Gemstone Files entry for February, 1972:

"The day before [Bruce Roberts’ father was allegedly murdered by Watergate ‘Plumbers’ Dale, Martinez, Gonzalez, and Barker in a San Francisco hospital], Tisseront , head of the College of Cardinals at the Vatican, was pushed out of a Vatican window. Tisseront had followed the career of the present Pope, Montini (whose mother was Jewish). Montini sodium-morphate murdered Pope Pius XI; was banished from Rome for it by Pius XII; became Pope in 1963. Tisseront wrote it all down; called the Pope “The Deputy of Christ at Auschwitz,” and the fulfillment of the Fatima 3 Prophecy: that “The anti-Christ shall rise to become head of the Church.” Tisseront also wrote about all the suppressed secrets of the Roman Catholic Church: i.e., that Jesus Christ was an Arab, born April 16, 6 BC at the rare conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. Arab (Persian) astronomers (the Magi) came to Bethlehem to look for their king, an Arab baby and found him in a stable, because the Jews wouldn’t let Arabs Mary and Joseph into their nice clean inns, even then. When Jesus overturned the tables of the money lenders at the Temple, the Jews had the Romans nail him to a Cross. He died on the cross when the Roman soldiers stuck a spear in his side, pulled out his liver, and ate it. Tacitus, the Roman historian, described it all in a chunk of history deleted by the Church. Nero burned Rome but that didn’t stop the spreading of Moses’ teachings by the early Christians (Arabs).

So the Romans decided to adopt the religion, clean it up, make Christ a Jew and Mary a virgin, and work out a church-state deal to fool the people in the name of God and country that had been operating ever since. Around 311 AD at the council of Nicasa , the Christian Orthodoxy was established: a dissenting bishop had his hands chopped off; another bishop was assigned to round up all the old copies of the Bible and destroy them in favor of the “revised” de-Arabized version. Cleaned up Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were declared “it”, the other Gospels were declared Apocryphal, and heretical. Roman Emperor Constantine became the first “Christian” emperor. Later, during the holy crusades, the Bible was again rewritten to include Jesus’ warning against the 'yellow race.’ “

And that is the Gospel according to Bruce Roberts, or whoever provided him with that bizarre revision of two thousand years of Christianity. Jesus an Arab? Suppression by the early church of dissident Gospels? The Bible, the sacred word of God, rewritten, revised, and altered to accommodate the changing political climate and the ambitions of Church and State? A half-Jewish Pope who collaborated with the Nazis and murdered his way to the Triple Crown? Absurd? Impossible? Unthinkable? Blasphemous?

Who else but a paranoid lunatic, one who thought that the Kennedy assassination was the result of a turf war to control organized crime in America between Howard Hughes and Aristotle Onassis, who else but someone like that, like Bruce Roberts’, would even entertain such ideas, let alone believe them? But is there any validity to what he claimed? To dissect his claims one by one:

According to his obituary in the New York Times (1), Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, age 87, died of a heart attack on 2/21/72 at the Regina Apostalorum Clinic in Albano, Italy, a “hill village twenty-six miles south-east of Rome.” He had checked into the clinic in July of 1971 to be treated “for a form of prostatic hypertrophy”, that is, enlargement of the prostate gland, a common and potentially fatal ailment in elderly men.

Tisserant had a long and distinguished career in the Church. An Oriental languages scholar (he spoke eleven different tongues), he did field research in Jerusalem and other areas of the Middle East. He was curator of Oriental manuscripts in the Vatican Library, and as administrator of it, he reorganized and modernized it. If there was a suppressed secret at the heart of the Christian religion, and it was documented, Tisserant would be the man who would have known. Tisserant was Dean of the College of Cardinals during the elections of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, two Popes who initiated the reforms that proceeded from the Second Vatican Council. As a conservative, Tisserant felt “uneasy about the tides of change swelling the Church”, yet it was also claimed that he “had little interest in Church politics.”

A workaholic despite his advanced age, Tisserant retired only because of “papal pressure”—-from Paul VI, the Pope Bruce Roberts claimed poisoned Pius XI, and which Tisserant documented in his diary. The fact that Tisserant was being pressured by the Pope to retire {Paul VI had apparently instituted mandatory retirement for Vatican clerics, another innovation], and that Tisserant was visited on the morning he died by Vatican Secretary of State Jean Cardinal Villot, who was as liberal as Tisserant was conservative, and who "conveyed the blessings of Pope Paul VI", may have led Roberts to believe that Tisserant was murdered. It was sometime between February 1972 and January 1973 that Roberts received--or claimed to receive--a copy of Tisserant's diary:

" January, 1973: Tisseront [sic] was dead--but as the Church rushed to destroy every copy of his papers, Roberts received one--and wrote a few of his own, released over New years':

1. "The Cover-Up of the Murder of Christ"

4. "Vietnam--Fatima 3--Holy crusade."

[Numbers 2 and 3 are not relevant to this discussion.]

It is not impossible that Roberts received a document--from what source he doesn't even hint--that purported to be a copy of Tisserant's secret diary. It was apparently common knowledge--or at least a common presumption--among Vaticanologists that Tisserant was keeping diaries for the purpose of eventual publication. Roberts could have been the victim of a hoaxer, if we charitably disregard the possibility of Roberts himself being that hoaxer. Or Roberts may have been merely guessing at solutions to fragmentary information that he may have been receiving from a variety of contradictory sources, and claiming to have the elusive documentation from high places in order to confer the aura of authority upon his own pet theories.

Whatever the reason, Bruce Roberts did not make up the claim that Pope Pius XI was murdered by poisoning, he merely added his own twist to it by accusing Giovanni Battista Montini, the then current Pope Paul VI, of being the guilty party. Other fingers have pointed at one Dr. Francesco Petacci, a Vatican physician and father of an actress, Clara Petacci, who just happened to be the mistress of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini 'the pair would be executed together, and their corpses exposed to the abuses of a crowd of disillusioned former admirers).

Pius XI had been an early supporter of Mussolini's, having once declared him (December 20,1926), "the man sent by Providence". (2) In 1929, Pius and II Duce signed the Lateran Treaty, which in essence recognized Roman Catholicism as the sole official religion of the Italian state even as the Vatican itself was recognized as a sovereign state and the Pope as inviolable. Mussolini, for his part, received the tacit approval, if not blessings, of the Papacy, which at this time feared the imminent eruption of godless Bolshevik revolutions. But Mussolini didn't uphold his end of the bargain on all counts and in 1931 Pius gave the dictator a tongue-lashing in an official encyclical. Pius didn't seem to learn his lesson, because in 1933 he forged a similar Concordat with yet another champion of Christian civilization, Adolph Hitler. The Nazis also reneged and Pius denounced Nazism in yet another encyclical in 1937. By this time even Pius had wised up, and regretting his former accomodationism with the two fascist regimes (not, it must be emphasized, because of their flagrant abuses of human rights per se but because of their flouting of the agreed-upon privileges and prerogatives of the Catholic Church), he resolved to correct his error by condemning fascism-nazism in no uncertain terms. In February 1939, with the wholesale attacks on Jews and the rapid escalation towards another world war, Pius fell ill while working on his speech, and begged his doctors to keep him alive long enough to deliver it.

It was only twenty-four hours before he was to deliver the speech, on the tenth anniversary of the concordat with Mussolini, ironically enough, that he suddenly died. The text of the speech disappeared. Allegedly, Petacci, in his role as a Vatican physician killed Pius by injecting him with a poison (probably not Roberts' ubiquitous sodium morphate), and embalming the body before an autopsy could be conducted. ( 3 )

According to John Cornwell, this revelation originated in "a scurrilous book entitled The Vatican Papers by one Nino LoBello" whose source "was the private diary of the powerful French cardinal of that period, Eugene Tisserant." (4) Anthony Rhodes, in his book on the relations between the Popes and the fascist dictators, states:

"Since this was written [the passages dealing with the death of Pius XI], allegations have appeared in the French and Italian press (1972) that Pius XI in his last illness was assassinated at the order of Mussolini, who had learned of the contents of the Pope's coming speech. They are based on the "revelations" said to be contained in the memoirs of the late Cardinal Tisserant...Arguments for and against this thesis continue to be bandied about, and will doubtless be repeated when Cardinal Tisserant's memoirs are published."

Rhodes discounts the assassination theory, noting that Pius, aged 82 years when he died on February 10, 1939, had nearly died in 1937 of a combination of "cardiac weakness, arteriosclerosis, and asthma", and he suffered another heart attack in November,1938, (6) implying that it wouldn't have taken much to kill an old and ailing man like Pius. Rhodes also notes that the British ambassador to the Vatican, D'Arcy Osborne, did not refer to any rumors or suspicions of assassination in his diplomatic cables to London at that time, and he would have had ample reason for publicizing any accusations of fascist murder of the Pope.

Another writer who recounts the tale of Mussolini's poisoning of Pius is Avro Manhattan (7). He also attributes Tisserant's unpublished diaries as the verification of this claim. Unlike Bruce Roberts, he does not claim to have seen a copy of Tisserant's actual papers, but claims for his source a mutual friend of both himself and the deceased Pope, Dom Luigi Sturzo, priest and founder of the Italian Catholic Action Party in the 1920's. Manhattan claims that Tisserant's diaries were removed from the Cardinal's home in France (he doesn't say by whom) upon his death, and taken to the safety of a Swiss bank vault. Supposedly, Tisserant himself had given strict instructions (again, Manhattan does not reveal to whom) no circumstances were the diaries to fall into the hands of the Vatican. No doubt, as one well advanced in the Vatican hierarchy, Tisserant (8) knew only too well the Church's penchant for rewriting history to its convenience.

Contrary to the Roberts-Gemstone version, none of these sources implicate Monsignor Montini, later Pope Paul VI, in the murder of Pope Pius XI. It is significant that Rhodes indicates 1972, the year of the deaths of both Tisserant and Roberts' father, as the year when the French and Italian press began to publicize that Pius XI was murdered on orders from Mussolini. Roberts could have gleaned this from readings of the foreign press, and as speculated before, twisted the theory to suit his own purposes. Roberts could not have gotten his information from either Manhattan or Cornwell since their respective books were published after the Gemstone Files were initially released, and after Bruce Roberts died in 1976 (1982 for Manhattan's book, 1989 for Cornwell's). However, Manhattan wrote many books on the Vatican, and could well have recounted the murder story in an earlier volume than the one cited here, and which Roberts could have conceivably read.

The other allegations made against Montini/Pope Paul in the Gemstone Files also do not seem to bear any resemblance to reality. There is little reason to believe that Montini's mother was Jewish. This just seems to be a gratuitous dose of anti-Semitism, as Roberts' seems to be implying that Montini's alleged Jewish maternity (which would officially make him a Jew, no matter what his religion, by Orthodox Jewish law) made him a fraud unfit to be Pope. Whatever Montini's mother's ethnicity, she was an apparent devout Catholic who had married into an upper-class Lombard family which had produced clerics over the past five centuries. Montini 's "banishment" from Rome by Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) came in 1954--fifteen years after Pius XII's coronation and fifteen years during which Montini served Pius as an advisor and unofficial Secretary of State--and came a year after he fallen afoul of arch-conservative Pro-Secretary of State for Extraordinary Affairs, Cardinal Tardini, over the issue of Montini's advocacy of the French "worker-priest" movement, a precursor of the current Liberation Theology. His banishment consisted of being named Archbishop of Milan, barely a hardship considering that the position practically assured, traditionally, election to the office of cardinal; an office Tardini rejected in 1953, according to rumor, merely to prevent the (as he saw it) pro-Socialist Montini from accepting the Red Hat when the Pope offered it to them both. (9)

As for Montini/Paul VI being "The Deputy of Christ at Auschwitz", the closest Montini got to the site of the infamous Nazi concentration camp was in 1923 when he served as secretary to the papal nuncio in Warsaw, when Auschwitz was still an obscure village in the south of Poland, near Cracow, called Oswiecim. Montini's health failed him in Poland, and after six months he was sent back to Rome, not to step foot out of Italy again (at least according to available records) until his papacy. (10)

The allegation that Montini was the fulfillment of the third Fatima prophecy--that "The anti-Christ shall rise to become head of the Church"--is more hearsay. It not only requires a belief in the veracity of the Fatima incident, but in the reality of the anti-Christ and its converse, in other words, in a belief in Catholic theology. Without that belief, terms like "anti-Christ" are meaningless , even as metaphor. No doubt many outraged traditionalist Catholics, and Cardinal Tisserant may or may not have been one of them, viewed Paul VI as the very devil in view of the Vatican II reforms for which he was primarily responsible, but Christians have been in the habit of playing pin-the-tail-on-the-anti-Christ since the Book of Revelation was written, and one man's anti-Christ has often been another's saint. As for the "Fatima 3 Prophecy", it refers to what was supposed to have been told to three shepherd children near Fatima, Portugal in 1917 by none other than the Virgin Mary herself. She prophesied to them, so the story goes, that the world would witness a "horrible, horrible war" (the world was already in the middle of a horrible war), that Russia must be converted (to Catholicism) or else this horrible, horrible war was guaranteed, and a third, allegedly even grimmer prophecy that the Church refused to make public. (11)

Over the years, rumors have circulated as to the contents of that third prophecy. Every possible assertion has been delivered, with varying degrees of conviction, including the one favored by Bruce Roberts. It has been claimed that Montini's patron, Pope Pius XII, a man given to seeing "apparitions", nearly fainted upon being told what the third prophecy was. This legend may have given rise to the speculation, on the part of Roberts and others, that the revelation was the near-future succession to the papal throne of the anti-Christ.

In the January, 1973 Gemstone entry, Roberts cryptically links "Fatima 3" with "Vietnam" and "Holy Crusade". It was actually no secret that the Vatican considered --and used--the Fatima "prophecies " as one of its must effective weapons in its Holy Crusade against godless Communism, a Crusade engineered by none other than Pius XII, firm believer in the Fatima "visitation", himself.

Ironically enough, Roberts may have confused Montini with Pius XII when he accused the former of being the "Deputy of Christ at Auschwitz". The controversy stills rages over the extent of the Vatican's complicity with the fascist states. Pius XI championed and engineered concordats with both Mussolini and Hitler before the scales fell from his eyes. His successor, Pius XII, has been the focus of even more bewilderment and invective over his official silence in condemning the Nazi Endlosung--"Final Solution"--of the Jews fascist war crimes in general. As Papal Nuncio to Germany in the 1930s, Pius XII (then Cardinal Pacelli), according to Avro Manhattan, helped pave the way to power for Hitler by ordering the Catholic Center Party to dissolve, thus making it easier for the Nazis to win the 1933 election. By his lack of forceful condemnation of Third Reich policies, Manhattan and similar critics charge, Pius XII tacitly encouraged Hitler's intransigence and helped bring the onslaught of World War II and its accompanying horrors. Other critics have been even more severe, accusing Pius XII of having been pro-German (he spent many years in Germany as nuncio, and often expressed his affection for the German people, which as one of his defenders correctly states, is not the same thing as being pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic). Whatever the consequences of Pius XII's policies, his major intention seems to have been securing the Church from persecution in the fascist states, a policy that was not always successful. A common explanation by Catholic apologists for the Vatican's reluctance to condemn the fascists in blunt, unmitigated terms was the fear that the Pope, by such harangues, would endanger not only Catholics under fascist sway, but also provoke the Nazis into committing even more brutal atrocities against Jews and other minorities.

The current Pope, John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) has also been accused of being a Nazi collaborator, even before he entered the church. According to some Jewish authors, fundamentalist Protestant preachers, and certain disciples of conspiriologist Mae Brussell, John Paul II worked in Nazi-occupied Poland for either Solvay Drugs of the I.G. Farben cartel in a factory at Auschwitz, or as a salesman for Farben's chemical division, selling Zyklon B, the deadly cyanide gas, directly to the Nazi camp at Auschwitz. Supposedly, John Paul, an actor by inclination, entered the priesthood in 1946 in order to escape arrest and trial as a Nazi war criminal. (13) While fundamentalists of certain sects cannot be regarded as objective or reliable in matters concerning the Catholic Church, Avro Manhattan (14) reports that not even Wojtyla's closest friend and confidante, Bishop Andre Deskur, would reveal what John Paul did during the war years. Manhattan calls this "Wojtyla's twilight period, not to be found in any public record." (15) It is possible, but extremely unlikely, that Roberts may have heard something about the alleged Nazi connection of this then obscure Polish cardinal, and either deliberately or unwittingly, confused him with Pope Paul VI. But it is most likely--barring the even more unlikely possibility that Roberts did have a copy of Tisserant's papers and faithfully paraphrased them in the Gemstone Files--that Roberts merely let his paranoid imagination run wild with certain persistent rumors that appealed to his anti-Catholic prejudices, and mixed them together to vilify the Pope at that time, Paul VI. But if Bruce Roberts was really the insider that he liked to portray himself as, why did he not mention in the Gemstone Files the allegations that Paul VI was a CIA asset?

Despite his upper-class background and the patronage of the reactionary Pius XII, Paul VI developed left-wing sympathies and continued, as Pope, the “dialouge" between the Church and the Kremlin begun by his predecessor John XXIII. When John XXIII died in 1963, CIA analysts predicted Montini's election to the papacy, an event that did not please them, Montini being too "liberal" for the Company's liking. Yet Montini had ties to the CIA going back to World War II when, in his capacity as officer of the Papal Secretariat, he had passed on information to the ass, the CIA's wartime parent agency. As Montini was one of four heads of Vatican Intelligence and the keeper of the key to the Vatican's secret code, it was a role he was well suited for. (17)

After the war, as archbishop of Milan, "he turned over to the CIA comprehensive dossiers on politically active priests. These were to be used to influence the Italian elections of 1960. (18) To express their gratitude, the CIA made generous donations to various Milanese charities under Montini's benefaction. Despite his services to them, the CIA was leery of Montini and were determined to do what they could to prevent him from becoming Pope, which in hindsight, must not have been very much. (19) It would seem difficult to understand what sort of game Montini/Paul VI was playing until one reflects on the simple, constant fact of Catholic "foreign policy" : no matter what the relationship between the Vatican and any state or ideology, or the personal political implications of individual Popes, the Vatican's chief concern is the preservation and extension of its own power and influence. The Vatican accommodates itself with whatever secular ideology happens to be currently dominant, and looks to the future to ascertain the likelihood of that dominance continuing.

In the 1960's, many in the Vatican hierarchy, including two Popes John XXIII and Paul VI) were convinced that Capitalism was waning and the future was assured for Communism. It was an opinion that millions of people believed--or wanted to believe--and there seemed a great deal of evidence to support it. The Church was preparing itself for existence in a potential Communist world, at the same time as it continued to placate the power of the still dominant capitalist west, namely the United States. The Church was never "in favor" of either system, because neither system placed the Church at the center of its ideology. So the Church, being the Repository of Truth for all Mankind, knew how to play the two off against each other by appropriating selected rhetoric from both sides for its own propaganda purposes, to appear the lone voice of sanity and humane philosophy in a world menaced by the militancy of the two contending nuclear super-powers. (20)

It was this inability to see the Big Picture, to reduce everything to the Machiavellian machinations of diabolical individual conspirators, that I think discredits the Gemstone Files--at least in this particular instance--as being a reliable source on covert politics. If anything went out a window anywhere on February 21, 1972, it was Bruce Roberts credibility.

PART 2

It is the second part of the February, 1972 Gemstone entry that makes the most mind-blowing claims, “dealing with the true identity of Jesus and "The Cover-Up of the Murder of Christ" (as he puts it later in the January, 1973 entry). While there is never any shortage of those willing to believe the worst--no matter how bizarre--accusations against the Catholic Church, it never seems to occur to many of these non-Catholic Christians, who hold that "true" Christianity was perverted by Rome until rescued by Protestantism, that there may be something wrong with their religion in essence, and not merely in the Roman version of it. These are the same sorts who would lap up everything Roberts claimed about the Vatican and its "anti-Christ" Pope, and then go into a state of hyper-tension upon reading Roberts "revelations" concerning Jesus from Tisserant's alleged secret diary. Whether Roberts really believed these things or whether he was just gleefully indulging in a little subversion of cherished certitudes is neither verifiable nor relevant. He had to have made it up, because he got too many minor details wrong for it to have come from the papers of a Middle Eastern scholar like Tisserant. Roberts claims that the Magi who came to Bethlehem were "Arab Persian astronomers" .The original Magi--the Three Wise Men-- were "the three stars in the Belt of Orion, pointing to Osiris' star Sothis (Sirius), which 'rose in the east' to announce the corning of the Savior at the season of the Nile flood.

These three Belt stars were still called Magi in the Middle Ages. (21) By Roman times, when Jesus was said to have been born, Magi meant Persian astronomer-astrologers who were associated with the cult of Mithra, a Persian deity whose mythology and rituals were appropriated nearly wholesale by the later Christian cult as it sought to Romanize itself. In fact, the very story of the Magi searching out the new-born Messiah came directly from Mithraism. Roberts correctly surmised the astrological allegory of the nativity story, but muddled the Magi's ethnicity by claiming Persians (Iranians) are Arabs. They are a distinctly different ethnic group, and the only reason many people today confuse them with Arabs is because they are now Muslims, and most Americans think all Muslims are Arabs. It is unlikely that the exact date of Jesus' birth could have been known. Traditionally, December 25 has been regarded as the date of birth because it was the birth date of Mithra and a host of other pagan sun gods who were born during the winter solstice, the Dies Natalis Solis Invictus Birthday of the Invincible Sun. December 25 was not even officially adopted by the Christian church, in Rome, until the fourth century CE, nearly four-hundred years after Jesus' alleged birth. The Eastern Christian churches never have accepted the date. The early Christian church didn't even find the Savior's birth date relevant. (22)

Roberts uses his claim of Jesus' concealed Arab identity to dish out some more anti-Semitism, making a crack about the Jews being unwilling "to let Arabs Mary and Joseph into their nice clean inns, even then." An ironic joke on Israel's ongoing expulsion of Palestinians from their land in order to provide more Lebensraum for Jewish immigrants for those who think the analogy strained, consider that many Israeli critics of their government's policies, such as Israel Shahak, have described Israel as an apartheid state comparable to its ally South Africa), it is the only example of real humor in the Gemstone Files, causing one to wonder if one of Gemstone's many samizdat compilers didn't insert it. Roberts sticks to the conventional outline of Jesus' life when discussing the Crucifixion, until he claims that "the Roman soldiers stuck a spear in his side, pulled out his liver, and ate these were it." Obviously these legionnaires were the first and ultimate communicants of the Eucharist!

Roberts' Christ does not rise from the dead, nor does he indicate why a religion would rise--or be engineered--around a crucified prophet who failed to come back to life. He next claims that Tacitus, the Roman historian (c.55-1 7 CE) recorded the true story of the Crucifixion, but the Church "deleted " it. Not all of Tacitus works have survived, and the Church certainly did alter, re-write, expunge, and destroy works which ran counter to its self-image, so this is not an impossibility. But as the Church was usually very thorough in its destruction, it would be impossible to know that Tacitus had written such a thing unless it had either been referred to by some other contemporary writer (usually a Christian writer eager to refute it), or the Church had kept a copy secretly. Since this information supposedly came to Roberts from the secret papers of Tisserant', it would do to remember that Tisserant was an expert on ancient documents and one time head of the Vatican Library.

Roberts then asserts that Nero burned Rome 64 CE), a popular rumor at the time which Tacitus believed and reported in his Annals. Nero blamed the fire on the then insignificant sect of Christians, and began the first persecution of them, burning many of them alive in gardens. However, there are scholars who doubt both the story of Nero setting Rome on fire (he certainly didn't fiddle while it happened, as there were no violins then) and the persecution of and the Christians- point out that the Annals of Tacitus are incomplete and most probably tampered with. The passage which details the persecution of the Christians by Nero was unknown, never referred to by any other writer, pro-or anti-Christian in antiquity. It first surfaced in an edition printed in Venice in 468. (23)

Despite this fact, it continues to be cited as a genuine passage proving the existence, thirty-some years after the crucifixion, of a large colony of Christians in Rome and their unjust persecution by an emperor regarded as one of the wickedest and most depraved. (24) Then, according to Roberts, to counteract the growing popularity of the Christian cult (who are here Arabs engaged in the "spreading of Moses' teachings"--if these Arabs accepted Moses' teachings, then wouldn't they be Jews?), "the Romans decided to adopt the religion, clean it up, make Christ a Jew and Mary a Virgin, and work out a church state deal to fool the people in the name of God and Country that had been operating ever since." This all sounds perfectly logical (except to those who persist in believing in the supernatural origin of Christianity), except for one thing: why would the Romans, who were engaged for many years in a bitter war with Israel, make their new Savior/Son of God one of the despised Jews?

One theory holds that Christianity was in fact the product of the Roman ruling class who, in their efforts to subvert the Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in Palestine, devised the cult of the other-worldly, pacifist Messiah to castrate and contain the Jewish rebellion, as well as counter its growing influence within the Empire, especially among the slaves and other downtrodden, who were harkening to its apocalyptic egalitarianism. The primary exponent of this theory (if not the inventor of it was Abelard Reuchlin, a Jewish apologist who claimed that the aristocratic Roman Piso clan actually wrote the New Testament and even cynically encoded the proof into the text itself. (25)

An obverse theory to the above suggests that the Jews devised Christianity as a Trojan Horse to subvert and overthrow the Empire of their conquerors, playing upon the seething discontent of the oppressed masses to overthrow the Empire. This theory is popular among certain anti-Semitic and white supremacist groups those not enamored with the Christian Identity/Aryan Israel thing), and was supposedly verified by a Jewish writer, one Marcus Eli Ravage, in the 1925. (26)

Both theories have their problems. While certain passages in the New Testament do indeed counsel a pacifist, quietist ethic that would ideally benefit an authoritarian power structure seeking to stifle all dissent and rebellion and funnel it into a scheme of post-mortem deferred reward (better known as pie in the sky by and by; see especially the Epistles of Paul), there are those troublesome passages such as Matthew 10:34-37 and Luke 22:36, which show so much ominous fascination with swords. A warning to the Jews and other malcontents, perhaps? If Christianity were a Jewish Trojan Horse, its success would have been a bittersweet, Pyrrhic victory, as well as a belated one: nearly three hundred years after the introduction of Christianity, after the Roman-Jewish war, after the destruction of the Jewish nation, the Roman Empire, still standing, became Christian and the Jews were scattered to the winds Fusing the two theories together results in a hybrid not too dissimilar to the Gemstone one: in brief, the Jewish resistance movement developed Christianity to subvert the Roman Empire, the Romans either caught onto it and rewrote it to their designs before the destruction of Jerusalem or after when they realized its value as a unifying cult for a restless, multi-ethnic population and a weapon against potential revolts.

They rewrote the Gospels to put the blame for the death of Jesus on the Jews, thereby creating the "blood-libel" that fueled anti-Semitism down to the present. The main divergence from Roberts' version is the historical existence of Jesus and his secret Arab identity. The preceding theories have all been offered as only speculation, any suspicions being currently unverifiable, but certainly not irrelevant. But none of these conspiracy theories regarding the possible origins of Christianity can discredit the fact that the quest for the historical Jesus has led scholars of integrity, both believers and unbelievers alike, into a dead end (just as the un-reliability of the Gemstone Files does not discredit the conspiracy theory of the Kennedy assassination because it hinges upon it). The lack of non-Biblical evidence has led many investigators to ask not only "Who was Jesus?" but, even more importantly, "Was Jesus?'.

Among those who assert the historical reality of Jesus while disbelieving the New Testament claims for his divinity and resurrection are Hyam Maccoby (27) and Hugh J. Schonfield (28), both Jewish apologists eager to reclaim Jesus as an exemplary Jew with no intention of starting a new religion and no pretensions to divinity. Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (29) contend in their controversial books that not only did Jesus not die on the cross, but he fathered a child on Mary Magdalene and that the descendents of that union are today at the head of a secret society, the Priory of Sion, plotting to place someone of Jesus' lineage on the throne of a united Europe. What all these authors agree upon is that Jesus was a rebel against Rome and a claimant, whether legitimate or not, to the throne of David. Morton Smith (30) also maintains Jesus' historicity, but contends that he was a magician, executed as much for sorcery and blasphemy as subversion. These comprise the most extreme and imaginative speculations on Jesus' possible real identity. A currently less popular theory (although it ruled in free thought circles a century ago) is that of the completely mythical nature of Jesus Christ. This claim was first put forth by the German Bruno Bauer who argued that Jesus was invented by the author of the Gospel of Mark. The French Count Volney argued in his Ruins Of Empires (1872) that Jesus was the personification of a solar god originating with Krishna of India. J. M. Robertson, a Scotsman, was the most dedicated proponent of the idea (31), and currently the torch is being carried by G. A.. Wells, who has written several books on the subject (32).

In outline, Robertson's theory postulates an ancient cult of Joshua or Yeschua (Jesus is merely the Greek for the Hebrew Joshua), among the ancient Jews, which practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism, a common practice in the primitive religion of all cultures. This bloody practice is dimly hinted at in the Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion and Last Supper-Eucharist Joshua may have been a Hebrew-Canaanite sun god supplanted by Yahweh, and relegated to the status of a legendary warrior-hero secondary to Moses, the champion of Yahweh. The Joshua cult may have had to go underground during the reign of the Yahwehistic-Mosaic party, only to surface once again in the chaos of the Jewish rebellion against Rome.

"The oldest documents and tradition show that the cult of Jesus the Christ was being pushed in rivalry to pure Judaism among the Jews of the Dispersion before the destruction of the Temple. Such competition was the more easy because the life of the synagogues was largely independent of the central temple and craved for rites and teaching which should make up for the sacrificial usages at Jerusalem... The Jews of the Hellenistic period regarded him Jesus/Joshua as the actual founder of the rite of circumcision. According to tradition he began his work of deliverance on the day fixed for the choosing of the paschal lamb and concluded it at the Passover. The hypothesis that Joshua is the original Jesus-- the origin of the myths which blended in a composite pattern mistaken for real history--solves many problems." (33)

However, Robertson doesn't discount the possibility that a have real person may have served as the focus for the Joshua cult's savior. Saint Paul's Jesus, as opposed to the Jesus of the Gospels, does not seem to have lived in any time recent to the writer of the Epistles (which are generally regarded by most scholars as pre-dating the Gospels). Paul does not give any of the biographical details that the four evangelists do, and he never mentions Pontius Pilate. His Jesus is obviously not the same character as that of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.

"The Jesus of the Pauline doctrine was either a mythical construction or a remote figure thought to have been crucified but no longer traceable in history. A Jesus ben Pandira is said to have been stoned and hung on a tree under the Hasmonean king, Alexander Jannaeus, nearly a hundred years before the Christian era. It is conceivable that Paul's Jesus is merely a nominal memory of the slain Jesus ben Pandira. (34) This Jesus ben Pandira, although an obscure figure, managed to cause the early Christians some problems and some embarrassment. Strangely enough, they did not try to discredit him by denying his existence or any connection to Jesus Christ. In fact, Church fathers like Eusebius and Epiphanius felt obligated to find ben Pandira a place in Jesus' family tree, explaining that he was Jesus' paternal grandfather, that is, Joseph's father. But if the virgin birth of Jesus was true, then there was no genetic relationship between Jesus and Joseph, and Jesus ben Pandira. And according to Matthew, Joseph's father was Jacob, but according to Luke his name was Heli. So who was Jesus ben Pandira (also Pantera, or Panthera), and what, if any, connection did he have to Jesus called the Christ, the Anointed One, or Messiah)?

The pagan philosopher Celsus, arch-enemy of the early Christians, claimed Jesus was "a Jewish sorcerer from Egypt" who was also the illegitimate son of "a soldier named Panthera” (35) This charge was repeated in the Talmud, from which Celsus may have gotten it. Celsus' works were destroyed by the Christians once they came to power, but most of his anti-Christian polemic, True Words, is known almost word-for-word because the Christian apologist Origen quoted it extensively in his rebuttal to it, Contra Celsus. The charges that Celsus made must have been taken seriously enough to warrant such a detailed response, and not merely shrugged off as the jibes of an anti-Christian bigot. Celsus "was a man who relied not on rumors and hearsay evidence but on personal observation and careful study. Because he had read both the Old and the New Testaments and was familiar with Jewish and Christian literature...his book is on the whole free of mistakes and misconceptions...it contains none of the popular pagan antagonism against Christians and makes no unsubstantiated charges." (36) If a man like that accused your savior of being a sorcerer and a bastard, it‘s no wonder you would feel obligated to answer the charges.

Regarding the father of Jesus ben Pandera, Morton Smith says: "It was not a very common name, but we do know of a Sidonian archer, Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, who was serving in Palestine about the time of Jesus' birth and later saw duty on the Rhine. It is possible, though not likely, that this tombstone from Bingerbrucke is our only genuine relic of the Holy Family." (37) (Sidon was--and still is--a city on the coast of Phoenicia, now called Lebanon. Perhaps Bruce Roberts wasn't that far off the mark after all.) Other Jewish sources claim that Jesus was the son of a ben Stada, also a magician, and that he--Jesus--"brought magic marks from Egypt in the scratches of his flesh" , that is, tattoos, most likely of magical sigils. ( In Galatians 6: 17, Paul claimed to "bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was Paul claiming to be a stigmatic, bearing--metaphorically--the same wounds as Jesus, or was he claiming to have the same magical tattoos as Jesus on his flesh?

A third century rabbi Hisdu claimed that ben Stada was the husband of Jesus' mother Miriam (Mary), a hairdresser, and Pandira was her lover. The implication being, of course, that Jesus was a bastard, born out of adultery. Yet another rabbi said that Pappos ben Judah was the father of Jesus and Stada referred to his unfaithful wife, s'tal da meaning one who has fallen away from her husband. (38) These were the sort of contradictory rumors and legends that early Christians were assailed with. Tertullian, a Church Father, summarized the standard Jewish allegations against his God circa 200 CE: "Son of a carpenter or a prostitute, profaner of the Sabbath, a Samaritan who had a demon...whom his disciples spirited away from the tomb so they could say he was risen, or whom the gardener hauled off, lest his lettuces be damaged by the crowd of sightseers. (39)

Some clarification is needed to explain how Jesus' father, Joseph or whatever his name was, could possibly be both a carpenter and a magician. The Hebrew word for carpenter, najjar, also meant Nazorite or Nazorean, a mystic brotherhood of wood-workers, the same sect that the Old Testament Samson belonged to. This could account for the (mistaken) reference to Jesus as being "of Nazareth", a town which is not known to have existed during that time. (40) As for the mother of Jesus, Miriam of Magdala may not have been a prostitute in the modern sense of the term, but a "sacred whore" or hierodule, a Virgin Bride of God, dedicated from an early age to the temple and to be the future bride of a sacred king. This according to the Protoevangelion, or Revelation of James, a second century CE gospel eventually eliminated from the official canon at the Council of Nicea, "declared Apocryphal and heretical" as Roberts, for once, correctly pointed out. That Miriam (or Mary) Magdala (or Magdalene) was a title rather than a personal name

as both Joseph and Jesus Christ/Joshua Christos probably were). As well as being the son of a sacred virgin/whore, Jesus may have been raised to be the husband of one as well. It would certainly explain the confusing plethora of Mary's and Joseph's within the gospels (including the suppressed ones), the obliquely sexual relationship of Jesus and remain a virgin, in a manner of speaking. (41) That these names were the titles of players in a ritualistic drama, perhaps one acted out for real with a knowing and willing sacred-king/scapegoat, perhaps one trained from birth for the role, lends credence to J. M. Robertson's theory of an underground Joshua cult running throughout Jewish history, surfacing during times of crisis when the Mosaic Yahweh cult was flagging, or impotent in the face of a major threat such as Roman oppression). It has been said that Jesus ben Pandera was executed by his own wish. (42)

The Talmudic version, dating from no earlier than the early second century CE (43), goes like this: Yeschu (Jesus) was found guilty (by the Sanhedrin) of being a sorcerer and a false prophet and condemned to death. Forty days prior to his death, a herald was sent out to urge anyone with anything good to say about Yeschu to come forward (and presumably stay the execution). No one did, and on Passover Eve, Yeschu was stoned (to death presumably) and then (therefore his corpse) hung from a tree (not a cross). ( 44) Anyone familiar with the New Testament will see obvious parallels here.

Finally, in the light of the ponderous evidence given above, what can be said of Bruce Roberts' revision of Catholic dogma? That, while justified in its skepticism, once again he missed wide of the mark. Unless the improbable be true, and Roberts actually received a copy of Cardinal Tisserant's secret diary, and that diary made the bizarre claims published in the Gemstone Files (which I won't believe until I am personally given verifiable evidence to the contrary), the only conclusion that can be reached is that Roberts, letting his prejudices once again get in his way, guessed at what might be the truth behind the inconsistencies and impossibilities of the Jesus story. Without doing any research into the subject, or knowing that he was far from the first to realize that two plus two does not equal five, he jumped to conclusions that--somehow--validated his (to be charitable)“ eccentric” worldview. Surely, to his mind, it was no coincidence that his father died the day before Tisserant died, was murdered, as Roberts would have it. It was the same evil conspiracy at work in both deaths, the same conspiracy that killed Kennedy. Jesus an Arab or a Jewish sorcerer-heretic crucified, or stoned or hung for blasphemy, or subversion, or treason or jaywalking: does it really matter, is it less shocking than the possibility that Jesus never existed at all? There have been plenty of people who freed themselves from the thrall of religion before Bruce Roberts, more will do so without ever reading the Gemstone File or suspecting some dark secret hidden away deep in the Vatican Crypt, other than that truth does not abide here.

But there is still one question remaining that the Gemstone File leaves unanswered: what was it really on the end of that sponge offered to Jesus at the crucifixion, (45) vinegar or sodium morphate wine?

Notes:
1) New York Times, February 22, 1972, p. 40

2) Blanshard, Paul, American Freedom and Catholic Power, 1949, Boston,
Beacon Press, p. 245

3) Manhattan, Avro, The Vatican-Moscow-Washington Alliance,1982, Chino, Ca., Chick Publications, pp. 27-8

4 ) Cornwell, John, A Thief in the Night: The Mysterious Death of
Pope John Paul I, 1989, New York, Simon & Schuster, pp. 47-8

5) Rhodes, Anthony, The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators (1922-1945),

1973, New York, Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, pp. 216-17

6) Ibid, p. 215

7) Manhattan, pp. 91-99

8) Manhattan, p.27

9) Anonymous,

"Paul VI, Pope" in Current Biography: 1963, New York,
H. H. Wilson Co., pp. 316-19

10) Ibid

11.) Blanshard, pp. 226-27,

11a) Manhattan, pp. 143-4. The Fatima cult was suppressed by Pius XII's successor, John XXIII, who "being the matter-of-fact man that he was, and fully realizing the political implications of the Fatima revelations, ordered the Portuguese hierarchy to drop at once "La pulcinellada", a word which, in Venetian slang meant leg-pulling or burlesque." John XXIII was known in some circles as "the Red Pope" for his apparent pro-Communist leanings.

12) Rhodes, pp.337-49

13.) Anonymous (Tony Alamo?), Fugitive Pope: John Paul II, A Catholic
Nazi World War II Criminal, no date, tract published by Tony Alamo,

Ministries, Music Square Church, Van Buren, Arkansas

14.) Manhattan, pp.40-5

15.) Ibid, p. 41

16 .) Lee, Martin A., "Their Will Be Done" , July 1983 , Mother Jones magazine,
pp. 25-6

17.) Baigent, Michael, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, The Messianic Legacy,
1986, New York, Henry Holt & Company, pp. 304-06

18.) Ibid, p. 306

19) However, according to Manhattan, they never stopped trying to sabotage Paul VI's papacy, and may have ultimately succeeded. See pp. 23-5

20) "The Vatican is accustomed to think in terms not of any particular country, but of whole continents as single political units. Hence the necessity of carrying out such policies on a continental scale as part of a later strategy integrated with plans it is implementing in other parts of the world." Manhattan, p.298. See also Manhattan's Catholic Power Today,

1967, New York, Lyle Stuart, dated in some incidentals but generally still applicable.

21.) Walker, Barbara G., The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets,

1983, San Francisco, Harper & Row, pp. 565-66; Doane, T.W., Bible Myths and their Parallel in other Religions, 1882, Mokelumne Hill, Ca., Health Research 985 reprint, pp.

151-53; Graves, Kersey, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors, or Christianity Before Christ, 1875, Mokelumne Hill, Ca., Health Research reprint, no date, pp. 63-67; Graham, Lloyd M., Deceptions and Myths of the Bible, 1979, NY, Bell Pub. Co., pp. 307-08

22.) Walker, pp.166-67; Doane, pp.473-74; Graves, pp.68-71

23) McKinsey, Dennis, in Biblical Errancy (periodical) #33, September, 1985, p. 3

24.) "Therefore to scotch the rumor [that he had set the fire] Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus [sic], the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible and shameful in the world collect and find a vogue. First, then, the confessed members of the sect were arrested; next, on their disclosures, vast numbers were convicted, not so much on the count of arson as for hatred of the human race. And derision accompanied their end: they were covered with wild beast's skins and torn to death to dogs; or they were fastened on crosses, and, when daylight failed were burned to serve as lamps by night. Nero had offered his gardens for the spectacle, and gave an exhibition in his circus, mixing with the crowd in the habit of a charioteer, or mounted on his car. Hence, the most exemplary punishment, in spite of a guilt which had earned there arose a sentiment of pity, due to the impression that they were being sacrificed not for the welfare of the state but to the ferocity of a single man.” Tacitus in the Annals, as quoted by Benko, Stephan, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, 1984, Bloomington, Ind., Indiana University Press, p. 15. McKinsey, op. cit., dissects this passage, putting its veracity in doubt.

25) Reuchlin, Abelard, The True Authorship of the New Testament, 1979, Kent, Wa., Abelard Reuchlin Foundation. Reuchlin's work has been carried on by John Duran whose unpublished manuscript The Origin of Christianity takes the theory into more detail.

26) Ravage, Marcus Eli, "A Real Case Against the Jews: One of Their Own Points Out the Full Depth of Their Guilt", Century Magazine, January, 1928, as quoted in Graham, pp. 276-77. The name sounds too coincidental to be real, but apparently Ravage really existed and probably wrote this article. The possibility of tongue in cheek satire cannot be dismissed, but why any Jew would want to fool with such volatile material is puzzling. (2002 Note: I eventually discovered the answers to this puzzling question...arrogance is one answer. The aptly named Mr. Ravage's revelations are featured here.)

27.) Maccoby, Hyam, Revolution in Judea: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance, 1981. Taplinger, NY

28) Schonfield, Hugh J., The Passover Plot, 1966, New York, Bernard Geis

29) Baigent, Michael, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, Holy Blood, Holy Grail,

1982, New York, Delacorte Press; Baigent, et al., Messianic Legacy, (see note # 17)

30) Smith, Morton, Jesus the Magician, 1978, New York, Harper & Row

31.) Robertson, J. M., Pagan Christs, 1987, Dorset Press, NY, reprint of 1903 original

32.) Wells, G. A., Did Jesus Exist?,1986, Pemberton, London

33.) Robertson, p. 21

34.) Ibid, pp. 67-8

35.) Wells, p.15; Benko, pp. 147-51

36.) Benko, p. 148

37.) Smith, p. 47

38.) Ibid

39.) Smith, p. 61

40.) Walker, "Jesus ben Pandera", p. 463

41) Walker, "Mary" pp. 604-05; "Mary Magdalene", pp.614-15

42) Walker, p. 463

43) Wells, p. 12

44) Wells, p. 16

45) The author regrets being unable to find reference to any Arian bishop having his hands chopped off though it is plausible, this was, after all, the Age of Faith), or to any warning by Jesus against the "yellow race" in the Bible. He trusts that those who do find them will be sure to let him know.

This piece originally appeared in The Gemstone Files, edited by Jim Keith, 1992, Illuminet Press, Atlanta. See "Dharma Jim and Greg" for more details.