Memories of the 28th Century

I recently thought of the Piso Christianity Conspiracy again. This is one that hasn’t caught on, yet, but it is as silly as most conspiracy theories are. I first encountered this in the early or mid-1990’s on Prodigy Services bulletin boards. The author of this, Roman Piso, claims that his ancestors invented Christianity in an attempt to avoid more rebellions by the Jews, and to some degree they seem to have been successful, because after the Rebellion of 70 CE the Jews didn’t start another war during the Roman period, and they dispersed around the empire. So there was no great concentration of them.

When I first encountered Mr. Piso on the boards, I thought he was kidding. The pieces of the story that were available were not well written, but the idea was amusing. I remember suggesting that he put the whole thing together in a book and see if anyone would pay attention to it. In the twenty plus years since then he has put it into a book, but it hasn’t made the big splash that he was hoping for. It appears that Roman Piso isn’t the first or only one who has thought that some ancient Roman nobles including some Piso’s were the actual authors of the New Testament. Abelard Reuchlin also wrote things along these lines, especially The True Authorship of the New Testament (http://www.amazon.com/The-true-autho.../dp/0930808029).

The theories of Reuchlin and Piso are given short shrift by professors of classics and similar disciplines, and I don’t blame them, but there are other authors who have attacked the same subject Creating Christianity and Caesar’s Messiah are two (see links below), but I don’t know if there are more. Those two books have similar content and conclusions to what Piso and Reuchlin wrote, but they wrote full length books and got good publishers. The critique of the Piso theory is very good (link below). The author of that essay makes some very good points, especially that there is no record in history of the most notable Piso in the works of Reuchlin and Roman Piso, to wit, Arrius Calpurnius Piso. I don’t know whether there is or is not a record of Arrius, but many Piso's have been recorded, and there probably were others of whom there are no records. The critique is interesting and well written, and it appears that the author is familiar with Roman history. I haven’t finished reading what is available online, but I have gotten the impression that the good stuff may be in the 2010 book Piso Christ: A Book of the New Classical Scholarship (link to amazon.com page below). All of this reminded me of Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, which thoroughly skewered all things of this sort.

A few weeks ago, when this matter came to mind in a conversation, I also remembered the conspiracy that invented Mormonism. That wasn’t long ago, and much of the material is actually available. Joseph Smith, Robert Pratt, and Sidney Rigdon obtained a manuscript by Salomon Spalding and edited it to their liking and named it The Book of Mormon. Sidney Rigdon: Creating the Book of Mormon http://sidneyrigdon.com/criddle/rigdon1.htm appears to have the story in fairly complete form, and this article says that it includes the analysis of the text. An article that appeared in the academic journal Literary and Linguistic Computing http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/4/465.abstract seems to show quite clearly that the Book of Mormon was produced by Smith and his associates. It is a pity that we can’t do a similar analysis of other religious books. On the other hand, it shows that there is money in starting a religion.

Even more recently the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard dreamed up a religion, and he made plenty of money from it, and Scientology continues to exist even after the death of Mr. Hubbard. I am not familiar with the details of Scientology, so I won’t comment of them. But it makes me wonder why I haven’t put out a sign advertising my religion.

I am going the lazy way and selecting things from old religions and trying to revive them. I figure that there would be less criticism for people worshipping Sky Father and Earth Mother than there would be for someone dreaming up completely new Gods and Goddesses. There’s a lot to be said for eclectic; we can select those things that were successful in other religions and discard the things that never really worked. And I have decided that there should be a few dietary rules that everyone can ignore.

If you are looking for information on starting your religion, then Mr. Piso's book might be slightly helpful, but the other books about that might be better. The journal article about the Book of Mormon would also be useful, because it can give hints as to what should be included in the holy book.

So get cracking. Start writing that holy book before you forget why you were going to write it. Don't worry; everyone will be able to say that you are wrong, or worse, but don't let that discourage you.



http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/es...opol_piso.htm\
Creating Christianity
http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Chris.../dp/1495419878
Caesar’s Messiah
http://www.amazon.com/Caesars-Messia...ar%27s+Messiah
Critique
http://www.tektonics.org/lp/pisocake.php
Piso Christ: A Book of the New Classical Scholarship
http://www.amazon.com/Piso-Christ-Bo...rds=roman+piso

http://www.worldlibrary.org/article/...n%20authorship
Reassessing authorship of the Book of Mormon using delta and nearest shrunken centroid classification
http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/4/465.abstract