Plain Talk from Skratchy

Christianity is one of the big religions in the world today, but is it changing? The book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (retitled Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the United States) is a controversial book by authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, which was first published in 1982 by Jonathan Cape in London. The book followed on from a BBC TV documentary, and was followed by a sequel, The Messianic Legacy, in 1987. It was reissued in an illustrated hardcover version in 2005.

In summary, the authors argue that there is a possibility that Jesus might have been married to Mary Magdalene, and that their possible child or children emigrated to what is now southern France. Once there, they established what became the Merovingian dynasty, which is championed today by a secret society called the Priory of Sion.

The response from mainstream historians and academics, however, was all but universally negative. Critics argued that the bulk of the claims, mysteries and conspiracies presented as fact, were concocted by the authors, thus making Holy Blood a work of pseudo history.

The book The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception is anti-Catholic, proposing the existence of a conspiracy organised by the Vatican. The book claims that several key scrolls of the Dead Sea scrolls were deliberately kept under wraps for decades to suppress unwelcome theories about the history of early Christianity. One theory in particular to be suppressed was the speculation, first proposed by Robert Eisenman, that Paul of Tarsus had deliberately fabricated the more supernatural aspects of the life of Jesus, perhaps in order to undermine the anti-Roman messianic cults in the region.

Incase you have never heard about The Dead Sea Scrolls. The scrolls and scroll fragments recovered in the Qumran environs represent a voluminous body of Jewish documents, a veritable "library", dating from the third century B.C.E. to 68 C.E. Unquestionably, the "library," which is the greatest manuscript find of the twentieth century, demonstrates the rich literary activity of Second Temple Period Jewry and sheds insight into centuries pivotal to both Judaism and Christianity. The library contains some books or works in a large number of copies, yet others are represented only fragmentarily by mere scraps of parchment. There are tens of thousands of scroll fragments. The number of different compositions represented is almost one thousand, and they are written in three different languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

The most resent information to hit the mainstream would be the release of The Gospel of Judas. One of the most significant biblical finds of the last century—a lost gospel that could challenge what is believed about the story of Judas and his betrayal of Jesus. The National Geographic Society released yesterday the first modern translation of the ancient Gospel of Judas, which depicts the most reviled villain in Christian history as a devoted follower who was simply doing Jesus's bidding when he betrayed him.

The Jesus Myth is a theory usually associated with a skeptical position on the historicity of Jesus, which claims that Jesus did not exist as an historical figure, but was, instead, an abstract, symbolic, and metaphorical allusion to a higher knowledge. The heart of the debate is as old as Christianity itself; even some early Christians who subscribed to a docetic Christology rejected the notion of a corporeal Jesus, though they still accepted his divinity. The theory, based in part on the lack of extant contemporaneous documents or other historically reliable evidence about his life, has not currently found widespread acceptance among Bible scholars and historians, though in more recent times, few scholars have supported it, such as Hyam Maccoby and John Shelby Spong.

These were just a few of the latest things to be revealed….What do you believe???

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