eBookProprietary (Proprietary)
Related collections and offers
Overview
In Deceptions and Myths of the Bible, Graham reintroduces us to the true origins of Adam and Eve, who were derived from a Babylonian account; to the story of Noah’s flood, which was the result of over four hundred years of flood accounts from various ancient civilizations; to the man named Moses who was fashioned after the Syrian story of Mises; and even to the laws of the Bible, which were patterned after the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. Graham points out the 137 similarities between the story of Jesus and the story of the Egyptian god Horus, and the hundreds and hundreds of similarities between the story of Christ and the Hindu god Krishna.
For any reader interested in history or theology, Graham’s book is essential, eye-opening, and controversial reading. If you are an atheist, you’ll be eager to read these arguments in support of your beliefs. If you are agnostic, you will want to have this evidence at your fingertips as you weigh systems of belief and disbelief. If you are religious, you will want to know how your faith came into being and how a study of history might shake or support your beliefs.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620875018 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 07/16/2012 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 496 |
| Sales rank: | 1,064,079 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Genesis or Creation
The Priestly Account
Divine Fiat
Heaven and earth, centre and circumference were made in the same instance of time and clouds full of water and man was created by the Trinity on the 26th of October, 4004 B.C., at 9 o'clock in the morning.
Dr. John lightfoot, 1654.
This was priestly knowledge of Creation in the seventeenth century A.D. What then of the seventh century B.C.? It should be understood that there was at that time no knowledge of man's natural development — anthropology, or of the creative process — cosmogony. To its priestly scribes this world was the center of the universe and man the sole concern of its Creator. That there were other worlds and galaxies was quite beyond their comprehension.
So let us realize that priests are not revealers of truth but only keepers of traditions, and that the purpose of both the scribes and their later translators was not to reveal the truth but to lay the basis of a theistic religion, based on the supernatural and the terrifying. This accounts for the presence here of the awesome word God. The original Hebrew did not use this singular word, or its equivalent, but the plural Elohim, many gods or aspects. Had this been followed, the mental darkness of monotheism might have been dispelled. It should also be noted that the word genesis does not mean "something out of nothing." It is a derivative of the word gene, the life germ, thus implying generation, growth. This is the key to the Mystery and if we would solve it we must make a clear distinction between the God of religion and the Creator of worlds. The one is a human ideal, the other a cosmic principle. These things understood, the interpretation offered here will not seem so preposterous.
We will not bore the reader with a verse-by-verse analysis but as with the Bible it seems a good way to begin. And so to Genesis 1:
1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
This very first verse disqualifies the Bible as authority, for it implies the aforesaid lack of knowledge. The author did not know how the world was created, and so he said a God created it. This is ignorance's way of explaining what it does not understand. The author's resort to it here is reminiscent of something a literary critic once said: "Whenever an author introduces a Chinaman in his story, I know that he is then writing about something he knows nothing about — 'the inscrutable Chinee.' "So with the author here: he too is writing about something he knew nothing about, namely, Causation and Creation, "revelation" to the contrary.
2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
"The Spirit of God" is a false term due to the idea of a personal Deity. The Creator, on the contrary, is not a spirit, nor has it a spirit; it is spirit in the sense of substance, a morally unqualified principle, whose modus operandi is that of violence. Here it moved very gently upon the waters. No mention is made of the violence involved in the creation of a world which includes the sun period, nor the trillions of years of time. No word of a "war in heaven," as of John the Revelator, nothing about a beast, a devil, a Satan-opposer — just peaceful creation by word of mouth. This is woeful ignorance of cosmogony.
In all other ancient cosmologies we find the Creator battling with some cosmic monster, out of whose body the world was formed: Sosiosh with Tiamat, Odin with Ymir, the Rig-Veda gods with Parusha, etc. This we say is pagan ignorance and Genesis the Hebrews' superior wisdom. This, for instance: "Where the Babylonian poet saw only the action of deified forces of nature the Hebrew writer saw the working of God. And that insight was Inspiration." And right there natural creation became supernatural, and that "inspiration," superstition. The result was twenty-five hundred years of benighted worship instead of welfare. This is the error and the evil this book fastened upon Western man and only now are we beginning to suspect it.
By the time this account was written the Hebrews had lost all knowledge of Causation and Creation and Genesis 1 is the result. In writings much older than this we find their Yahweh battling with Leviathan, the dragon, the serpent, Isaiah, 27:1. Psalm 74 reads thus: "Thou breakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness." And in the Apocryphal Book of Enoch we read: "In that day shall be distributed for food two monsters; a feminine monster, whose name is Leviathan, dwelling in the depths of the sea, above the springs of waters; and a male monster whose name is Behemoth. ..." In job41:10, God and Leviathan are as one: "None is so fierce that dare stir him (Leviathan) up: who then is able to stand before me?"
Why then is this aspect absent in the Priestly account? Besides the fact that the priests needed the divine, the perfect, the supernatural for their religion, its absence is due to the translators' ignorance of the words they were translating, words such as bara tebom, tohu, bohu, and others. These do convey a hint of warfare and violence. The original Hebrew reads thus: "In the beginning Elohim (many gods) bara (not created, but cut out) the heavens and the earth. And the earth was tobu and bahu, and darkness was on the surface of the tehom"
Tebom is the primordial ocean, space or Absolute. Tobu and bohu, mistranslated "without form and void," connotes the monstrous and the violent. As Professor Jeremias, the German orientalist, says: "There can be no doubt that tohu is connected with Ti(h)amat and buhu with Behemoth. Bohu is the equivalent of the Babylonian Apsu, the male mate of Tiamat." Thus bohu and Behemoth arc the Hebrew equivalents of Tiamat, Ymir, Purusha, and so on, all therianistic symbols of the violent elements with which the Creator had to contend. Elsewhere they are called turbulentos.
According to its apologists, the Bible is a Hebrew refinement of all pagan theologies and cosmologies, a process that completely obscured all knowledge of Causation and Creation. As Bellamy says: "But we must not forget that the report in Genesis has only come down to us in its sublimated — and therefore from the mythologists' standpoint, very unoriginal, not to say corrupted — form. Nevertheless, if we listen carefully to the Hebrew wording of the first verses in Genesis, we still find traces of the original meaning which no priestly editor has been able to extirpate."
3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Here begins that fatal personification that has deceived the human race. A personal and vocal God said, "Let there be light." God said nothing of the kind; the allegorist said He said it, which makes all the difference between superstition and knowledge. Man puts words into the mouth of his creations then later believes these creations spoke.
4. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
Here again, God saw the light, and thought it good, but how did this priestly scribe know that He did? Did God tell him so trillions of years after the act? No, the world exists and the author just assumed its various stages were right and proper. That this light is not sunlight is obvious, since the sun, the stars, were not created till the fourth day. On the contrary, this light is that first primordial "light shining in darkness," and it was not produced by some deity saying Let it be. The one creative energy separated into two, positive and negative, and their interaction produced something luminous compared to the darkness of the Absolute. According to the New Testament this "light shining in darkness" was Christ, but actually it was Lucifer, the Son of the Morning, of creation; in the power sense, none other than the Creator himself. It is the Hebrew concealment of this fact that has hidden from us the true nature of Causation; the result has been twenty-five centuries of spiritual ignorance. This ignorance must now be dispelled. The time has come for an "agonizing reappraisal" of the entire scriptures, and Genesis is the place to start. Therefore we too say, Let there be light, but this time the light of understanding.
5. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
Please note the capitals here. As the earth has not yet been formed nor the sun created, they are not our day and night; they are what the Hindus call the Day and Night of Brahma, the Creator — immeasurable periods in the creative process. In this account the Days are from the evening to the morning; that is, from the darkness of the Absolute (nonbeing) to the light of Being. As these Days are billions if not trillions of years, we see here how much is covered and covered up, by these four words, "Let there be light," and also how little they explain.
6. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so.
8. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
The word firmament in Hebrew is rakia and means only a wide expanse, namely, space. In this is the nascent planetary entity, a vast globular field of cosmic energy — the "ring-pass-not" of ancient cosmology. The division of the waters (energy) above and below is but the division of the planetary elements from the Absolute, Being from nonbeing.
9. And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
By assuming that this "dry land" is our present physical earth we have missed the whole meaning of this chapter, namely, that it deals only with the prephysical world. The division here is not that between land and water but between the spiritual and the material, the Trinity and the Quaternary. This took place on the cusp of the third and fourth involutionary planes. The priestly error lies in leaving the spiritual behind to be worshiped and adored, whereas the material four are the concretion of the spiritual three. The Creator burns his bridges behind him, but this would never do for a religion and so the priest concealed it.
10. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
The "earth" here is the earth-entity, at the fourth plane and still invisible. So with the "seas." Throughout both the Old and the New Testament the three planes between the spiritual and the physical are called "seas," "waters," etc. Between this fourth plane and physical earth is the sun period, a matter of trillions of years. This the priest was either ignorant of or did not want known. The authors of the New Testament knew it, but presented it in a manner too occult for modern man to grasp. Later we will explain it.
11. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
This priestly scribe saw clearly that everything in the world comes from a seed within itself, but he could not, or would not, see that this is so of the world also. Had he said that it is a cosmic plant "whose seed is in itself," what a difference it would have made. The supernatural would not have blinded us to the natural; "divinity" would not have diverted us from Reality.
12. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself....
Grass, trees, fruit, and all this before the sun was created or ever it had rained on the earth, according to Genesis 2:5. This is real occultism and not one of our ecclesiastics knows what it means. With our theory, however, its meaning is obvious. On this third day and plane, grass, trees and fruit are purely ideative, defined in our outline as planetary ideation. On the metaphysical planes below, this becomes archetypal. There can be no other meaning to Genesis 2:4-5. "... the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew. "The Jews got this bit of occult truth from the Hindus. According to their cosmology all evolutionary forms were first created in mental, astral and etheric matter in Involution, these serving later as models for the physical. This does not mean that every form that has appeared in Evolution was there in archetype, thus proving each a permanent entity as some would like to believe; on the contrary, the specie and kingdom prototypes were there and their first evolutionary counterparts were endowed from the beginning with the capacity for incalculable proliferation, hence the myriads today. Be this as it may, to understand the myths such as this we must cease to think of the earth as of now and think in terms of a cosmic entity, invisible but evolving and creating for trillions of years before it became a visible, concrete object. This is the aforesaid key to the biologic kingdoms. There the reader may have had his doubts, not knowing he had read it all before in his holy scriptures.
13. And the evening and the morning were the third day.
This third day and plane is the end of the ideative period and you will remember it was here Uranus, the last god in the Greek trinity, was dispatched. This is correct since he represented the end of ideation. Creation went on, however, under Cronos. This is Greek henotheism — one god at a time. No such change is recognised by the priest, however; to him the same God remains throughout, external and omnipotent. Now since there is only one Creator, this method is defensible, but it hides from us the all important fact that the creation of worlds is a natural process, cyclical in nature and incalculable in time.
14. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years:
15. And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18. And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
And now that the earth is ready for business, it needs lights, and presto! they're made. Kindergarten cosmology, also geocentric — the sun, the moon, the stars were made just to give light to the earth. Again we wonder what these semiancients knew about galaxies a billion light years away. Yet here and there in their borrowed cosmology we find traces of the original occult meaning in spite of the priests' destruction thereof. This is such a case and it is truer than modern science. For decades science told us the earth was thrown off from the sun; now it is back with Dr. Lightfoot and the priest — instantaneous creation, not only of the world but the universe. The priest must have nodded here for all unintentionally he tells us the earth was made first, and this is correct. The earth is older far than the sun; as we said, suns are the youngest visible bodies in the universe. At the time in the earth's history referred to here, our sun was not yet visible and the moon was a nascent planet. The contemporary suns of that time had existed for billions of years and are now planets also.
20. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
The "waters" here are still prephysical substances. In Evolution these become the seven planes, and these are the seven heavens of the Cabala and some religions.
21. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
Well, seeing's believing. Apparently this God wasn't sure until he did see. As for whales: if these creatures evolved from land animals, science would say this reveals a woeful lack of knowledge of Evolution, but this is not Evolution: it is Involution and the whales are archetypal whales. The Bible does not stop to explain; it merely states occult truths in cryptic fashion and leaves us to understand when and if we can. The tragedy is that it has never been understood in the Piscean Age.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Deceptions and Myths of the Bible"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Lloyd Graham.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface 1
Premise: A Genetic Cosmo-Conception 8
Causation 9
Energy (Source) 14
Planetary Elements 16
Qualities 18
Laws 19
Biologic Forms 20
Cosmic Forms 21
Summary 25
The Scriptures: The Concealed Truth Revealed
Chapter I Genesis or Creation 27
The Priestly Account 27
Divine Fiat 27
Eden, The Garden of Eden, Paradise, etc. 43
Chapter II The Jhwhistic Account 46
Genesis: Second Chapter 46
Chapter III The Serpent 56
Come Back to Erin 59
Chapter IV Genesis: Third Chapter 61
Chapter V Genesis: Fourth Chapter 77
Chapter VI Noah and the Flood 85
Chapter VII The Tower of Babel 105
Genesis: Eleventh Chapter 105
Chapter VIII Abraham, Isaac and Jacob 109
Abraham 109
Isaac 126
Jacob 129
Chapter IX Joseph 137
Chapter X Exodus, or Evolution 145
Chapter XI Mount Sinai and the Laws 174
Chapter XII Joshua 188
Chapter XIII Judges and Kings 202
Judges 202
Samson 203
Samuel, Saul and David 208
David 213
Psalms 218
Solomon 220
Chapter XIV The Prophets 236
Isaiah, Ezra, Nehemiah 237
Elijah 244
Elisha 248
Chapter XV Ezekiel's Vision 252
Chapter XVI Daniel 256
Chapter XVII Jonah 262
Chapter XVIII Job 269
Chapter XIX The New Testament 279
The Mythical Nature of Christ 279
The Social Context 294
Chapter XX The Gospel Story 297
Chapter XXI The Miracles 320
Turning the Water into Wine 321
Feeding the Multitude 324
Walking on the Water 328
The Transfiguration 332
The Crucifixion 345
The Resurrection 356
Chapter XXII Revelation, Part I 363
Chapter XXIII Revelation, Part II 388
Ephesus 392
Smyrna 394
Pergamos 395
Laodicea 396
Thyatira 399
Sardis 402
Philadelphia 404
Chapter XXIV Paul 409
Chapter XXV Christianity: Its False Doctrines 422
Chapter XXVI The Church: Its False Foundation 437
The Dark and Middle Ages 455
Index 475