TANATA
posted on May 03, 2008 - 07:19 AM
A NEW DAY MAY BE AHEAD FOR COPTS, IF CHURCH FOUNDER ST. MARK IS 'BELOVED DISCIPLE'
John Mark, Not Zebedee’s John, Wrote John’s Gospel, Revelation, As Well As Mark, Writer Says
by ELI AKIM
ATLANTA, May 2, 2008 — A resurgent new day of respect and influence for the Coptic Orthodox Christian church may lie ahead, an American Bible researcher and writer says, if his stunning hypothesis stands up that African scholar St. Mark, or John Mark, an apostle of Jesus, is the author of the Gospel of John and the book of Revelation, in addition to Mark’s Gospel, as the writer claims. St. Mark evangelized Alexandria in the 1st century and founded the Coptic church.
If true, the new finding, which would reveal a vast cover-up some 1,900 years old, would turn Christianity upside down -- and reveal the depth of an age-old racially motivated heresy campaign involving extensive biblical tampering.
In support of his claim, Randall Gray alludes to the scene in John’s Gospel (Jn. 18:15,16) in which the unnamed “other disciple” argues as mediator on Jesus’ behalf as the high priest Annas listens. “John Mark, a scholar, and Jesus beloved friend, is arguing to defend Jesus, while Peter cowers outside denying Jesus, and Zebedee’s John and James are high-tailing it from Gethsemane,” the writer said. The point Gray makes is a valid one in stating that John the apostle, a Galilean, is “no different in terms of profession, education or residence than Peter would have been, who wilts at the hour of reckoning.”
“Zebedee’s John didn’t work in Jerusalem as a scribe … John Mark did,” Gray said. “The so-called ‘other disciple’ got an audience with Annas, because Annas knew John Mark, and he knew him because Annas worked with him. Zebedee’s John the Galilean would have been crucified right along with Jesus if he had showed his face. Peter surely knew that.
“And John was martyred, as Jesus predicted,” Gray added, “if you happen to believe the figurative words of Jesus (Mk. 10:38,40), which are of the sort that Jesus would use, and if you suspect, as we do, that racist heretics tampered with the Bible to cover up John’s death so as to obscure the African John Mark or Saint Mark as Revelation’s author.” Jesus tells both John and James, the sons of Zebedee — and likely Jesus’ cousins, Gray says — in response to their ongoing harangue over which disciple will be greatest in heaven that they will drink “the same cup” as Jesus, which is clearly a metaphor for martyrdom.
“John Mark, of Cyrene, was the only man named John whom the apostle Paul places in or near Ephesus (2 Tim. 4:11), and John Mark wrote in Latin and Greek, as well as Hebrew,” Gray added. “Do you want him, or a fisherman, writing scripture for you?”
The former religion editor and reporter for a daily newspaper in the American South bases his “admittedly bold” conclusion, in part, on a striking parallel of “John and Mary problems” he discovered in the New Testament and Leonardo Da Vinci’s 15th century painting “The Last Supper” after a two-year effort to “uncode” the so-called Da Vinci Code. “Decode,” says Randall Gray, would be an inappropriate term, as the former military cryptologist says there has “never existed a code” in the controversial work, but rather “a cover-up of a botched repainting” of the “dry-plaster fresco,” which he says occurred sometime after the French invaded Milan in 1499.
Gray suspects the Cyrenean John Mark was once present in the painting, because Leonardo’s patron for “The Last Supper” Milanese Duke Ludovico Sforza, nicknamed “il Moro” at birth, or “the Moor,” possessed African features. The terms “Moor” and “African” are synonymous, the writer points out. “Shakespeare confirms that in ‘Othello, the Moor,’ his last and best tragic play,” Gray pointed out, as does the archaic term ‘blackamoor.’ ”
Leonardo’s much-debated painting, which took the celebrated artist from the Italian Renaissance three years to paint (1495-1498), more closely resembles a parody or “a comedy of errors,” which Gray says Leonardo, “a perfectionist to a fault,” would never have committed. Among these errors, he says, is a plainly visible “hand gripping a knife with no arm attached, which is floating in midair behind the back of Judas.”
The greatly disintegrated but partially restored masterwork by Leonardo, which appears on a refectory wall in the Santa Maria delle Grazie chapel in Milan, depicts the Passover meal Jesus shared with his disciples, a pivotal event which took place, the writer notes, “in none other than the home of John Mark and his mother Mary,” both of whom were African refugees in Jerusalem from Cyrene, known today as Libya. Gray further boldly asserts that the founder of the Coptic church and his mother Mary are the “John and Mary” at the foot of Jesus’ cross in John’s Gospel (19:25,27), and not St. John the evangelist or apostle and Mary, the mother of Jesus, as implied. This means John Mark, or St. Mark, and not John, the son of Zebedee, a fisherman from Galilee, is the so-called “disciple whom Jesus loved.”
Gray defends this point by citing Acts 1:14, where Mary, the mother of Jesus, is in Jerusalem after Jesus’ ascension, being attended to by her “real sons,” Jesus’ half-brothers. “Why would Jesus have asked Zebedee’s John, who was probably his cousin and Mary’s nephew, to be her son, if she had plenty?”
Gray emphasized that his motives are not to discredit the Bible, but to discredit heretics, who “didn’t want in the first century, and obviously still don’t want, the Copts to get their due.”
“It’s important to me that Coptic Christians around the world, as well as their founding patriarch who has been hidden from us, get the credit they rightfully deserve as specially beloved of Jesus,” says Gray, who worked for a year in Ethiopia, at the time Haile Selassie was deposed in 1974. Prior to this assignment he was once arrested and detained at gunpoint at the Cairo airport at the height of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. “Nevertheless,” he says with a grin, “I loved visiting Egypt and its typically gracious people. My stay, unfortunately, was abruptly cut short.”
Gray rattled off a series of biblical contradictions or “errors” in the final, post-resurrection scenes of each gospel, which he says are not the fault of the gospel writers, but rather “the work of heretics who tampered with the Bible,” in like manner to the repainting efforts by heretics to remove John Mark from “The Last Supper.” He makes an irrefutable point to defend his charge of an alteration in the painting: “In the process, someone removed altogether anyone and everyone named John in the painting, so there are only eleven male disciples, none of whom are "the disciple whom Jesus loved -- and the whole scene revolves around him, because it is he who asks Jesus who will betray him.”
Asked to speculate on why the African apostle of Jesus and his mother have been obscured, as he claims, Gray rubbed his bald head and stroked his gray beard before answering. “If you want my cut-to-the-chase answer,” he replied, “they racially identify Jesus, clearly, which the powers that be don’t want, I suppose, whoever they are. But Jesus is much more than a man with dark skin, but rather, we think, a composite of all of the races which make up mankind, as Adam must have been.” Gray just in recent years has concluded that Eden, and a literal “first couple,” existed in Ethiopia, basing that conclusion on archaeological, genetic, paleographic and migratory research in the ancient nation where he once lived and worked.
“Ethiopia is unique,” he explained, “which is more accurately called Abyssinia, which means ‘mixed races.’ Eighty languages, with Amharic being the national language, and hundreds of dialects exist in that one nation, as do people with a variety of features. People with white skin and red beards, who call themselves original Berbers, are found in Africa, as is a single Ethiopian tribe with composite DNA, like we believe Adam and Jesus possessed, after all … they had the same direct biological father.”
So if Adam was a dark-skinned man, containing within him the DNA for all dark-skinned races, where did white people come from?
Gray chuckled, but gave a straight-faced answer: “Eve came from Adam’s rib bone, didn’t she?” he asked rhetorically, “and aren’t bones white?”
Gray, 54, of Signal Mountain, Tennessee, who is completing a non-fiction manuscript titled RETURNING TO ABYSSINIA (working), is currently seeking author representation, and is available for interviews.
Joined: May 03, 2008 | Posts: 2
