The Nicene creed, as seen at the end of this article, was the foundation and beginning of Christianity and the death of freedom for almost 1500 years. This creed was created by the Constantine Roman government at about 325CE and became the instrument used to bring about the repression of millions of people, the destruction of their cultures and the eradication of their knowledge and education in a way unequalled, even by the communist and fascist systems of the twentieth century.

It is a popular misconception, among even Christians themselves, that Christianity began 2000 years ago among a group of Galilean fishermen and their leader Jesus, who became known as the Christ. This is not true and the leaders of the mainline churches have known that this was not true for all of the last 1700 years.

Because of this misconception many strange beliefs about the source of Christian concepts have arisen during this time and many of them, not surprisingly, have been associated with religions and philosophies in opposition to Christianity. Among these should be included the writings of today’s authors who attempt to prove that Jesus was not the character portrayed in the Bible but was, rather, a member of the Essenes, an Egyptian heretic, the leader of a political group trying to re-establish the monarchy in Judea or, if not the leader at least, the pretender who was being promoted by the political group.

The authors of these ideas are writing for both the popular market and the scholastic. They are both amateurs and serious students and they dissect and re-assemble myths and legends from all round the Mediterranean, from Israel to southern France. In doing so they claim to be able to prove that Jesus was everything from a pauper to a plutocrat, a woman and high priestess of the sacred sex temples to a misunderstood leader of a group of people who founded a guild movement in Judea.

He has travelled from Egypt to India and Tibet; has studied at the feet of all the great teachers in the world and at the same time has been nothing more than a carpenter’s son, the bastard of a Roman soldier and the leader of the reformed Church established by Herod the Great.

In almost every case these authors have at some time or other, during their researches, come up against the problem that there are no actual historical records for the existence of a person called Jesus who was the son of a couple called Joseph and Mary and associated with the house of David. In spite of the large amount of material available from that era there are no records that show that Jesus was arrested and tried by Pilate and then executed by crucifixion. There are records for just about everything else in Roman history, in Judea, from the trivial to the momentous, but nothing about Jesus.

The only historical mentions of this person outside of the Bible are in the writings of Josephus Flavius called 'The war of the Jews' where he discusses the revolt of the Jews against the Roman armies at the time of the fall of Jerusalem in 70CE and in the Talmud a foundation book of modern Judaism. The Talmud was begun in the first century but not completed until about the third century CE. In the case of Josephus the reference is thought to be spurious and to have been added by a Christian scribe at a period some time after the original work was written. In the case of the Talmud, this work was not started until after the fall of Jerusalem and was not completed until at least a hundred years later. It is full of many assumptions about Judaism itself, let alone Christianity, and proposes that the events recorded in the Bible and other Jewish works regarding the history of Judea prior to the fall of Jerusalem are all accurate. It takes the point of view that the history of Judea is the history of God working with and in the Jewish nation and that all events recorded as having happened to the Jews must have some sacred purpose.

Before 325CE Christianity was just another Jewish sect and even if the Christian dogma was not accepted by most Jews the beliefs contained therein would still be recorded by Jewish historians as if they were true simply because they were Jewish. This makes almost any Jewish religious writing a lot less than reliable as a source of historical proof for anything. Therefore, in the case of both the Talmud and the works of Josephus, it is better if we accept that they must be treated with a great deal of caution.

The evidence for the existence of Jesus is not good and if we do what most others do when confronted by this fact and fall back into belief then we might as well also believe that the world is flat, it is the centre of the universe, God created the world in 4002BCE at three o'clock in the afternoon and flies are spontaneously generated in rotting meat.

We propose that it is time to take a fresh look at the evidence contained in the New Testament and to one degree or another all material found on this site is doing that. This new look will allow this evidence to stand or fall on its own; it will be self evident or it will not be accepted. Therefore we will not use any outside sources for proof although we do use some for comparison. Because of our experiences in coming to the conclusions we have we are sure that many readers are in for a surprise at how much information is contained in the New Testament stories and just what that information has to say about the origins of Christianity.

Excerpts from The Little Read Hand Book (purchase on book page)

The Little Read Hand book is about a journey undertaken by us, Josef and Lydia Anne Matheuson. It is not a biography, nor is it an entirely complete record of that journey. However, it is a record of many of the experiences we encountered during what, in earlier times, would have been entitled 'A Quest' and maybe even 'A Grail Quest'. It is a compilation of thoughts and reflections about, and derived from, a lifetime of experiences and events; it is not a scientific thesis. In the first section we speak about 'Stephen' and 'Thyatira' and, it is important to say that time has been spent on this series of events because they are not in public knowledge and because they were the foundation for all that came after.

Stephen was supposedly a spiritual entity speaking through a medium among a group of people who named their group Thyatira. During the 1970s the Stephen experience was not unique; there were many groups around the world that were doing similar things. One was known as The Seth Group, another was White Eagle and there was even an experimental group undertaken at Stanford University in which the supposed entity was called Phillip. The difference between the Phillip group and all the others was that they made no secret of the fact that Phillip had been invented.

Various parts of this book discuss two Stephen events at length. One called "karno dioti" [the reason will become obvious in that chapter] and the other the five 5s, because both of these events have quite important things to say about the human mind, the way in which it is used and the way in which people are prepared to believe rather than to know, thereby making understanding more difficult. These events also clearly demonstrate the manner in which we humans can build some quite impressive, yet false, edifices of conceptual structures on the minutest grain of evidence even before its validity has been checked.

Throughout our lives we have met many people who have imagined themselves to be on a spiritual quest or journey of revelation and growth.......If you are setting out on this type of adventure we recommend you read this book first and reflect on the cost to us and our families before you decide whether or not you are prepared to pay in a similar way.

Our old previous world was reduced to ruins on a number of occasions......We lost houses and other possessions as we turned away from our old world and the life it represented...... All of our previous belief structures were held up for scrutiny as if under a searchlight or microscope and, slowly and painfully, in many cases, they were dismembered before our eyes and were revealed to have been the straw men they actually were, and always, had been. Towards these latter years of the odyssey we found the Grail; in quite an unexpected manner, and in a most unusual place. It was an exciting experience and very confirming of what we had been doing, as were many of the other things that were experienced.

Throughout this book we make mention of Zoroastrianism. As most people are unaware of what this is we will endeavour to explain and for those familiar with the writings of Nietzsche and his book Thus Spake Zarathustra we start by saying that his Zarathustra is not the same as the one we describe, even though some of the philosophy may be quite similar.

Depending on the language used the name 'Zoroaster' can be 'Zarathustra' or 'Zaratut'. When the name 'Zoroaster' is used this has nothing to do with the comic book hero Zorro.

I was busy working and doing the things I normally did, the things that anyone does in a mundane
world on a day-to-day basis; I was being quite normal. And then I heard a voice. It said:
"Draw the creation."
I was thirty-three years old and had never heard disembodied voices before that time and nor have
I heard any since and so I looked about my work-room for whom it may have been who had said these
words and discovered I was still on my own. So, with some trepidation I replied:
"I cannot draw to save myself."
And wondered why I was talking to myself.
The Voice repeated:
"Draw the creation."
Angrily, I replied,
"I cannot bloody well draw!"
"You can draw a bloody straight line, can't you!"
"Yes," I said somewhat fearfully.
"Then do so," the Voice replied.

Lydia Anne's story:

My husband and I had gone to bed and were asleep. I had a most extraordinary dream in which a space-ship had landed in the paddock outside our home. The inhabitants of the UFO came down a ramp and asked to be fed because they were hungry. I went into our kitchen and made trays of sandwiches and thermoses of coffee to take to them. As they took the food I was awoken by my husband shouting in a strange language which to this day I have not been able to identify. He woke and told me that he had dreamed of a space-ship landing in the paddock and that I was not to feed the people as it would ruin everything we had. He had experienced the very same dream, and every element coincided with mine.

About a week later my husband and I were playing cards in our dining room. Suddenly, in the middle of a hand, I put my cards on the table and insisted that we go to the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in the city. My husband put his hand of cards on the table and said: "let's go, then." On arriving at the Cathedral we went in through the large double doors at the front. Moving down the aisle I stepped into a pew and knelt down. My husband sat on the pew. As I was kneeling in meditation I felt two hands surround my head and heard the words: "Go in peace, my daughter, and do what you have to do." My husband told me that as well as hearing the words he had seen an old monk dressed in a brown habit come down the aisle and put his hands around my head. There was no physical monk. In fact, there are no monks at that cathedral.

Jesus cries out" "I thirst," and is given something to quench his thirst... it was very bitter.. it was not nice,... so the story tells us. Throughout the Gospels, from the mouth of Jesus himself, comes the concept that to drink is to take in a teaching or spirit or that which enlivens one's spirit or being. In the above story the very opposite is happening - that which is being taken in is bitter and unpleasant. Why is this?.. It was given to him on a reed and in Greek, which was the language in which the Gospels were originally written, the word for 'reed' is 'Kanon'. This word 'kanon' is the source of the word 'canon' which is used in the church to mean that teaching which is authorised by the church. So the man on the cross was offered an authorised teaching that was simply dreadful. On this reed/canon was, according to the Gospels, a sop. What is a sop? It is something given in place of the genuine article and is... less than the genuine. In Victorian times a sop - a piece of cloth soaked in milk - was given to the crying babe instead of the breast. In the case of the man on the cross the sop was placed to his mouth, suggesting that the canon that was put to his mouth was less than genuine and rather bitter. To put it another way the canon of teachings about Jesus - the son of the father - as we have accepted them from the Christian church for the last two millennia, is somewhat less than it ought to have been and the teachings that are supposed to have originated in the mouth of Jesus were actually put there by the authorised canon as a sop to the people.

This book was originally produced in the early 1990s and is the foundation for much of the information found in the ‘Little Read Hand Book’. It has since been revised, updated and improved as new information has come to hand. This editing has not changed the book except in the sense that much of the information that was originally deduced, because of lack of historical and archaeological information, has now been confirmed through new research and finds.

The intention of this book is to erode the foundations of both Christianity and Judaism by demonstrating that the myths and legends of both those religions are exactly that; myths and legends. Most of the stories in the Bible which have been used as proof of the source of both the Judaic and Christian teaching are much older than either of those religions and can be found in the religious imagery of other peoples. Some, however, are pure invention and have been created by religious councils as a means of promoting and proving various new dogmas as the need arose.

Many people have told us that they do not agree with what we are doing because, even if it is not totally true, Christianity provides a moral structure for society that would not be there otherwise; Christianity, they say, introduced love of neighbour and caring for each other into our world. Our answer to both these ideas is absolute rubbish because people loved each other, cared for each other and created lawful societies long before Christianity came along; had they not civilized society would not have reached the level that enabled it to recognize the inherent goodness of the teachings of many of the Middle Eastern religions of the time. The morality was there before the religions which were merely a vehicle for the continuance of those concepts. And if the morality of the Church throughout the centuries from its inception is an example of Christian morality then we are probably better off without it. However, morality must come from within and if it does not then there is no god powerful enough to provide it because morality cannot be forced upon people. If your morals are not self generated then your religion cannot do it for you.

Most antiquities scholars refuse to accept that there are symbolic and coded messages in the Bible. We hope that by the time you have finished this book you, like us, will no longer agree with them. The sad thing about biblical scholars and other antiquarians is that they start from the point of view that Jesus must have existed in some form; even if he was just a teacher or a revolutionary. They seem to be unable to comprehend that much of what is contained in both the Old and New Testaments is fiction generated to be the vehicle for teachings that were considered far too valuable to be available to the great unwashed masses. In this sense they make a very common mistake which is to look at the past with the eyes of the present; that will just not work. To understand the people of the past one needs to try and get into their heads and see why they thought and acted the way they did. We hope this book helps you to do that.