Home Welcome
I appreciate you spending time here. I write books for a living, but if you've made it this far, I guess you already knew that. In this site I'll tell you a little more about me, and quite a lot about the sort of stuff that interests me, and hopefully interests the people who buy my novels. I also do a bit of public speaking, and you'll find details of where and when on the 'Appearances' page, so you'll know where to go - or where to avoid!
Novels Novels
I have four novels in this series published to date: The First Apostle , The Moses Stone , The Messiah Secret and The Nosferatu Scroll . To buy one of the books, click on the images on the right-hand side of any page.
To read more about these books, click on the images below, then click the bottom right-hand corner to turn the page.
Appearances Appearances
26 March - 18 April 2012:
Guest speaker on board the Sage Sapphire for her inaugural cruise, sailing from Southampton and around the Mediterranean and then back to Southampton.
Research Including relevant research is always something of an odd part of any novel, because an author has to try to strike a balance between swamping the reader with information - a so-called 'info dump' - and not providing enough information to allow him or her to completely understand the facts behind the novel.
I believe that in these kinds of historical mystery-thriller, for want of a better description, most readers do want to know what evidence or background there is for the novel. So I spend a lot of time doing detailed research before I apply fingers to keyboard to start the first chapter, and when I'm deep in the writing, I'm still leaping onto the internet or delving into a history book to check the facts as I go along.
I hope that this attention to detail is evident in the books, and each one always includes a comprehensive author's note where I attempt to explain exactly which bits of the story are true, and which I made up. I always try to base each story on a fairly solid foundation, and then to weave a believable tale around that.
Whether or not I've managed to succeed, I leave it to you to judge.
Research
About me About me
Confession time, I suppose. My name isn't really 'James Becker'. Like a lot of authors, I write using a nom de plume, mainly because my real name is Peter Stuart Smith, which I've always thought is rather dull and boring. 'James Becker' is far more like the proverbial alligator sandwich - short and snappy.
I live on the side of a mountain in Andorra in the Eastern Pyrenees surrounded by a forest of about a million trees filled with wildlife, including wild boar, and a handful of neighbours. It's hot and sunny in the summer, cold in the winter and we get a lot of snow - feet of it sometimes. When it all gets too much, we head to France for a bit of peace and quiet.
My last proper job was in the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm, and today I spend most of my time writing and, when I'm not at home, cruising - I'm a frequent guest speaker on several cruise lines, including Cunard.
The First Apostle The First Apostle
The central idea of this book is founded on fact because, despite my fiction, there is some historical evidence that Saint Paul was an agent of Rome, employed by the Emperor Nero in precisely the manner I've suggested in this book. For more information about this, readers are directed to Joseph Atwill's book, Caesar's Messiah .
The hypothesis is that Paul and Titus Flavius Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian, were employed by Rome to foster a peaceful messianic religion in Judea in an attempt to reduce the rebelliousness of the Jews and their opposition to Roman rule. If true, this suggests an interesting piece of lateral thinking on the part of the Roman emperors.
Saint Paul
Unlike Saint Peter, we are at least certain that the man who became known as Saint Paul actually existed. Quite a lot is known about him, and some of his writings survive to this day. His birth name was Saul and he was born in about 9 AD to a wealthy Jewish merchant in Tarsus in Cilicia. He was a member of the tribe of Benjamin, and was an Aramaic- and Greek-speaking Pharisee, one of the most ancient of the Jewish sects.
Apostle 2 Saint Paul (continued)
As a young man he was a violent opponent of Christ and was active in identifying those he saw as heretic Jews and delivering them for punishment. Tradition holds that he was on his way to Damascus to continue his persecution of Jews when he was blinded by a light from heaven and underwent his celebrated conversion, after which he remained blind for some time. Once his sight was restored he became an ardent Christian. This apocryphal incident may have been inspired by ophthalmia neonatorum, a painful weakness of the eyes that left him almost blind in later life.
Whatever the reality of his conversion or motive in switching from persecutor of Christians to dedicated supporter of Jesus Christ, there are mixed views about his contribution to the Christian religion. One body of thought suggests that his views were so different from those of Jesus that his teachings are sometimes referred to as Pauline Christianity.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche viewed him as the anti-Christ, and the American Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that Paul was the first corrupter of the teachings of Jesus and actually tried to have his writings removed from the Bible.
Apostle 3 Saint Peter
As the Spanish scholar Josep Puente states in the book, Saint Peter is found only within the pages of the New Testament, and there's no independent historical evidence to substantiate his existence. The two epistles ascribed to Peter were written in sophisticated Greek and display such disparate characteristics that many commentators doubt they were authored by the same person, and few serious researchers believe they could have been writtem by a simple Aramaic-speaking fisherman. Despite all this, he's considered by the Roman Catholic Church to have been its first pope.
The bones of the apostles
Both men apparently died at the hands of the Romans, and in Rome, though neither death can be substantiated historically. Peter is believed to have died on either 29th June or 13th October 64 AD, and he was apparently crucified upside down, while Paul was allegedly beheaded in 64 AD or 67 AD - as a Roman citizen he could not be executed by crucifixion.
As for the final resting place of the bones of the two saints, the Vatican has shown a certain amount of confusion on the subject.
Apostle 4 The bones of the apostles (continued)
Two separate sets of bones, both found under Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, have been conclusively identified as those of Saint Peter. The first announcement was made in 1950 by Pope Pius XII and the second in 1968 by John Paul VI. The first set was inspected by an anthropologist in 1956 and found to contain five tibias - most human skeletons have a mere two, and at least one of those examined came from a woman - as well as pig, sheep, goat and chicken bones.
The 1968 bones also included those of various domesticated animals, plus mouse bones, and fragments of Saint Peter's skull. The fragments were a serious embarrassment, because what purported to be the apostle's skull had rested in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome since about the ninth century.
To complicate the situation still further, in 1953 what appeared to be the skeleton of Saint Peter was unearthed in Jerusalem on the site of a Franciscan monastery called Dominus Flevit on the Mount of Olives. The bones were in an ossuary inscribed, in Aramaic, Simon Bar Jona (Simon, son of Jona). Bearing in mind that there's no evidence Saint Peter ever actually lived, such confusion over his remains is perhaps not surprising, and such duplication of relics is not uncommon in the Catholic Church - although there were only twelve apostles, the remains of some twenty-six are buried in Germany alone.
Apostle 5 The bones of the apostles (continued)
According to the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History , Saint Paul's bones were given by Pope Vitalian to Oswy, King of Britain, in 665 AD. Given the Vatican's reluctance to surrender relics of any sort, this seems a somewhat unlikely fate for the skeleton. What happened to the bones after that isn't known.
The Cathars
Catharism was a dualist and Gnostic religion that possibly descended from the Byzantine Bogomils and, earlier, from Manichaeism. The Cathars believed that a benevolent god had created the human soul and the realm of spirit and light that lay beyond the Earth. But an evil deity had then trapped the soul and forced it to suffer in the corrupt flesh of the human body: salvation lay only in death, when the soul could finally escape to the spiritual realm. Because they believed that the soul could also make this journey in the body of an animal, they were strict vegetarians.
They saw themselves as Christians, but rejected the Old Testament because they believed that the god who was described in it was the evil deity who had created the world to enslave the souls of mankind. They believed this god was actually the devil, and that the Catholic Church was therefore in the service of Satan.
Apostle 6 The Cathars (continued)
Catharism was diametrically opposed to the medieval Catholic Church in almost every way, and the contrast between the two could hardly have been greater.
Unlike the Catholic Church, the Cathars asked for nothing at all from their congregations except faith. In fact, they made material contributions to the society in which they lived. When a Cathar took the consolamentum vow and became one of the perfecti , he or she donated all their worldly goods to the community. They had no church buildings or property, and the movement rejected all the trappings of wealth and power. Unusually for the period, Cathars also treated women as equals, and ensured that the children in the community were properly educated.
The obvious piety and essential goodness of the Cathar perfecti greatly appealed to the people of the Languedoc, and the heresy gained considerable power. That, predictably, was unacceptable to the Catholic Church, which could see its own power and influence in the area waning, and the inevitable result was the Albigensian Crusade.
Apostle 7 The Albigensian Crusade and the fall of Monts égur
The events described in the novel which took place during the Albigensian Crusade, including the ending of the siege of Montségur, are historically accurate. The defenders of the citadel did request a two-week truce to consider the surrender terms offered by the crusaders, only to then reject them on 15th March 1244. One possible reason for this strange request was that the Cathar defenders wanted to celebrate an important ritual on the previous day, the 14th March, possibly the so-called Manisola Festival.
The day before this, 13th March, was the spring equinox, another important date for the religion, and some records suggest that this was the date when at least twenty, perhaps as many as twenty-six, non-Cathars opted to receive the consolamentum perfecti , which would condemn them to certain and incredibly painful death some forty-eight hours later.
For obvious reasons I haven't been possible to establish as fact the story of the escape of the last four perfecti from the doomed fortress carrying the Cathar treasure, but there is considerable anecdotal evidence, some apparently deriving from records of later interrogations conducted by the Inquisition, that something like this event did actually occur.
Apostle 8 The myth of Christ
Finally, anyone who has ever properly researched the birth of Christianity must have wondered why no truly contemporary sources - apart from the books that now form the New Testament, which were anything but contemporary, being written between about 75 AD and 135 AD - ever mention Jesus Christ.
In all, the Bible is a compilation of sixty-six books - thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New - that were written by some forty different individuals over a period of about sixteen hundred years.
It's generally acknowledged that the first list of the present twenty-seven New Testament books appeared in a letter written in 367 AD by the Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius. In Carthage in 397 AD, a council decreed that only the canonical writings - the agreed twenty-seven books - were allowed to be read in church as divine scriptures: they were literally to be accepted as the gospel truth. That decree essentially marked the creation of the New Testament.
All those other documents - and there were hundreds of them, including the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Enoch, the Gospel of Mary, the Protovangelion of Jesus, the Apocalypse of Peter and the Gospel of Nicodemus - that disagreed with this corpus of work were excluded and became known as the 'banned books'.
Apostle 9 The myth of Christ (continued)
It's worth emphasising that this selection was made on the basis of content, not authenticity or relevance, so the result was by any standards, highly selective. Even those books which were included are frequently at variance with each other, including the so-called synoptic gospels of Mark, Luke and Matthew, all three of which appear to derive from an earlier common source, possibly the alleged Q Document, now lost.
So, despite what is preached from pulpits in churches around the world every Sunday, the only evidence for the existence of the man upon whose shoulders rests the largest single religion in history lies within the pages of a single section of the Bible, a heavily-edited, non-contemporary source. What this proves has been, and no doubt will remain, a source of worldwide debate by theologians and philosophers, believers and non-believers, for centuries to come.
The Moses Stone The Moses Stone and the fall of Masada
The description of the fall of Masada is as accurate as it is possible to be, almost two millennia after the event. The siege ended with the Sicarii defenders effectively committing mass suicide rather than surrender to the hated Roman army. Two women survived the siege, and they later told the historian Josephus what had occurred. Their account is generally accepted as being an accurate description of the events of the last hours before the fortress fell.
Between 1963 and 1965 the Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin carried out excavations on the site, during which eleven ostraca - small pieces of pottery or stone - were found in front of the northern palace. One of them bore the name Ben Ya'ir, the leader of the Sicarii, and each of the others bore a single different name. It's not known for certain, but it seems at least likely that these were the names of the ten men who carried out the executions of the Sicarii defenders prior to the breaching of the wall of the citadel.
Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls
The settlement of Qumran is located on a dry plateau, about a mile inland from the north-west bank of the Dead Sea and near the Israeli kibbutz of Kalia.
Moses 2 Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (continued)
Most accounts agree that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered accidentally by a Bedu goat-herder named Mohammed Ahmad el-Hamed, who was nick-named edh-Dhib , meaning 'the wolf'. Early in 1947, he either went into one of the caves near Qumran looking for a lost animal or perhaps threw a stone into a cave to drive out one of his goats, and heard the sound of something shattering. The result was that he found a collection of very old pottery jars containing ancient scrolls wrapped in linen cloth.
Recognizing that the scrolls were old and perhaps valuable, el-Hamed and his fellow Bedu removed some - most accounts state only three scrolls were taken from the cave at first - and offered to sell them to an antiques dealer in Bethlehem, but this man declined to buy them, believing they might have been stolen from a synagogue.
These scrolls passed through various hands, including those of a man named Khalil Eskander Shahin, colloquially known as Kando, an antiques dealer. He apparently encouraged the Bedu to recover more of the scrolls, or possibly visited Qumran himself and removed some of them. Whatever happened, Kando eventually personally possessed at least four of the scrolls.
Moses 3 Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (continued)
Whilst arrangements for the sale of the relics were being made, they were entrusted to a third party for safe-keeping, a man named George Ishaya, who was a member of the Syrian Orthodox Church. Recognizing the importance of the scrolls, Ishaya took some of them to St Mark's Monastery in Jerusalem to have the texts appraised. Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, the Metropolitan of Palestine and Transjordan - a metropolitan is a rank more or less equivalent to an archbishop - heard about the scrolls. He examined them and managed to buy four of them.
More of the scrolls started appearing in the murky Middle Eastern antiquities trade, and three were purchased by Professor Eleazer Sukenik, an Israeli Archaeologist. Shortly afterwards, Sukenik heard about the scrolls Mar Samuel had acquired, and tried to buy them from him, but couldn't reach an agreement.
Then a man called John Trever became involved. He was employed at the American Schools of Oriental Research and was an enthusiastic photographer, which turned out to be a significant hobby. In February 1948 he met Mar Samuel and photographed all the scrolls the Metropolitan owned. Over the years, the scrolls have steadily deteriorated, but his album of pictures has since allowed scholars to see them as they were at that time, and has facilitated their study and permitted translations of the texts to be made. It wasn't until 1949 that Qumran was identified as the hiding place of the scrolls.
Moses 4 Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (continued)
Further searches were then carried out and the other caves in the area were explored. Scrolls were found in eleven of these caves, but no scrolls or fragments were ever discovered at Qumran itself.
The first archaeological expedition to Qumran was led by Father Roland de Vaux of the École Biblique in Jerusalem. He began his excavations in Cave 1 in 1949, and two years later started digging at Qumran as well. His approach was badly flawed, because de Vaux assumed that the inhabitants of Qumran had written the scrolls, and used the contents of them to deduce what Qumran must have been.
It was a classic circular argument, and the result was entirely predictable: because the scrolls were mainly religious texts, de Vaux came to the conclusion that the inhabitants of Qumran were devoutly religious, a sect called the Essenes. Every artefact he and his team recovered from the site was interpreted in line with this assumption, despite the lack of any empirical evidence to support this conclusion.
So a water cistern became a Jewish ritual bath, and so on, and any finding that disagreed with this hypothesis was simply ignored or assumed to be later contamination.
Moses 5 The Copper Scroll
The Copper Scroll and its listing of tons of buried treasure, of course, flew directly in the face of de Vaux's interpretation of the site, and he dismissed it out of hand as either a hoax or some kind of joke. This relic is still one of the more perplexing mysteries of Middle Eastern archaeology. Discovered by Henri de Contenson in 1952 in Cave 3 at Qumran, it was completely unlike any other relic found anywhere, before or since. Although generally regarded as one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, absolutely the only reason for this assumption is that it was found with other scrolls in one of the caves at Qumran. In every other respect - material, content, and language - it is entirely different.
Made from almost pure - 99 per cent - copper, the preparation of which would have been extremely difficult, and almost eight feet in length, the scroll is simply an inventory, a matter-of-fact listing of the whereabouts of an enormous hoard of treasure. The language used is unusual. It's an early form of Hebrew - what's known as a square-form script - which appears to have some linguistic affinity with pre-Mishnaic Hebrew and even Aramaic, but some of the expressions used are only completely comprehensible to readers familiar with both Arabic and Akkadian. In short, the palaeography (the style of writing) and the orthography (the spelling) used in the Copper Scroll are unlike any other known contemporary texts, from Qumran or anywhere else.
Moses 6 The Copper Scroll (continued)
Another peculiarity is the presence of a handful of Greek letters that follow certain of the locations listed, and spell the name of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. Theories abound, but nobody has produced any convincing explanation for this.
It's been suggested that the Copper Scroll contains some thirty mistakes, of the kind that would be expected from a scribe copying a document written in a language with which he was unfamiliar, suggesting that the contents of the scroll had been copied from another source. This, again, is pure conjecture.
The locations of the hidden treasure listed in the Copper Scroll are both highly specific and completely useless. The depth at which a cache of gold has been buried, for example, is described in detail, but discovering the actual location requires knowledge of town and street names, plus property ownership data from first-century Judea, knowledge that has been lost for two millennia.
The general consensus is that the Copper Scroll probably is genuine, and that the treasures were hidden in the Judean desert. It's even possible that one of them has been found: in 1988 a small earthenware vessel containing a dark, sweet-smelling oil was found in a cave near Qumran, and one interpretation of a listing on the Copper Scroll suggests it could have been one of the items recorded.
Moses 7 The Silver Scroll
Perhaps the most intriguing entry of all on the Copper Scroll states that another document had been hidden that contained more detailed information about the location of the various treasures. One translation of this enigmatic section of the text reads: A copy of this inventory list, its explanation and the measurements and details of every hidden item, is in the dry underground cavity that is in the smooth rock north of Kohlit. Its opening is towards the north with the tombs at its mouth.
This other document, which has become known as the Silver Scroll, was one of several treasures claimed to be hidden in the city of Kohlit. There is an area named Kohlit lying to the east of the Jordan River, but there's no evidence that this is the place referred to in the Copper Scroll, and the only other Kohlit in the Middle East is Keley Kohlit in Ethiopia, much too far away to be a possibility. The other clue is the reference to the tombs at its mouth. This could be interpreted to indicate a north-facing cave close to a burial ground, but is of little real help.
But if the Copper Scroll is an authentic listing of buried treasure, then the reference to the Silver Scroll must also be assumed to be authentic, which means that this object did exist. The authors of the Copper Scroll presumably knew exactly where the Silver Scroll was secreted, because of their accurate, though meaningless to us, description of its location.
Moses 8 Ein-Gedi
The oasis at Ein-Gedi was one of the most important settlements outside Jerusalem during the first century AD, and was raided by the Sicarii during the siege of Masada. It is certainly possible that the Jewish priests might have believed the Temple was under imminent threat from the advancing Roman army, and would have tried to remove their most important treasures to a place of safety. If so, Ein-Gedi would have been an obvious choice.
If the Temple of Jerusalem had been the custodian of the Copper Scroll, Silver Scroll and the Mosaic Covenant at this time, the presence of these relics at the oasis beside the Dead Sea would not have been unexpected. During their raid, the Sicarii would probably have grabbed anything they could lay their hands on. And if these Zealots did unexpectedly find themselves in possession of three of the holiest treasures of the Jewish nation, they would have done everything in their power to ensure that the hated Romans wouldn't be able to seize them.
The Temple Mount and the Wailing Wall
The Western Wall - of which the Wailing Wall is a part - is one of the four retaining walls of the Temple Mount, and its construction shows a distinct gradation from the bottom to top.
Moses 9 The Temple Mount and the Wailing Wall
The courses of masonry at the base extend about two-thirds of the way up, and are formed from large single blocks of light-coloured stone, the biggest ones probably at least a metre cubed. Above them, significantly smaller stones have been used, all the way to the top. The wall isn't a single structure, though the lower part looks as if it is. The lowest seven courses of stones have indented borders and date from 20 BC when Herod strengthened the Temple Mount. Above them, the next four layers of stones are slightly smaller, and they were laid down during the Byzantine period, which ran from AD 330 to 640. The third section, above that, was built after the Muslim capture of Jerusalem in the seventh century, and the layer at the very top is the most recent, added in the 19th century. What isn't visible are a further seventeen courses of stones, all now underground because of the almost constant building that has taken place in that area.
The origin of the name Wailing Wall is simple enough. After the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70, no Jews were allowed to visit Jerusalem until the early Byzantine period. Then, they were permitted to visit the Western Wall just once each year, on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple. The Jews that came to the Wall leant against it and wept over the loss of their holy temple, and that was how the name was coined.
Moses 10 The Temple Mount and the Wailing Wall (continued)
The Western Wall was never actually a part of the Temple: it was only a support wall for the ground on which the Second Temple once stood. But orthodox Jews believe that the divine presence, what they call the Shechinah , continues to reside in the place where the Temple used to stand. When the Temple was built, the Holy of Holies, the inner chamber where they would have kept the Ark of the Covenant, was at the western side of the building, and that was where the Shechinah would have remained. The Western Wall is the closest the Jewish worshippers can get to that location, and that's why it's so important to them.
Har Megiddo
The name of this historic place is Megiddo, and its normally prefixed by either tel , meaning mound, or more commonly har , or hill, but sometimes it's also referred to as Tel-el-Mutesellim or the Hill of the Ruler. Over the years, the name Har Megiddo has been corrupted into Armageddon.
Megiddo was one of the oldest and most important cities in Judea, and the plain below it was the site of the first ever recorded pitched battle. There've been dozens of battles at that location, and three Battles of Megiddo. It's also supposed to be the place where the final battle on earth, between good and evil, will be fought.
Moses 11 The Mosaic Covenant
It's generally accepted that the Ark of the Covenant was a real object, probably a highly ornamented acacia wood box covered in gold leaf, which was carried by the wandering Israelites. The logical assumption is that the Covenant itself was also a real, tangible object, and was kept inside it.
According to the Old Testament, Moses gave the original Tablets of the Covenant, or more accurately the Tablets of Testimony, to the people of Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai. This Covenant was a contract between God and His chosen people, the Ten Commandments that later formed the basis of both the Jewish and the Christian faiths (though Exodus specifies that there were 14 commandments).
Moses went back up to Mount Sinai before later returning to his people to find that they'd already ignored the second Commandment, which forbade the construction of any kind of graven image for the purpose of worship. Moses's brother Aaron had made a Golden Calf and erected an altar in front of it. Moses flew into a violent rage and in his fury smashed both the tablets of the Covenant.
God then offered to personally carve a second set of tablets, and Moses went back up to Mount Sinai yet again to receive them, and it was these tablets that were placed in the Ark of the Covenant, more correctly the Ark of Testimony.
Moses 12 The Mosaic Covenant (continued)
This Ark vanished in about 586 BC when the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians, but there are no traditions relating to the tablets themselves, only to the Ark. It's been assumed that when the Babylonians looted the Temple they took away the Ark and the tablets but there's nothing in the historical record to confirm this.
The Ark had become an object of worship and veneration by this time, so it's possible that when the Babylonians descended on Jerusalem, the tablets had already been taken to a place of safe-keeping, just leaving the Ark in the Temple. But whatever happened, the original Mosaic Covenant simply disappeared into oblivion over three thousand years ago. These tablets were too important to the Jewish religion to be mislaid, and if they weren't taken as plunder, then they were almost certainly hidden before the conflict began, and the oasis at Ein-Gedi would have been a possible, perhaps even a probable, hiding place for them.
At the end of the book I describe the Israelis hiding the Mosaic Covenant in a cavity behind the Wailing Wall. If this relic was ever found, I think this is exactly where they'd want to put it, to return the Covenant to the place closest to where the Ark had originally stood. In doing so, they'd be reuniting the Shechinah , the divine presence, with the earliest record of the Covenant between man and God.
The Messiah Secret The Messiah Secret - The life of Christ
The story of the life of Jesus Christ is fraught with inconsistencies, none of which are entirely surprising in view of the passage of time and the need of the Catholic Church, in particular, to produce a seamless and acceptable account of the life of the man who was responsible for founding the Christian religion. Three of the more common of these misconceptions are:
Jesus was born on 25 December.
If there really were shepherds tending their flocks in the fields when Jesus was born, as the Gospel of Luke claims, then the month was most likely to have been June. That was the first month of the year when sheep were allowed into the fields to graze on the remains of the wheat harvest.
In fact, the date of 25 December was almost certainly chosen by the early Church as the major Christian festival because it was important to subdue all other religions, including paganism, and one of the most important pagan celebrations was the festival of the Unvanquished Sun, held every year on 25 December. It is known that the new festival was established by the fourth century AD, because in AD 334 the 25 December first appeared in a Roman calendar as Christ's date of birth.
Messiah 2 Life of Christ - misconceptions (continued)
His name was Jesus Christ.
The name Jesus is actually a British invention. His original Hebrew name was Yehoshua, which later became Yeshua or Joshua. The name Yehoshua was translated from the Hebrew into Greek and then into Latin, where it was rendered as Iesvs or Iesous, which was then changed to Jesus in English.
Jesus would have been known as Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub (Joshua, son of Joseph, son of Jacob). He would never have been known as Jesus Christ while He was alive. In Hebrew, 'Messiah' means the anointed one. The oil used for such an anointing is called khrisma in Greek, and so an anointed person is called Khristos , which was translated into Christus in Latin and then became Christ in English. Being anointed was not a special privilege reserved for the Messiah - all sorts of people were anointed, including kings, high priests, prophets and even people suffering from some forms of sickness.
Jesus lived in Nazareth.
In fact, it's almost certain that Nazareth didn't exist as a settlement when Jesus was alive, and Jesus of Nazareth is actually a mistranslation of an Old Testament passage by whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew.
Messiah 3 Life of Christ - misconceptions (continued)
The name Iesous Nazarene or Nazareneus means that Jesus was a Nazarene, not that he came from a place called Nazareth. If the writer had meant that he did come from Nazareth, the correct word would have been either Nazarethenos or Nazarethaios . A Nazarene was an ascetic, a holy person who spent a lot of time praying, and who lived simply with no or few possessions. They were an important sect in northern Palestine.
The missing years
There's also a large gap in the story of the life of Jesus Christ that the Christian Church never mentions. His birth is talked about, then His appearance at the Temple at the age of twelve or thirteen, His ministry and of course His death and apparent Resurrection, but where was Jesus between the ages of about thirteen and thirty?
There's evidence that He spent quite a lot of His early life outside Judea, and it's possible that He actually lived in India for at least a part of this time. Such travels were not unknown in the first century AD. What later became known as the Silk Road was already well established, and there was frequent traffic between the countries around the eastern Mediterranean, and places as far away as China.
Messiah 4 The missing years (continued)
In the winter of 1887, a man named Nicolai Notovitch was travelling through India as a correspondent for the Russian journal Novaya Vremiya. In November, near Ladakh, he fell from his horse and suffered a broken leg. His bearers carried him to the Hemis Gompa monastery for treatment. While he was recovering there, Notovitch was told a story that astonished him.
He was puzzled that he'd been given such excellent treatment at the monastery, and was told by one of the lamas that they considered him to essentially share their faith, to almost be a Buddhist. Notovitch objected that he was a Christian, but the lama told him that the greatest of all the Buddhist prophets, a man named Issa, was also the founder of Christianity He produced two ancient books and read the story of Issa to Notovitch, who took notes and recorded as much as he could.
According to these books, Issa was born in Israel and arrived in India when he was about fourteen in company with a group of merchants. For the next fifteen years or so, he travelled through the sub-continent, including six years in Nepal, learning the tenets of Buddhism and acquiring a reputation as a preacher and prophet. He then returned home to Israel to combat the oppression of the Jewish people. These texts, Notovitch was told, were part of a collection of Tibetan scripts written in Pali, an old Indian language, during the first two centuries AD.
Messiah 5 The missing years (continued)
The parallels between the lives of Issa and Jesus were obvious, and on his return to Europe Notovitch tried to publicize his discovery, but every Church official, including one at the Vatican, warned him in the strongest possible terms not to try to publish anything about this strange story. The power of the Church at the end of the 19th century was sufficient to ensure that when Notovitch did finally manage to publish La Vie Inconnue de Jésus Christ in 1895, not only was the work essentially ignored, but Notovitch himself was arrested in St Petersburg and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress accused of literary activity dangerous to the state and to society. He was exiled without trial to Siberia, but was allowed to return in 1897. His ultimate fate is unknown, but he probably died in about 1916.
Various attempts have been made to debunk his claims, but without success. An impartial look at the evidence suggests that Notovitch did visit Ladakh and Hemis Gompa - the basis of at least one of the debunking attempts was that he was never there - and later travellers to the area have been told similar stories of books held at Hemis Gompa that contained accounts of the life of Jesus in India.
It's an interesting story, but without sight of the original documents held at the monastery it's unproven. But there is other evidence that suggests Jesus and Issa might have been one and the same person.
Messiah 6 The missing years (continued)
First, when Jesus reappeared in Judea as an adult, He was clearly already an accomplished prophet, which suggests He had to have learned His trade somewhere.
Second, there are a lot of similarities between what Jesus is supposed to have preached and the Buddhist religion, so if India is where He went for His formative years, its at least possible that when He returned to Judea He was essentially a Buddhist. For example, both religions cite exactly the same story of the poor widow giving two coins - all she has - at a religious gathering, and this tiny gift being fêted by the presiding priest as being more valuable than all the other contributions. As Buddhism was founded about 460 BC, it's almost possible to argue that Christianity is simply a Buddhist sect, the religious message being carried to Judea by Jesus, which then became enshrined in the Christian religion.
The third piece of circumstantial evidence is that when the first Christian missionaries arrived in Ladakh, they discovered that the local people were already very familiar with the story of Jesus/Issa, and they were carrying and using rosaries.
And then there are the problems with Jesus's crucifixion.
Messiah 7 The Crucifixion
The accepted story of the death of Jesus is perhaps the most contentious part of His life, because it simply doesn't make sense for a whole list of reasons, far too many to fully discuss here. But one of the most obvious anomalies was that Jesus apparently died within about three or four hours of being crucified, and His body was then taken down from the cross.
The whole point about crucifixion was that it was intended to be a slow, lingering and very public form of execution. That was why the Romans used it - to frighten and intimidate their subject peoples. Victims could survive for as long as four or five days on the cross if their legs weren't broken. And the bodies of victims were never removed from the cross after death. For the purposes of intimidation, they were left there to rot, and guards were routinely posted at sites of crucifixions to ensure that relatives didn't manage to steal the bodies for secret burial after death.
If Jesus's execution did take place as described in the Bible, there had to have been collusion between the Roman authorities and the Jewish people, because nothing else makes sense. And that could imply that He was still alive when he was taken down from the cross, because crucifixion was not necessarily fatal - if a victim was removed from the cross within a few hours, and if the wounds caused by the nails didn't become infected, survival was quite possible.
Messiah 8 The Crucifixion (continued)
If that was actually what occurred, Jesus obviously couldn't stay in Israel - having a condemned and crucified man walking around would have been unacceptable to the Romans - so He would have had to leave the country. And if He had spent almost half of his life in India, that would have been the obvious place for Him to return to. Which brings us to the Rozabal.
The Rozabal - it's an abbreviation of Rauza Bal , and the word rauza means the 'tomb of the prophet' - is a building in Srinigar which contains two tombs. One of them is the grave of the Islamic saint Syed Nasir-ud-Din, and points north-south, in accordance with Muslim custom. The other tomb is aligned east-west, a Jewish custom, and bears the name Yuz Asaf. This grave is unique in that it bears a carving of a pair of footprints - a common custom at the graves of saints - but also what look like the marks of crucifixion, a punishment unknown in India, on the feet. Records show that this tomb dates from at least as early as 112 AD.
According to the Farhang-i-Asafia , an ancient text that describes the history of Persia, the prophet Jesus - who was then known as Hazrat Issa - healed a group of lepers, who thereafter were referred to as Asaf , meaning the purified, because they'd been cured of their disease. Jesus or Issa then acquired the additional name Yus Asaf , meaning the leader of the healed.
Messiah 9 Jesus's appearance
What did Jesus look like? The current depictions of Him as a tall man of noble bearing with long hair and a beard have no historical basis whatsoever. In the first century AD, the average height of an adult male in Judea was about five feet.
The description of the King of the Jews from the Slavonic copy of Josephus's Capture of Jerusalem states that 'He was a man of simple appearance, mature age, dark skin, small stature, three cubits high, hunchbacked with a long face, long nose, and meeting eyebrows ... with scanty hair with a parting in the middle of his head, after the manner of the Nazarites, and with an undeveloped beard.' In the Acts of Paul and Thecla , He's described as 'a man small in size, bald-headed ... with eyebrows meeting, rather hook-nosed.'
Jesus was, according to several accounts, physically quite unattractive. In the Acts of Peter a prophet described Jesus as having 'no beauty nor comeliness', and in the Acts of John as 'a small man and uncomely'. Celsus described Jesus as 'small and ugly and undistinguished'. Tertullian said that 'He would not have been spat upon by the Roman soldiers if his face had not been so ugly as to inspire spitting.'
The first depictions of Jesus showed Him as a small man, clean shaven and with short hair. In the sixth century, He was first depicted with long hair and a beard, and He'd grown slightly.
Messiah 10 Jesus's appearance (continued)
By about the eighth century, what's now the present picture of Jesus had fully emerged. It's probable that the image on the Turin Shroud, now positively established to be an extremely accomplished medieval forgery, simply served as a reinforcement of the physical appearance of this 'new' Jesus.
The Baigdandu anomaly
I mentioned the Baigdandu anomaly in the novel, and this is real. Every few generations, a child is born in the village of Baigdandu with red hair and blue eyes. A local legend states that centuries ago a tribe of Greeks arrived in the area looking, oddly enough, for the tomb of Jesus Christ, and eventually settled there, and it's their genes that cause this aberration. I'm not a geneticist, but I have met a lot of Greeks and most of them have brown eyes and black or very dark brown hair. The idea that the present anomaly could be caused by this particular inter-marriage doesn't seem to me to make much sense.
But some of the descriptions of Issa refer to him as fair-haired with blue eyes, and logic suggests that this is a far more likely explanation of this anomaly. So it's just possible that the bloodline of the man we know as Jesus Christ is still present after two millennia, and that His genes can still be found among the inhabitants of a tiny mountain village set high in one of the remoter parts of the Kashmir.
The Nosferatu Scroll The Nosferatu Scroll - Vampires in history
Many people think that belief in vampires is a comparatively recent phenomenon, but the myth of a bloodsucking creature of the night can be traced back for thousands of years, and there is one school of thought which suggests that perhaps the most famous murder of all time was the result of an attack by a vampire.
The Bible is silent about the weapon used by Cain to kill his brother. In Genesis , it states that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. Numerous objects have been suggested as the likely murder weapon, including rocks or lengths of wood, though another theory stated that it was the jawbone of an animal, the teeth specially sharpened. Shakespeare made reference to this as the weapon in Hamlet .
But the Zohar , the group of books that provide the foundation of the Jewish Kabbalah, offers another suggestion entirely. In that work, it states explicitly that Cain bit his brother on the throat, and so it could be argued that the world's first known vampire was actually the biblical Cain.
Unlike most other monsters and demons, belief in which is often restricted to a particular geographical area or linguistic group, the vampire legend appears to have roots in nearly every country of the world. In Iran, ancient Persia, a vase was found which depicted a man being attacked by a huge creature apparently trying to suck his blood.
Nosferatu 2 Vampires in history (continued)
The mythical Babylonian deity named Lilith was reputed to drink the blood of babies. Some 6th century Chinese texts refer to so-called revenants or the living dead. Other cultures around the world, from the Aztecs to the Eskimos, and from India to Polynesia, all have legends that refer to creatures that are remarkably consistent, and eerily similar to the vampires of European fiction.
Blood, and especially the blood of virgins, became an important cure for ailments in the 11th century, being prescribed by both witches and doctors, and even the Catholic Church recognized and latched onto the symbolic importance of this belief, offering wine as the blood of Christ as a part of Holy Communion.
Belief in vampires gained ground during the Renaissance, but reached almost epidemic proportions in central Europe in the 14th century. The Black Death, the Plague that decimated the population of Europe, was believed to be caused by vampires. According to one theory, in their haste to dispose of corpses, it is quite possible that many people were buried in plague pits whilst they were still just alive. Their frantic efforts to free themselves from the earth above them, where the dead would literally seem to be rising from their graves, could have fuelled stories about the vampire myth. And there were documented cases of suspected vampires being symbolically killed before being buried, often by beheading.
Nosferatu 3 Real-life vampires
Then there were the real-life vampires, or people who just about qualified for the title. In the mid-15th century, a man named Gilles de Rais, a respected French military officer, began torturing and killing children to use their blood in various experiments. He was believed to have killed between two hundred and three hundred children before he was caught and brought to trial.
