THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

The year is 70 c.e. and the great war of the Jews, the so-called First Revolt, against the Romans is just about to end with the conquering of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, which was the center for all Jewish life, by the Roman general Titus and his army. Two years later the last of the resisters were under siege on the rock fortress of Masada in the Judean desert where they committed mass suicide rather than be Roman slaves.

The word went around to all the elders to gather all the treasures and scrolls of the Temple for safe keeping, some where put in earthen jars and stashed away in caves near the Dead Sea, to be found almost two thousand years later. The temple treasures and Menorahs where deposited in a vault under the temple floor.

The Crusades:

The first proximate cause of the Crusades was the advance of the Seljuq Turks. The world had adjusted itself to Moslem control of the Near East: The Fatimids of Egypt had rule mildly in Palestine; and baring some exceptions, the Christian sect there had enjoyed a wide liberty of worship. Al-Hakim the caliph of Cairo, had destroyed the church of the Holy Sepulcher, but the Mohammedans themselves had contributed substantially to its restoration. But in 1070 the Turks took Jerusalem from the Fatimids, and pilgrims began to bring home accounts of oppression and desecration.

The second proximate cause of the Crusades was the dangerous weakening of the Byzantine Empire. For seven centuries it had stood at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, holding back the armies of Asia and the hordes of the Steppes. Now its internal disruptive heresies, its isolation from the West by the schism of 1054, left it too feeble to fulfill its historic task. In1071 the Byzantine army was almost annihilated at Manzikert: the Seljuqs captured Edessa, Antioch, Tarsus, even Nicaea and gazed across the Bosporus at Constantinople itself. If Constantinople should fall, all eastern Europe would lie open to the Turks.

The third cause of the Crusades was the ambition of the Italian cities, Pisa, Genoa, Venice, and Amalfi, to extend their commercial power. When the Normans captured Sicily from the Moslem, and Christian arms reduced Moslem rule in Spain, the western Mediterranean was freed for Christian trade; the Italian cities, as ports of exit for domestic products foreign products, grew rich and strong, and planned to end Moslem ascendancy in the eastern Mediterranean, and open the markets of the Near East to West European goods.

The final decision came from Pope Urban himself.

From March to October of 1095 he toured christendom to gain support from all the leaders, and on a cold November day the council met at Clermont in Auvergne. Thousands gathered in the fields to hear Urban addressed them in French. He pleaded to the crowd that Jerusalem most be taken back from the Infidels. "Undertake this journey eagerly for the remission of sins, and be assured of the reward of imperishable glory in the Kingdom Of Heaven". said Urban.

Through the crowd an excited exclamation rose: Dieu li volt-"God wills It!" Urban took it up, and called upon them to make it their battle cry. He bade those who would undertook the crusade to wear a cross upon their breast.

The First Crusade: 1095-1099

Thousands of vagrants joined the Holy War. Men tired of hopeless poverty, adventurers ready for brave enterprise, sons hoping to get a better place in society, merchants seeking new markets for their goods, knights whose enlisting serfs had left them laborless, it seems that everybody wanted a piece of the action. War propaganda was rampant, the atrocities of Moslems towards Christians. Tales of wealth and beautiful woman were there for the taking. The biggest inducement was the indulgence remitting all punishments due to sin to those who died in battle.

In 1097 The armies totaling some 30,000 men marched towards Nicaea. On the pledge that their lives would be spared, the Turkish garrison surrendered on June 19, 1097. After a few days rest, the Crusaders set out for Antioch.

Antioch, described by the chronicler of the Gesta Francorum as a "city extremely beautiful, distinguished, and delightful," resisted siege for eight months. Antioch fell on June 3, 1098, just a few days before a great Moslem army under Karbogha, Prince of Mosul was approaching. Many of the Crusaders, fearing that they could not hold out against this might, boarded ships and fled. To restore courage to the Crusaders, Peter Bartholomew, a priest from Marseille, pretended to have found the spear that pierced the side of Christ, when the Christians marched out to battle the lance was carried aloft as a standard.

On June 7, 1099, after a three year campaign the Crusaders reduced to 12,000 souls, exhausted, stood before the walls of Jerusalem. But the Turks whom they had come to fight had been expelled from the city by the Fatimids a year before. the caliph offered peace on terms of guaranteed safety for Christian pilgrims and worshipers in Jerusalem, but Bohemund and Godfrey demanded unconditional surrender. The garrison of one thousand men resisted for forty days. On July 15 Godfrey and Tancred let the men over the walls, and the feeling that they accomplished what they had started to do was a bigger victory. Reports of eyewitness Raymond of Agiles, a priest went this way.

• Wonderful things were seen. Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded...others were shot with arrows, or forced to jump from the towers; others were tortured for several days and then burned in flames. In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet. One rode about everywhere amid the corpses of men and horses.

Other contemporaries gave other details; woman were stabbed to death, suckling babies were snatched by the leg from their mothers's breasts and flung over the walls, or had their necks broken by being dashed against posts, and 70,000 Moslems remaining in the city were slaughtered. The surviving Jews were herded into a synagogue and burned alive.

Godfrey of Bouillon was chosen to rule Jerusalem with the title of Defender of the Holy Sepulcher. The latin Kingdom of Jerusalem became at once a sovereign state. The Greek Church was disestablished, its patriarch fled to Cyprus, and the parishes of the new kingdom accepted the Latin liturgy and papal rule.

In 1120, Raymond du Puy reorganized an institution that had been a hospital for ailing Moslem pilgrims, as religious order vowed to chastity, poverty, and obedience, and the military protection of Christians in palestine, and these Hospitalers or Knights of the Hospital of St John, was to become a rival to another religious order, The Knights Templar. The Hospitalers wore a black robe with a white cross on the left sleeve, and the Templar a white robe with a red cross on the mantle, Each hated each other fiercely.

At about the same time{1119} Hugh de Payens and eight other crusader knights solemnly dedicated themselves to monastic discipline and the martial service of Christianity. They obtained from Baldwin II, a residence near the site of Solomon's Temple, and established the unofficial Order of the Poor Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon and were soon called Knights Templar. The Templars were said to have come into existence for the purpose of providing protection for the increasing flow of pilgrims as they made their hazardous journeys between the coastal port of Jaffa and Jerusalem.

All of these original nine knights were laymen who took an oath to live as monks... warrior monks. This is were it gets to be sticky. Researchers are questioning the motives behind such a grand undertaking. Nine men to protect hundreds of pilgrims with bands of Saracens robbing and killing the unprotected pilgrims? That is a overwhelming task, wouldn't you say?

The nine knights had their lodgings in the stables of Solomon, and they did not try to recruit anybody. It was not before they had spent nine years in Herod's Temple that Hugh de Payen left for the West in search of recruits to enlarge the Order. Is there something wrong here? What were they really doing there for nine years? What was their agenda, and why did it take nine years to recruit more men for a task that was supposed to be their prime objective? Speculations abound.

The most prominent scenario is that the nine men that constituted the Knights Templar for almost a decade, were doing extensive digging under the ruins of Herod's Temple. What were they searching for?

A French historian Gaetan Delaforge comments in his book, The Templar Tradition in the Age of Aquarius.

• "The real task of the knights was to carry out research in the area in order to obtain certain relics and manuscripts which contain the essence of the secret traditions of Judaism and ancient Egypt, some of which probably went back to the days of Moses."

Author and researcher Graham Hancock in his book, The Sign and the Seal, that the knights were not what they seemed. He concluded that the Temple site itself was the focus of their interest and there is evidence of their major excavations. He quotes from an Israeli archaeologist's official report which established that these nine knights were searching the Temple ruins for something unknown:

• "The tunnel leads inwards for a distance of about thirty metres from the southern wall before being blocked by pieces of stone debris. We know that it continues further, but we had made it a hard-and-fast rule not to excavate within the bounds of the Temple Mount, which is currently under Moslem jurisdiction, without first acquiring the permission of the appropriate Moslem authorities. In this case they permitted us only to measure and photograph the exposed section of the tunnel, not to conduct excavation of any kind. Upon concluding this work...we sealed up the tunnel's exit with stones."

We can deduce that whatever they were searching for, they probably found it, and it led to their power and the eventually their demise. Could it be that they were blackmailing the church with some proof that Jesus was not God? Was it some copies of what we call the "Dead Sea Scrolls"?

Who was the "Teacher of Righteousness"? Was it James the brother of Jesus, as Robert Eisenman, contends in his new book, James the Brother of Jesus. Eisenman concludes that James, not Peter was the true successor to the movement we now call Christianity. Drawing on the Dead Sea Scrolls and on long overlooked Church texts, Eisenman reveals that the Christianity of Paul was a distortion of what James and Jesus preached, and that the death of James triggered the uprising against Rome.

Was this the treasure that the Templars found under the Temple walls, and did they use this information to control the Pope and the Church for almost two hundred years for their own benefits? It's beginning to look like it.