Yes, the Holy Grail can be said to be different things to different people. Many people who write books on the subject usually make this statement as a starting point. I certainly note what IrjO said about Laura's then religious beliefs and Frank's STS disposition corrupting the transcripts. This obviously makes life very difficult for us when reading the clues. As you may by now have realised, I usually use the C's statements as a starting point for many of my articles. If what they say is supported by facts, then I will adduce in this thread (and elsewhere for that matter) whatever evidence I find which supports their comments.
To give you just one example of this, which I haven't commented on before, the C's once said that Abraham/Moses fled Egypt with a mere 600 followers rather than the 600,000 Israelites that Jewish biblical scholars usually speak about. It so happened that during my researches I found contrary evidence for the higher number when reading a book on the Exodus called The Exodus Enigma, by the author, Ian Wilson, who like his fellow English author Graham Phillips, posits that the Exodus occurred around, or at least not long after, the time of the volcanic explosion that occurred on the island of Thera (today Santorini) in the 15th Century BC, which destroyed the great Minoan civilisation. Wilson does not, however, place the Exodus in the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten like Phillips does but in one of Akhenaten's 18th Dynasty predecessors instead. He mentions that Exodus 12.37 numbers the Israelite men alone in the refugee band as being 600,000 in total, which would have meant there would have been some two million persons altogether once you include women and children. As Wilson says, this was probably more than the whole population of Egypt at that time and is plainly a ridiculous proposition. He then states that some scholars have scaled the figure down to as few as 600, which just happens to be the figure the C's gave us. Unfortunately, he does not tell us who these scholars were. Nevertheless, if Wilson, an excellent researcher, states that some scholars believe the figure was as low as 600, I am prepared to believe him.
Some while ago, I started writing an article on who the real Moses may have been and, whilst doing so, I discovered there is a lot of evidence to support what the C's have said about him. For example, Wilson in his book is alive to the fact that Moses (and therefore Abraham) may have been a Hittite since, during the 18th Dynasty, it was not uncommon for the children of subject foreign princes to be brought up in the Egyptian court in order to gain their loyalty in later life. The Romans would later employ a similar approach. Wilson quotes the Biblical scholar George Mendenhall to support the notion that Moses/Abraham was an Hittite. Mendenhall argued that the possibility that Moses spent some time at a royal court was indicated by the similarity between the covenant which Moses is described as having set up between Yahweh and the Israelite people and the sort of covenant between lord and vassal that was common around the middle of the second millennium BC among such people as the Hittites. The form is in each case almost identical: the lord's identification of himself and his titles - "I am the Lord your God"; a statement of his past munificence, "... who brought you out of Egypt"; a requirement of loyalty and obedience - "You shall have no other god to set against me; you shall not make a carved [graven] image" etc. The fact this blood covenant may have been a Hittite one is very telling given what the C's said here:
Q: At the making of the Covenant at Mt. Sinai, there was a bunch of sacrificed animals, and Moses took the blood, dividing it in half, he cast one half on the altar. Taking the book of the covenant, he read it to the people, and they said 'we will observe all that Yahweh has decreed. We will obey.' And then Moses took the blood and cast it on the people saying 'this is the blood of the covenant that Yahweh has made with you containing all these rules.' What is this blood of the covenant?To give you just one example of this, which I haven't commented on before, the C's once said that Abraham/Moses fled Egypt with a mere 600 followers rather than the 600,000 Israelites that Jewish biblical scholars usually speak about. It so happened that during my researches I found contrary evidence for the higher number when reading a book on the Exodus called The Exodus Enigma, by the author, Ian Wilson, who like his fellow English author Graham Phillips, posits that the Exodus occurred around, or at least not long after, the time of the volcanic explosion that occurred on the island of Thera (today Santorini) in the 15th Century BC, which destroyed the great Minoan civilisation. Wilson does not, however, place the Exodus in the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten like Phillips does but in one of Akhenaten's 18th Dynasty predecessors instead. He mentions that Exodus 12.37 numbers the Israelite men alone in the refugee band as being 600,000 in total, which would have meant there would have been some two million persons altogether once you include women and children. As Wilson says, this was probably more than the whole population of Egypt at that time and is plainly a ridiculous proposition. He then states that some scholars have scaled the figure down to as few as 600, which just happens to be the figure the C's gave us. Unfortunately, he does not tell us who these scholars were. Nevertheless, if Wilson, an excellent researcher, states that some scholars believe the figure was as low as 600, I am prepared to believe him.
Some while ago, I started writing an article on who the real Moses may have been and, whilst doing so, I discovered there is a lot of evidence to support what the C's have said about him. For example, Wilson in his book is alive to the fact that Moses (and therefore Abraham) may have been a Hittite since, during the 18th Dynasty, it was not uncommon for the children of subject foreign princes to be brought up in the Egyptian court in order to gain their loyalty in later life. The Romans would later employ a similar approach. Wilson quotes the Biblical scholar George Mendenhall to support the notion that Moses/Abraham was an Hittite. Mendenhall argued that the possibility that Moses spent some time at a royal court was indicated by the similarity between the covenant which Moses is described as having set up between Yahweh and the Israelite people and the sort of covenant between lord and vassal that was common around the middle of the second millennium BC among such people as the Hittites. The form is in each case almost identical: the lord's identification of himself and his titles - "I am the Lord your God"; a statement of his past munificence, "... who brought you out of Egypt"; a requirement of loyalty and obedience - "You shall have no other god to set against me; you shall not make a carved [graven] image" etc. The fact this blood covenant may have been a Hittite one is very telling given what the C's said here:
A: Has to do with bloodline.
Q: So this symbolized the bloodline of the Jews?
A: No.
Q: What bloodline are we talking about here?
A: Aramaic/Aryan. [MJF: This would represent the Mediterranean and Armenoid mix the anthropologists Huxley and Haddon referred to - see below]
Q: Are you saying that the Jews are Aramaic/Aryan? [MJF: But the Hittite 'Indo-Europeans' who moved into the Middle East were such a mix]
A: No. Jews are not bloodline categorizable, per se.
Like the C's above, Wilson points out that the Jews (or the Israelites as they were then known) of the Exodus were not classifiable as a separate, distinctive racial or ethnic group but were a mixed, classless assortment of people, which still remains true to this day. He quoted, the anthropologists Huxley and Haddon who claimed that: "The Jews can rank neither as nation nor even as ethnic unit, but rather as a socio-religious group carrying large Mediterranean, Armenoid and many other elements, and varying greatly in physical characters." Interestingly, Wilson points out that several of the Levites [MJF: Who the C's described as being a "Sect of monk-like pacifists connected to Moses" who, in his persona of Abraham, was also a Levite. Moreover, like Abraham/Moses, they had originally been Hittite moon worshippers] described in the Bible as having been involved in the Exodus had Egyptian names such as Phinehas, Merari, Hophni and even Moses himself and possibly his Biblical brother Aaron too. But as Wilson explains, this does not in itself mean that these people were 'Egyptian' since this term too lacks any any specific racial connotation. He adds that they appeared to have been so long Egyptianised that they had no specific names to fall back on. On that last point, I wonder if Abraham abandoned his original Hittite name (or it may have been changed for him) so as to become known to the Egyptians as Moses or 'Mosis', which simply means 'is born" and is not really a proper name but is rather a title or statement.
One day I may finish that article and post it. However, I merely want to cite the above as proof that we should not readily discount what the C's may have said in the past, particularly when Frank was involved, because their statements may still provide us with useful clues that we can pursue. If we can subsequently find evidence to support the truth of what they said, I think we can then regard that as a hit for the C's.
