The Conspiracy Hypothesis*

THE JUDEO/CHRISTIAN CYCLES

THIRD END-TIME (c. A.D. 1132):
The Time of Peter Abelard and Arnold of Brescia

| Abelard: The Third Elijah | Arnold: The Third Elisha | Cleansing of the Temple | Beast and False Prophet | Prophetic Numbers and the Crusades |

The Dark Ages

The URANTIA Book teaches that:

“The church, being an adjunct to society and the ally of politics, was doomed to share in the intellectual and spiritual decline of the so-called European “dark ages”. During this time, religion became more and more monasticized, asceticized, and legalized. In a spiritual sense, Christianity was hibernating. … During these dark and despairing centuries, religion became virtually secondhanded again. The individual was almost lost before the overshadowing authority, tradition, and dictation of the church.” (2074 D)

The chronological prophecies in Daniel (Bible) point to the period in the Middle Ages centered around the year A.D. 1132. When we look for the characteristics of “Elijah’s” and “Elisha’s” in this era two personalities shine out of the darkness like an electric arc: Peter Abelard and Arnold of Brescia.

Abelard: The Third “Elijah”

Popular historians, Will and Ariel Durant, first admitting that any such specific dating must be both arbitrary and reflective of the prejudices of the historian, set their timeline of the Dark Ages “between the death of Boethius in 524 and the birth of Abelard in 1079".

Historian Charles Homer Haskins calls Abelard “one of the most striking figures of the medieval renaissance”. And the Durants term him “a flame that set the mind of Latin Europe afire in the twelfth century”.

How can I describe Abelard in modern terms? Some Elvis in

Abelard and Heloise

his prime, a little Billy Graham, and one of the popular, late night show host-comedians -- all rolled up into a kind of famous Harvard professor to whom students flock from all over the world, whose lectures they can understand because he gives them in a universal tongue understood by all scholars, Latin. Then, like a mix-mastered tragic lover right out of Shakespeare and with the added notoriety of an O.J. Simpson; this Romeo is first castrated by the family of his sixteen-year-old student/lover, and later hauled up before a judge and the court of worldwide public opinion accused of one of the most dastardly and accursed crimes of the age in which he lived! Not sexual child-abuse (even Heloise’s family did not oppose the marriage which ensued -- there had been a misunderstanding about Abelard’s intentions -- and Heloise loved him throughout her life). The charge was heresy. The man dared to have his own thoughts about religion, and what’s worse, to encourage others to have their own as well!

Just like Elijah two millennia before him, Abelard did not start the trend toward more open thinking (and living) which he came to exemplify, but it was he who prevailed against “the reactionary tide of spiritual decadence that had set in” (ref. 1064 B). The Durants tell us that:

“what disturbed the Church more than any specific heresy in Abelard was his assumption that there were no mysteries in the faith, that all dogmas should be capable of rational explanation … if he had been the only one of his kind he might have been left untouched, in the hope that he would not take too long to die. But he had hundreds of eager followers … ”

Abelard did nothing less than make religion first-hand again. He did this with the tool of ancient thinkers: dialectic reasoning. He also did it in a time when original thought “at variance with established religious beliefs, especially dissension from or denial of Roman Catholic dogma by a professed believer or baptized church member” (the American Heritage Dictionary definition of “heresy” -- and Abelard represented all of that) could get you burned at the stake! Original thought, however, is vitally needed for spiritual growth (see Jesus-Style Meditation):

“Religion is a purely personal and spiritual experience and must forever be distinguished from man’s other high forms of thought, such as:

1. Man’s logical attitude toward the things of material reality.
2. Man’s aesthetic appreciation of beauty contrasted with ugliness.
3. Man’s ethical recognition of social obligations and political duty.
4. Even man’s sense of human morality is not in and of itself, religious.

Religion is designed to find those values in the universe which call forth faith, trust, and assurance; religion culminates in worship. Religion discovers for the soul those supreme values which are in contrast with relative values discovered by the mind. Such super-human insight can be had only through religious experience” (2075 D).

And such genuine religious experience cannot be had apart from original thought:

“The divine spirit makes contact with mortal man, not by feelings or emotions, but in the realm of the highest and most spiritualized thinking” (1105 A).

Abelard was just that kind of thinker!

In his book, Sic et Non, Abelard laid bare the many contradictions to be found in the scriptures and as well as in the writings of the so-called Church Fathers, both of which the Church taught were inerrant and which formed the basis of its doctrines. In Tractatus de Unitate et Trinitate Divina, which was condemned by the Church, he applied rational processes to the mystery of the Trinity, daring to find new truths in old, established facts. But it is in his Historia Calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes), his autobiographical work, that the personality of the man -- the “Elijah” -- in relation to his times comes through. This is a MUST READ for anyone who wishes to seriously consider what is being said on this site. Let the man’s own words speak for him!

The URANTIA Book teaches that it was the “renaissance” (lower case “r”) which awakened religion from its long period of hibernation, or more precisely, became its hungover, coffee-sipping, get out and look at the sunrise morning. (ref. 2075 A). And by this it must refer to the twelfth century renaissance kindled by Abelard; although it might be more accurate to picture him as having thrown lamp oil on a weak flame already started by others. His fire was burning well by the time of the Renaissance (upper case “R”) as more and more people began to appreciate its light and beauty. A 1936 Webster’s Dictionary shows that this precise distinction of meanings relative to the capitalization of word’s initial letter was in effect contemporaneously with the reception of The URANTIA Book revelation. Its use of the uncapitalized “renaissance” has meaning, and directs our attention to the 12th century!

Abelard had

Rousseau

started a conflagration which burned through the centuries. It shot up sparks that set alight St. Thomas Aquinas, who fired the 17th century Rationalists and the 18th century Enlightenment, which caught on fire people like Rousseau and Jefferson (who, himself, was so Jesusonian that he published a “Bible” consisting solely of Jesus’ words!). Also, unfortunately, ignited was “the narrow-minded and godless attitude of nineteenth and twentieth-century so-called science -- atheistic science” (which The URANTIA Book calls the “father of modern secularism” -- its mother being “the totalitarian medieval Christian church,” which, of course had given birth to Abelard and Arnold). This weak flame fanned into life by Abelard and Arnold is presently -- as we close in on the millennial transition -- roaring out of control as “the devastating influence of … secularism”, which is turning to ashes “the spiritual experience of millions of unsuspecting souls” ( refs. 2081 A). The fire has doubled back upon itself during its millennium and has reestablished conditions similar to those it originally overcame. That is how cycles work, and the phenomenon is particularly apparent in these millennial religious cycles: the Yahweh worship restored by Elijah and Elisha later kills Jesus; the Kingdom of Heaven, as represented by the Church, goes on to condemn Abelard and Arnold; and the secularism which grew out of their awakening of religion, today threatens to destroy it.

The URANTIA Book asserts that:

“it required great power, a mighty influence, to free the thinking and living of the Western peoples from the withering grasp of a totalitarian ecclesiastical domination. Secularism did break the bonds of church control, and now in turn it threatens to establish a new and godless type of mastery over the hearts and minds of modern man. … Secularism frees a man from ecclesiastical slavery only to betray him into the tyranny of political and economic slavery” (2081 B)

Abelard and Arnold can no more be blamed for what a millennium of socio/religious evolution did to the flame of truth they kindled with the flint of the pagan philosophers and the steel of Jesus’ words and spirit, than can Elijah and Jesus be blamed for the evolutionary results of their own teachings.

The URANTIA Book explains what happened this way:

“The great mistake of secularism was this: In revolting against the almost total control of life by religious authority, and after attaining the liberation from such ecclesiastical tyranny, the secularists went on to institute a revolt against God himself, sometimes tacitly and sometimes openly” (2081 D).

It may seem that our end-time heroes are just urinating into the wind, but the cycles do not so much describe two-dimensional circles as they do an upward spiral, where the ends and new beginnings overlap, but at succeedingly higher levels each time around:

“The sectors of time are like the flashes of personality in temporal form; they appear for a season, and they are lost to human sight, only to reappear as new actors and continuing factors in the higher life of the endless swing around the eternal circle” (366 B).

Each end-time transition brings us that much closer to the “final evolutionary attainment of a world of time and space,” the age of light and life (621 A). True spiritual progress is always made throughout these evolutionary religious millennia. There are in each cycle’s completion always “continuing factors in the higher life” of the evolving mortal sons of God who inhabit Urantia (planet earth).

Arnold of Brescia: The Third “Elisha”

Will Durant writes, “the mood of the time called for a voice, and found it in Arnold of Brescia.”

Arnold of Brescia is believed to have been a student of Abelard’s, and has been identified as such by one of their contemporaries. It is certain that they were condemned together by Pope Innocent II at the Council of Sens in A.D. 1140/41 (see Table).

This “Elisha” of the Middle Ages concentrated his own message almost entirely it seems on the text of Jesus’ condemnation of the Temple money-changers. He decried the greedy materialism of the Roman Catholic Church (not that many other Catholic church people were not doing so as well), calling it “a den of thieves”. And he demanded that ecclesiastics divest themselves of all of their trappings of wealth and luxury. Their absolution for sins -- he declared -- was no more than empty words in the mouths of such corrupt prelates, whose hearts were set on mammon. He did all this as a Catholic brother in the church, not as an outsider!

Durant says that Arnold:

“was substantially orthodox in doctrine, but denied the validity of sacraments administered by priests in a state of sin. He held it immoral for priests to hold property, demanded a return of the clergy to apostolic poverty, and advised the church to surrender all her material possessions and political power to the state.”

Durant tells us that Arnold’s:

“ideas outlived him, and reappeared in the Paterine and Waldensian heretics of Lombardy, in the Albigensians in France, in Marsilius of Padua, and in the leaders of the [Protestant] Reformation.”

Cleansing of the Temple

It was Arnold who translated what he absorbed at the feet of Abelard into real-time, revolutionary, secularistic politics (but not humanism -- Arnold, like Abelard, was a believer). Arnold directly challenged the temporal authority being claimed by the Church. He captured the imagination of an already growing movement which hoped to reestablish the ancient Roman Republic, and he led those relatively peaceful revolutionaries to chase the Pope out of Rome and set up a secular government which lasted for a number of years (A.D. 1145 to 1155).

Jesus, a millennium earlier, had set cattle into motion as a force to upset ecclesiastical authority corrupted by materialism. Arnold did the same, however he used people instead of cows. In both cases the “Temple” was cleansed. The URANTIA Book says that Jesus’:

“cleansing of the temple discloses the Master’s attitude toward commercializing the practices of religion as well as his detestation of all forms of unfairness and profiteering at the expense of the poor and unlearned” (1891 A).

And that was Arnold’s point exactly.

And when we realize that “Baal worship” consisted of real estate deals in the name of religion, which annulled land rights previously held by the poor (ref. 1064:3), we can see that this was Elijah’s and Elisha’s attitude as well! The other teaching of Jesus which helped to motivate Arnold doubtlessly was, as restated in The URANTIA Book:

“You should not employ temporal power in the furtherance of the spiritual kingdom” (1930 B).

The “Beast” and the “False Prophet”

Perhaps -- indeed likely -- Abelard and Arnold are the actual fulfillment in real time of a Bible prophecy in Revelations (“The Revelation of St. John the Divine” -- Bible). While considering this, however, we should not overlook the fact that The URANTIA Book tells us that Revelations survives “in greatly abridged and distorted form” and consists of “fragments of a great revelation, long portions of which were lost, other portions of which were removed, subsequent to John’s writing. It is preserved … fragmentary and adulterated” (1555 B) . That is not to say that what remains does not contain truth and light, indeed The URANTIA Book quotes at least two passages from it (ref. 513 B and 539 C). We should certainly expect to find in its pages a vision of the -- to John -- future Elijah and Elisha, unless that happened to be in one of the missing fragments. John relates:

“And there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein.

“But the court which is without the temple leave out, and measure it not; for it is given unto the Gentiles: and the holy city shall they tread under foot forty and two months.

“And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth.

“These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth.” (Rev. 11:1 to 4)

The magical powers later attributed to these “two witnesses” appear to be added material. The reference to “sackcloth” perhaps refers to John the Baptist’s rough clothes, which however, were animal skins. Sackcloth is the traditional Jewish garb worn to symbolize mourning and national emergencies. As we shall see, both Hebraic meanings were applicable at the time represented here.

Prophetic Numbers and the Crusades

One of the same numbers found in the chronological prophecies in Daniel (“time, times and a half”), stated differently however, is repeated in Revelations (above). There it is given as “a thousand two hundred and three score days” and again as “forty and two months” (30 days X 42 = 1,260 days). It is used, as we have read, in relationship both to a period when the “gentiles” (KJV -- literally, “nations”) will tread the “Holy City” under foot, as well as to a time when “two witnesses” will appear, who are symbolically represented as being “two olive trees and two candlesticks” -- the first of which traditionally supplied an oil used for anointment (a symbol for the Spirit of Truth, “Christ” means “the anointed one”) and the second which provides light (the symbol for spiritual knowledge, truth, insight, etc.): both perfect symbols for an Elijah/Elisha team.

The Crusades

Where the number appears in Daniel as “time, times, and an half”. There is a specific verse of prophecy connected to it referring to the accomplishment of the scattering “of the power of the Holy People” (Dan. 12:7). The number of day-years produces the year A.D. 1092.

In A.D. 1092 the death of Malik Shah set his sons to fighting one another for supremacy in the Middle Eastern Seljuk Empire. This so weakened the realm that for the first time in centuries an opportunity opened up which would allow the West to capture Jerusalem. It likewise provided an opportunity for a massive land-grab wherein the non-primogeniture sons of European nobility could acquire estates for themselves. It was around this year that Peter the Hermit was said to have had his (possibly apocryphal) dream while sojourning in Jerusalem. In it God directed him, Peter believed, to go to the Pope and convince him that the time had come to relieve the Christians in Jerusalem, who were living there as a persecuted minority.

In any event, Peter the Hermit headed straight to Pope Urban II, the second of the Gregorian Reform Popes, who had also been Hildebrand’s confidant. In A.D. 1092 Urban preached (declared) the First Crusade.

Whereas the Seljuk’s comprised an empire, the Crusades were an army of invaders and occupying forces from the various, sovereign “nations” of the West. They captured Jerusalem in A.D. 1099, committing horrible atrocities on Jew and “Saracen” (“Moslem”) alike. After herding the Jews into their synagogue the Roman Catholic Army of Christ burned it to the ground with them in it! Surely those Jews before the flames engulfed them had some remembrance of the historical acts of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Roman General Titus, and Emperor Hadrian. One must wonder if their minds somehow, as they might in a movie, flashed forward to Hitler as well, for the Crusaders’ treatment of them did nothing less than prefigure this monster of our own age, who himself more than likely prefigures the “Antichrist”, in the same way that Antiochus provided the template for Hadrian.

The Crusades indeed “scattered” the power of the Jews, not only in the Middle East, but in Europe as well, where through the centuries of wars under the cross they were reduced from the level of a prosperous agrarian people to bare subsistence. The confiscation of their land and wealth began even before the Crusaders had left the continent. Those who wore the symbol for Christ were urged to atrocities against these innocent farmers and ghetto dwellers by the battle-cry: “Kill a Jew and save your soul!”

Their major intellectual centers (Worms, Mainz, and Cologne) in ruins, cut free from their agrarian means of self-sufficiency, and often fleeing for their very lives, the many homeless people of this diaspora of the dark ages gave rise to the myth of the “Wandering Jew”. Landless, the only path to power available was through the accumulation of portable wealth -- riches -- and those who attained this power lessened the persecutions against their people by bankrolling (for interest) later Crusades as well as wars among the goyim themselves. Money-lending by Jews was already somewhat in practice before A.D. 1096, when the attacks by Crusaders on Jewish centers began, but the Crusades ensured its growth and development.

The period of the First Crusade (A.D. 1096 to A.D. 1099) is usually seen as marking the emergence of Ashkenazic Jewry, the northern European, generally Yiddish-speaking Jewish culture which went on to claim a place of leadership in the modern Jewish scene. New York University Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, Robert Chazan (European Jewry and the First Crusade), says that the “human strength reflected in the martyrdom [of Jews by Crusaders] of 1096 lay at the core of the creative upsurge that distinguishes Ashkenazic Jewry of the centuries that followed.” He feels also that the “restless energies and startlingly new insights that characterize late eleventh- and twelfth-century northern Europe civilization” was also a likely factor in the “creative outburst [in which] the essence of early Ashkenazic Jewry may be found.”

Seljuk Minaret

The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (or Crusader “Outremer” -- a word which roughly translates as “overseas”) consisted of that named city and all other areas wrested away from the “Saracens” by the “Franks” (Europeans). It lasted less than a century, but during that time several generations of Europeans were born there, made close friends among the indigenous population, adopted many aspects of the culture, and grew to maturity. And during this time there persisted an almost steady stream of European tourists making pilgrimages to Jerusalem, many of whom hoped for, and some of whom were given, a chance to kill a Saracen.

Most of Outremer, including Jerusalem, fell to Saladin, the enlightened Sultan of Egypt who in stark contrast to the Crusaders treated his captives in an authentically “Christian” manner with mercy and decency, in spite of the fact that he was a Moslem, and thus considered to be a “pagan” by the Church. The contact with the culture of the Middle East, which had never experienced a “dark age” to that time, did much to bring civilization to Europe. It had also been imported a little at a time for centuries across the Strait of Gibraltar through Spain, which may well have accounted for the presence in Paris of the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers (earlier fairly well destroyed throughout Europe by the Christians) which were researched by Abelard and adapted to his purposes.

So, it was during the precise time indicated by the chronological numbers in Revelations, during which the barbaric, European “nations” trod the Holy City underfoot, that Abelard and Arnold carried out their respective spiritual missions. They were never -- nor does the prophecy in Revelations demand it -- in Jerusalem itself. They were simply contemporary with its occupation. Neither were they resurrected in the flesh on earth like their counterparts in the vision, but their ideas lived after them, and it is quite possible that at least one of the two will become a permanent member of the Urantia advisory council of Jerusem along with such members as Elijah and John the Baptist (ref. 513 C):

“And they [the two witnesses] heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up hither. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud … (Rev. 11:12)

This verse is immediately followed by a reference to “the four and twenty elders”, whom The URANTIA Book identifies as the Jerusem council (compare 513 B and Rev. 11:16)

Whether the various magical attributes and powers associated with the “two witnesses” find any symbolic fulfillment in the lives of Abelard and Arnold I have not yet been able to determine, in fact I have hardly looked for them. In any case these attributes may represent corruptions or additions to the text. However, the prophecy does use the image of “the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit” (Rev. 11:7) for their enemy which “shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and shall kill them”, and that part of the prophecy is especially accurate.

(Continued:) “The Beast From the Bottomless Pit”