A CERTIFIED LETTER SENT TO THE POPE

                                                                                     September 23rd of 2015

Dear Sir,

I am contacting you with a request. I have discovered something surprising about religion (the Bible) and since you are an authority and I am self-taught I would like to ask you to evaluate whether what I've found makes sense or not.

I will be short. I think to be able to demonstrate, in only10 steps, that the dogma of Jesus’ Virgin Birth stems from a misinterpretation of an 'enigma' in the Gospel of Matthew which actually tells us who was Jesus’ father:

1) We can not find in the New Testament (NT) that Jesus ever claimed to have been born of a virgin.

2) Paul, who wrote half of the books of the NT, does not mention Jesus’ Virgin Birth and even contradicts it by saying that Jesus was a descendant of David "according to the flesh" (Rm1 :. 3)

3) Two of the four official gospels – Mark and John – do not mention Jesus’ Virgin Birth and the two gospels that do refer to a mystery regarding Jesus’ birth - Matthew and Luke - offer different genealogies (Mt1: 1-17 /Lk: 23-38).

4) Because of extramarital affairs some lineages are  real and others supposed: the father of a child is not necessarily the mother's partner. The genealogies in the Bible recognize this reality: the real lineages are based on the 'father begot son' principle while the supposed lineages use formulas such as "Cain knew his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to..." or "Jesus was, as was believed, the son of ..."

5) Matthew mentions in his genealogy for Jesus four women - Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and Tamar - and we find in the Old Testament that all had extramarital affairs. Tamar had Peres from Judah, her father-in-law. (Gn38) This information prepares us for what we will discover about Jesus’ parents.

6) Matthew’s genealogy for Jesus is based on the 'father begat a son' principle, but ends with, "... Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born. So the amount of generations is: 14 from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the Babylonian deportation; and 14 from the Babylonian deportation to Jesus.

7) The traditional division is: Abraham/David, David/Josiah and Jeconiah/Jesus. But when we repeat David in the second column, we must do the same with Josiah in the third column. And since Josiah marks the Babylonian deportation, and there are 14 generations from him to Joseph, the fact that Matthew says there are 14 generations from the Babylonian deportation to Jesus, means that Joseph and Jesus belong to the same generation: Jacob first had Joseph, and later, when this son reached adulthood, he had Jesus from Joseph's wife (his daughter-in-law), just like generations earlier Judah had Peres from his daughter-in-law (Tamar).

8) In case Jesus was the son of Jacob, he was a descendant of David and Matthew's genealogy makes sense: it traces Jesus’ lineage back to David, because the Messiah was supposed to be a descendant of him; it lists 4 adulterous women because Jesus was born from an extramarital relationship; it ends with 'Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born' and invites us to divide the generations in groups of 14 to enable us to discover that Joseph and Jesus were brothers. Besides, Matthew had  a reason for hiding this information: the Jews stoned adulterers to death and did not respect bastard children.

9) This enigma should not surprise us because a) calling the Bible a  'sacred' book originally meant to recognize that it guards secrets (the words 'sacred' and 'secret' have the same origin: they come from the verb 'to segregate'; because b) the word 'religion', which comes from the Latin word 'relegere' and means ‘to re-read’, an also ‘to reunite’ (religare), refers to reading the Bible again and again in order to discover its secrets; and because c), according to an ancient Jewish tradition someone who is enlightened is able to create a mystery that many generations later reveals its secrets and this is the case of the Bible.

10) When the Gospels made their appearance, the Christian authorities were no longer descendants of Jews, who were familiar with books that guard secrets, but instead of pagans, who were familiar with pagan ideas such as, for instance, that of a god who is born of a virgin. And when they read in Matthew: "..María was betrothed to Joseph, but before they came to live together she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit", they assumed that this meant that Mary had Jesus without having a sexual relationship. And when they read, "Now all this took place to fulfil what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: "Look the virgin is with child and will give birth to a son whom they will call Immanuel, a name which means "God-is-with-us", they believed it confirmed their assumption. Therefore, they thought that Matthew said: "... Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born" and that Luke said, "... Jesus was, believed to be, the son of Joseph" to indicate that he was not the son of Joseph, but of an angel.

Twenty years have passed since I discovered that Matthew says that Jesus was born of a relationship between Mary and her father-in-law. Now it  is time that the world knows of my findings. Therefore, I am asking several authorities to evaluate my hypothesis. I am contacting Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the pope, because the Vatican has the best collection of Sacred Scriptures; Munib A. Younan, President of the Lutheran World Federation, because protestants believe in the sufficiency and authority of the Holy Scriptures; George Soros, because he studied philosophy and philosophers seek the truth, Sebastien Fath, because as a professor of history he has studied religion; and Xosé Luís Vilela Conde, the director of La Voz de Galicia, because newspapers evaluate news and decide what news is published.

In previous attempts to share my findings, someone claimed that one can find in the Bible whatever one wants to find. I consider that one can ignore in the Bible – and in life in general – whatever one wants to ignore. And should someone who ignores certain information deliberately not be called ‘ignorant’ (stupid)?

I would appreciate it if you evaluated my hypothesis as soon as possible. I hope that this Christmas people know the truth and reflect upon all the questions that my discovery entails. The most important questions are, “Who created this enigma?” and “Why does this enigma reveals its secrets now?”

Sincerely,

Bruno Lernout