What’s up with all these Biblical conspiracies?

Okay, this is a rant because these conspiracy theories drive me crazy. It’s bad enough that people think that the aliens helped humans build the pyramids, invent all sorts of things for us and teach us how to walk and talk, but it’s another thing when people suggest that the Bible has secretes that were deliberately hidden from us.

The most outrageous theory is that Jesus was secretly married to Mary Magdalene and even had children with her. This idea was espoused recently in Dan Brown’s book ‘The Da Vinci Code’. His story suggests that Da Vinci was a member of the Illuminati, a secret society opposed to the Chruch, that along with the Templar Knights were trying to preserve the Holy Grail, which they equated to Jesus and Mary Magdalene’s child. Most of this is based on goofy information or misguided inferences. For example, Michelangelo’s Pietà, the famous stature of Mary holding Jesus’ body after it was taken down from the cross shows her as a twenty year old, not the fifty year old she should have been. Michelangelo claims he made her young to illustrate that she was a timeless virgin, but some have deducted that he was depicting Mary Magdalene, not Mary the mother of God. A recent Science Channel series ‘Biblical Conspiracies’ also revealed the discovery of an alleged unknown Michelangelo Pietà sculpture that has a Cupid included. Cupids were often used in sculptures to indicate eroticism. All I can say is that this conspiracy is not provable. It’s the fuel for Hollywood movies and gnostic sexual rituals.

Another episode of this series reveals a supposed lost gospel written in the fifth century that tells in allegory form that Jesus married a Phoenician pagan priestess, Mary of Magdalene (Magdalene means tower, and there was a Tower City in Phoenicia), that Jesus is the son of Phoenician Roman solider named Pantara or that Jesus was thought to be the son of Helios, a Greek god. Worse yet, Mary Magdalene was considered to be the founder of the Galilean Christian sect and the incarnation of Artemis the Moon goddess. Some one argued that Jesus, being a Jew, could not have married a non-Jewish woman, but if his father were a non-Jew, than he would have been exempt from this law. This is nuts! If Jesus were not a pure Jew he would not have been allowed to read from the scriptures in the synagogue, a scene that was related in the New Testament.

Speaking of the Science Channel series, I like the one that tells about the discovery of how the Romans crucified someone. I didn’t realize that there is no forensic evidence for how crucifixions were done. The images and statures that are ubiquitous in churches and religious paintings have the same basic cross with Christ nailed through the hands and feet. The latest findings show that this is wrong and a mistake perpetrated by Emperor Constantine because he saw a cross like the ones we are familiar with in the heavens before a great battle that he won, subsequently proclaiming Christianity as the state religion. The cross symbol was forever accepted as the kind of cross that Jesus was nailed to.

The evidence for a different kind of crucifixion cross consists of the following: A heel bone with a nail driven through the side of it that was found in the Holy Land suggests that this is how the feet were secured to the cross. Bones of a crucified male (believed to be the last Kind of the Jews) in an Ossuary (a bone box) found in a cave near Jerusalem shows that nails were driven through the back of the hand not the front. After much work the forensic experts came to the conclusion that the Romans crucified people on a X-shaped cross, not the one we’re used to seeing. How about the wild idea that our crucifixes and paintings of Christ on the cross are wrong all this time? Good grief!

There are lots of other conspiracy theories. One is that Mary Magdalene was a disciple or even an apostle and that the Church suppressed this.

Some people have suggested that Jesus taught reincarnation. Really?

Some have even claimed that Christianity was a conspiracy to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion.

Give me a break!

Thanks for reading.