it either on his own head or that of Yeshu, and this is where the confusion may have arisen, for in both cases it makes little sense for a sitting king to crown himself, or, alternatively, to crown someone who is not yet king. Mead's solution, though he never really spells it out, is to take the crowning of Yeshu figuratively, using it to stand for the more literal anointing of Yeshu as Jannaeus's future successor. As we have already noted, Mead concludes that "Epiphanius is arguing most deliberately that the kingly and high-priestly offices were transferred immediately from Jannaeus to Jesus, so that there should be no break in the succession. . . ." Yet, as we have also seen, this never happened. Neither of them was even in a position to see that it happened, and in the course of events Jannaeus's queen would rule at his death. But what if Epiphanius had managed to get ahold of a tradition that related not to Alexander, the sitting king of Judah in the 1st century BC, but to another Alexander who was not king of Judah but who was in a position, militarily and politically (and theologically), to claim its unworn crown toward the middle of the 4th century BC, close to the cometary year 333?

In this context, the account makes a bit more sense, for it is precisely Alexander of Macedon who expected the Mediterranean Sea to recede before him in southern Anatolia, who solved the problem of the Gordian Knot by slicing it with his sword (or pulling the pin of the yoke), and it was he that we can easily picture placing the crown of Judah on his own head with his own hand in the presence of the high priest of the Pythagorean/Hebrew IAHYEH/Yahweh. In the absence of a Jewish incarnation of the sun at Jerusalem in the years following 333, we have here rather a Greek descendant of Hercules—who may have been the equivalent Greek avatar at 1281 BC—conquering all of coastal Canaan in the manner of Joshua and then reversing course and finishing up with the symbolic recognition of the Jewish capital as the natural seat of authority in the region. Later, Alexander would accept the perceived assent of the oracle at Ammon in the Libyan desert to his conquest of Asia. For now, he either accepted or simply took the crown of David from the priest Jaddus. If this is the case, then the real meaning of this event is not that the political and religious authority of the Jewish throne was passed to Jesus, but that it was passed to the kings of Macedonia, and it was only with the adoption of "Christianity" by the Roman Empire under Constantine that the former rulers of Judea finally fell under the influence of the followers of Yeshu.

AD 5—The Hidden Messiah

On the way he asked them, "Who do people say I am?"
They replied, "Some say John the Baptist ...."
"But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?"
Peter answered, "You are the Messiah."
—Mark 8:27-29

The best place to hide something is in plain sight, and I must admit it also took me a while to adjust my eyes to the dimmer light of a 1st century lacking the Christian messiah before I could begin to make out the vaguest outlines of the original manifestation of the sun in that cometary cycle.

The main effect of transporting Yeshu the Nazar forward by a century was not to overwrite the legitimate history of the reincarnated avatar of the 1st century. Instead, the gospel writers took another tack, one that had been used many times before. As we have already seen, when the editors of the Old Testament were presented with variant forms of the same story, they would not simply remove one version. Their modus operandi was to preserve both forms and to edit them together into a more or less coherent whole. The two versions of the creation story, the two accounts of the Deluge, the two genealogies of Cain or Kenan, the two ascents of Mount Sinai by Moses, all represent this refusal to show a preference for one received version over another. In the case of the New Testament, the new storyline simply moved the old characters aside and placed the new Jesus into the old story where he was made to interact with the previously existent personalities, among whom we may expect to find the original earthly representative of the sun at the beginning of the Common Era. We have already taken notice of the elements of the Christian story that were taken over from earlier avatars, mainly Yeshu and Mithras, so that what remain must be elements of the original story of the as yet unnamed avatar of the 1st century.

First of all, and not surprisingly, the name of this avatar was probably neither Joshua, nor Yeshu, nor Jesus; and his mother was most likely not named Miriam. He was born the year before the census of AD 6 mentioned by Luke, though it was confined to the newly absorbed Roman territory of Judea and did not cover the entire empire as Luke suggests. And though there was indeed a "star" in the east in 102 BC, there was also one in AD 5, so we can assume that the birth of the person hiding behind the figure of Jesus was marked by the cometary appearance of that year, though almost certainly not by the winter solstice. Since there are scattered indications in the Acts of the stoning and hanging from a tree of the earlier Yeshu, and though the clear indication is that someone was executed during the fourth decade of the Christian Era, there is no reason that he should have been nailed to a wooden cross in the manner of the Romans and the Persians.

The most obvious candidate for the position of Son of the Sun for the period following the inclusion of Judea in the Roman Empire was none other than John the Baptist, a person mentioned by Josephus, unlike Jesus himself of whom he is totally unaware, with the exception of an obviously interpolated passage elsewhere in his work. Not only was this John, or Yochanan, a virtual mirror image of Jesus, his life has been interwoven by the gospel writers with the life of Jesus to an extent that begs to be seen as an indication of his theological importance during the period in question.

Josephus describes rather cryptically the life and death of John, called the Baptist. "Herod" is Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee. His defeat was by Aretas, king of Arabia Petres, over Herod's imminent divorce of the sister of Aretas:

Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod's army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John, that was called the Baptist, for Herod slew him, who was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism; for that the washing [with water] would be acceptable to him, if they made use of it, not in order to the putting away [or the remission] of some sins [only,] but for the purification of the body; supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness. Now when [many] others came in crowds about him, for they were very greatly moved [or pleased] by hearing his words, Herod, who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion, (for they seemed ready to do any thing he should advise,) thought it best, by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause, and not bring himself into difficulties, by sparing a man who might make him repent of it when it would be too late. Accordingly he was sent a prisoner, out of Herod's suspicious temper, to Macherus, the castle I before mentioned, and was there put to death. Now the Jews had an opinion that the destruction of this army was sent as a punishment upon Herod, and a mark of God's displeasure to him.

Much is made in Christian theology of the function of John as the forerunner of Jesus and his execution before Jesus, yet chronologically this appears to make no sense, for the events surrounding the execution of John can be placed fairly solidly at AD 36, five years after the 17th year of Tiberius, when Jesus was supposedly hanged. This distorted sequence is the result of the misplacing of the birth of both characters to AD 1 rather than AD 5, for it is abundantly clear that both were meant to have been born within a one-year period, six months apart. In Luke, there is a meeting between Elizabeth, the mother of John, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, both of whom are pregnant with their famous offspring. Whatever the mystical significance of this passage, the chronological implication is to establish the synchrony of the two births. So both are born in AD 5 or possibly early AD 6 (in the case of Jesus), and only Josephus manages to get the timeline right.

In The Templar Revelation, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince point out an obscure passage in Mark where King Herod identifies Jesus as a reincarnation of John.

Now King Herod heard of Him, for His name had become well known. And he said, "John the Baptist is risen from the dead, and therefore these powers are at work in him."

This is a peculiar statement and makes no sense as it stands. As we have seen, however, the editors of the bible obsessively refused to throw anything away, but would alter inconvenient events rather than remove them completely. Thus, the suspicion arises that it was John who was the purported reincarnation of Jesus, or Yeshu, as we have already suggested, and that Herod was aware of this avataric succession marked by the return of Typhon to the neighborhood of earth. The authors further point out that in the apocryphal book of James, it is John who is Herod's target when he supposedly ordered the massacre of all newly born male children. In this account, Herod even saw John as the future king of Israel. Again, this makes no sense unless the story of Yeshu has been artificially moved forward into the time when John was the legitimate incarnation of the Sun God.

Picknett and Prince present a wealth of information pointing toward an item of hidden knowledge that purportedly survives among the descendants of the Templars, that is, the Rosicrucians and the Masons, but they never quite reach the correct conclusion, even though they have a chapter entitled "John Christ," and even point out that the appellation "John I" was reserved among the members of the Priory of Sion for Jesus. Whether there is an actual surviving tradition among these groups or not, the great heresy with the power to supposedly destroy Christianity as we know it is the simple statement that John the Baptist was the original subject and object of much of the material to be found in the New Testament and that Mead was right in relegating the historical Yeshu and his teachings to the early years of the lifetime of Julius Caesar, a period when this Yeshu had access to the religious system of the Egyptians and to the knowledge stored at the Library of Alexandria.

In other cases, it is under the editorship of "Luke" that certain fragments of clues from the original material have managed to survive, concerning the true state of affairs during the two centuries surrounding the beginning of the Common Era. According to G. A. Wells, the historical John "was a preacher with a following of his own which persisted in some areas into the second century, as is evidenced by Christian polemics against it." Referring to J. K. Elliott, he tells us that the rivalry between the two sects reached its peak at the end of the 1st century, and Elliott even ascribes the Lord's Prayer originally to John. Wells points out that alongside the fact that there is no mention in Josephus of John's interaction with Jesus, neither is there any such interaction mentioned in the Christian bible outside of the gospels and Acts (by the same author as Luke), which were the last written. Wells takes seriously the belief on the part of John that he was to lead the way for a much more important appearance in the near future. The theologians argue over who this might be, whether it was Jesus or Yahweh himself. But there is another option, one in much closer accord with the astronomical and chronological foundations of the belief system represented by Yeshu and the Baptist. This third option is simply the next avatar in the series, expected by those who understood its cosmic underpinnings, at AD 111. And they were not, at least for a while, disappointed, for there is a heroic, even eschatological, though finally tragic quality to the life and death of this new representative of the sun on earth and its ultimate effect on the lives of succeeding generations of Jews as they sought to survive and prosper in the world created by the followers of the rejected Yeshu and his successors. This new incarnation of the sun was Simon bar Kokhba, whose story we will not tell at the present moment.

The Son of Isis

"Miryai am I, of the kings of Babel,
a daughter, a daughter of Jerusalem's mighty rulers.
They have given me birth: the priests brought me up.
In the fold of their robe
they carried me up into the dark house, into the temple.
—Sidra d'Yahya (Mandaean text)

When all is said and done, the "New Testament" devolves into a veritable pastiche, nothing more than a conglomeration of ancient religious tales and biographical snippets that not only includes the historical Yeshu, not only elements from the lives of Mithras and John the Baptist, but assorted fragments from the biographies of Joshua, King David, and even the Indian Krishna (or Christna). To try to extract from this mélange a consistent picture of the life of a single individual is hopeless, and frankly, a meaningless exercise. To argue that the very inconsistency of the story points to its reality, as Picknett and Prince have done, is to miss its composite nature entirely. And to suggest that the only alternative is that the New Testament is a work of fiction, as they also have done, is to ignore the underlying reality of its various component elements; a classical straw man. But unlike Pythagoras, who carefully fitted together the various elements of the religious and philosophical systems he encountered in Egypt and at Babylon, as well as in his own native Greece, into a coordinated whole, like someone assembling a jigsaw puzzle, the various Christian authors have taken the path of least resistance, shattering the collective religious inheritance of mankind into a thousand pieces and then assembling them into a montage in which various objects are recognizable—an arm here, a leg there, a king here, a messiah there—but whose overall pattern is deficient in consistency and rationality. One begins to understand why the Christian Church in all of its many inflections tells its followers to accept the story (or stories) of Jesus on faith. They have little else. As Paul understood, beyond the statement that he died and that he rose, there is nothing. That this composite character should have had children, as certain fans of Leonardo da Vinci would have us believe, begs the question: "Which one of his many incarnations?" Which is not to say that there may not have been a composite female equivalent of the composite Jesus. If this were all that the Templars were hiding, it seems unworthy of such an expenditure of time, wealth, and blood.

Of course, on a strictly mythological level, there is another heresy to which the notions of a married Jesus or of John as the real messiah pale in compassion. It has been understood for a long time that the Lazarus (or L'Azarus) of the New Testament is an echo of the Egyptian Osiris, reassembled and raised from the dead by his sister and wife, the goddess Isis, with the exception of his missing phallus, which was replaced by an artificial one, presumably related to the Tower of Zeus illustrated in Chapter Nine. Thus, Mary Magdalene, the sister of Lazarus, represents Isis. The son of Isis and Osiris was Horus, the incarnated Sun God, the Egyptian equivalent of the Greek Apollo and the Hebrew Abel; one of the three sons of Adam and Eve that included Cain (or Khayu) and Seth (or Set), the Comet. It has also been understood for a long time by those who have not been hiding under a proverbial rock, that Jesus, or Yeshu, was the Hebrew equivalent of the incarnated sun. Thus, in this mythological context, Magdalene was not the wife of Jesus. She was his mother. And that is the second great secret the recognition of which could have conceivably had the power to destroy the Church. And that also may have been why the armies of the pope went to so much trouble to try to stamp out the Templars without a trace. And finally, that is simply another variation on the story preserved in the Talmud that the Jews managed to protect against overwhelming odds at risk to life and limb for more than two millennia.

Though I wouldn't say that it rises to the level of confirmation, there is a tantalizing suggestion in the writings of the authors of the Talmud that this identification of the mother of Jesus with the Magdalene was known to the Jewish chroniclers of the life of Yeshu. The reader should keep in mind at this point that the exaggerated negative tone of the Jewish texts on the matter matches the equally positive exaggerations of the New Testament, so that we can assume that the truth about Yeshu is to be found somewhere between the two extremes. As an example of the negative tone of the Jewish sources we can cite the suggestion that the identification of the mother of Yeshu as a woman's hairdresser has some darker meaning paralleled by the Christian belief that the Magdalene was somehow a fallen woman. That the latter is an echo of the Talmudical identification is supported by the fact that the term for this Miriam, the mother of Yeshu, is the expression "megadela neshaya" (Sanhedrin 67a of the Babylonian Talmud), which supposedly means "dresser of women's hair." As an alternative to the common suggestion that "Magdalene" is derived from the name of a city, this alternative origin defines the center of the debate over who this person really was, if it does not finally present its solution.

What is important here is not the contention that "Magdalene" meant "hairdresser." This could very well be the same kind of word game for which Hebrew writers and their Phoenician predecessors have been known for millennia, especially since it stands beside the use of Yeshu (as a substitute for Yeshua) as an acronym whose underlying meaning referred to someone whose name should not be spoken, not unlike the Egyptian practise of changing the name of a defendant when he appeared in court, a practise with clearly magical overtones. Rather, the importance of the Hebrew identification is that it reinforces the suggestion that Yeshu was the son of Magdalene. Among other things, the idea of Mary Magdalene as the mother of Jesus wounds, perhaps mortally, the contention that certain European families are the descendants of a marriage between Jesus and the Magdalene, unless one wishes to ascribe some of the more peculiar dynastic practises of the Egyptian monarchy to Jesus. It also casts a new light on the modern notion of the Holy Grail as a metaphor for the female bearer of the bloodline of Jesus, thus refocusing the debate on the family of Uther Pendragon and King Arthur; both of whom may have been cometary avatars, and thus successors to Yeshu and John the Baptist, during the waning years of the Roman Empire; and the latter of which British rulers has always been associated with the Grail.

Yeshu among the Phoenicians

For Cronus, whom the Phoenicians call Il ,^†
... had by a nymph of the country called Anobret an only son,
who on that account is styled Ieoud,
for so the Phoenicians still call an only son:
and when great dangers from war beset the land he adorned an alter,
and invested this son with the emblems of royalty,
and sacrificed him.
—Sanchoniathon; in Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica

Even the notion that Mary the Magdalene was the mother of Jesus, though inflammatory enough, does not exhaust the secret heresies that have survived from the distant past. There is a third, even grander, abomination, at least in the eyes of the theocratic authorities, that is tied to the genealogy of Jesus as found in Luke. It appears, from the tail end of that genealogy, that in his earliest incarnation, even earlier than that of Joshua the son of Miriam, he was not only Zeus the son of Cronus, the god of Time with whom we have already identified Joseph the son of Jacob in Chapter Two; he was the son of Maia, the wife of Vulcan of the Phoenician list and the sixth of the Pleiades or female descendants of Atlas. I should point out here, parenthetically, that my derivation of the name of Joseph occurred before I had any idea that he was the equivalent of Cronus in the antediluvian king-list of the Greeks.

Yeshu before the Flood

 None of this is terribly surprising, for we have already seen hints of it from Godfrey Higgins and our other sources. What is surprising is the possibility it raises that the earlier ancestors of Yeshu from before Matthat that appear in Luke may represent a late survival of a list of kings from before the time of the later, possibly historical, antediluvian patriarchs; that appears nowhere else in ancient literature, not even in the surviving copies of Manetho. In which case what we have in the texts known as Matthew and Luke are two attempts to fit a fundamentally incompatible genealogy into that of the descendants of King David. The one in Matthew has been severely truncated in order to place its members within the relatively short period between Zorobabel, who died in 410 BC, and the 1st century AD. That in Luke, as far as we can tell, maintains almost the entire sequence of ancestors by appending it to the life of Nathan, the brother of Solomon, thus allowing the entire period from the 10th century BC until the 1st century AD to be used. The first twelve kings in the version of Luke would appear to be analogous to the twelve sons of Jacob, which represent the twelve tribes of Israel. Only two of the names of the seven kings surviving in Matthew match those in Luke. Four of the names in Luke, however, match the tribes of Israel—Joseph (which included Manasseh and Ephraim), Judah, Simeon, and Levi. Only with Eliezer do we enter the historical period about six centuries before the rise of Menes in Egypt and Gishar in Sumer. Though Addi matches Adamu of the Assyrian list, it is not clear exactly where these kings ruled. We suspect that they ruled an empire that stretched from (what is now) southern Algeria to Crete, Anatolia, and Armenia, but we cannot currently prove it.

Alignment of the Antediluvian King-Lists in Luke and Matthew and That of the Assyrians

The first thing we notice is that the repetition of names now makes a bit more sense, for we would expect to find a certain number of names repeated in a list of royal heads of state. The contradiction is that there are 1200 years missing from the Hebrew chronology, leading us to suspect that the patriarchs before Ham were borrowed wholesale from another civilization. Yet many of these earlier kings have names that we have come to associate with the Hebrews and their Jewish descendants even down to the present day. The obvious clue is the similarity between the name of the father of Joseph, Heli, and the name of the brother of Agreus, Halieus (meaning fisherman), in the Phoenician history of Sanchoniathon. Chrysor was the son of either Agreus or Halieus—and the inventor of hook, line, bait, and fishing boat—which raises the tantalizing possibility that "Jesus Christ" was actually Yeshu ben Chrysor. The Phoenicians, of course, have been identified with the Sea Peoples who overran the Eastern Mediterranean in the years following the Trojan War, but recent evidence suggests that they were autochthonous, having lived on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean for millennia. The implication is that these names were those of the kings of the early Phoenicians and that they were adopted by the Hebrews during their long association with the Phoenicians in Canaan. So the problem becomes one of determining the exact nature of the relationship between the Hebrews and the Phoenicians. Even now we can surmise that more than one of the eponymous ancestors of the tribes of Israel (the supposed sons of Jacob) were actually eponymous ancestors of the bearers of the Phoenician alphabet that would later be adopted by the Hebrew rulers of Canaan.

We see from Chapter Eleven that as early as the reign of Sargon of Akkad (2334-2278), Sidon was one of the provinces of Canaan, reinforcing our conclusion in Chapter Nine and in my earlier Origins of the Tarot Deck that the Phoenician alphabet came into existence sometime near the year 2400 BC, placing the Phoenicians in Canaan a mere five and a half centuries after the reign of Menes. The notion that Christianity had its origins in the Phoenician version of a religious tale that goes back to the last kings of the antediluvian world parallels the work of Martin Bernal in his Black Athena series in that Christianity is the ultimate example of the influence of Greco-Roman culture on the civilization of the West. If the Greece of the philosophers can be shown to have had its origins in Egypt and the Lebanon, how much more significant is it that the very religious system that defined Western thought until the Renaissance and beyond should find its origins, not in Judea of the 1st century or even the 1st century BC, but in the coastal strip inhabited by the ancestors of the Levites west of Mount Lebanon long before the rise of the New Kingdom in Egypt.

In the original form of this religion, Ieoud was simply the son of Joseph, the god Cronus, the god of Time. As the son of a god, he was automatically a god. When it became necessary to make Joseph a descendent of the archetypal but quite mortal King David, in an attempt to convince the population of Judea that his son was the long awaited Messiah, Joseph ceased to be a god in his own right, so that the inventors of Christianity found that they had traded the divinity of Jesus for his messianic descent from David. The solution to this quandary, if it can even be raised to the level of a "solution," was to make the son of Joseph not his physical son but the miraculous son of that very same god who had been forcibly removed from the character of Joseph the man, producing a peculiar kind of schizoid dual personality, one part, human descendent of David, and one part, divine son of Halieus, in order to make the son of Joseph both the king of the Jews and the king of heaven. It took me a long time to understand what the Trojan Luke had done when he inserted his pre-existent genealogy of Jesus into the history of Jewish kingship. At first I suspected that the genealogies in Luke and Matthew were of two different people, perhaps Mithras and Yeshu. Once I understood, however, it made perfect sense how elements of the Phoenician religious system, apparently still surviving at Troy, had been made to fit the supposed predictions of a messiah in the Hebrew bible and how that process had opened a veritable can of worms in trying to rationalize the illogical, leading to the necessity of holding two contradictory ideas in one's head at the same time if one wished to take the story seriously. And here, dear reader, we have that final nail in the coffin of historical 1st century Christianity. And that nail lies not in some obscure pseudepigraphical text but at the very canonical heart of the religion of the later Jesus, a faint echo of his earlier and more glorious self as a personification of the sun.

The sequence of antediluvian kings and their symbolism in the Greek genealogical system was as follows: Chaos, which is self-evident; Gaia, who was the Earth; Uranus, who was the Heavens; Cronus, who was Time; and Zeus, who was the Sun. In this system, the crucifixion of the Sun God refers to his suspension for three days at the intersection of the ecliptic and the celestial equator at the vernal equinox. Godfrey Higgins and many others of the rational persuasion have laid bare the foundations of this myth.

There are some superficial resemblances between the life of King Sosos and the myth of the sun. The death of Sosos was sometime very near the Flood of Deucalion, i.e., the Deluge, so that it may have become associated in the popular mind with the perceived causes of the Flood, whether they were thought of as moral or military in nature. It may even have been seen as a kind of sacrifice whose effect was to secure the survival of the human race from total destruction by the waters of the flood in Egypt and the cessation of rainfall in the Sahara. Beyond this there is nothing. Sosos certainly didn't rise from the dead after his death, except in the most symbolic of senses in which the earthly manifestation of the Sun God, the king of Egypt, returned to his father in the sky, for then Menes would not have become king. The other elements of the story derive mainly, though not exclusively, either from Amenhotep III (the son of Joseph ben Jacob), the life and death of Yeshu under Jannaeus, or the life and death of John the Baptist under Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate.

Another thing we notice in the king-lists of Luke and Matthew is that both elements of the name Melchizedek appear, Sadoc among the eponymous ancestors in Matthew, and Melchi twice, among the pre-Ogygean and the antediluvian kings in Luke. Melchizedek was, of course, the king of Salem during the lifetime of Abraham. Thus, we may suspect that the Sadoc in Matthew is the equivalent of the anonymous king of Judah in Luke, Salem (or Jeru-Salem) having been the capital of Judah in later times.

As for the kings of Assyria in the above table, the advent of the dynasty of Puzur-Ashur I that supposedly followed Aminu appeared long after 2920 BC. The implication is that there is a gap in the Assyrian timeline that mimics that in the Hebrew bible. We may suspect a similar origin.

A Nymph of the Country Called Anobret

Osiris was the son of this goddess
who was really a Mai or Mary, the Celestial Mother,
he being the only god of the Egyptians
who was born upon this earth and lived among men.
Of this Forlong remarks: "His birthplace was Mount Sinai;
called by the Egyptians Nysa, hence his Greek name Dio-nysos."
—Eliza Burt Gamble, The God-Idea of the Ancients

As for the quotation from Sanchoniathon at the head of the last section, we should take a moment to look at its significance in the light of the current reconstruction. If Ieoud (incorrectly spelled "Ledud" for clearly typographical reasons on various websites dedicated to the New Age version of Atlantis) is identical with the later Christian Yeshu or Jesus, we need to ask ourselves whom Cronus and Anobret represent.

Cronus the son of Uranus, the latter being the Agreus of the Phoenician list, is called Chrysor in Sanchoniathon's actual king-list, as distinguished from his tale of Ieoud, so that we may suspect that Chrysor was the model for, or simply a variant spelling of, the Christ of the New Testament. As we earlier implied, and now explicitly state, this suggests the name Jesus ben Christ, or Jesus son of Christ, reinforcing our previous suspicion that Joseph was originally a god, the god Christ (or Cronus), as opposed to his son, the god Jesus (or Zeus). This identification leaves us in a position to understand how Mary, the mother of Jesus, could be the same person as Mary Magdalene and why his mother would appear in da Vinci's fresco of the Last Supper at his right hand, as we will find in Chapter Eighteen. The clear implication is that the story of "Jesus Christ" in the Christian bible is an amalgamation of two separate stories, one concerning Cronus the Time God, and the other concerning his son Zeus, the Sun God, which goes a long way toward explaining the annoying self-contradictions found in that work, including the notion of a "Holy Trinity."

According to the tale of Ieoud found in Sanchoniathon and transmitted to us by Eusebius, the mother of Ieoud and the wife of Chrysor was a "nymph of the country called Anobret," whereas the Pleiades, with whom we have already identified the wives of various well-known antediluvian rulers, were also called "nymphs" by the Greeks. As Marguerite Rigoglioso writes in The Cult of Divine Birth in Ancient Greece,

A bit later in his treatment of the Pleiadian religious story, Diodorus mentions that the native Atlantians called the Pleiades "nymphs." Larson ... corroborates this classification, distinguishing the Pleiades as nymphs of a "heavenly" sort in contrast to the more general "earthly" nymphs usually associated with springs, lakes, or streams. As I have argued, the "nymph" classification is a clue to a female's identification as a holy parthenos, and we see this borne out in the stories of the Pleiades' sexual relationships with gods, as expressed both in the works of Diodorus and in the extended mythology of the Seven Sisters.

Again, a parthenos is a virgin, and by extension, a virgin mother.

There are various explanations of the meaning of the word Anobret, some of which were brought into play in attempts to show that she was either Sarah, wife of Abraham, or Semiramis, the wife of "Ninus," whom we have identified with Nitocris, the wife of Sargon of Akkad. There have even been some who have seen the story as a foreshadowing of the one in the bible, identifying the word with the supposed characteristics of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Jacob Bryant, however, presents an explanation that goes beyond such limited explanations, translating it as "fountain of light," according to John Garnier in The Worship of the Dead. In which case the nymph, Anobret, would be "The Fountain of Light." One wonders where that fountain of light might be found. As Allen writes in his Star Names,

The Hindus pictured these stars [the Pleiades] as a Flame typical of Agni, the god of fire and regent of the asterism, and it may have been in allusion to this figuring that the western Hindus held in the Pleiad month Kartik (October-November) their great star festival Dibali, the Feast of Lamps, which gave origin to the present Feast of Lanterns in Japan.

As for which of the Pleiades is meant, I originally thought it was Meropê, whom Marguerite Rigoglioso calls "the only Pleiad who supposedly gave birth to a child as a result of intercourse with a mortal ...." As she says, "I contend this story refers to a priestess of divine birth who broke her vow to abstain from sexual relations with human men in nonritual encounters." More likely it is Maia, the companion of Vulcan according to some accounts (Frazer, 1961; Newlands, 1995), Vulcan being an alternate name for Chrysor among the Phoenicians. Again in the words of Rigoglioso,

That Maia's name means "nurse" calls to mind the Pleiades' "nursing" of the infant Zeus ....

In the Homeric Hymn 4 to Hermes (4–6), Maia is described as a mountain "nymph" who was "modest" and "shunned" the company of the blessed gods, dwelling within a cave's shadow" on Mt. Cyllene. I propose these details indicate Maia was a cave-dwelling holy parthenos who lived in solitude.

According to Rigoglioso, the Pleiades, either the nymphs or the stars, were seen as the origin of the entire human population of earth, an idea not out of line with the biblical concept of the Garden of Eden.

The later name Delos thus connoted the coming into being, or manifestation into form, of the "light of the star" (Asteria) itself .... I return to this idea in Chapter 6 when I discuss the belief held by some Greeks that the gods originated from the Milky Way. I argue there that an esoteric strain in early Greek religion may have even held that the divine children born of virgins hailed from the constellation known as the Pleiades, in particular.

The parthenogenic nature of this number [seven] corresponds perfectly with the nature of the seven Pleiades themselves as both virgins and mothers in Greek myth .... [The] Hindu characterization of the Pleiades as "mothers of the world" is in complete alignment with Greek myths naming the Pleiades ancestral mothers who created entire lineages.

The author goes on to identify the origin of this Pleiades myth with ancient "Libya" and the land of the Amazons, a theme we have already explored in detail.

Significantly, Diodorus also says that the tradition about the Pleiades was foreign to Greek soil. The story, he reports, originally belonged to the "Atlantians," whom he identifies elsewhere as a civilized historical people of North Africa once invaded by the Libyan Amazons. The idea for an African origin for the Pleiadian myth is consonant with the various other stories connecting the Pleiades—and Dodona—to Africa. These include the myth that the Seven Sisters' father was possibly the North African king Atlas, and the legend of the "founding" of Dodona by a holy parthenos from Egypt. The detail that the Pleiades' mother may have been an "Amazon queen" (Scholiast on Theocritus^‡ 13.25) could also place their story in ancient Libya, where ... legends and ethnographic accounts attested to the presence of historical Amazon women.

Er—The Resurrection of an Armenian King

The third entry after the twelve eponymous ancestors in Luke is someone named Er, who should be familiar to anyone who has read the Greek philosophers, especially Plato's Republic, for Er was the son of Armenius in the Myth of Er, by which the Greeks meant that he had come originally from Armenia, though he was described as a Pamphylian by Plato. Pamphylia was on the southern shore of Anatolia, where his biographers would later claim that Alexander had driven back the waters of the Mediterranean. Er had died, though his body did not decay, and he was committed to the funeral pyre twelve days after his death where he revived at the last moment to tell a tale of his travels through the land of the dead, whose geography followed Greek notions of the layout of the celestial sphere. Er's tale is one of judgment and reincarnation, and also contains elements of the resurrection of the dead in the case of the king himself. Er follows Jose and Jose follows Eliezer in the genealogy from Luke, as the Mary mentioned by Josephus, the one who made a burnt offering of her unnamed son, was the daughter of Eleazar. Joseph Atwill (2011) sees this story as a parallel to the story of Jesus. More likely, it is an erratic boulder left over from the period when Er ruled in Armenia. The famine described would have been caused by the cometary event of 3663 BC.

The presence of the mother of Er in a story of the Hebrews is not surprising, for they lived near the Hurrians, whose earliest home is normally placed in the Caucasus. The Hurrians had relations with the Hittites in Anatolia and lived on the Khabur River in what is now Syria. The name Khabur resonates with that of the Hebrews. The Khabur River was the Chebar of Ezekiel and the Styx of the Greeks, so that what we have in the story of Er is a mythical account of his return to the land of his ancestors. It would even appear that the reason the Assyrians later transported the Hebrews to the valley of the Khabur was that they believed this to have been their true homeland. Modern scholars have trouble with the idea that Chebar could have been the Khabur, for Ezekiel was living in "Chaldea," which they identify with the land of the Kaldu in southern Iraq. This brings us back to the confusion between the Sumerian city of Ur and the "Ur of the Chaldees" where Abraham was born. The problem here is that the term Chaldean was anciently confused with the inhabitants of Sumer, so that the northern Ura could be referred to as "Ur of the Chaldees" and the Chebar river could be placed in "Chaldea" by Ezekiel. Thus, Cyrus Gordon wrote in Before the Bible:

Ur of the Chaldees, the birthplace of Abraham, was a northern commercial colony probably founded by the Sumerian Empire called the Third Dynasty of Ur during its heyday .... All of the connections of the Patriarchal Narratives are northern, with no trace of direct contact with Sumer and Akkad.... Older books—including many a forgotten tome of the nineteenth century—correctly locate Ur of the Chaldees in the general Haran area.... The Patriarchs are depicted as Arameans as long as they remained in their native land.

However, it should be pointed out that Khaldis was the supreme deity of the ancient Armenian city of Van, now in southeastern Turkey. Khaldi was the genitive form of the word, meaning literally "of Khaldis" or "from Khaldis," as pointed out by A. H. Sayce in Volume 14 of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of 1882. The Armenians have their own version of the Myth of Er, in which it becomes clear that Er was the equivalent of the Greek Eros, and took place in the area of Mount Ararat where Noah's ark was supposed to have alighted. Though Eros has a different spelling in Greek from the god of Love, there is a story about the former in the History of Armenia by Moses of Chorene that has Queen Semiramis seeking after the beautiful Ara, as he spells it, that leaves little doubt that this is the same youth worshipped by the Greeks and that it is he who rises from the dead and informs mankind of what awaits at the end of life. Khaldis was the father of many other gods, as was El the father of the Elohim among the Phoenicians. This all points to an origin of the Hebrews and Phoenicians in Armenia and Azerbaijan, possibly alongside the ancestors of the Babylonians.

Chronologically, as pointed out by De Santillana and Von Dechend in Hamlet's Mill, the Myth of Er places the vernal equinox somewhere in the Milky Way, an alignment that straddles the beginning of the Age of Taurus, placed by Godfrey Higgins at 4400 BC, when, according to the ancients, the precession of the equinoxes began. This is not as absurd an idea as one might imagine, for 4375 was actually the year of a tree ring minimum associated with the ice core acidity peak of 4400±100 BC. From the list it would seem that the real father of Er was Jose and that Er ruled a good deal after the equinox had left Gemini, though the legendary construct lasted for millennia thereafter, the Milky Way having been replaced by the longitudinal great circle that passes through the equinox. One can imagine that it was Er who brought the notion embodied in the myth to his people, sometime after the cometary event of 3663 BC. Are Jose and his resurrected son Er another, even earlier, version of the Yeshu motif we have already tracked across three millennia? The story is beginning to look like an infinite regression reflecting back at us from the early days of the New Stone Age.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

^† Called Israel in the version of Porphyry.  ^‡ The Scholiast, quoting from Callimachus, gives the Pleiades the alternate names, Coccymo, Glaucia, Protis, Parthenia, Maia, Stonychia, and Lampado.

[Chapter Thirteen: The Hyksos and the Hebrews]

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