This subject is being dealt with as a component of my series on The Princes, the Priests and the Prophets hence the preface of PPP. The link here is provided to connect with the main article.

Church has changed a lot since the first century. The church services then followed the simple pattern of the synagogue which was:

• Reading the Scriptures
• Instruction from the Scriptures
• Prayers

In some churches reading the scriptures has been preserved in a reduced form as reading the lesson while in many it is dispensed with altogether. Reading was organised in such a way that the congregation repeatedly covered the whole Torah. I cannot find any evidence that there was a tradition in Old Testament temple worship or at the time of Christ of a sermon as a regular part of the worship. Speeches like sermons were for special occasions. From the example of Nehemiah 8 the explanation of the scriptures (Instruction from the Scriptures) was not left to one individual but came from others present.

Speeches like sermons were not reserved for the Sabbath. Joshua gave such a speech in Joshua 24. Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5–7 and Peter speaking after Pentecost in Acts 2:14–40 are other prominent examples. Jesus was not speaking on the Sabbath and Peter was not speaking to Christians which breaks the popular definition of a sermon. What we find is described in 2 Peter.

Peter explained that God demonstrated that He was with people and they spoke on HIs behalf as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. It is left to us to either recognise or denounce the evidence that the person is supported by God and hence the validity of what is said. It is evident that something like this was the case with Apollos. He was found to be inspired by the Holy Spirit and hence fellowship was extended by the church, even though he was an disciple of John the Baptist. We find that in Luke 4 Christ, as an ordinary person, was able to read and explain the Bible and it was not an unusual event.

The format for services that includes the sermon (a monologue that you do not have to publicly defend) has been inherited from the false Church and her daughters. God's system taught people the whole Torah over time and gave opportunity to hear different perspectives, which lead to critical understanding. Followers of the false Church have dispensed with that. The priests have done a job on this system to advance themselves and make people dependent on them and not the scriptures. If the pastor does not turn up they are in trouble. The scene above shows why the deceivers had to keep the Bible away from the vernacular i.e. the language spoken by the ordinary people. That is typical treatment for any law so that they can manipulate it to their advantage. In 1204 they crushed the work in Iona Scotland started by Columba. The Germans were now well entrenched as the princes, the priests and the prophets in England. The princes, the priests and the prophets have a class structure based on wealth, birth, and citizenship. At the very top is the chief prince, who considers himself equal to God and the others rank in importance under him. It was the emperor in Rome in Christs day and the Church of Rome adopted the system and established its emperor, now called the Pope, at the top. According to their system, to represent God and not be of their circle is unthinkable.

In English God broke the back of this stranglehold established upon God's people for the current era. The basic legacy has been passed down through colonialism, notwithstanding the manipulation of the language to control the uninitiated. That is not an endorsement of colonialism, just an acknowledgement of a consequence of it. In 1543 King Henry VIII of England caused the English Parliament to pass the Act for the Advancement of True Religion. Its focus was on reading the Bible in an English translation. Henry had been excommunicated by the Catholic Church in 1534 and responded with The Acts of Supremacy, two acts of the Parliament of England passed in 1534 and 1559 which established Henry and subsequent monarchs as the supreme head of the Church of England. Before 1534, the supreme head of the English Church was the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. In English a domestic prince holds the power and relies on widespread understanding to keep the priests at bay. The language of the Bible is the vernacular. The Anglican Church once understood this and backed the king while the state in turn supported the Anglican Church in England.

Without the military might the priests have relied on mysteries to control people but the combination of the two (the lying mysteries and the military supremacy) is devastating. With the aid of the foreign language texts like the Vulgate and the accompanying ignorance, the priests have been able to hold themselves as indispensable through mysteries like the Vicar of Christ and mass , basing it on Acts 2:42.

So they have added Service of the Lords Table or Eucharist:

•  Presentation of the Elements (bread and wine)
•  Prayer of Thanks
•  Partaking of Communion

A Mass is a ceremony or ritual which is centered on the sacrament of the Eucharist. A sacrament is an outward sign of something sacred. The Eucharist repeats the last Supper as a sacrifice , not as a memorial like Passover. To further tighten the noose they have ceremonialised church to always require their mysterious Eucharist now expanded to:

• Salutation (greeting)     
• Sursum Corda (Latin: meaning Lift up your hearts. Said by the priest at Mass)    
• At a certain point must continue thus We render thanks …    
  
• Anamnesis (from the Attic Greek word ἀνάμνησις meaning reminiscence or memorial sacrifice )    
• Oblation (this is where the bread ans wine turn into Christ body and is offered)    
• Epiclesis (the priest invokes the Holy Spirit upon the bread and wine)    
• Doxology(praise typically in the form of Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, world without end, Amen )

And that was the simplified version. Check out the order of a Mass and you will see. They have added all sorts of chants and answers to calls and you have to say that you believe in the Trinity. God has freed us but even today people who claim to be Christian seem to believe that the Church is theirs and they decide who talks in it rather than observing the Christian tradition and inviting all others who have something to say to speak. Paul was concerned about decently and in order not controlling who spoke and following the example of Gamaliel (Acts 5:33-40), but that is another story. Because people had access to the Bible, by the time Christ reached Capernaum they recognised that He was not of the clique but His words were better. In Britain it came to be Henry VIII that regained control for the princes. The split in the Roman Empire gave rise to a Byzantine side where the Emperor was strong and a Western side where the Pope was strong. It got further muddled with the rise of Islam. The scene for the liberation of Britain from the Pope was set with the reformers during the 15 ^th and 16 ^th century.

The first hand-written English language Bible manuscripts were produced in the 1380s by John Wycliffe . Wycliffe, was an English priest, and a seminary professor at the University of Oxford. He became well-known throughout Europe for his opposition to the teaching of the Catholic Church. Wycliffe attacked the privileged lifestyle of the clergy and the luxury of local parishes and their pomp and ceremony.

Johann Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press in the 1450s, and the first book to ever be printed was a Latin language Bible, printed in Mainz, Germany. The invention of the movable-type printing press opened the way for Bibles to be produced in large quantities in a short period of time.

By the time of Henry VIII (28 June 1491 - 28 January 1547) the seeds of dissatisfaction with the Latin Bible were eminently recorded. In the 1490s after Oxford professor and the personal physician to King Henry the 7 ^th and 8 ^th , Thomas Linacre , read and compared the Bible in Greek to the Latin Vulgate, he wrote in his diary, Either this (the original Greek) is not the Gospel or we are not Christians.

In 1496, John Colet , another Oxford professor, started reading the New Testament in Greek and translating it into English for his students at Oxford, and later for the public at Saint Paul's Cathedral in London. The people were so hungry to hear the Word of God in a language they could understand, that within six months there were 20,000 people packed in the church and at least that many outside trying to get in!

Erasmus

First let us consider the basic challenge with the Bible. The Old Testament has only three basic sources: The Samaritan Pentateuch, the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. The Samaritan Torah commonly called the Samaritan Pentateuch , is a text of the Torah written in the Samaritan script. The Torah is the books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible. The Masoretic Text is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) in Rabbinic Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism is the version of  Second Temple Judaism practised by the Pharisees as opposed to the Sadducees. The Septuagint is the first translation in the history of the Bible. It is the Tanakh translated into from Hebrew into  Greek. The Tenakh is:

• The Five Books of Moses (Tanakh): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy
• The Eight Books of the Prophets (Neviim): Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekial plus the 1 book of the twelve minor prophets (Trei-Assar) - Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
• The Eleven Books of the Writings (Kesuvim): Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra/Nehemia, Chronicles

The word Apocrypha means biblical or related writings not forming part of the accepted canon of Scripture . These are books that were well known to be used by the Second Temple scholars but are not authoritative as scripture. These books are under the control of the Hebrews and had been for, in the case of the Tenakh, over a thousand years before the New Testament and Catholicism. The New Testament is where the Catholics claim supremacy. These are the writings of Christ's Disciples.

At this point we come to Erasmus. Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, known as Erasmus or Erasmus of Rotterdam, was a Dutch, Catholic priest and a classical scholar. In 1516, with the help of printer John Froben, he published a Greek-Latin Parallel New Testament. The Latin was not from the corrupt Vulgate (the Latin or Roman version), but his own translation of the Greek, which he had managed to collate from several old Greek New Testament manuscripts that he had acquired. Erasmus represents a return to truth but in the language of the learned. He did not believe things like Lutheran's doctrine of predestination to Salvation or Calvinist's predestination of the damned, which under-gird the power of the pope. He promoted the philosophy of Christ which he found most clearly stated in the Sermon on the Mount, and a return to the texts in the original language. He was a threat to the papacy because of his sound philosophy and historical accuracy. Henry VIII would have Erasmus translation available for use in creating the English Bible.

the Reformation

As I see it the reformation is about getting the truth hilighted to the learned by Erasmus to be translated into a positive impact on the common man in the street.

Martin Luther

Martin Luther was a German monk who nailed his 95 Theses of Contention against the Catholic Church to the Wittenberg Church door on Halloween in 1517, the year after Erasmus had published the cleaned up Greek-Latin Parallel New Testament. Luther would later translate the New Testament into German for the first time from the 1516 Greek-Latin New Testament of Erasmus, and publish that in September of 1522. Next he published a German Pentateuch in 1523 and followed in the 1534 with a complete German Bible containing the Apocrypha.

Reformation Day vs. Halloween

It is interesting that most people are very familiar with Halloween but very few know of Reformation Day. I did not until I started researching this topic. First let me say what a tridium is. A tridium is a religious observance lasting three days. Allhallowtide, Hallowtide, Allsaintstide is a tridium called the Hallowmas season. It starts with All Saints' Eve (Halloween), followed by All Saints' Day (All Hallows') and ends with All Souls' Day and goes from 31 October to 2 November. Allhallowtide is a purported to be a time to remember the dead, including martyrs, saints, and all faithful departed Christians . Hallowmas (All Saints' Day) follows its vigil (Hallowe'en) and its present date is claimed to be established by Pope Gregory III (731 - 741). Some time during the first part of the 11 ^th century Abbot Odilo established All Souls' Day for the monks of Cluny and associated monasteries to pray for the dead. The word hallow actually means the same thing as saint to them. Hallowe'en means hallowed evening i.e. evening of the saints. The een is a contraction of even meaning the evening before . 31 October 1517 was the day Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, the Church and the date were connected. The main portal of the church was often used by the university staff to pin up messages and notices. Samhain or summer's end was a day celebrated by the early Celts who believed that on that day dead people left their graves and walked among the living. The ordinary Celts disguised themselves to confuse these spirits. We talked before of Aiden and the true church in England during the 7 ^th century. It is probably in reaction to this that Pope Gregory III tried to Christianise this pagan festival and win the Celts over to Catholicism.

The Synod of Whitby 664

The Western Roman Empire (which included Britain) had fallen in 476 A.D. and the interest of Rome in the west was taken on by the Pope. There was significant progress in undermining those who lived as disciples of Christ among the Celts during the 7 ^th century. We noted earlier that Patrick had established those who lived as disciples of Christ in Ireland and Columba continued the work in Scotland. It is a credit to Patrick as a Christian that he is not even mentioned by Bede in Ecclesiastical History of England but is nevertheless a famous Christian. Pope Gregory I was Pope of the Catholic Church from 3 September 590 to 12 March 604 AD. He is famous for initiating the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome, the Gregorian Mission, to convert the Celtic Church and Anglo-Saxons in England to popular Christianity. It might also be an interesting bit of trivia that he was probably black. You might want to read this article at USA Today: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/03/01/pope-benedict-cardinal-peter-turkson-africa/1957701/ | Catholic Church may have already had a black pope by David Gibson, Religion News Service Published 4:45 p.m. ET March 1, 2013 | Updated 5:01 p.m. ET March 1, 2013.

The Gregorian mission started in 596 . It was headed by Augustine of Canterbury and so is also known as the Augustinian mission. Pope Gregory I sent a group of missionaries to Kent to convert Æthelberht, King of Kent, whose wife Bertha, was Catholic. The ruling class was German but the natives were Celtic. In 597, the forty missionaries arrived in Kent and were permitted by Æthelberht to preach freely in his capital of Canterbury. Æthelberht was converted some time before 601. Gregory gave Augustine power over the clergy of the native Britons, but the long-established Celtic bishops refused to acknowledge his authority. According to Truth Triumphant p.82

He promptly received the answer that the pope was not entitled to be called the “Father of fathers” and the only submission that they would render to him, would be that which they owed to every Christian. Augustine threatened them with the sword, and, as will be noted later, twelve hundred of these British Christians were slaughtered by a pagan army.

After Æthelberht's death in 616 the see (or bishopric) of London was abandoned. Æthelberht's daughter Æthelburg, married Edwin, the king of Northumbria. By 627 Paulinus, the bishop who accompanied her, had converted her husband. When Edwin died, in about 633, she and Paulinus were forced to flee back to Kent but by then they had established Catholicism in southern Britain. Wilkinson reports that

As further evidence of the gulf between the Roman and the Celtic Church, another episode occurred in England in 664 when the Papacy by state force inflicted a severe wound at the well-known Synod of Whitby in northern England. The king of that region had married a Roman Catholic princess, who, with the help of her priestly confessor, laid the trap for the pastors who were graduates from Patrick’s schools. The king, wearied with the strife between the two communions, became a tool to the plan. That conference with its unjust decisions drove the leaders of the Celtic Church out of northern England. About fifty years after this, or in 715, the growing influence of the Roman Catholic Church backed by the papal monarchs of Europe, brought about an attack upon Scotland’s center of Celtic Christianity at Iona. Founded by Columba and celebrated in song and story, this was attacked, and the clergy of the Irish Church were expelled from the place. TRUTH TRIUMPHANT p.82

Wilkinson later talks about the a instruction from Pope Gregory to Augustine

At first it was Gregory’s intention, which he intimated, indeed, to King Ethelbert, to have all the temples of idolatry destroyed; but on maturer reflection, he altered his mind, and dispatched a letter after the abbot Mellitus, in which he declared, that the idol temples, if well built, ought not to be destroyed but, sprinkled with holy water and sanctified by holy relics, should be converted into temples of the living God; so that the people might be more easily induced to assemble in their accustomed places. Moreover, the festivals in honor of the idols, of which the rode people had been deprived, should be replaced by others, either on the anniversaries of the consecration of churches, or on days devoted to the memory of the saints whose relics were deposited in them. On such days, the people should be taught to erect arbors around the churches, in which to celebrate their festive meals, and thus be holden to thank the giver of all good for these temporal gifts. Being thus allowed to indulge in some sensual enjoyments, they could be the more easily led to those which are inward and spiritual..

I think that you can see the link with paganism and Halloween. Not all Celts were Christian and these were not even Celts, they were Anglo-Saxons, germanic colonisers. Celtic Christians have no temples and Patric and Columba certainly did not. They lived in peace with the people but did not endorse their pagan practices. The Catholics had another approach. Wilkinson draws on the writings of historian Albert Henry Newman who says:

By making a parade of ascetical life, by pretended miracles, and by promises of earthly advantages, they succeeded in converting Ethelbert, king of the Saxons, who with about ten thousand followers received baptism in a river at the hands of the missionaries. A firm alliance having been formed between the king and the Roman See, the missionaries addressed themselves to the far more difficult task of subjecting the British Christians to Rome. When all other means proved unavailing, they persuaded the Saxon king to make an expedition against them. Three thousand of the British Christians were slaughtered on one occasion. For centuries the Christians of the old British type, in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as in various parts of Germany, resisted with all their might the encroachment of Rome, and it is probable that Christianity of this type was never wholly exterminated.

The Synod at Whitby was part of the effort by the Catholic Church to exterminate Christianity of the type supported by Patric, Columba and others of that line. The synod itself was unsuccessful but the overall project succeeded in wiping Celtic Christianity from the minds of the British and replacing it with an English version of Catholicism. At the time of the Synod of Whitby true Christianity (meaning the Christianity of the apostles) was established and growing among the Celts. There is a webpage at https://www.wilfrid.com/Wilfrid_pilgrimage/Whitby_synod.htm which deals with the Synod of Whitby. The facts largely support the telling in Truth Triumphant which I have, in major part, adopted as my standard. The argument was decided based on whether the Romans (who claimed that their practise came directly from Peter) or the Celts (who argued that their practise came directly from John) were right. The website is dedicated to the church of St. Wilfrid's but you can identify the facts and form your own conclusions. I encourage you to peruse the website.

The success of the counterfeiters at whitewashing the issues cited by Luther is striking when we observe that the whole world is aware of Halloween but nobody by comparison knows of Reformation Day or if the 95 theses are still relevant. For example the 95 theses start like this:

You can check out the rest at https://www.luther.de/en/95thesen.html , a website dedicated to Martin Luther. The USLEGAL website says: A canonical penalty is a punishment imposed under penal law of the Church, such as excommunication or purgatory. The law of the church is set out in the Code of Canon Law... . Luther was talking about Catholic Church law but persists with a belief in unscriptural doctrines such as purgatory. According to the same Wikipedia webpage on Reformation Day cited earlier:

Roman Catholic attitudes
Bishop John M. Quinn of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Winona and Bishop Steven Delzer of Evangelical Lutheran Southeastern Minnesota Synod leading a Reformation Day service in 2017

On 31 October 1999, the Lutheran World Federation and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, regarding a resolution on some points of doctrinal disagreement between mainline Lutheran Churches and the Catholic Church (See also Criticism of Protestantism). The World Methodist Council formally recognized the Declaration in 2006.

In 2013, the Joint International Commission between representatives of the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church published a report entitled From Conflict to Communion, anticipating the forthcoming Lutheran-Catholic Common Commemoration of the Reformation in 2017, which noted that "in 2017, Lutheran and Catholic Christians will commemorate together the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation". The "common commemoration" was a year-long remembrance concluded on Reformation Day 2017.

editors of WikipediaReformation DayWikipediahref="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation_Day"accessed 2018-10-29

Consider what day they used. Halloween is 31 October and is the same as Reformation Day which is the pagan day of the dead.

A Bit on Islam

Arabs are Ishmaelites, from Abraham out of Hagar. In their religion, Islam, the promises of to Abraham are traced through Ishmael (the elder) and not through Isaac (the child of promise through Sarah). The two major religions of the western world pit Isaac (using the Bible) against Ishmael (using the Koran).

In 330 B.C. Constantine split the Roman Empire into two parts: the capital in the west was Rome and the eastern capital was Constantinople. The Eastern Roman Empire became known as the Byzantine Empire. It was Atilla the Hun that brought them to heel but Germans struck the final blow. The east was influenced by Greek culture, rather than the Latin (Roman) of those in the West. Germanic tribes such as the Visigoths, Vandals, Angles, Saxons, Franks, Ostrogoths, and Lombards each took turns at the Western side. Finally in 476 A.D. Romulus, the last of the Roman emperors in the west, was overthrown by Odoacer, who became the first Barbarian i.e. one from those Germanic tribes, to rule in Rome. The eastern part of the Holy Roman Empire survived for another 1,000 years and is called the Byzantine Empire. Under the Arabs it was reduced to only Anatolia i.e. Asia Minor. As an aside note that Angles and Saxons is how we got Anglo-Saxon and they were considered barbarians. I will get to British-Israelism eventually.

Even though the Huns had caused Rome to crumble it was the Arabs that built the next Empire . The Byzantine Emperor Justinian (527 to 565) initially picked up Italy and added some territory from North Africa to southern Spain but Africa and Spain was lost to the Muslims and Italy was taken by the Germans. Sunni Islam is the world's largest religious denomination, followed by Catholicism. The same basic problems in Christianity exist in Islam. They are issues of philosophy of law i.e. jurisprudence. At the first division there were three major sects: Kharijites who are now extinct, Sunnis and Shi'as. Divisions arose from a disagreement over the choice of Muhammad's successor. Even now Sunis and Shias are further divided into several sects even though there is one Koran just as Christians hold widely different opinions formed from one Bible.

Before Islam an Arabian monarch was called malik (King, ruler). Caliph comes from an Arab word which means successor , steward , or deputy and is believed to be a shortening of Khalfat Rasl Allh ( successor of the messenger of God ) however scholars believe that the original meaning of the phrase was successor selected by God . The term was not commonly used as a title until the early twentieth century. I dealt with ruling by divine right in the article The Princes, the Priests and the Prophets and you might take note that it is a feature of both Islam and Catholicism. The title of Ayatollah (translated into English as Sign of God , Divine Sign or Reflection of God ) became popularized with the creation of Qom Seminary in 1922.

Before Muhammad unified Arabia under Islam, Arabs were polytheistic nomads and raided their neighbouring Arab tribes. The first caliphate (the Rashidun Caliphate) was established immediately after Muhammad's death in 632. During this time the empire took over Egypt, Syria, Armenia and Persia.

A civil war broke out under the fourth Rashidun caliph (the fourth in the succession of Rashidun caliphs) which led to the establishment of the second caliphate (the Umayyad Caliphate) in 661. The Umayyad was considered too secular by some Muslims. It is during this time that the empire was extended as far as the Iberian Peninsula. Christians, who constituted a majority of the Caliphate's population, and Jews were required to pay a head tax called the jizya to practice their own religion. Muslims only paid another tax called zakat tax dedicated to various welfare programmes. Non-Arabs were treated as second-class citizens regardless of whether or not they converted to Islam which ultimately led to the Umayyad's overthrow. Zoroastrianism was the pre-Islamic religion of Iran (Persia) and still survives there in pockets but more so in India, where the descendants are known as Parsis, or Parsees. Umayyads allegedly killed all Zoroastrian clergy upon conquest of east Iranian lands, and destroyed their buildings and literature, but relations between the Muslims and the Christians in the state were stable in this time. During their frequent battles with the Christian Byzantines (Christians of the Roman variety) they had little fear of sedition in Syria which, like many other parts of the empire, had remained largely Christian, and Christians held prominent positions. Why could that be?

A caliphate or khilāfah is a public institution, somewhat like a political party over a one party state comprising the Muslim community and the lands and peoples under its jurisdiction, where the leader is a caliph. Following the Abbasid Revolution from 746 - 750, which primarily arose from non-Arab Muslims being deprived, the third caliphate ( Abbasid Caliphate) was established in 750. From 945 to 1157, the Abbasid Caliphate came under Buyid (Persian) and then Seljuq (Turkish) military control. In 1250, a non-Arab army created by the Abbasids called the Mamluks came to power in Egypt. Mamluk means slave in Arabic and refers to Muslim slave soldiers and Muslim rulers of slave origin. In 1258, the Mongol Empire sacked Baghdad, ending the Abbasid Caliphate but in 1261 the Mamluks in Egypt re-established the Abbasid Caliphate at Cairo. This Abbasid dynasty continued to claim authority in religious matters until the Ottomans conquered Mamluk Egypt in 1517 giving rise to the fourth caliphate.

Muhammad

Muhammad was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in 570 A.D. i.e. about a century after the fall of the western side of the Roman Empire. He would have been aware of the power of the Pope there as well as the possibility of a successful challenge to the Byzantine Empire. Starting in about 613, Muhammad began preaching that there was no other God but Allah and that Muslims (followers of his religion) should devote their lives to this Allah. There was no written Koran then and it supposedly came to Muhammed via Gabriel sporadically. This puts the church above the emperor. When you consider what had recently occurred in Britain with the Gregorian mission which started in 596, you will get a better picture of the world in which Muhammad lived. There was an obvious abuse of Christianity by Rome and it would have been evident in Africa since Jews had fled there and were evangelised into Christianity via the Ethiopian Eunuch 600 years before Islam. While the Pope was able to take advantage of the power of Rome in Europe and seek papal supremacy, the African situation where Rome was weak and the Emperor was still considered supreme over the church, gave rise to Islam.

The RomanPersian Wars were fought against the Greco-Roman Empire by two successive Iranian empires: the Parthian and the Sasanian (Neo-Persian). The Parthian Empire was founded in 247 BC and dissolved in 224 AD. The Sasanian Empire ruled from 224 to 651 AD. Battles began in 66 B.C. and continued escalating so that by of the 6th and 7 ^th centuries they were both exhausted and vulnerable (something like how the world wars of the 20 ^th century opened the way for the USA). Emperor Justinian (527 to 565 AD) had extended the Empire so that it started from around Italy and circled around covering much of the middle east, went down to Egypt, then across north Africa and into southern Spain.

By the time of Muhammad the major players in the East were the Sasanian Empire and the Byzantine Empire. Remember that in the Germanic tribes had eventually caused the collapse of the western Roman Empire in 476 A.D. The Siege of Constantinople in 626 by the Sassanid Persians and a large confederation of heterogeneous peoples from Asia, ended in victory for the Byzantines. The failure of the siege saved the Empire from collapse. Benefiting from their weakened condition, the Arab Muslim armies swiftly took over the entire Sasanian Empire, and wrested away territories in the Levant, the Caucasus, Egypt, and the rest of North Africa from the Byzantines.

Much of the success of the Arabs can be attributed to Muhammed. Hijra or Hegira refers to Muhammad's departure from Mecca to Medina in AD 622, prompted by the opposition of the merchants of Mecca and marking the establishment of the first Muslim community. When Muhammad appeared on the scene Mecca was a centre of commerce and trade located at the crossroads of several caravan routes. Mecca had a second major source of income linked to the sacredness of its principal religious shrine, the Kabah which Islamic tradition maintains was constructed originally by Adam and then rebuilt by Abraham and his son Ishmael, the father of Arabs. Out of respect for the the Kabah, fighting in Mecca and its vicinity was forbidden, which allowed commerce to flow unimpeded by feuding clans and tribes.

Most members of the Quraysh (the merchant tribe) considered Muhammad to be a dangerous insurrectionist that threatened their lifestyle. In 618 he lost protection in Mecca with the death of his influential uncle Abu Talib and eventually fled to the city of Yathrib (subsequently called Medina) in 622 AD. Muhammad was joined by his followers and were promised freedom to practice their religion. It marks the founding of the Ummah (meaning Muslim community) in Medina and the beginning of the Islamic era.

Muhammad developed a role as impartial arbitrator in a local disputes which lead to him becoming the city's judge, foremost statesman and military commander and of course its supreme religious leader, establishing the community as Muslim. From this base, over the next ten years Muhammad and his many followers returned to Mecca and conquered the region. Muhammad died in 632 and a series of leaders, known as caliphs, became his successors. This system of being run by a Muslim ruler, became known as a caliphate.

The caliphate system eventually evolved into the Ottoman Empire, HORN 8 (1516-1917) which controlled large regions in the Middle East until ended by World War I. Another typical example of the princes, the prophets and the priests. Islam was in opposition to Catholicism not to Christianity . They were secular-empire builders. I leave it to you to explore the similarities. You will notice that Islam never covered Italy where the little horn was and it never controlled Britain where God was developing the seed to spread the true gospel to the world via the British colonialism.

The story of Islam as it relates to African people can hardly be told without referring to Mansa Moussa. I will insert this extract taken from Wikipedia some time in 2018, https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa

Mansa Musa (about 1280 – about 1337) was an emperor (mansa) of the Mali Empire during the 14th century. He became emperor in 1307. He was the first African ruler to be widely known throughout Europe and the Middle East.

Mansa Musa was the great nephew of Sundiata Keita, who was founder of the empire. He is famous for his [Hajj] (1324–5). His caravan was said to consist of 60,000 people carrying supplies and bags, 500 slaves each carrying a gold staff, and 80 to 100 camels each carrying 300 pounds of gold dust. On his journey, he is said to have given out millions of dollars worth of gold. He gave out so much gold in Cairo that the value stayed relatively low for many years.

Mansa Musa also helped to spread Islam. He was a devoted Muslim, and built many schools based on the teachings of the Qur'an, there also is a saying that every Friday when he stopped, while on his Hajj, he ordered a Mosque to be built, because that is a Muslim holy day. He sent students to Islamic universities in northern Africa was fames sens 1344

After his Hajj, European cartographers began to draw Mansa Musa on maps. As the empire of Mali fell apart Mansa Musa's reputation did as well; he was no longer drawn as a noble king on maps, but instead more uncivilized. He was drawn as a parody of European royalty, a naked savage with a crown. Mansa Musa was married to Inari Kunate. Mansa Musa, at his time worth $400 billion, is still the richest man to date.

A investigation into the Ghanan and Mali Empires would be enlightening to some who believe that Africa was a constant rabble of self-serving chiefs before the Berlin Conference from 15 November 1884 to 26 February 1885 carved it up. Islam penetrated Africa from the North.

While it appears to be true that there was less persecution of Christians under Islamic domination, there is no record of a consistent effort to preserve true Christianity in the way that it was done by the Celts who faced domination and extermination under the Anglo-Saxons and Catholicism.

Meanwhile in England

In the introduction to this series I mentioned Adomnan of Iona who lived from 627/628 to 704, who was Abbot of Iona and a successor of Columba. Columba and his followers taught the Bible in the vernacular. Those who lived as disciples of Christ were thriving in England. Iona was established as a centre for Christianity in 563 A.D. by Patric (the Gregorian mission started in 596) and was held by his followers until they were driven out of it in 1204 by the Benedictine monks. That was about 200 years before Henry VIII who would open another door to Christianity, since that one was now closed.

Aiden was born around 590 AD. Young Aidan was sent from Iona to King Oswald of Northumbria (a German not a Celt) in answer to his request for an evangelist even though Paulinus, the Roman bishop that accompanied Æthelberht's daughter, Æthelburg and converted her husband, was still alive. Aidan's success at spreading the truth centred on his training schools (the island of Lindisfarne and Melrose on the Tweed River), called monasteries, using the term in its ancient sense. The first person sent had abandoned the challenge and Aiden was his replacement. From Aidan's first training centre, similar organisations were established in the kingdoms of Bernicia, Deira, Mercia, and East Anglia. Rome had divided England into seven kingdoms, the Heptarchy, which was the arrangement in England in Aidan's time.

Whitby in Northumbria is remembered particularly because of Hilda . She is the one who apparently hosted the Synod at Whitby there, seemingly at her seminary, which would have grown out of Aiden's work. She was abbess of the training college/seminary there which was divided into a male and a female section, unusual for that time.

Spain

There is a comparative demonisation of Islam vs. Roman/evangelical Christianity which is not supported by history i.e. there is evidence that one is no better than the other. Christians seem to believe that since the Bible is good everyone that reads it interprets it the same and follows the good while all Muslims identify with the evil in the Koran. The truth is that both have been applied to acquisition and concentration of power by the princes and the priests. Catholics have long recognised the similarities. On the Catholic website National Catholic Reporter , Aug 17, 2007

Iranian author Vali Nasr in his 2006 book The Shia Revival ticks off an impressive string of parallels between Shi'a and Catholicism: a strong emphasis on clerical authority; an approach to the Qur'an accenting both scripture and tradition; a deep mystical streak; devotion to a holy family (in the case of Shi'ites, the blood relatives of Muhammad) and to saints (the Twelve Imams); a theology of sacrifice and atonement through the death of Hussein, the son of Muhammad's cousin Ali, who was martyred in Karbala, Iraq, in 680; belief in free will (as opposed to the Sunni doctrine of pre-destination); holy days, pilgrimages, and healing shrines; intercessory prayer; and strongly emotional forms of popular devotion, especially the festival of Ashoura commemorating Hussein's death.

John L. Allen Jr.The Catholic-Shi'a connection; Another Latin Mass noteNational Catholic Reporterhttps://www.ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/catholic-shia-connection-another-latin-mass-noteAugust 17, 2007

I do not believe that I have to recount Catholic atrocities through the years up to relatively recently with the Ustaše  (Ustashe). Their history of intolerance is similar.

Spain has been both Muslim and Christian. By the time of the Moors (after 711 A.D.) German peoples had invaded England and and were displacing the Celts while the Arabs were displacing Germans in Europe. In the 400's and 500's Germans (Angles, Jutes, and Saxons) drove the native Celts from England and into Wales, Ireland, and Scotland and we identified Patric, Columba, Dinooth and Aiden who maintained the faith. In the first century the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) came under the Roman Empire. In the late third century two Germanic tribes, the Franks and the Alemanni, periodically invaded the Iberian Peninsula. In 410 A.D. other Germanic tribes, the Suevi and the Vandals, were driven there from Europe by the Huns which you can read of on Exploring History Website https://exploringhist.blogspot.com/2016/02/who-were-huns.html . These were followed by the Visigoths, from Gaul. These German people accepted Catholicism en masse perhaps because of the attitude displayed by Augustine to sanctify all their paganism. The Synod of Whitby in 664, where Catholics tried to purge those who lived as disciples of Christ from the Celts, would have been almost 50 years before the Moors. The Moors were a nomadic people from Mauretania. They invaded Spain in 711 by expelling the Visigoths, the German people who then controlled Spain. Under their leader Tariq ibn-Ziyad they spread northward as far as France before they were halted by Charles Martel and his Frankish knights (Germanic) in 732. They established the Umayyad caliphate (the second caliphate) in Cordoba but never had a stable central government. In the 11 ^th Century the caliphate fell to the Almoravids.

The Almoravid dynasty was a Berber (people who spoke the Berber language) Muslim dynasty with capital in Morocco. Berbers or Amazighs are an ethnic group indigenous to North Africa, spreading from Algeria in the west through Libya to western Egypt. Berbers had only recently converted to Islam and they provided the bulk of the fighting force of the invading Islamic armies. They felt discriminated against by the Arabs and appear to have also suffered Arab-Muslim subversion. The dynasty originated among the Lamtuna and the Gudala, nomadic Berber tribes of the Sahara.

Almoravids were supplanted in 1174 by the Almohads, another Berber tribe. During this period, Catholic German rulers in Northern Spain were trying to recapture the south. It is also during this time that Peter Waldo in Lyon (around 1173) started the Waldensian movement. It quickly spread to the Cottian Alps between what is today France and Italy and was nearly annihilated in the 17th century by these Catholic Christians. In 1085 Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile recaptured Toledo, Cordoba fell in 1236 as the Moors were driven to surrender. In 1238, the Christian Reconquest forced Spanish Muslims south, and the kingdom of Granada was established as the final refuge of the Moors. Granada, was captured by Fernidad V and Isabella I in 1492. In 1502 the Spanish crown ordered all Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity. Things for Muslims worsened until in 1609 the last Moors still adhering to Islam were expelled from Spain.

The Moorish occupation of Spain raised it to prominence in Europe and propelled Europe out of the dark ages. Wikipedia tells of this contribution to Europe in its article on al-Andalus @2018-11-02 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Andalus . Were the Christians good and the Muslims bad?

Tolerance

Racial prejudice was a hallmark of the Muslim empire from early. The Moors had converted to Islam and had done the grunt work of capturing the Iberian peninsula and establishing Al Andalus. By 750 the Arabs had taken over and were abusing Moors, the very people who had started the caliphate, and it had lead to several rebellions of Moors. Modern Germany has retained visible records of what the Moors of this period actually looked like. It is quite different from the modern Arabic complexion. It appears that the Arab masters of society became occupiers of what was then nomadic land. The argument that Africans had no concept of ownership of land was later used to claim the lands of Africa by Germanic peoples. Religious prejudice was also evident in both cases. The Jizya is discussed on wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizya . It was a tax on Jews and Christians in the Muslim world.

Forced conversion has been a hallmark of the princes and the priests from antiquity. Antiochus IV Epiphanes (c. 215 - 164 BC) became ruler of the Seleucid Empire in 175 BC. Some time thereafter he banned many traditional Jewish and Samaritan religious practices: he made possession of the Torah a capital offence and burned the copies he could find; Sabbaths and Feasts were banned; circumcision was outlawed, and mothers who circumcised their babies were killed along with their families, and ritual sacrifice was forbidden; consider  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maccabees and https://www.britannica.com/topic/Maccabees . The Maccabees were a group of Jewish insurgents who took control of Judea, which at the time was part of the Seleucid Empire. They founded the Hasmonean dynasty, which ruled from 167 BC to 37 BC and they reasserted the Jewish religion, partly by forced conversion. John Maccabees, known later as Hyrcanus I consolidated and extended Jewish control, established control over Samaria and conquered the whole of Idumea and forced its inhabitants to convert to Judaism (Josephus, Ant., 13:257ff.). That is how the Idumaean king Herod of Jesus day was a Jew by religion. Alexander Jannaeus (c. 80 BC) demolished the city of Pella in Moab, because the inhabitants would not agree to adopt the national custom of the Jews . Josephus, Antiquities. 13.15.4

Wikipedia says

The Codex Theodosianus (Eng. Theodosian Code) was a compilation of the laws of the Roman Empire under the Christian emperors since 312. A commission was established by Theodosius II and his co-emperor Valentinian III on 26 March 429 and the compilation was published by a constitution of 15 February 438. It went into force in the eastern and western parts of the empire on 1 January 439.

    “It is Our will that all the peoples who are ruled by the administration of Our Clemency shall practice that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans.... The rest, whom We adjudge demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas, their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of Our own initiative (Codex Theodosianus XVI 1.2.)”.

Forced conversions of Jews were carried out with the support of rulers during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages in Gaul, the Iberian peninsula and in the Byzantine empire.

editors of WikipediaForced conversionWikipedia, the free encyclopediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_conversion23:47, 29 November 2023

Forced conversion has been a global trait of both Christianity and Islam as can be explored on Wikipedia at the link just mentioned. Consider a few instances. Charlemagne, King of the Franks (a Germanic race), forcibly converted the Saxons. In the Massacre of Verden in 782, Charlemagne reportedly had 4,500 captive Saxons massacred because they rebelled against conversion. In 785 His law Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, stipulated death to those Saxons who refused to convert to Christianity. Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and Emperor from 800, all until his death, in other words a german. Bear in mind that Saxon is a name of Germanic people occupying Britain, therefore it appears that they are even intolerant their own.

Continuing with the Forced Conversion page on the Wikipedia site above; in 1201 Pope Innocent III pronounced:

Those who are immersed even though reluctant, do belong to ecclesiastical jurisdiction at least by reason of the sacrament, and might therefore be reasonably compelled to observe the rules of the Christian Faith. It is, to be sure, contrary to the Christian Faith that anyone who is unwilling and wholly opposed to it should be compelled to adopt and observe Christianity. For this reason a valid distinction is made by some between kinds of unwilling ones and kinds of compelled ones. Thus one who is drawn to Christianity by violence, through fear and through torture, and receives the sacrament of Baptism in order to avoid loss, he (like one who comes to Baptism in dissimulation) does receive the impress of Christianity, and may be forced to observe the Christian Faith as one who expressed a conditional willingness though, absolutely speaking, he was unwilling ..

Based on the Bible, true Christians are essentially Messianic Jews. After Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 Sephardic Jews (from Hebrew Sefarad: Spain ) and Mudéjar (Spanish word from Arabic mudajjan: permitted to remain ) Muslims were baptized under coercion and in the face of execution. The Spanish Inquisition, established in 1478 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, made the state and inquisitors wealthy by confiscating the property of the persecuted. After the forced conversion, the Spanish Inquisition targeted these converts, who they suspected of secretly practising their religion. The end of Al-Andalus and the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula went hand in hand with the increase of Spanish and Portuguese influence in the world courtesy of Columbus. The Ottoman (Muslim) Empire and Morocco absorbed most of the Jewish refugees. So if the choice is to pay a tax under Islam or suffer persecution or death under Christianity which would you choose? God did it the way that He wanted to and not necessarily what seemed easiest. On the other hand it is difficult to see how a large population of biological white Jews would appear in Poland and the answer appears to be the Khazars. Both Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica cite the Khazars.

Determining the origins and nature of the Khazars is closely bound with theories of their languages, but it is a matter of intricate difficulty since no indigenous records in the Khazar language survived, and the state was polyglot and polyethnic. The native religion of the Khazars is thought to have been Tengrism, like that of the North Caucasian Huns and other Turkic peoples.[16] The polyethnic populace of the Khazar Khaganate appears to have been a multiconfessional mosaic of pagan, Tengrist, Jewish, Christian and Muslim worshippers.[17] Some of the Khazars (namely the Kabars) joined the ancient Hungarians in the 9th century. The ruling elite of the Khazars was said by Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Daud to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism in the 8th century,[18] but the scope of the conversion to Judaism within the Khazar Khanate remains uncertain.The editors of Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaKhazarsWikipedia, the free encyclopediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars08:43, 1 January 2024

. . .Textual witnesses dating from the 9th and 10th centuries claim the Khazars adopted Judaism in the 8th century. These texts are not without problems, however, and lack of archaeological or other physical evidence indicating a mass conversion has called both the extent and historicity of this conversion into doubt.The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaKhazarEncyclopedia Britannicahttps://www.britannica.com/topic/KhazarAccessed 2 January 2024

There is a wealth of back and forth on the subject but these are the facts that I have distilled. There was a Khazar conversion but nobody knows to what extent. The Askenazi Jews appear white and have been proven to have been genetically different from other Jews by their extensive degree of white genes. Nobody has genetic material of Khazars to prove what their genetic code was. Ashkenazi Jews are not completely white and hence have been mixed and it appears extensively. Ashkenazi Jews are from the area of Germany. The rest is speculation on both sides.

The Jews were welcome in the Roman Empire and fared well because of a favour that they had done for Caesar (The battle of the Jewish Camp with Antipater). The Roman Empire did not Extend to Poland. When the Eastern Roman Empire fell and the Muslim Empire appeared in the 7^th Century the Jews fared well under the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) as we spoke about earlier. It was be natural for them to go there and that is the origin of the Sephardic Jews and Mudéjar Jews. They were pushed out of Spain by the Germans (Ferdinand and Isabella and the like) in the 15^th Century and went into north Africa. The Germans formed a barrier between the Spanish peninsula and the Slavic and Russian people to their north. The Sephardic Jews therefore went into Africa. During the time when the Jews fared well under the Muslims is when the ruling elite of the Khazars was said to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism i.e. in the 8^th century. It is reasonable to expect that as the source of the Askenazi Jews' whiteness. It is not unreasonable to imagine that maybe a few Sephardic Jews went there but not on the scale required to explain the Askenazi Jews. Possibly the most ridiculous argument that I have heard is that DNA tests prove that the Ashkenazi Jews are not Khazarian. The Khazars disappeared from history. How could you possibly know their DNA?

The Kingdom of Poland had been founded in 1025. From that time onward it was the most tolerant country in Europe and became Known as Paradisus Judaeorum (Latin for Paradise of the Jews ). The German and Polish people are both part of the broader group of Western Slavic and Germanic peoples so the Polish are not Germans but close. Remember however, that the English (Germanic) word slave comes from the word Slav. I believe that represents how the Germanic people came to view the Slavic people. I do not see the Jews clamouring to have that kind of treatment. Nevertheless, consider that Sviatoslav I had recently destroyed the Khazar Empire, a race of Turkish people. Sviatoslav I was from Kiev i.e. a Ukranian like Attila the Hun might have been around 400 years before. Ukrane was a melting pot of races. Sarkel fell in 965, followed by the capital city of Atil, c. 968 or 969, and now you have, in the same general region, a kingdom favouring Jews established fifty-five years later. Is it unfair to speculate that a whole lot of Polish Jews have little blood lineage to Abraham? At this time, since 711 AD, Jews were thriving in the Portuguese peninsula and it would be a while before they were forced into Africa by the Germanic Catholics. This leads to another aspect of intolerance that I intend to explore later in the series. I will make a minor comment here, but first I want to make a point about the Askenazi Jews.

How did these Ashkenazi Jews therefore end up in Germany? Possibly similar to how black Jews ended up in Africa but with much more mixing. There were no white Jews that we know of before the first century AD. Jews are a subset of Israelites that have remained largely intact. We know that Jews voluntarily migrated to Egypt at various times but not to Northern Europe. The migration to Northern Europe appears to have been forced and come as a result of the Jews expelled from Jerusalem, perhaps as slaves, during the 1^st century. By the time of Isabella and Ferdinand they would have already been thoroughly mixed white and would therefore have passed as Germanic except for actively practising their religion. It is reasonable to assume that most of that mixing would happen with Khazars who shared their religion and were largely upper class. It would have been a win-win. Jews want ascendancy and Khazars was legitimacy. It is difficult for me to see how that mixing would occur so extensively with Germanic people or Greco-Roman people.

There is nothing illegitimate about becoming a Jew by conversion, or intermarrying between biological Jews and converted Jews, however the ruling elite of the Khazars appear to be the core of the Askenazi Jews and their conversion appears to have been done out of selfishness, like with the Romans and Christianity, and not primarily out of respect of God or deep spiritual conversion. I have focussed in this series on the behaviour of the princes, the priests and the prophets. Where were they. To whom did they hold allegiance. Wikipedia article captioned Khazars,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars ,08:43, 1 January 2024 states ‎,The suggestion that the Khazars adopted Judaism as early as 740 is based on the idea that, in part, it was, a re-assertion of their independence from the rule of both regional powers, Byzantium and the Caliphate, while it also conformed to a general Eurasian trend to embrace a world religion. It is grounded in rebellion and self assertiveness not a deep yearning for God. Byzantium is the Roman Empire while the Caliphate refers to the Muslims. Elites are typically driven by money and social preeminence which appear to be elements of the mixing and conversion. One thing that I can speak of from observation is how this mixing among black people can caused the mixed to possess a psychological drive to out-do the biological original in defence of their presumed ancestry. Just as the Catholics who took over the Christian faith from the Jews became exceedingly intolerant so too have the Zionists who have taken over Judaism from the Jews. It would marry with my expectations.  Let us take a look at what the God that they claim to have chosen said.

To me there is a big difference between being a Jew and being a Zionist. I do not believe that converting to Judaism is illegitimate but claiming to be a Jew is not only about circumcision. I am yet to be convinced that the God of the Zionists is not the USA. You can give lip service to being God's friend and being delivered by HIm but it could be in reality that you are actually being delivered by a tyrant. Satan appears as a god of light, at least for a while. With regard to the Palestinians I sometimes hear the excuse that God said to wipe out the Amalekites. Amalek was the grandson of Esau the brother of Israel. Israel sought safe passage through their land, not to occupy it. They turned on Israel unprovoked. I rarely hear of the story of Saul who sought to wipe out people that God had accepted to live in His land and what David was later required to do with Saul's progeny. Which one is the situation with the Zionists? If God is almighty then it is He that drove the Jews from HIS land and accepted the Palestinians and there is no Jeremiah to say when that will end. God says that it will be at the return of the messiah and that has not happened yet. Being truly Jewish is to acknowledge But thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the seed of Abraham my friend (Isaiah 41:8 [KJV]) .

Getting back to intolerance and Islam, the contention that popular Christianity is better than Islam or vice versa is not borne out by history. God has made a way for those who live as disciples of Christ. The demise of the Western Roman Empire created the opportunity for Britain, Spain and France but my focus is on Britain. Subsequent Empires stopped at the Iberian Peninsula hence Islam, for example did not get a foothold in England. They had the power and control in all the known parts of the world to enforce their intolerance. There is no more inherent evil in the middle east than in any other part of the world but the wielders of power have always used violence and there has always been violent reprisals. With the Spanish discovery of 1492 that there was a continent now called America, the fortunes of the Iberian peninsula changed drastically. Spanish intolerance went to the Caribbean and America and could just as easily have overrun England with the Spanish Armada but that story is for another time.

English Bible timeline

While the Spanish were growing in wealth and power things were also changing in England. Henry VIII was Born in June 28, 1491. William Tyndale was born in England in 1494, executed by strangling, then burnt at the stake on October 6, 1536. He was betrayed by an Englishman that he had befriended. He must have had a fantastic mind being educated at Hertford College, Oxford, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Magdalen College and Oxford. Tyndale was the first man to print the New Testament in English. He also fluently spoke eight languages.

Tyndale set about to use the same 1516 Erasmus text as a source to translate and print the New Testament in English. Tyndale showed up at Luther's home in Germany in 1525, and completed his translation by the end of that year. He was already on the run from English inquisitors and bounty hunters because of the wide-spread rumour that his English New Testament project was underway. Some time during 1525-1526 the Tyndale New Testament was printed in the English language .

This was now during the reign of King Henry VIII who is said to have owned a copy. Did Henry read it? The year after the printing, in 1527, Henry VIII requested an annulment of his marriage, but Pope Clement VII refused. In response Henry had parliament pass laws between 1529 to 1536, abolishing papal authority in England and declaring Henry to be head of the Church of England. Henry pushed through the Act of Supremacy in 1534 which made him head of the church of England. On July 18, 1536, the English Parliament passed An Act Extinguishing the authority of the bishop of Rome which was the final law in the series severing the Church of England from Rome. Tyndale was executed on October 6, 1536 but he was condemned years before by Catholic authorities. He did not benefit from the changes to the English law. Tyndale's New Testament  were burned as soon as they could be confiscated. The Catholic Church claimed that it contained thousands of errors but they really burned them because they could find no errors at all and individuals risked being burned to death if caught with one in their possession but he public became more and more determined to read them.

Tyndale was hounded and murdered for fear that having the Bible in the language of the common man meant financial disaster to the church. They could no longer get away with selling indulgences or selling the releases from Purgatory . The need for priests would diminish and the veneration of church established saints and Mary would be open to ridicule.

Tyndale was on the run for 11 years and during that time his biggest customer in England was the King's men, who would buy up every copy to burn them and Tyndale used their money to print even more.

Myles Coverdale and John Rogers (of Bloody Mary fame) were disciples of Tyndale and moved ahead with the project after his death. They made use of Luther's German text and the Latin as sources. Coverdale finished translating the Old Testament, and in 1535 he printed the first complete Bible in the English language on October 4, 1535, now known as the Coverdale Bible.

John Thomas Matthew Rogers went on to print the second complete English Bible in 1537. This was, the first English Bible translated from the original Biblical languages of Hebrew & Greek. He printed it under the pseudonym Thomas Matthew , an alias used by Tyndale at one time, since a considerable part of this Bible was the translation of Tyndale. It is a composite made up of Tyndale's Pentateuch and New Testament and Coverdale's Bible and some of Roger's own translation of the text. It is commonly known as the Matthew-Tyndale Bible.

In 1539, Thomas Cranmer , the Archbishop of Canterbury, hired Myles Coverdale at the bequest of King Henry VIII to publish the Great Bible . It became the first English Bible authorized for public use, as it was distributed to every church, chained to the pulpit, and a reader was even provided so that the illiterate could hear the Word of God in plain English. William Tyndale had been burned in 1536. Tyndale's last words were, Oh Lord, open the King of England's eyes . Now three years later in 1539, King Henry VIII funded, the printing of this English Bible. Cranmer's Bible, published by Coverdale, was known as the Great Bible because it was over 14 inches tall i.e. 14 inches thick.

The Gospel of the Kingdom of God would spread to the four corners of the world propelled by the Anglo Saxons especially and their insidious colonialism. God could have used Celtic people or Romans or anything else but He chose that way. He also could have allowed it to be gobbled up by the many empires that represented the beast over the years. We will continue this subject later with the circumstances surrounding Henry VIII who was pivotal in how God was preparing to send the gospel to the world.

NOTE: You may notice two different styles of citing Josephus. My own citations are of the first type but sometimes the second comes in an extract.

Ant. 18.1.6 - refers in Whiston to Book 18, Chapter 1, Paragraph 6 of the Jewish Antiquities.

Ant. 18. 23 - refers in the Loeb edition to Book 18, Section 23 of the Jewish Antiquities

Acknowledgements

The basic template for my maps was acquired from Wikimedia Commons

. By STyx - Own work , Public Domain, Map

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