Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [199]
From about 100 B.C. to 100 A.D., the orthodox Jewish priesthood suffered an eclipse. The promises of their scriptures had failed them-Jerusalem was destroyed and Israel was dispersed. Thereafter many Jews fled to Egypt, Rome and Greece, and those among them who might have become priests joined the schools of the Mysteries, among them that of the Gnostics.34
Jerusalem was razed again under Hadrian in 135 CE after a revolt led by the Zealot Simeon Bar Cochba, who was appointed as the "star of Jacob" predicted in Numbers 24:17 and reiterated in the Zadokite Document found at the Dead Sea. But, say Baigent and Leigh, "Unlike the revolt of AD 66, Simeon's insurrection, commencing in AD 132, was no ill-organised conflagration resulting, so to speak, from spontaneous combustion. On the contrary, much prolonged and careful planning went into the enterprise."35
When their efforts to raise up the messiah failed and no such promised inheritance was forthcoming, in order to save Judaism and achieve its goals of world domination, zealous "Jews," i.e., "the Chosen," worked to concoct a story to demonstrate that their new covenant had indeed been kept by "the Lord." Just as a Moses was created to give divine authority to "his people" and to make them the elect of God, so Jesus was devised to prove that the Lord had indeed sent his long-awaited redeemer to his chosen as part of the new covenant. However, it could not be demonstrated that such a redeemer was a great warrior who physically usurped the enemies of Israel, because Israel had been destroyed; therefore, the messiah's advent was made solely into a spiritual usurpation. As Higgins says, "It has ... always ... been the object of Jesus to open the Jewish religion to the whole world."36 For, as it says at John 4:22, "salvation is from the Jews." Translated differently, that passage would read, "Jesus is from the Jews."
With the final destruction of Israel, which drove out of Palestine not only the Jews but also the Samaritans, and with their subsequent entrance into the mystery schools, in particular at Alexandria, the push for the Judaizing of the Gnostic/Therapeutan Jesus sayings and narratives began in earnest. As Wheless says:
It was at this critical juncture, to revive and stimulate the jaded hope of Jewish believers and to spread the propaganda amongst the all-believing Pagans, that the written Christ-tales began to worked up by the Christian propagandists. Before their admiring eyes they had for models the "whole literature" of Jewish apocryphal or forged writings, plus the Pagan Oracles ...37
As noted, any number of the Jewish aspects in the canonical gospels and epistles betray that the writers were ex-Jews, halfJews or non-Jews who were not expertly familiar with Jewish rituals and practices, did not know the geography of Palestine, and certainly did not write in the language of the Jews. However, the historicizing conspirators were also doubtlessly aware that Judea was a perfect place to set the story, since, as Andrew Laird says, "Set a story in a distant time, or clime, or both, and you are more likely to be believed."38 And, since Judea was destroyed and its people scattered, it would be harder to disprove the tale.
In reality, much of the information about the Jews found in the NT was derived from the study of the OT and other Jewish books, such as Josephus's histories, as opposed to from the experience of the writers themselves. These inaccuracies serve as evidence that the gospel writers were simply sitting around with books, studying and copying passages, and throwing in an original phrase or two to link them all together.
The Library and University of Alexandria
In their creation of Christianity, the Therapeuts had at their disposal the university and library at Alexandria, which had been established by Alexander the Great as an international center of learning. Indeed, in its heyday the Alexandrian Library was a vast repository of some 500,000-700,000 manuscripts collected from around the world. Doane stresses the importance of Alexandria:
In Alexandria