The Jerome Conspiracy - Softcover

Wood, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 193656503X ISBN 13: 9781936565030

Publisher: Tubi Publishing, LLC, 2010

Synopsis

A fundamental teaching of modern Christianity is the eternal damnation of unbelievers.  Most Christians assume this was always a doctrine of the faith.  However the historical record proves otherwise.

There were two distinct divisions of Christianity during its formative centuries: the churches of the East and the churches of the West.  A second century document entitled The Sibylline Oracles shows that the earliest churches of the East taught universal salvation - the doctrine that everyone will eventually be reconciled to God.  In The Sibylline Oracles, unbelievers are eventually removed by God from the afterlife fires at the request of Christians.

For centuries Biblical scholars were convinced that the earliest churches in the West taught eternal damnation in hell.  However, the fairly recent discovery of an early Greek version of The Apocalypse of Peter has dashed this longstanding characterization.  The second century Muratorian Fragment reveals that The Apocalypse of Peter was widely read in the earliest churches of the West.  And the newly found Greek version shows that it too taught universal salvation.  In The Apocalypse of Peter, unbelievers are eventually removed by God from the afterlife fires at the request of Christians.

So the mainstream, majority view of the earliest churches in both the East and the West was one of temporary not eternal punishment.  The writings of Saint Augustine show this continued up into the beginning of the fifth century.  In 420 CE he wrote in Enchiridion that the majority of Christians believe in temporary punishment. However, a little more than one hundred years later, belief in eternal punishment had become so entrenched in Christianity that to teach otherwise was declared anathema - a heretical act worthy of punishment or death.

This leaves us with two historical puzzles to solve.  First, why did the vast majority of churches teach temporary punishment in the first place?  And second, what definitive event occurred during the fifth century that caused Christians en masse to suddenly embrace the doctrine of eternal damnation?  In The Jerome Conspiracy parable, cryptographer Michael Wood pieces together the historical record to solve both these puzzles.  And the resulting solution ends up exposing a previously unwritten fifth century conspiracy - a conspiracy that altered the course of the Christian faith for the next fifteen hundred years.

About this title

From the Author:

I didn't begin digging into the history of Jerome with the idea of uncovering any dirt on him - let alone pegging him with a fifth century religious conspiracy that changed the course of Christianity. Rather I backed into the discovery quite accidentally while solving a Dead Sea Scroll puzzle I was working on.
 
For centuries Christians believed there was only one Hebrew version of the Jewish scriptures - the version that is contained in the Old Testament section of the modern Christian Bible.  However the Dead Sea Scrolls found in cave four revealed something quite startling: There once were three Hebrew versions of the Jewish scriptures.  One Hebrew version (from the Jews in Egypt) was translated by Egyptian Greeks in the second century BC.  This translation of the Egyptian Jewish scriptures is called the Septuagint (also known as the LXX).  Another Hebrew version (from the Jews in Palestine) was translated into Aramaic. This translation of the Palestinian Jewish scriptures is called the Peshitta.  And the remaining Hebrew version (from the Jews in Babylon) is what is used in Christian Bibles today.  It is called the Masoretic Text.
 
In a nutshell, there were three textual lines of Jewish scriptures by the time Jesus was born: Egyptian, Palestinian, and Babylonian.  Jesus, his disciples, and the early church all quoted the Greek Septuagint (which was based on the Egyptian version of the Jewish scriptures).  Modern Bibles, however, contain the Babylonian version of the Jewish scriptures.  So the initial historical puzzle that started it all was: When and why did the church abandon the Egyptian version of the Jewish scriptures for the Babylonian one?
 
In investigating the answer to that question, it didn't take long to learn that Jerome was the one who replaced the Egyptian version of the scriptures with the Babylonian one.  He did this when translating the Latin Vulgate Bible.  So once I learned when the change occurred, I then wanted to know why it occurred.  Why did Jerome replace the original Christian version of thirty nine biblical books with a significantly different set?  And it was during my investigation into that question I fell down the rabbit hole.  As I peeled back the layers of the onion I began to realize Jerome did a lot more than just swap one version of the Old Testament for another.  He was a very busy man. 
 
So I made a list of all the changes Jerome made to the Bible and early Christian writings (which were many).  I was determined to connect the dots.  I was determined to understand what all the changes he made had in common.  That's when I realized they all converge on one inescapable conclusion - the conclusion I call The Jerome Conspiracy.  And ironically, the discovery of Jerome's conspiracy led me full circle back to the Dead Sea Scrolls found in cave four.  The very scrolls that started me down this unexpected path ended up providing the requisite empirical proof of Jerome's conspiracy.
 
Jerome's motivations were related to his pet doctrine of eternal damnation in hell - a doctrine believed only by a tiny minority of Christians during his day.  The Jerome Conspiracy parable begins with an evangelical couple losing their adult atheist son to a car accident. They are convinced his rejection of Christianity has damned him to an eternity of hellfire.  However, as the story unfolds, the evangelical parents begin to uncover many surprising historical facts regarding the original Bible and the original Christian faith.  In the end, they realize that all the facts connect back to one man ... Jerome. What they learn next forces them to reassess both sacred cows: their view on eternal damnation and their viewpoint of their son's fate in the afterlife.

About the Author:

Michael Wood demonstrated an innate talent for cryptography when, at the young age of 19, he designed REDOC-II - one of the only unbreakable codes in existence today.   The claim of impenetrability caught the attention of Eli Biham and Adi Shamir, the two Israelis who broke the standard US code designed by the National Security Agency.  Biham and Shamir published a paper confirming Michael Wood's code was completely impervious to their method of attack.

The physical infrastructure of the internet was expanding at a chaotic rate during this time. Michael Wood turned his cryptanalytic attention to solving this real world problem.  He wrote software which instructed a computer how to decode the information flowing through its network wires.  Through artificial intelligence the computer assembled the deciphered information into a real-time map of the worldwide physical infrastructure.  This resulted in a manageable data communication environment.

His successes provided him experience in applying cryptanalytic methods to extremely disparate fields.  As the teenage son of an evangelical pastor, he earned awards for memorizing entire books of the Bible word-for-word.  His cryptanalytic and religious worlds collided when he began to study the Dead Sea Scrolls.  He quickly realized the experience he gained in cryptanalytic thinking afforded him a unique opportunity to empirically solve some of the still outstanding ancient mysteries.

Initial success in making groundbreaking discoveries through cryptanalysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls further inflamed his passion for fusing the historical record, the Bible, and cryptography.  Today, Cryptographer Michael Wood's full time devotion is deciphering the Koine Greek papyri, the Hebrew Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Aramaic documents found in Wadi Murabbat to unravel more ancient Biblical revelations.  His previous discoveries are documented in The Jerome Conspiracy, The Hidden Bible, The Jesus Secret, and Breaking the Romans Code.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tubi Publishing, LLC
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 193656503X
• ISBN 13: 9781936565030
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 198