Posted by Leper King at webproxy.einpgh.org on November 27, 1999 at 16:19:30:
Kevin,
I saw Dogma last night and i noticed the name kazantzakis glowing on the screen in conection with your search for truth... his works also formed a seminal part of my search.
I wonder if you are familiar with the Roman Emporer Julian, called the "Apostate" by his enemies?
He rejected Constantines Christianity in favor of a revived Roman paganism. He also became obsessed with the resurrection and in an effort to prove what he believed to be the grand and most central fraud surrounding christianity - that a man could become a god (other than the emporer) - julian sent out his best agents and they discovered the hiding place where the christist sect had hidden the body. the christist sect then tried to say that it was the body of john the baptist, however, the skeleton still retained its skull!
julian paraded the body and those christist prisoners who had held the body
in secret through the streets of the empire's capitol. after a
short period, he then destroyed the body publicly and declared an
end to the myth...
a year later he was killed in an ambush by alleged "Persians" with an arrow . That is the story told by julian's enemies (the christians). Julian's supporters claimed that it was a christist assassination. The results were that paganism was overthrown a final time and christianity restored until the present day as the official state religion of Rome. The part of the history about the finding, parading and destruction of the Christ's body was removed from the official histories and the resurrection story was restored.
The only remnants of this are kept in the Vatican Library in the Archives, of all places!!! also a good read on this can be found in "The Essene Origins of Christianity" by Edmond Bordeaux Szekely.
what do you think of all this?
later,
Ray