High Stakes Read Free

was Dionysius. Horus, a major god of the Egyptian religion, was born of the virgin Isis and, coincidently, was also supposedly born in a stable. Mithra, the main god in Mithraism, which was a major religion of Rome, was conceived when God in the form of light entered a virgin. Myrrha was a virgin who gave birth to Adonis in Phoenician mythology. As you can see, the concept of a virgin birth was not new and its mythology permeated throughout cultures at the time.
    Only the gospels of Matthew and Luke mention the virgin birth and both are dated by scholars after the Gospel of Mark and the Epistles of Paul. Neither Mark nor Paul mentions the virgin birth. Many scholars ask why not? Matthew bases his virgin birth story on the prophecy of Isaiah (Isaiah 7:14); but that prophecy clearly states that the name of the child will be Immanuel, not Jesus. Many scholars believe that this prophecy actually refers to another child later on in Isaiah (Isaiah 8:3–4) and is not a prophecy concerning the Messiah. In fact, as we will see later on, many of the so-called prophecies concerning the Messiah are very dubious and have blatantly been misinterpreted. I am not saying this, but Biblical scholars are. Paul in Galatians (4:4) says, “But when the time had fully come, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem under the law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.” Most scholars say that the message here is that Jesus was a normal Jewish child called by God. If indeed Mary was a virgin, why not say so? Instead, he used the term woman.
    As we will see throughout this book (as well as others on Jesus), many of the facts of Christ’s life are based on the Bible. That is well and good to a point. After all, for many years it was the only source we had that had any substantial accounts of even a portion of Jesus’ life. But most people have not done a lot of research on the Bible and how it came into being, just as they have not researched how Christianity came into being. The Bible is considered a holy book and the word of God by many Christians, but as many scholars have pointed out, the Bible can contain errors, inconsistencies and downright falsehoods!
    We must remember that historically the Bible did not take its form until the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D . That is some three hundred years after the life of Christ. Now, three hundred years is a long time, but on top of that we must also realize that it was put together by the early Catholic Church and was edited, rewritten, purged of what the early Church deemed heretical, and manipulated for their own agenda. Do you realize that even today no one knows who actually wrote the four gospels of the New Testament!
    Biblical scholars believe that Matthew, Luke and Mark were written by the same writer, for the writing style is similar as are the stories, and that John was written by another writer because the writing style is different and also brings in new portions of Christ’s life. I don’t know about you, but I envision a little monk about a hundred or so years after Christ writing these stories that we know as the gospels of the New Testament. I am not going to go into a long treatise on how the Bible was written or put together other than to say that as far as the New Testament is concerned, its beginnings and writings are highly suspect, highly prejudicial, and were formulated and edited by the early Christian Church. In other words, as usual, man put his hand in it and messed it all up.
    The Bible was written and edited in a time of extreme ignorance, in which the general populace was basically uneducated and illiterate. The early Christian Church was also at that time in the throes of formulation, with constant infighting and politics coming into play as Pauline Christians (those following the beliefs of Paul), Jewish Christians (those following the beliefs of Christ’s brother James), and Gnostic Christians (those following