When one grows up accepting the account of Jesus’ death as factual history, it comes as quite a shock to see what the New Testament actually says about the "Son of Man!" Nowhere in the NT life of Jesus do we find an account more confused than the time leading up to his death. In this chapter, we shall first take a look at the events leading up to the Passover arrest of Jesus.

Matthew 26:17, "Now on the first day of the feast of unleavened bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying unto him, where wilt thou that we prepare for thee to eat the Passover?"

Mark 14:12, "And the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the Passover, his disciples said unto him, . . ."

Luke 22:7, "Then came the day of unleavened bread, when the Passover must be killed. And he sent Peter and John, saying, go and prepare us the Passover, that we may eat."

First of all we need to understand that these scriptures can’t possibly refer to the first day of Unleavened Bread, because that would have been the fifteenth of Nisan¾ a high holy day or annual Sabbath. The disciples would not have been making their preparations on this day. This would have been a total disregard for the Law and a desecration of the high Sabbath. As it is clearly the preparation day that is meant in these scriptures, or the fourteenth of Nisan, we notice at once a contradiction in the New Testament account. What we have, in fact, is another unmistakable indication that whoever was writing these accounts was a Gentile and did not understand the Holy Days of Israel’s Creator!

Next comes John’s account, which is found in 2:13: "The Passover of the Jews was at hand. . .", and in 11:55, "And the Jew’s Passover was nigh at hand. . ." To drive this point home, we can see immediately that whoever is writing this particular "Gospel" is not the Jewish Yohanan the apostle of Yoshua ben Yoseph!

Continuing in John 13:1: "Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world . . . And supper being ended, the devil having now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him; Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God; He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, . . ."

There is a problem here! It is quite obvious that this is the same supper, or the famous "Last Supper" in the other Gospels, yet John tells us it was before the Passover, which is to say the feast of Unleavened Bread which would begin on the night of Nisan 14/15. This would mean that John’s "Last Supper" account took place at the very latest on the night of Nisan 13/14, and perhaps earlier. But, the accounts quoted above in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are attempting to show, albeit mistakenly, the time of the "Last Supper" to be the preparation day, or the 14th of Nisan, meaning the supper was actually taking place on the evening of the 14/15th (keep in mind that a Hebrew day begins at sunset). This day is mistakenly called the first day of Unleavened Bread, again meaning that whoever wrote this simply did not understand the distinction.

Yet, if we strictly allow that the Gospel story is correct in the case of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, then the day Jesus told his disciples to prepare for the Passover would have to be the 13th of Nisan. We can know this because John 19:14 tells us that the next day was when the Jews were preparing for the Passover, and that would have been the 14th¾ which means that Jesus and his disciples kept the Passover on the wrong night. This is even further clarified by the fact that Christians are given to understand that Jesus died as the ultimate Passover lamb at the very time the Passover lambs were being slaughtered by the priests in the Temple on the afternoon of the 14th. There is no question of this because not only was the Sabbath "drawing" on in the story of Jesus’ trial, but that particular Sabbath was a "high" Sabbath, which is to say, that Jesus’ trial and execution were on the 14th of Nisan which was followed by the first day of Unleavened Bread¾ the 15th of Nisan!

I will not attempt to go into the various explanations offered to try to figure out this faulty Gentile chronology. I have here a book entitled The Christian Passover, which devotes one entire chapter in an effort to correct all the confusion noted above. The author, Fred Coulter, without admitting that there is a problem with the text, waxes quite eloquent in his explanations, while often contradicting himself in other chapters.

The most usual excuse for the contradictions is, however, that the Jews were at this time keeping the wrong day for Passover, and that Jesus and his disciples were keeping the right day. Fred Coulter, who believes this, writes, with emphasis: "THIS IMAGINARY SCENARIO [the problems outlined above in the four Gospels] COULD NOT POSSIBLY BE TRUE! THE EVENTS DID NOT TRANSPIRE THAT WAY! We can be absolutely positive that Jesus and His disciples did not keep the Passover in the manner just described, nor did the Jews keep their Passover in this manner! Such a scenario exposes the folly of this mistranslation." After going on to blast the Jews for apostatizing from the command of Israel’s God, Coulter does admit: "If this verse [Luke 22:7] actually means that the lambs were killed on the 15th, the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, then no one would have eaten the Passover until the 16th. Obviously that cannot be the meaning in this account by Luke, or in the parallel accounts by Matthew and Mark."

Of course Mr. Coulter cannot possibly make his argument that the Jews were keeping the wrong day in light of the clear statements (or misstatements!) of the Gospels¾ especially if we consider the direct mention by Paul that Jesus was the Passover sacrifice! What he is indeed admitting is that the entire NT account is a jumbled mess made by those who were trying to abolish the true eternal Passover of Israel, and put in its place a Mithraic "mass" which Christianity has completely accepted.

In an effort to clear up the various problems, Mr. Coulter goes on to appeal to the "original" Greek. IMAGINE! He goes to the text of the Greek Catholic Church and the mishmash of the Stephanus Greek version of Erasmus’ text, which was a hodgepodge assembled from countless and contradicting mss., to denounce the Jews and the first century Passover customs. Sadly, all Mr. Coulter’s arguments amount to is an attempt to protect and defend the Catholic Church fathers who originally supplied the missing links in the personal life of Jesus and their attempt to reconcile the Jewishness of one Joshua of Nazareth and the Mithraic traditions of the Babylonian Mysteries!

A critical observation should be made here. Not only do all Christian ministers make the point that Jesus was the ultimate Passover lamb, they say that his sacrifice did away with the "Old" Testament Passover. They do this in the face of Exodus 12:14-20 which plainly tells us that GOD COMMANDED THE PASSOVER FOREVER! How could God, Who does not change, command one thing at one time, then change His mind and abrogate it in the New Testament? Did He not know that, to follow Christian reasoning, He would send His son to die? What’s more, according to some Christian denominations, it was Jesus speaking and giving the command in the "OT" (i.e., according to some, the Logos of John 1:1 was the Elohim in the "OT"). And how, I would ask, does Ezekiel 45:15-24 fit into this picture? There we are told¾ verse after verse¾ that when the Messiah establishes the Kingdom, the Passover will be kept with animal offerings! These are very inconvenient questions when one gets outside of the "emotional" story of the New Testament Easter story!

Of course in relegating the true Israelite Passover to the garbage heap, Christianity imposes on their adherents a "new Passover command" complete with some very strange symbolism. G.T. Armstrong writes in his book, The Real Jesus, "By this institution of these New Testament symbols, [bread and wine] Jesus was changing the character and the time of observance of the Passover for all Christians to observe hereafter. He was partaking of His own ‘supper’ about 20 or so hours before the time of the Old Testament Passover, when the tens of thousands of families would be sitting down to their sacrificial roast lamb; and establishing new symbols which would look back to the reality of Christ’s sacrifice of His broken body and shed blood, rather than forward (through the slaughter of animals) to the need for such sacrifice for sins!"

This perspective goes a long way to understanding that the accounts of the Gospels are not only jumbled, but were, to repeat myself, written by men who were not familiar with the "Jewish" holy days. As to Mr. Armstrong’s statements, not only are they unsubstantiated in the "Old" Testament, they contradict the just-quoted Scriptures from Ezekiel! All Mr. Armstrong does is uphold one of the most pagan and damnable tenets of the Mysteries.

Let’s now look at the symbols of the wine and bread, which Christianity asserts replaced the "old" symbols of Israel’s Passover, which were instituted by Elohim forever, and Who, remember, DOES NOT CHANGE!

In volume one we went into exhaustive detail about the "sacred banquet" of pagan theology. I will admit that the first time I came face to face with the facts (of which I was never before aware!) concerning the pagan customs, and saw there in particular the details of the so-called "Christian" Eucharist, or the "Last Supper Passover," as I have grown up hearing it called, it was a disturbing revelation to me.

Imagine wholeheartedly believing in the symbols of wine and bread as the blood and flesh of Jesus, and then reading that the worshippers of Osiris, for only one example, annually celebrated his resurrection at the spring equinox (or near Passover), and ate a "sacred cake, or wafer, after it had been consecrated by the priest, [which became] veritable flesh of his flesh." Furthermore, they drank his blood in the form of wine!

After reading this, and finding it repeated in the mythologies of dozens of ancient nations, thousands of years before the birth of Jesus, it can do nothing but leave doubts in the minds of anyone who can think for themselves. And yet I could go to John 6:56 and find the same story completely laid out, which means, as a Christian, that I must somehow turn a blind eye and accept the story as the true "Word" of God: "He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him." I need only ask that you go back to volume one to prove how pagan the entire concept of a "savior-god’s" flesh and blood is. However, I will augment this by citing one example.

Barbara Walker writes: "Wheat was the ‘plant of truth’ cultivated on the mummy-cases of Osiris and made into communion cakes, to be eaten by worshipers so they could partake of the god’s divinity and become immortal like him."

What is very important to our present study is that before this pagan "Eucharist" found its way into the Babylonian Mysteries, the people of Mesopotamia celebrated a more ancient custom which entailed the offering of animals for sins! In other words, anciently, before Nimrod’s death, all peoples sacrificed animals as atonement and recognition of their sins, as we read in the case of Abel in Genesis. This practice comes as no surprise as all peoples were the children of Noah who was a true servant of the Creator. Noah, as king of the post-flood world, taught all of his posterity the ways of their Creator, and it was only after his time that the great apostasy of Baal (i.e., Cush) and Nimrod along with Semiramis took place. With this religion the true sacrifice, as instituted by our Creator was abolished, and in its place the Sun-god of Babylon offered his flesh and blood for his adherents to eat and drink. In the symbols of Nimrod’s flesh and blood they would find forgiveness for their sins, healing of their bodies, and immortality in the presence of their god: but they were in reality eating and drinking unto themselves damnation!

Allow me to depart for a moment to recall from volume one the fact that the English word cannibal has a distinct history. In imitation of the sacrifice of Nimrod, humans were offered upon his altars at the spring equinox: "Hence the priests of Nimrod or Baal were necessarily required to eat of the human sacrifices; and thus is has come to pass that ‘Cahn-Bal,’ the ‘Priest of Baal,’ is the established word in our own tongue for the devourer of human flesh." Once these humans were consecrated to Baal/Nimrod, their flesh became his, and along with their blood the adherents of the Mysteries could partake directly of the body and blood of their savior-god.

Wine became an important part of the pagan Babylonian ceremony celebrating the savior-Sun-god because of the fact that it was considered to be the blood of life. This referred to the menstrual blood of the Mother-goddess, who gave life to the savior-god. Similarly, this blood of life flowed from the savior-god to his worshippers, symbolized in the drinking of wine at his holy Eucharist¾ symbolism that can be traced directly to Babylonia and relates to Semiramis the great goddess of the Babylonian Mysteries. "Worshipers of Dionysus/Bacchus believed that their god’s sacred blood was the wine, pouring out of his body at his sacrificial death, just as the juice poured out of the grapes."

Alexander Hislop writes, "in Scripture he [the Sun-god of Babylon] is referred to (Ezek. viii. 14) under the name of Tammuz, but he is commonly known among classical writers under the name of Bacchus, that is, ‘the Lamented one.’ To the ordinary reader the name of Bacchus suggests nothing more than revelry and drunkenness, but it is now well known, that amid all the abominations that attended his orgies, their grand design was professedly ‘the purification of souls,’ and that from the guilt and defilement of sin.’"

When I was seeing for the first time in my research the identical legend of paganism’s "Eucharist" in my church’s Passover substitution, I could only lean on the excuse that I have already mentioned: Satan, centuries before Jesus, had counterfeited the truth in his Mystery Religion. As I pointed out before, I was not the only one who had thought to blame the Devil in this instance. Justin Martyr, in his defense of the Eucharist, says, "Which thing indeed the evil spirits have taught to be done out of mimicry in the Mysteries and Initiatory rites of Mithra."

What about that excuse? I have to ask if it is logical to think that God would, in His mercy and wisdom, allow a being as diabolical as Satan to so completely counterfeit His truth that it simply could not be told apart from the real thing? In volume one I had to defend the disturbing information I was uncovering on this very premise, because what history clearly tells us is that the Babylonian Mystery Religion is almost identical to Christianity. Sure, in the case of my own former denomination, they had accepted enough truth from the "Old" Testament to almost totally obscure what they were actually preaching. However, since that time I have come to see that they were not much different from the first century Samaritans whose religion consisted of about one-third "Judaism," and two-thirds Mithraism!

Think about it for a minute: why would a loving Creator place humanity in such a situation? It would be like a parent placing two apple pies before their starving children: one would be laced with poison while the other was nourishing. Now the parent wouldn’t tell the child which one of the pies was deadly, so it would be up to these innocent little babies to make the right choice. If you choose the right one you have life. If you choose the wrong one it would be death! This is, in effect, what we are asked to believe about Christianity. While on one hand we can see and acknowledge that it is laced with the poison of Mithraism, we are also to believe that somewhere beneath the tangle is a life-giving truth that God will allow only a few to find.

It is significant that this is not the situation with the so-called "Old" Testament. There one can clearly find the "facts of life" presented without being embroiled in great controversies. Furthermore, as an aside, but one that is very significant, I have yet to see from history a counterfeit of this faith, lest it be either from the Samaritans or Moslems in some small easily detectable degree. However, you should make no mistake here, to the descendants of Jacob it is a deadly important fact that Christianity has supposedly been built upon the "Old" Testament, when indeed the church fathers have essentially dismantled it and replaced it with fables. Even though Christians are taught that the "OT" is the foundation for the New, the simple truth is that a close examination of the one will leave the other exposed to the deception outlined in this book.

This brings us back to the sacraments, or the wine and bread of the "Last Supper." Where in all of the "OT" are we to find such a precedent? Why on earth would we, or should we, partake of a cannibalizing feast of a dead god? Of course the answer is to be found in volume one, which outlines the documented history of the many different pagan gods of Mesopotamia who were symbolically eaten so that they could live on through their worshippers. But, find, if you can, the prophecy in the "OT" that tells us that we must eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Messiah! You cannot! Only the sacrificial animal is found there, and even though its flesh was eaten by the priest, its blood was not consumed¾ indeed, such an act is an abomination to the Elohim of Israel!

Notice in Leviticus 17:10: "And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people. . . . Ye shall eat the blood of NO MANNER OF FLESH: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off."

Before reading further on this subject, notice for a moment in Deuteronomy chapter 12 that the Elohim of Israel commands that we should "utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: and ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars [phallic images, i.e., steeples!] and burn their groves with fire: ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place." (12:2-3)

Now notice that in the same chapter the Elohim of Israel tells his children about their offerings: "Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; AND THOU MAYEST NOT EAT THE LIFE WITH THE FLESH!" "Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou inquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise."

It is very possible that this entire chapter in Deuteronomy is a warning to the Israelites about the pagan custom of drinking blood for salvation—a practice that had been well-established among the newly-released slaves of Egypt.

In reality, the sacrifice of the Passover lamb, which is equated with Jesus, was not a sin offering. If indeed it was, then why wasn’t the lamb offered for everyone in Israel¾ why only the first born? The answer is that this particular sacrifice was instituted in Egypt to indicate to the death angel whose house he was to "pass over" when he came into the land. The symbol of blood on the doorpost spared the first born of that house, and the sacrifice of the Passover lamb in subsequent generations was only a commemoration of that event. It does not in anyway connect to an individual being forgiven of their sins by eating the flesh of a lamb.

We can also add to this information the point already raised that the Passover itself was instituted by our Creator forever and no man has the right to abrogate it and institute another command¾ least of all an abominable substitution of drinking blood! This is exactly what the New Testament teaches and that, dear reader, is a deadly doctrine for anyone to accept! Indeed, allow me to use Paul’s own words against Christianity: "As we have said before, so now I say again, if any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed." Now the Gospel, or good news, Paul was supposedly teaching was from the "Old" Testament prophecies about the Messiah of Israel, and those did not include the eating of his flesh and drinking of his blood¾ which means that any other message was accursed!

So how did the ritual of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a god become part of Christianity? I think by now you know the answer to that one: it lies in the wholesale conversion of pagans coming into the Christian Church in the first three centuries of this era. More to the point, because Mithraism was the prevailing religion of Rome, and that is where Christianity got its foothold on the world, we need not marvel at the transformation of a sacred rite of Mithra into a ceremony of the worship of Jesus. In fact, the Mithraic ceremony of the Eucharist is, of all the other cannibalized Sun-god mysteries, the only one that is almost identical to its Christian counterpart.

The sad fact of it all is that we can obviously attack Easter and Christmas as pagan, and I have always done so with a certain pride because the admonition to keep these pagan feasts is not found in the NT, but rather rests on the authority of the Catholic Church. But the celebration of a sacred banquet is equally as pagan, and, I say now that if it were not found commanded in the NT few of you would have any problem in abandoning it completely as an abomination before your Creator!

When reading the account of Jesus’ arrest, few Christians have thought to really examine all the details found mingled into the affair. Take for example the account of Peter drawing his sword and cutting off the ear of one Malchus, a servant of the high priest. According to the Gospel account, we find Jesus reprimanding Peter while at the same time picking up the man’s ear and restoring it to his head¾ an act that surely would have caused some great hesitation among the guards. At any rate, if this was a true account, wouldn’t you suppose that Peter’s assault should have caused a response of some type from the sword-carrying guards? You would have thought that they would have at least arrested Peter for the assault. But they didn’t, and the most puzzling part of the whole thing is that after Peter had launched his assault, we next find him following along behind Jesus and the guards to the scene of the "midnight" trial.

Karl Kautsky writes: "Imagine a man who resists the arrest of a comrade with force, fires a revolver and wounds a policeman and then peacefully accompanies the forces of the law to the station-house to get warm . . . It would be hard to invent anything more absurd."

And, by the way, speaking of Peter and the trial, let’s look at the incident of the cock crowing three times and Peter’s denial of Jesus. The fact is that in paganism there was an ancient tradition that the crowing of a cock THREE TIMES was an omen of death!

First of all, in the pagan Mysteries a man with the title of Peter was keeper of the gate into heaven. This is an interesting point considering that in the New Testament we find, for some reason, this pagan title being used as an excuse to give Simon "Peter" the right to abrogate the authority of God Himself on earth and in heaven, symbolized by those famous Christian keys.

When the Sun-god was resurrected he couldn’t enter into his kingdom until dawn¾ hence it was at the rising of the sun that this event occurred. "The angel of annunciation appeared as a cock ‘to announce the coming of the Sun.’ At cockcrow the Savior arose as Light of the World to disperse the demons of night. But if he tried to enter into his kingdom earlier, disrupting the cycles of night and day, the Gatekeeper would deny him. The ritualistic denial took place also in the fertility cults of Canaan, where the dying god Mot was denied by a priest representing the Heavenly Father." Given the history presented thus far, there is certainly no mistaking why the account of the crowing cock is included in the trial and death of Jesus: the death of the Sun-god-savior also included this same tradition long before this time!

Before moving on to the next chapter, let us close by adding an additional note on the apostle Peter. The Encyclopedia Britannica makes it clear that there was indeed tampering with the accounts of Peter within the

Gospels, especially in the question of the Petrine doctrine, which is the cornerstone of Roman Catholicism. Following the belief that the Synoptic Gospels are essentially the work of one man, i.e., "Mark," the "interpreter of Peter," they conclude: "but it is hard to think that if it [the Petrine verse] were really authentic it would have been omitted from all the other gospels, and it perhaps belongs to the little group of passages in Matthew which seem to represent early efforts towards church legislation, rather than a strictly historical narrative. Besides it is noticeable that in one other point Matthew has slightly remodeled the Marcan narrative. According to the latter Jesus asked, ‘Whom say men that I am?’ and Peter replied ‘the Messiah’ without qualification. But in Matthew the question is changed into ‘Whom say men that the Son of Man is?’ and, whatever may be the original meaning of the phrase ‘the son of man’ it cannot be doubted that in the gospels it means Messiah. Thus the simple answer of Peter in Mark would be meaningless, and it is replaced by ‘The Messiah, the son of the living God,’ which is no longer a recognition of the Messiahship of Jesus but as a definition and an exaltation of the nature of the Messiah."