Amerikos - APOCALYPSE AND ARMAGEDDON, THE SECRET ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY: the first shall be last and the ... last shall be first

1. Everything traces back to Egypt?
2. Moses was likely an Egyptian who followed the religion of the Aten?
3. Hellenization, put into effect by Alexander the Great, started the process that created Christianity well before the first century CE?
4. There was a major pre-Christian Jewish Gnostic movement in Alexandria, Egypt during the last two centuries BCE which, combined with Neoplatonism, greatly contributed to the development of Christianity; that Christianity didnt just pop up out of nowhere with the advent of John and Jesus?
5. Jewish Egyptian Atenists had survived the death of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten and eventually coalesced into the Essenes who moved to Qumran and that John and Jesus had been among these Essenes?
6. John the Baptizer did not invent the rite of baptism and that Christians were not the only ones to make use of it?
7. The Jesus portrayed in the gospels has little to do with the real Jesus; that Jesus clearly instigated an insurrection against the Romans, expecting his Essene allies from Qumran to help him, but when they failed to arrive Jesus was captured, arrested, and executed?
8. There were major divisions within the earliest Christian church; factions led by different apostles (mainly James the Just, Peter, John and Paul) with different territories and that Paul meddled in just about all of them?
9. Christianity was meant to be led by a hereditary priesthood through the family of Jesus with the center of operation in Jerusalem, but that these priests were not to marry or have children because the apocalypse was to happen within the lifetime of the first believers?
10. The first known book-burning in all of history, at Ephesos (found in the book of Acts ), brought Paul to the attention of the Roman imperator Nero and that the riot at Ephesos only a couple of years later really got his attention?
11. James the Just, brother of Jesus, was the main rival of Paul and that James caused Paul to be arrested by the Roman authorities, with Paul eventually having to stand before Nero for judgment?
12. There is a direct connection between the Great Fire in Roma and the beginning of the first major Jewish revolt against the Romans of 66-74 CE and that some of the apostles were probably killed when the Romans took Jerusalem, the rest escaping into Egypt?
13. The books contained within the New Testament were written in an entirely different order than we find them within the canon today with the Apocalypse of John being among the first, but they have deliberately been arranged as they are presently as an effort to deceive and that we actually have two New Testaments from two major factions combined into one today, the gospels having been written last of all, mainly in Egypt?
14. It all does matter to our modern world?

The information and analysis contained within the pages of this book are the result of many years of research and are based upon solid fact derived from extant evidence, not faith or supposition. This is a work of history, not fiction. It is meant to inform the reader. It is meant for those who wish to finally break out of the bounds set for them by those with religious and political agendas - for those who want to know about the true origins of the religion we today call Christianity. This work is meant to be controversial, but is not meant to offend. It is meant to set the record straight with insights that can truly be found nowhere else.

PROLOGUE:
PROPRIETARY RELIGION

People often claim that they want to know the truth. But, when pressed in any way, especially about religion, one finds that they often prefer to adhere to the beliefs they already have rather than accepting a new fact or two that might lead them to something more in line with truth. And, after all, in order to get to truth one must first have some facts. Right? But often people believe that they have facts when they only really have supposition.

As an undergraduate in college I was struck by the fact that I was being taught things about religion that I had never heard of before even though I had attended church and studied my Bible from the time I was able to read. And I gradually began to realize that the material that I was being taught was, in a way, seen as proprietary to the ministerial profession and that ministerial students would graduate from college with absolutely no desire to share much, if any, of it with the folk. I came to realize that religious authorities generally preferred to keep the folk as ignorant of true religious history as possible so that they could continue to have a monopoly on such knowledge. Thus, nothing had really changed in that regard since the days of Jesus himself. My studies since that time have only tended to reinforce my original observation.

This investigation did not take place overnight and it has not been rushed by some university system that requires professors to pump out books in order to maintain their status. There is no way that it could have been completed and presented to the folk in, say, sixty to ninety days or even a year. And even if some may suggest that I did not, perhaps, look at all of the evidence available, I think that they would have to admit that I have evaluated and considered things in such a way as to obtain information that has been overlooked by others.

There are all kinds of books out there, even at this very moment in time, purporting to tell the truth of Jesus and/or Christianity. And all of these books come from differing viewpoints and serve up different supposed facts. And these books are, in the main, quite popular, judging from sales figures. But people somehow seem to realize that something is missing from the earliest history of Christianity, yet they dont know what it is and their efforts to discover it are like trying to grasp air. So they latch onto these histories and pseudo-histories in an effort to obtain the knowledge that they cant seem to obtain from just reading the Bible or attending Sunday School classes. After many years of research, I have concluded that even the best histories of earliest Christianity leave out some important points. Usually this is simply a sin of omission rather than being deliberate. After all, no one can know everything about that period in time, take it from me. And neither do I purport to know all about it or even to have every fact that can be obtained about that time. This would simply be impossible. So people, generally, are still left wanting.