Publisher's Synopsis
There are two words that are repeated over and over throughout Luke's Light: masculine and feminine. They are repeated because they kept showing up in Luke's two texts. I set out with just one goal: find and decipher the coded messages. But Luke put a lot of effort into revealing Jesus' message of gender equity. And even more surprising was finding the same message of gender balance in the Old Testament texts that Luke used to send his message to Theophilus. Luke's Light illuminates the darkest corners of the Church's darkest secret, closely held and fiercely protected for nearly two thousand years. Tens of millions of people who suspected or discovered the secret were labeled heretics, tortured into recanting, and then murdered. Only in the past two hundred years could this secret be revealed with any hope of physical survival, thanks to the edicts that came out of Rome centuries ago that were designed to protect and preserve the deception. This is a story of new discoveries about Jesus, his life, his work, and his family. The hidden stories confirm many ancient Christian traditions, while it dispels others. The big question is 'Why coded messages?' Why wouldn't Luke just write openly and clearly so that anyone could read the information he wanted to impart? Perhaps that question is best answered by trying to put ourselves in Luke's place in the religious politics of his time. Consider what you might do if your church should be invaded by a larger and more powerful religion, a group that is destroying all evidence of your chosen religious doctrine. Consider what you might do to preserve the information about you, your family, and your religion. Assume that you are aware of other cultures from history that had experienced a similar fate. And assume that you believe that records of that culture would remain but records of your religion would all be destroyed. Assume that you are permitted to write about what is happening, but only if your story supports the new religion's version and doctrine. What might you do to tell the real story of what happened to you? I believe you might write a story that appears to support the invaders' story. But you might name people who lived in that 'other culture' whose records you thought would survive. You might tell similar stories, hoping that someone would recognize the similarities and understand that you could not write about what was really happening but had to refer to that other culture's history in order to preserve your own. Luke did exactly what any of us would do under similar circumstances. He found a way to leave a coded message that could be found at some future time as long as historians and religious leaders preserved the documents he used to relay the story. He had before him Paul's letters to the Churches; Mark's gospel; Q gospel; Matthew's gospel; the Greek Septuagint; Plutarch's Moralia and Parallel Lives; classics by Homer, Euripides, Aratus, Epimenides, and others. Perhaps the most important document on that table was Philo's guidelines for Allegory. Every chapter in Luke's Gospel contains Pythagorean Sacred Numbers. Why would Luke go to such lengths to leave Sacred Numbers in his gospel? The answer is quite simple: Regardless of the language spoken, everyone who reads his gospels has the same understanding of numbers and the various functions applied to numbers. Numbers are the One Universal Language. A Pythagorean Master Teacher inserted the numbers into Luke's Gospel to attract attention and to send a numeric message-using the One Universal Language-that there is a coded, written message. That's the real story. And that's where Philo's Rules for Allegory are needed. Perhaps the most important of Philo's guidelines is to watch for something unusual in the text. The first obviously 'unusual' occurrence in Luke's gospel is the appearance of the Angel, Gabriel: Luke 1:19: 'The angel replied, 'I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been
