Communication with Gods Spirits

UFOs and Spirit Communication:

A Challenge for Discernment

"It is better not to know what is not revealed by God, than to know by humans what someone has him or herself presumed to know" -- Tertullian, On the Soul 1.6

Whenever someone hears the acronym "UFO" almost always what is otherwise "unidentified" is "identified" in the mind of the person with a space craft, usually a silver disc, but not always, that is piloted by either a human being or some non-human entity. The phrase "flying saucer" was coined by Kenneth Arnold and became in vogue during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Many people have claimed to have photographed UFOs and still some have even claimed person-to-person contact with the occupants and pilots of UFOs. These contacts range anywhere from "mission" contacts, wherein the person is a "contactee" who is meant to spread the news of the alien presence here on Earth and their message for humanity, to abduction contacts, wherein the person is taken against his or her will by the extraterrestrials. One of the best cases of the abductee kind known to this author is that of Leah A. Haley, a fellow Mississippian, who courageously documents her experiences of alien abduction and harrasment by the U.S. military in her latest book:

Unlocking Alien Closets: Abduction, Mind Control, and Spirituality. Haley admits of having many unanswered questions about her experiences. But one thing she zeros in on is the notion of extraterrestrial "good guys" and "bad guys"; the "bad guys" can often masquerade as the "good guys." This state of affairs has left Haley with symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but she has not relinquished her faith in God. Her experiences often tested her faith in God. Haley was guided at times by a voice she calls the "Silent Voice." It gave answers to her prayers. To her horror, however, Haley realized that this voice could also be mimicked with technology owned by the U.S. military in order to (mis)guide her during her daily affairs. How was she to discern between the two? And was the "Silent Voice" really benevolent? Haley admits of suffering through this discernment and asserted that it was never easy. In the conclusion of her book she asserts that after twelve years of searching for answers about her personal experiences with UFOs and alien abduction, UFO phenomena are intertwined within two opposing sets of forces: 1) evil human beings who work with malevolent aliens and who are the playthings of evil spirits -- Satan is their leader; and 2) good human beings who work with benevolent aliens and good spirits -- God is their leader and their primary goal is to promote and uphold the principles of righteousness and truth.

The relationship between UFOs and the Bible is not so unusual when one considers the technical meaning of the English term "extra-terrestrial," that is, "above and beyond the Earth." By this definition, the angels spoken of in the Bible are "extra-terrestrial" or "beyond the Earth." All spirits, good and evil, may also be understood in this sense as "extra-terrestrial." This sense also fits Christ, by definition, whose kingdom is "not of this Earth." A popular work on the subject of UFOs in the Bible is found in Barry Downing's book:

The Bible and Flying Saucers. In it, Downing explores well-known biblical texts such as "the pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night" that led the Hebrews, the star of Bethlehem that led the magi, and Ezekiel's vision of the "wheel within a wheel" as episodes that, in the light of the modern UFO phenomena, we might recognize as the activity of UFOs. Art has also played a role in the depiction of what look like UFOs appearing in history.

The painting to the far left, "The Baptism of Christ," by Aert De Gelder, 1710, depicts what looks to be a disc-shaped craft hovering above John the Baptist and Jesus. The onlookers do not seem surprised by the scene. One notices that four rays are beaming down upon Jesus and John and in the middle of the disc is the shape of a white dove with out-stretched wings. A collection of artwork that shows what appear to be UFOs and unusual aerial phenomena througout history and especially in the lives of famous biblical figures can be found in Matthew Hurley, The Alien Chronicles: Compelling Evidence for UFOs and Extraterrestrial Encounters in Art and Texts Since Ancient Times (United Kingdom: Quester, 2003).

The "contactee" experience emerged in the consciousness of popular culture during the 1950s. People claimed to have been brought on board space craft and commissioned by the human ETs to make their presence known (see J. Gordon Melton and George Eberhart, The Flying Saucer Contactee Movement: 1950-1990 [Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Centre for the Humanities, 1990]). One of the more well-known contactees of the 1950s was George Adamski. Interestingly, one group of human ETs and their contactee debunked many other contactees as liars. This particular contactee case is that of the Swiss-born Eduard Albert Meier, known as Billy Meier. His contact guides were first known as "Pleiadians" but later renamed themselves as "Plejarens" ('j' = a 'y' sound). This was meant to disguise their true identity, that of Plejaren, in order to sift out the copy cats who might also claim to be in contact with Pleidians. According to Meier, he is the only Plejaren contact on Earth with the mission to spread their message and make known their presence with photographs, film footage, sound recordings of their "beam" ships, and metal samples. They want to assure us that they are human as we, but much more spiritually advanced than we are. Meier's main contact person during the mid 1970s and early 80s was a female Plejaren by the name of Semjase. Her picture is given here and is a pencil sketch based on Meier's personal descriptions of Semjase during their many contacts. According to Meier, these were face-to-face contacts whereby he was directed by Semjase to meet her out in the Swiss country side. Meier would record each conversation that took place during a contact with Semjase subsequent to each contact. He collected these conversations in what are known as the Contact Notes. There are 4 volumes of these in English, but many more remain only in German. The Notes bear on the topics of politcs, economics, geography, astronomy, and, of course, religion, especially Christianity. This is not surprising, for, according to the Notes, one of Meier's earlier incarnations was that of the person known as Jesus Christ but whose real name was "Jmmanuel." The Notes claim a story for Christianity that is not easily recoverable from history. The so-called original text of Jesus' ministry and teachings is peddled by Meier as a first-century text that was written in Aramaic and found in Jesus' (Jmmanuel's) tomb in Jerusalem. The story of this text, known as the Talmud Jmmanuel, is chronicled in the Adobe pdf. document linked to this page (click above). This is not to be confused with the Babylonian Talmud and the Palestinian Talmud of Rabbinic literature. The word talmud means "teaching" and is derived from the Hebrew verb lamad, "to teach." The Talmud Jmmanuel was supposedly found in 1963 just south of the old city of Jerusalem in Jmmanuel's burial tomb after his crucifixion. It is promoted as the source text of the gospel of Matthew. The discoverer and translator of the Talmud Jmmanuel, a Greek Catholic priest named Isa Rashid, kept the alleged Aramaic scrolls and sent his German translation of it to Meier in 1974. I've decided to spend some time on this particular case because it is one of the few examples of an extraterrestrial contact that goes into so much detail about the "original" Jesus and why and how Paul started the "false religion" known today as Christianity. For those of us who are convinced by the holy spirits that the terms "God" and "Christ" represent spirit beings of the highest order and the term "Satan" represents spirit beings of the lowest order due to their Fall (see "Rules of Discernment for Christian Spiritism" in the Menu on this website), the Meier contacts become very disturbing indeed. To say upfront, the material in the Talmud Jmmanuel has no "text history" that can be, at all, discerned in the writings of the early church fathers. One can reconstruct the entire New Testament from the writings of the church fathers who, taken as a whole, have quoted every verse of the New Testament. James W. Deardorff, in his study of the Talmud Jmmanuel (Celestial Teachings: The Emergence of the True Testament of Jmmanuel (Jesus) [Tigard, OR: Wildflower Press, 1990) has argued that the Talmud was so heretical that its contents did not survive long enough to make it into the writings of the church fathers. But often times, it is possible to reconstruct "heretical" ideas from the apologetic writings of the church fathers; nothing there resembles the Talmud Jmmanuel. The argument from "heresy" then has no basis for the Talmud's absence in the writings of the church fathers. Deardorff is not a biblical scholar and he too easily accepts the Talmud Jmmanuel as genuine and real and makes a huge, belabored effort to support his case. The only biblical scholar that I am aware of who addresses the Talmud Jmmanuel in any critical fashion whatsoever is Robert M. Price (see Robert M. Price, Jesus is Dead [Parsippany, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2007] 123-134). Price, a one-time conservative evangelical preacher turned liberal-atheist-skeptical scholar, offers criticisms of the Billy Meier gospel that point out its undemonstrated claims and assertions. He claims that it is another piece of New Age bufoonery. Price concludes that the Talmud Jmmanuel stands in a long-line of gospels and extra-canonical narratives of biblical figures that claim to be derived from angels, spirits, or UFOs and mediated through a human agent, such as the Oahspe bible of 1882, the Urantia Book of 1955, The Gospel of the Holy Twelve communicated from deceased personalities such as Emmanuel Swedenborg, and The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus of 1907 that was dictated from the "Akashic records" (a theosophical forerunner of 1980s channeling), among others (see further, Edgar J. Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha [Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1956]). While we admit of the presence and influence of spirits and UFOs in history up till the present day, we also admit of deceptive spirits, uninformed spirits who think they know better, and holy spirits who work and communicate on behalf of the true God and the true Christ. Evidence for holy spirits and their communication with humanity in early Jewish and Christian literature is abundant. These holy spirits give a different story of God, Christ, and the Creation apart from what we find of God, Christ, and the Creation in Oahspe, Urantia, and the Talmud Jmmanuel. (See this website).

The Meier case has throngs of devotees who are adamant that the case is "the truth." Its main allure are the photographs of the UFOs and the "fulfilled predictions." My personal inspection of the Meier material reveals one glaring problem: THE TOTAL LACK OF DISCERNMENT. Neither do the Notes make a case for discernment of extraterrestrial messages nor do those devoted to the Meier material seem to be aware of such discernment. This state of affairs might be due to the "all-too-Christian" nature of spiritual discernment, for this discernment is centered on the identity of Jesus as "Lord" and "Christ" (see 1 Corinthians 12:10 and 1 John 4:1). Anything that smacks, even remotely, of Christianity or of the New Testament is branded by the Meier material as a falsehood, wrong-headed theology, and as deriving from a religious cult. One will search in vain to find the phrases "holy spirit" and "spirit of God" in the Meier Contact Notes or other Meier literature, even though both phrases have a pre-Christian antiquity and occur frequently in the Old Testament and Early Jewish literature (see the attached Adobe .pdf document). What people need to understand is that God, Christ, and the holy spirits, on the one hand, and modern-day Christianity and its churches (Catholic and Protestant), on the other hand, are not cut from the same cloth. When thoughtful people hear the terms "Christ," "Christian," and "holy spirit" the image of a zealous, loud, foot-stomping, cocky, narrow-minded, bible-waving preacher usually comes to mind, or else the rigid organization of the Vatican fills their head with images of intrigue, power, and control. These images drive many inquisitive people away from Christianity and moves them to alternative forms of spirituality that are considered "life changing." So many variations of the "life changing" truth exist that they all cannot be true. Thus, such a situation provides us with the necessary opportunity for discernment. What is the truth (as Pilate once asked)? How can we know it is the truth? By what criteria do we use to discern a message from an extraterrestrial as being "true"?

The obvious anti-God and anti-Christ message of Meier's contact person, Semjase, is nothing she hides whatsoever. God and Christ are man-made things derived from ignorance and power-hungry churches who want to keep the masses psychologically enslaved. Again, organized mega-religion and God and Christ are seen as equals by Semjase. But is this true? Do the photos of Semjase's craft and the fulfilled predictions of the Plejaren's provide sufficient evidence for the veracity of their statements about Christ and God? Or might it be the case that what they say about modern Christianity is true (e.g., a corrupt Vatican, the Inquisition, etc.), but that their identification of it with the terms "God" and "Jesus Christ" is not true? What we have here, then, are half truths--that most powerful of weapons weilded by deceitful and purposefully misguiding spirits and extraterrestrials. Don't the "bad guys" have means at their disposal to accurately predict future events, especially those events happening on the Earth, since the Earth is, indeed, an easy nut to crack for technologically advanced extraterrestrials? What if a fulfilled prediction is nothing more than the manipulation of the present by the ETs to force a certain outcome that was "predicted"? Or what if a prediction is simply ascertained by the probable outcome of present-day events? Prediction then would not be some uncanny ability possessed by only highly spiritually advanced ETs or spirits. One can "predict" that by the year 2040 mortgage rates will be a lot higher, going by present-day trends. Does this prediction make one any more reliable and correct about statements regarding God, Christ, and the Creation? No. The ability to make fulfilled predictions is no criterion, necessarily, for the veracity of other statements. In the Old Testament, God's predictions were merely the outcome of certain cause-and-effect events; God did not "magically" foresee the future as much as He either carried out what He said He would do or calculate what would happen based on present circumstances. Fulfilled predictions are not unique. We humans can predict things to come as well. This is no criterion for advanced true spirituality.

Back in the 1950s, one theory as to the origin of some UFOs (that has died out) was that they derived from the lower spiritual dimensions, popularly known as "the devil" or "hell." Paul Ingelsby authored a book entitled UFOs and the Christian (Britian: Regency Press, 1978) that asserted this position. In the past, however, contactees were approached by extraterrestrials who did not dismiss Christ and God in the way that we see them dismissed in the Notes and in the Talmud Jmmanuel.

A contactee by the name of Truman Bethurum, born in 1898 in Peris, California towards Riverside, chronicles his contacts with a female UFO pilot named Aura Rhanes whose silver disc reminds one of UFO photos that show a sleek, silver, large disc hovering in the air. His book is entitled, Aboard a Flying Saucer and first appeared in 1954 (see front cover, left). Aura Rhanes claimed that she and her entourage were "Christians" and urged humanity to "learn to place your faith in God, and, by Christian effort which will be an example to him, try to lead him back to a sincere faith or to increase in him the practice of religions," i.e., a devotion to the true God and the true Christ that modern Christianity has all but disfigured by its teachings. For many, the thought of human-looking beings traveling through interstellar space in "UFOs" and calling themselves "Christians" sounds too unrealistic; Christianity is an Earth-based religion, a religion that many believe to have been the concoction of Paul of Tarsus who borrowed from pagan thought and applied it to a Jesus of Nazareth whom he made into a cosmic Christ. This is not only the opinion of some Earthlings, but it is also the opinion of recent contactees and their contact persons, especially Billy Meier and the Plejaren's. The disfigured teachings of modern Christianity and the so-called "mythical Christ" serve the Plejaren's as pure fodder to trample the names of "God" and "Christ" underfoot. They go so far as to claim that Christianity has its backing and support by malevolent ETs who want to keep humankind enslaved to religious error and cult-like manipulations. Maurice Osborn summarizes:

"The whole purpose of this wicked deception is to cause a stir in humans to believe in Christianity and commit different deceitful manipulations as proof of their beliefs in benevolent extraterrestrial beings. To make these deceptive affirmations appear more believable they will even give the appearance of extraterrestrial beings that are interested in the earthly Christian religion. . . . They will . . . recognize God's Son, Jesus Christ, for their redeemer and master of the universe. Humanity must become aware of this conspiracy because it only serves to enslave mankind by those who maintain their station in Gizeh" (The Essence of the Notes: A Summary of notes written by Eduard "Billy" Meier of his contacts with extraterrestrial human beings, based on translations published by Wendelle Stevens [2nd edition; Ramona, CA: Maurice Osborn, 2005] 21). It is no wonder that in a list of UFO contactees, Semjase has placed a minus sign next to Truman Bethurum's name to indicate that he is lying about his contacts. See Wendelle Stevens, Message From the Pleiades: The Contact Notes of Eduard Billy Meier 2, p. 131.

The Plejarens berate Christianity as a false religion that spreads false ideas such as "Christ," "God," "Satan," "the Fall," and "Resurrection." The Plejarens deny the existence of the very source that corruputed earliest Christianity, Lucifer (Satan), and they deny the existence of the very source from which the Truth comes, God, Christ, and the holy spirits. Meier often spews words and phrases about Christianity that have little to no substantive meaning; the words, instead, distract the seeker from going any further into a personal, disciplined, and quality study of the Old Testament and early Christianity. From reading the Contact Notes and the Talmud Jmmanuel, Meier's knowledge of Christian origins and church history is either speckled with New Age-occult gibberish or else is simply obselete. He speaks of the most obvious observations, that any half-educated lay person can make, e.g., wars, Vatican intrigues and murders, and corruptions of the Christian church over the centuries, as if they contain some profound revelation to mankind that has been kept hidden by the Judaeo-Christian Institutional Grindmill. He uses quick and easy catch phrases such as "the false doctrine of the New Testament" that is used by the "Christian cult religion" to meddle in the politics of other countires. There is no "doctrine of the New Testament," at least, not in the New Testament. A thoughtful, critical, and logical inquiry into Meier and his literature reveals nothing profound in the way of Truth, but rather, it reveals a disturbing possibility of deception on the part of the Plejarens themselves. Many devotees of Meier and his Talmud are not that well-read in the New Testament, early Judaism, and early Christianity (including Deardorff). A careful study of the term "spirit," the phrases "spirit of God," "spirit of the Lord," "a holy spirit," and "the holy spirit," and prophecy in the Ancient Near East and in early Christianity, as well as the church fathers, would show that which the Plejaren's are either ignorant of or else simply choose not to speak about it, for whatever reason. The term "spiritual" is used by Meier, but it is used primarily for the human spirit and its power to recognize and know wisdom; the real meaning of "spiritual" (pneumatikos), that of pertaining to "spirits" or a "spirit world," is completely neglected. A few of the "basics" are in the Talmud Jmmanuel, such as reincarnation and the continued existence of the human spirit after physcial death, but beyond that, true spiritual sustenance for the soul is lacking. One of the maxims of the Plejarens is that only the strongest and fittest survive and the weak are defeated. This is observed in nature and they tie this into their spiritual teachings. But, this is Lucifer's game plan: the strongest defeat the weak. Heaven, God, and Christ work in just the oppposite way. Whether we choose to believe that the Plejarens are actually beings from lower spiritual dimensions ruled by Lucifer, or not, Satan's hand in matters of religion can be seen throughout Christian history.

Lucifer's Christianity began to emerge more clearly (but unbeknowngst to the greater part of humanity) when the Church consilidated power under Theodosius I during the late fourth century A.D. This Christianity was not the Christianity of Christ that was held by the Apostles and by Paul; this "earthly Christian religion" was the Christianity of Lucifer, "the spirit of the world" (1 Corinthians 2:12) that would come to dominate Christendom. Once Rome could no longer martyr Christians under Constantine's new declaration for the toleration of Christianity in Rome, the spirit attack on Christ's Christianity did not cease, but assumed a more subtle form. In this new phase of establishing Christianity as the state religion of Rome, as it legally came to be under the rule of Theodosius I who succeded Constantine, the Scriptures were declared "closed" as a canon, thwarting Christ's promise of further revelation by the holy spirits (see John 16:12-15, and for the realization of this promise among the earliest Christians see Acts 2:1-4, 1 Thessolonians 5:19-20, and 1 Corinthians 12-14). Because of this, those Christians who still communicated with the holy spirits at that time, such as the Montanists, were branded as "heretics" and banned from the Church. The choice of those writings which constituted Scripture became established. Creeds, believed to embody the basic truths of Christianity, were formulated, and, thereby, virtually denied the Christian his right and responsibility to discern the truth for himself. The Church soon became the major instrument for force-feeding a mixture of truth and error to God's Truth-starved children. And so it is to the present day. This is the Christianity that the Plejarens parade in front of the eyes of an undiscerning humanity as THE Christianity. This Christianity is present-day Christianity, but it is not Christ's Christianity.

As an alternative to present-day Christianity, the Plejarens offer the so-called real story and ministry of Jmmanuel (Jesus) in the Talmud Jmmanuel, an altogether different figure than the figure of Christ in the New Testament Who is easily linked by the Plejarens to present-day Christianity on the mere basis of the word "Christ." Any disciplined student or scholar of Christian origins, regardless of denomination or religious persuasion, who knows the original languages of the Bible (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek) and of the texts of the Church Fathers (Greek, Latin, Syriac), will quickly see that the Talmud Jmmanuel is a complete and novel substitution for Christian origins whose "genuineness" hangs on early sayings of a Hebrew (Aramaic) gospel of Matthew by Papias, Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. 3.1.1), Origen quoted by Eusebius (Eccl. Hist. 6.25.4), and Eusebius (Eccl. Hist. 3.24.6), and alleged Aramaisms (first-century Semitic syntax) in the German translation. One must not confuse the original Aramaic gospel text with the medieval Hebrew text of the gospel of Matthew accomplished by Shem Tov that preserves a purely Jewish gospel tradition (see George Howard, Hebrew Gospel of Matthew [Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1995]), and the Syriac New Testament which is a 3rd to 4th century A. D. translation of the Greek New Testament into a Syrian dialect of Aramaic known as Syriac (George Lamsa promotes the Syriac New Testament text as the "Original Aramaic" New Testament text which is misleading because it implies that the text pre-dates any Greek gospel text, and it does not; our earliest extant New Testament texts are in Greek). Also, one must not link the fact that the Greek gospels contain Semiticisms, i.e., Semitic expressions and syntax in Greek dress, with the idea that these Semiticisms are indications of an Aramaic document from which the Greek texts were translated. The Greek gospels were composed by Jews whose mother tongue was Aramaic, the language of the household, and whose second tongue was Greek, the language of commerce in the first-century Palestinian-Mediterranean world. The Semiticisms are evidence of Semitic interference whereby the mother tongue (Aramaic) influenced the clause/sentence structure of the secondary language (Greek) in which the scribe was composing his gospel. Another possibility for the presence of Semiticisms in the Greek gospel tradition is due to the Septuagintal influence (the Greek version of the Hebrew Old Testament) on the part of the Greek church or the gospel writers. For Semitic interference and Septuagintalisms in a Jewish Greek text, see Jeremy Corley, "Septuagintalisms, Semitic Interference, and the Original Language of the Book of Judith," in Jeremy Corly and Vincent Skemp, eds., Studies in the Greek Bible: Essays in Honor of Francis T. Gignac, S.J. (CBQMS 44; Washington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2008) 65-96. See also Joseph A. Fitzmyer, "The Study of the Aramaic Background of the New Testament," in Fitzmyer, The Semitic Background of the New Testament, Volume 2: A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997) 1-27.

The evidence for the genuineness of the Talmud Jmmanuel, i.e., its textual history and integrity, is flimsy, shaky, and oftentimes "not there." The editor of the Talmud, Billy Meier, himself admits that, "The German version of the Talmud Jmmanuel does not correspond to the original translation from ancient Aramaic because Isa Rashid neither mastered the German language sufficiently nor was he familiar with the code of the Mission to the point that he could have drawn up the German version. The German version does represent a copy of the translation from ancient Aramaic, but in a form that has been corrected by Eduard A. 'Billy' Meier and supplied with the code required by the Mission. The German version represents a product 80% of whose style and sentence structure was achieved by Eduard A. Meier, while the remaining 20% must be considered Isa Rashid's translation effort" ('Billy' Eduard Albert Meier, ed., Talmud Jmmanuel [4th ed.; Tulsa, OK: Steelmark, 2007] x). Isa Rashid was the Greek Catholic priest who was responsible for finding the alleged Talmud Jmmanuel in a tomb in Jerusalem and translating it into German. "Isa Rashid" is a pseudonym. From Meier's own words, the bulk of the Talmud Jmmanuel is the product of his own efforts and his Plejaren contacts and not based on any alleged Aramaic original. Because of the claims made by Meier, a knowledge of German and Aramaic (and Hebrew) is required in order to truly criticize the Talmud Jmmanuel. The claim that the Talmud Jmmanuel was originally in Aramaic recalls the historical probability that Jesus and his disciples originally spoke Aramaic. In first-century Palestine, Hebrew was no longer used as the vernacular, but had been replaced by Aramaic, a Semitic language very similar to Hebrew and with a long history; during the first millennium, Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Ancient Near East. From the end of the nineteenth century till the present day many eminent scholars have investigated and supported an Aramaic background to the gospel tradition. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is confirmed that Hebrew was used as a written medium in first-century Palestine. Greek and Latin were spoken as well as written in first-century Palestine. Whether Hebrew was spoken as wide-spread as Aramaic remains debated. Whenever we read the word hebraisti, "Hebrew," in Acts, it is usually understood that "Hebrew" means "Aramaic." Paul could speak hebraisti and obviously read his Scriptures in Hebrew and Aramaic as we read them today. But he wrote (and dictated) in Greek and quoted from the Old Testament in Greek. For its proponents, part of the allure of the Talmud Jmmanuel is that Meier's claim to have found it in "Aramaic" situates the Talmud in the original tongue of Jesus and, in the light of the probablity that some of the first gospel writings were collected in Aramaic, gives the Talmud Jmmanuel an aire of authenticity as being "original" gospel, predating any extant Greek gospel text. The Aramaic craze among some scholars is seen in those who feel that a gospel tradition that contains non-Aramaic features cannot be authentic. Minimizing the criterion for authenticity in this way is unnecessary, given the possibility that Jesus himself was bilingual (Latin? Greek?), which was not unheard of in first-century Palestine, and the mere presence of Aramaisms does not necessarily prove that a tradition is authentic. This can also be said for the so-called Aramaisms in the German translation of the Talmud Jmmanuel (see Robert H. Stein, "The 'Critieria' for Authenticity," in R. T. France and David Wenham, eds., Gospel Perspectives 1: Studies of History and Tradition in the Four Gospels [repr. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003] 225-253, esp. 233-236; and G. R. Selby, Jesus, Aramaic and Greek [South Yorkshire: Brynmill, 1990]).

Trained as a biblical scholar, I am competent in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Syriac as well as French and German. Many of the German words in the Talmud Jmmanuel simply did not exist in first-century Aramaic. There is such a thing as paraphrase, but "metallic lights" and "half death" (among many other terms and phrases) don't come close to a paraphrase of first-century Aramaic. As to the so-called Semiticisms (Aramaisms) in the German translation that allegedly point to the Aramaic original from which Rashid is said to have made his German translation, they are nothing that would really indicate a translation from an Aramaic document, for the Semiticisms alleged are not unique to Aramaic. Furthermore, and the one main glaring problem, is that the alleged original Aramaic scrolls were destroyed in a fire during an Israeli raid on a Lebanese refugee camp in 1974 where Isa Rashid and his family were staying. Rashid and his family supposedly fled and left the scrolls behind and they were subsequenlty burned. Rashid was killed in Baghdad in March 1976. All that remains of the Talmud Jmmanuel is Meier's German version. Meier claims to have retrieved items from Jmmanuel's tomb, but it is unclear whether this tomb was the crucifixion tomb in Jerusalem or his tomb of final resting in Srinagar, India (according to the Plejarens and the Talmud, Jmmanuel survived the crucifixion and settled in present-day Srinagar in Kashmir, Inida, and died at the age of 115). Photos of these tomb items are given in the fourth edition of the Talmud Jmmanuel. Photos of the Aramaic scrolls themselves would have been more convincing in order to show that such a document ever existed. The lack of such an Aramaic text does not weigh in favor of the genuineness of the Talmud Jmmanuel because the authentication of any document must begin with its physical characteristics. This is impossible for the Talmud because the alleged Aramaic scrolls are no longer available for scrutiny. If one is able to take seriously the Talmud Jmmanuel as a genuine, first-century Aramaic text, THEN THAT VERY TEXT NEEDS TO BE PRODUCED, for nothing less than a side-by-side, Aramaic-German-English edition of the Talmud Jmmanuel will suffice, much like the Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition that has the Hebrew text on the left-hand side and the English translation of the Hebrew text on the right-hand side--or even better, like the new critical edition of the Gospel of Judas that has a photograph of the actual tattered coptic papyrus sheet on the left page, and on the right, a transcription of the coptic in legible characters and an English translation (see Rodolphe Kasser and Gregor Wurst, eds., The Gospel of Judas Together with the Letter of Peter to Philip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos [Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2007]). Deardorff and other zealous proponents of the Talmud assert that this is too extreme, too petty of a reason to "dismiss" a serious investigation of the Talmud Jmmanuel, and that the German edition should alone suffice. Deardorff supports this position by claiming that a study of the German text alone is no different than biblical scholars who study the New Testament Greek texts because they, too, are not the originals and are not even the first, second, or third generation copies of the originals. We do not, indeed, have originals or the first few generation copies of the gospel texts or, for that matter, the rest of the New Testament texts (see Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind who changed the Bible and Why [San Francisco: Harper, 2005]). But some of our earliest Greek gospel texts were produced during the second and third centuries, (not the 20th century) and, furthermore, we do possess Jewish and Christian Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek texts that date from the 5th century B.C. through the 1st century A.D. (see J. A. Fitzmyer and D. J. Harrington, A Manual of Palestinian Aramaic Texts: Second Century B.C.-Second Century A.D. [Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 2002]). Deardorff also pins much of his argumentation for the genuineness of the Talmud Jmmanuel's alleged original Aramaic source text on the saying of Papias in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 3.69.16: "Now Matthew collected the sayings in a 'Hebrew' dialect, but each person translated (interpreted?) them as best he could," where "Hebrew dialect" means "in the Aramaic language." But in reality, Papias' statement is a little more than a red herring drawn across the path of the modern discussion of the Aramaic substratum of the sayings of Jesus. Meier's German text is not stable for he constanstly "revises" and "corrects" each edition. Even the latest 4th edition on sale is still under revision by Meier. Who in their right, critical, and scientific mind (Deardorff has a Ph.D. in atmospheric science) would study an alleged first-century Aramaic text about God, Jesus and his ministry via a 20th/21st-century German translation, the bulk of which is the responsibility of one who neither knows Aramaic nor possesses the Aramaic texts from which the German version was made? Most biblical scholars would concur, but not simply because of the controversial nature of the Talmud Jmmanuel as being linked to a modern-day UFO case that claims UFOs are real in the life of Jesus and in our lives today. In his discussion of the tenuous Secret Gospel of Mark, a Greek text that Morton Smith of Columbia University allegedly discovered in the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem in 1958 (Smith took photographs of the Greek text, but the text itself has not appeared since), Stephen C. Carlson reveals how biblical and extra-biblical texts about Jesus can be perpetrated. In the discussion, he mentions the Talmud Jmmanuel: "Misdirection is the technique of causing the audience's attention to be distracted from the anomalies that would defeat the illusion. The first requirement is that the illusion must be plausible to the audience, and in the biblical studies field this means that a supposedly ancient text must be found in an ancient language in pre-modern handwriting. This requirement is sufficient by itself to filter out the vast majority of attempted biblical hoaxes, for example, the nineteenth-century Unknown Life of Jesus, which was supposedly written in Tibetan but only known through Nicholas Notovitch's Russian notes. Likewise, the 1970s Talmud Jmmanuel known to UFOlogists can never be taken seriously by biblical scholars--its archetype is a German-language version claimed to have been translated from a destroyed Aramaic text. Secret Mark, by contrast, is a rare example of a modern biblical hoax written in ancient Greek. It has a plausability lacking almost every other hoax attempt" (Stephen C. Carlson, The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark [Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005] 88). For Smith's original study see Morton Smith, The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark (repr. Middleton, CA: Dawn Horse Press, 2005; originall published in 1973). Morton Smith is now deceased.

Alternative gospel texts and modern apocrypha, like the Secret Gospel of Mark, have swept over the landscape of biblical studies over the past 100 years. Apart from much of this literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts stand out simply because they are texts that can be dated to the time of their production in the original languages. But there have been many other texts about Jesus whose sources are dubious. As an alternative gospel text claimed to have been originally found in Aramaic, the Talmud Jmmanuel is not unique. The Essene Gospel of Peace was translated by Edmond Bordeaux Szekely from "original" Aramaic and Hebrew texts, which he claimed to have found in the secret library of the Vatican, but (like Meier) he was unable to produce the Aramaic and Hebrew texts. The translation was first published in Germany in 1928 then in English in 1937. The Jesus in this gospel is a naturist and a vegetarian, two popular pursuits during 1920s and 1930s Germany. In Antiquity, too, various texts about Jesus circulated that were considered "fakes." The Letter of Jesus of Abgar first turns up in the fourth-century church historian Eusebius. Jesus' letter is in reply to an invitation to go to Abgar's court in Syria to heal the king. In the Gospel of Barnabas, Jesus claims not to be the Messiah and puts himself in the same place as John the Baptist. But this text is actually a medieval Islamic creation that claimed to be a lost gospel. A Coptic addition found in a Coptic Bible manuscript relates Jesus healing an animal and it even contains a Semiticism, "But they answered and said . . . " The original text, however, has never been found, and could very well be forged. It goes without saying that Nicolas Notovitch's The Life of Saint Issa (Jesus) was exposed as fraudulent, a text that deals with Jesus' lost years in Tibet and India, but a version of which we only have in Notovitch's Russian notes that he claimed to have made through the dictation of a Buddhist monk who translated aloud the text to Notovitch into Russian. The text known as The Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Jesus, by an Eye-Witness, written by an Essene elder, was suppose to have been found in Latin in a parchment roll in an old Greek monastery in Alexandria during the late 1880s. The reaction to this text and its translation into German bears a striking resemblance to the circumstances surrounding the Talmud Jmmanuel. The introduction of this text states that "a missionary in his fanatical orthodox eagerness tried to destroy the antique document." But the text was allegedly saved and transcribed by a Frenchman and subsequently translated into German. It asserts that Jesus did not die upon the Cross, but died six months later. The Talmud Jmmanuel stands in a line of texts that claim to come from original source texts, texts that, otherwise, are "no longer available." For biblical counterfeits, forgeries, and reproductions, see Edgar J. Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1956; originally published as Strange New Gospels, 1931); and Andrew Phillip Smith, trans., The Lost Sayings of Jesus: Teachings from Ancient Christian, Jewish, Gnostic and Islamic Sources--Annotated and Explained (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths, 2006) pages 178-202, "Further Traditions, Fictions, and Forgeries." See further, Anthony Grafton, Forgeries and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); and G. Bardy, "Faux et fraudes litteraires dans l'antiquite chretienne," Revue d'Histoire Ecclesiastique 32 (1936) 5-23, 275-302. Can we say anything about the Talmud Jmmanuel without its source text? See further: http://home.swipnet.se/corbie/English/index.html , and clik "Bible Hoaxes Exposed: Talmud Immanuel" and "James Deardorff."

I have personally translated Semitic texts from that era, 3rd century B.C. to 1st century A.D., and I have a good idea of what a translation of a Hebrew, an Aramaic, or a Syriac text would look like in German or English (or French). The Talmud Jmmanuel does not look like it. The Talmud Jmmanuel contains things that are just far too modern to be accepted as the true utterances of Jesus during his ministry in first-century Palestine. Some of it reads like yesterday's newspaper, and it is because of this that suspicions should be raised. For instance, Israel is prophesied to "never find peace because wars and many calamities will threaten the unlawful occupants of this land" (TJ 25:7). This sounds more like a modern creation by someone who is anti-Israeli than it does the utterance of a first-century Palestinian Jew. Supporters will respond that Jmmanuel was able to say this because of his ties with UFOs and their technology to see way into the future. But this is merely assumed rather than known. Furthermore, the Talmud Jmmanuel is divided into chapters and versification, not unlike our present-day Bibles. The original Aramaic scrolls, if they existed, would not have had such divisions. Instead, it would have been a continuous text as we see in the Dead Sea Scrolls texts and Nag Hammadi texts and gospels. Who was responsible for the chapter divisions and versification? It could only have been either Rashid or Meier. Why would Rashid or Meier bother with these divisions in the translation? To make it look more "Bible-ish" and therefore as a suitable and legitimate alternative? A first-century Aramaic text would have looked nothing like our Bibles today and the scholarly New Testament Greek text of Nestle-Aland or UBS and Hebrew Old Testament text of Biblia Hebracia Stuttgartensia. If the translator remained true to the text, a translation would look more like the translations of the non-Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls texts found in Martinez, Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition. In addition, it is difficult to find any correspondence between the "theology" of the Talmud Jmmanuel and the theology of the rest of the Ancient Near East and the early Jewish and Christian world. Notwithstanding the Muslim and Indian(Hindu)/Buddhist traditions of Jesus in India, that are very late (see Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Jesus in India: An Account of Jesus' Escape from Death on the Cross and His Journey to India [Amsterdam, The Neterlands: Fredonia Books, 2004; originally written in 1899]), we have no extant Jesus narratives from "western" sources that look, even remotely, like anything in the Talmud Jmmanuel (see R. Joseph Hoffmann, ed. and trans., The Secret Gospels: A Harmony of Apocryphal Jesus Traditions [Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1996]; and David Wenham, ed., Gospel Perspectives, Volume 5: The Jesus Tradition Outside the Gospels [Wipf & Stock, 2004]). Jesus' surviving the crucifixion, the so-called "swoon theory," is not unique to the Talmud and is a late development. See Frederick T. Zugibe, The Crucifixion of Jesus: A Forensic Inquiry (New York: M. Evans, 2005) 146-163.

Occasionally, the Talmud Jmmanuel reveals extremely trite and unreal statements. For example, during the last supper, Jmmanuel (Jesus) was supposed to have said, "Drink from this cup, all of you; the throat becomes thirsty even on a rainy and cold day" (TJ 27:41). What? "Truly, I say to you, a wise person does not hunger and thirst because of things that must happen. But a fool hungers and thirsts on account of stupidity and dissent against things that must happen" (TJ 27:42-43). Come again? The word "trinity" is used in TJ 21:31-32 where Jmmanuel predicts fourth-century Trinitarian theology as an erroneous teaching. There is no word in Aramaic for "trinity," the TJ German text of which is Dreifachheit, "three-wayness ," and Dreieinheit, "three united." The word "trinity" was coined by the church father Tertullian (ca. 160-225 A.D.) from two Latin words, tria, "three" and unitas, "unity." The Talmud Jmmanuel also claims that Jmmanuel was the first person to be nailed to a cross, for up until then the crucified were tied to the cross. The crucified were indeed tied to the cross, but there is evidence that nails were also used way before the crucifixion of "Jmmanuel." So this is a historical point that can be checked against the Talmud; and the Talmud is wrong here. Admittedly, the Greek gospels pose historical inconsistencies as well when compared with one another. See Ian Wilson, Are These the Words of Jesus? Dramatic Evidence from Beyond the New Testament (Oxford: Lennard Publishing, 1990).

The fourth edition of the Talmud Jmmanuel has a pencil sketch of what Jmmanuel (Jesus) really looked like (shown here to the left), drawn by Semjase from, you guessed it, old pictures of Jmmanuel dating back to the time when Jmmanuel (Jesus) was active in Palestine. Pictures of the original human Jesus (Jmmanuel) as he was during his ministry on Earth? But of course. Who took the pictures? And with what kind of apparatus were they taken? Might not have Semjase simply given a copy of one of the original pictures to Meier to include with his thousands of other photos, instead of providing just a drawing based on the photos? The drawing, shown here, looks nothing like a first-century Semitic Palestinian as we know them to have looked at that time. The drawing looks more like a Chinese-Manichaean Jesus than a Semitic one. Notice the ear. Do ears really look this way? If the Talmud Jmmanuel was a real archaeological find in first-century Aramaic, just as Meier claims that he found it to be, shown to him in Jerusalem by Rashid, then this would only support its status as an archaeological find, and nothing more. Its truth value, the veracity of its statements, on the other hand, would have to be assessed and gauged by other criteria, for many other gospel texts that have emerged from the sands of Egypt and other parts of the Middle East are no more considered "the truth" about Jesus and about what he really said simply on the basis of their being an archaeological find, e.g. the gospel of Judas, gospel of Thomas, gospel to the Hebrews, etc. Furthermore, if the Talmud Jmmanuel was an archaeological find, this alone does not establish it as a first-century text. See Leo Deuel, Testaments of Time: The Search for Lost Manuscripts and Records (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965).

Let us consider a hypothetical situation for a moment. What if the Talmud Jmmanuel was found, just as Meier said it was, in Aramaic, in a tomb in Jerusalem, but it was actually a creation of the Plejarens and placed there by the Plejarens themselves? This is not impossible. There is evidence that demonstrates the ability of spirits to produce or copy actual Greek and Latin texts onto photographic plates. This is called "psychography." One spirit was able to copy Luke 17:4,5 in Greek onto a photographic plate during a prayer group sitting. The spirit said that the particular Greek text he had copied onto the photographic plate could be found in the British Museum under a glass shade and that it was the only one in existence, given by Cyril Lucar, of Constantinople, to Charles I and known as the Codex Alexandrinus. Sure enough, it was the very text that the spirit had copied onto the photographic plate. A picture of it and a description of this episode can be found in G. Henslow, The Proofs of Spirit Forces (3rd ed. revised; Chicago, IL: Marlowe Press, 1920) 271-76. Even though the Talmud Jmmanuel was not reproduced onto photographic plates, psychography does show that extra-terrestrial beings have the capacity to reduplicate or even create texts in ancient languages. According to Meier, the discovery of the Talmud Jmmanuel was not "accidental" as in the case of the Bedouins who came across the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi (Gnostic) texts during the 1940s and 50s. Rashid was contacted, commissioned, and led by the Plejarens to the tomb of Jmmanuel in Jerusalem in order to find, retrieve, and translate the Talmud Jmmanuel and reveal to the world the real "truth" about religion, God, and Christianity: "The Plejarens had been contacting M.R. (Isa Rashid) since 1956. He was a priest of the Greek Catholic church. He was ordered to handle different matters, which he promised to do. As a result, the Plejarens thought him to be the right person to solve a difficult mission. He was shown the location where he could find the Talmud Jmmanuel, which was the original scripture written by Judas Ischarioth at the time of Jmmanuel. He learned the old Aramaic language and was able to translate the writings. He performed this properly and made a German translation" (Osborn, Essence of the Notes, 308). The Contact Notes, volume 1, page 80, line 27, claim that Rashid was taught Aramaic by the Plejarens themselves in order to fulfill his mission of translating the Talmud Jmmanuel. Semjase states, "With our help, he learned the old Aramean [Aramaic] language, and this way became able to translate the writings." This provides us with evidence that the Plejarens, too, are capable in Aramaic. Might not the Plejarens have simply created the Talmud Jmmanuel themselves and apported the document into the "tomb" within which Rashid allegedly located it? In his study of the Talmud Jmmanuel, Deardorff claims that if it is a literary forgery, then "it is a cleverly, creatively and comprehensively planned one" (Celestial Teachings, p. 67). These are the very attributes, cleverness and creativeness, that the counsels of Hell have had centuries to utilize in order to plan matters that distract and mislead humanity away from the Truth, God, and Christ. How the Plejarens created the Talmud document is another question and one they would whole-heartedly deny since, according to them, the real author was Judas Iscariot whom history confused with the "real" betrayer of Jesus (Jammanuel), that of the similarly-named Judas Ihariot (go figure that one). Might not the Plejarens have known where the document was on the mere basis of them having planted it there in the first place? Possibly.

The only criteria we have available for the discernment of extra-terrestrial influences and revelations (be they from spirits or extra-terrestrial humans), revelations of rewritten Bible texts, and so-called "original" texts about the real life and teachings of Jesus, given to us by extra-terrestrial sources, come from the Hebrew, early Jewish, and early Christian traditions of discerning messages from extra-terrestrial sources. This discernment was always carried out by Hebrews, Jews, and Christians with the full knowledge of its necessity because two camps were believed to always have been at work communicating with human kind: the good guys (God, Yahweh, the Lord, Christ, holy spirits, angels, angel of the Lord, spirit of God) and the bad guys (Baal, Belial, Beelzebub, Satan, the old Serpent, evil spirits, deceitful spirits). Historically, both camps were believed to be instrumental in producing texts (through human instruments) and giving revelations to both early Jews and Christians who debated among themselves as to who was in possession of the real truth. Spirits can produce writing here in this physical dimension without the aid of a human instrument. Note the materialized hand of a spirit that wrote on the plaster a message to King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 5:5. The attached Adobe pdf. file deals with this problem.

The Plejarens dismiss the terms "Christ," "God," and "Satan" as figments of the human imagination proliferated over the Earth in order to enslave humanity under the false religion of Christianity. Fourth-century, Roman Christianity distorted the Truth, indeed, but the Talmud Jmmanuel is not the "truth" that was distorted, as the Plejarens would have us believe. The Truth that the Church distorted is found in Johannes Greber's Communication with the Spirit World of God. Correspondence by this author on two different occasions, 1992 and 2006, showed that Meier and his circle have never heard of Greber's Communication with the Spirit World of God, but I have heard of Meier. As the reader might have seen elsewhere on this website, modern Christianity, with all of its religious errors, and Christ are not one and the same. Christ the Spirit is not of this Earth (recall, "My Kingdom is not of this Earth," and John 1:1). Many times, what humans have done in the name of Christianity has served but poorly the cause of God and Christ. But the discernful reader needs to understand that man-made Christianity and its "dark history" (that is so often invoked by the Plejarens in order to discredit it as a religious cult) has nothing in common with God and Christ whose reigns are above and beyond the Earth. Celestial angels worked on behalf of Christ for the salvation of humankind (Hebrews 1:14). Spirits known as "holy spirits" or "spirits of Christ" are spoken of throughout early Christian literature as beings from higher dimensions who communicate the things of God and Christ to humankind. So, from this perspective, it is not, in the least, unrealistic for pilots of UFOs to call themselves "Christians." By doing so, the pilots of UFOs are not identifying themselves with the things of modern, man-made Christianity, but are simply aligning themselves with that mighty Spirit who incarnated from the highest heavenly dimension onto the Earth as the heralded Messiah.