In the wake of Easter season, another moment in a year rekindles an annual propaganda campaign to push the edges of history further in a particular direction. A number of theories get passed around, but no other holiday gets as much ridicule, criticism or scrutiny as such. Though, the debate rages around the many specific traditions associated with Easter, the alleged connections, historically, between Easter and the ancient occult religions, and the cultural vestiges bare little resemblance to anything the ancient pagan world of Europe or Mesopotamia would recognize. On the contrary the only historical foundations of the day of the celebration itself are held in their entirety points to the records of the risen Jesus as a historical fact to the devoted faithful orthodox community of believing Christians.
They claim a spiritual heritage, across a variety of traditions, a specific victory of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it has been passed down in and through History. In a haze of stories going back millennia, spanning contents, as the world’s largest religion, it’s core issue is the scandal of all scandals, to answer the question about a man who had allegedly died and been raised to life again on the third day after his burial. Regardless of their differences, all of the language of their accounts spell out the same details. A jewish man taught in Galilee, was crucified in Jerusalem at the hands of Pontius Pilate. A detail of history that is regarded with the greatest amount of certitude among those considered experts on the history surrounding the account.
One feature of these questions that come up is a span of history that gets very little focus across the attention span spectrum of the supposed modern digital age. It’s an era spanning the years between the Roman Catholic persecution of the Cathars, Abiginsians, the Waldenses, Jews and other groups. The violent malevolence of the age of the crusades and the Inquisitions is a sin reckoned against the Mother Church that cause her many accusers to reach back to other moments in her history that many call an ancient war of the Orthodox Catholic tradition and her Gnostic counterparts.
When we zone in on the record of what we have surrounding the medieval contentions of these “proto-Protestants”, the waters get fairly muddied, to the point that there are many who wonder whether or not such groups ever existed in the first place. As such, the locality of those communities and their beliefs seem to like the widespread proliferation we would see if the case was that these groups had maintained a consistent presence stretching back to the origins of Christianity as a whole. That being the case, this article stands to determine if such a thread can be coherently discerned from the anals of history as they exist.
