Turkish archaeologists have discovered an unknown burial in the city of Demre, Antalya province. The schisms took place in the underground of the church of St. Nicholas, and the head of the department for the protection of monuments, Cemil Karabayram, suggested that these are the remains of the famous saint. The hypothesis casts doubt on the fact that the holy relics taken out by Italian monks in the 11th century and now located in the city of Bari belong to Saint Nicholas. However, this is far from the only mystery of the personality of the prototype of Santa Claus.
Controversial appearance
Nicholas the Wonderworker, or Nicholas the Pleasant, is one of the most popular Christian saints. He lived in the IV century in the town of Myra of Lycia, in Asia Minor, and went from priest to archbishop. Church legends attribute to him all kinds of miracles and tell of his boundless mercy.
But, despite numerous legends, the personality of the saint remains one of the most mysterious in the period of the emergence of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire. Let's start with the fact that it is not known for certain what Nikolai looked like. Recently, a group of scientists from the Liverpool University's Facial Plastic Reconstruction Laboratory created a three-dimensional portrait of the saint. British doctors, sculptors and prosthetists used the method of the Soviet sculptor Mikhail Gerasimov.
Seventy years ago, Mikhail Mikhailovich proposed a method for restoring a person's appearance from his bone remains. In doing so, he had to become a historian, anthropologist and archaeologist. During his life, Gerasimov created over two hundred sculptural reconstructions of historical figures, including Tamerlane, Ivan the Terrible, Ulugbek, Yaroslav the Wise. However, Saint Nicholas was not included in this list due to the lack of the necessary bone material …
Nevertheless, the British reenactors received a certain image that had to be urgently "corrected". The fact is that the anthropometric and historical data entered into a special computer program for the restoration of facial bones and tissues gave a phenomenal result. A robber-looking old man with a broken nose looked at the scientists from under frowned eyebrows. Naturally, the result received for grants from the British Evangelical Society had to be urgently "transformed". After applying the most modern advances in facial anatomy and CGI technology for computer image generation, the saint took on a more handsome appearance, although he retained a sullen look.
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Ecumenical Council and a broken nose
In June 325, Emperor Constantine I convened an Ecumenical Council in the city of Nicaea (now Turkish Iznik). This was the first in the history of Christianity such a representative meeting of clergymen, called upon to solve a number of urgent church problems.
Constantine was preoccupied with church disputes between Archbishop Alexander of Alexandria and Presbyter Arius. The controversy between them involved more and more believers and actually split Christians in the East. Therefore, the emperor used a formal pretext for solving the problem of calculating the Paschal and announced the decision to hold an Ecumenical Council.
During a heated dispute that erupted at the council between Nicholas and Arius, they eventually moved from verbal arguments to assault. During the scuffle, Arius broke the nose of the future saint. However, success in single combat did not bring him victory at the council and "Arianism was declared" heresy, and the presbyter himself was excommunicated from the Church.
What did the church hierarchs argue about so hotly, and what split the parishioners of the Eastern Church for many years?
Arian controversy
The early Christians were free to understand religious tenets. Therefore, only several dozen Gospels were written. Subsequently, church theologians with great difficulty selected four canonical versions of them, and the disputes about other apocryphal do not subside to this day.
So Arius defended his understanding of Christianity, headed by an ordinary man - a preacher, "overshadowed by the divine seal." As arguments, he cited some provisions of the "Gospel of Peter", from which only a few fragments have come down to us. Apparently, it really was a very unusual composition, telling about how the host of "light" and "dark" angels fought for the soul of a Nazarene, directed either by the Jewish Yahweh or by Satan. These were rather strange angels in late antiquity. Most of all, they resembled the Olympic gods and gods, who appeared in their original form, then turned into mortals, then visited their heroes in dreams, revealing the future for them.
Nicholas fiercely objected to Arius, proving that Jesus was not a man, but a real God, included in the single triad "God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit." In addition, the saint sarcastically, it is completely incomprehensible where Arius found the Gospel of Peter, about which everyone had heard, but no one had seen. Maybe he dreamed about it after drinking strong Alexandrian wines?
The early Christian historian Sozomen writes that it was after these words that Arius, in anger, stabbed Nicholas with his staff, breaking his face and breaking his nose. At the same time, he left the last word for himself and, when the defeated saint was carried away, no less caustically reported that every minister of the Alexandrian Museion knows where to look for the works of the Evangelist Peter. However, he added gloomily, one must be especially careful and strong in faith there, for one can find many scriptures composed by dark angels only under the dictation of Satan himself …
Wonderful Musseion
The Muséion of Alexandria (museum) has been a beacon of knowledge from antiquity to the early Middle Ages for eight centuries. For the first time in history, this temple of wisdom brought together scientists, philosophers, healers and historians under one roof.
The museum was founded by a colleague of Alexander the Great, Ptolemy Soter, at the beginning of the 3rd century BC. The author of the idea of construction was the court philosopher Demetrius Flersky. Demetrius suggested (and Ptolemy liked this) "to graft the shoots of Hellenism to the thousand-year-old tree of Ancient Egypt." Simply put, Demeter wanted, with the hands of Ptolemy, to put together the surviving treasures of Egyptian temple science and to translate all significant manuscripts into Greek. The main part of the museum is the Library of Alexandria, with hundreds of thousands of scrolls. Many historians believe that library papyri hid innumerable secrets of antiquity - from the history of Atlantis to the birth of Christianity.
Therefore, when references to the early Christian apocrypha (compositions not officially recognized by the church) were voiced in the Arian controversy, Nicholas the Pleasant immediately began to furiously denounce the wiles of the evil one who tempted the early Christians with his diabolical "life of the Savior." What could be discussed here? A number of researchers, including the famous biblical scholar Dave Hunt, not to mention the author of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown, believe that this was the legendary “Gospel of Lucifer”.
Manuscripts that destroyed the "treasury of knowledge"
In 391, the Emperor of Theodosia closed the museum by special decree. At the same time, the Alexandrian patriarch Theophilus directed the raging crowds of fanatics to destroy everything pagan and heretical. Especially for a long time obscurantists were looking for some "devil's scrolls", allegedly threatening the very existence of the Church, and immediately burned them. At the same time, the city authorities, saving the remains of the "treasury of knowledge", instructed the last curator of the museum, Theon of Alexandria, to send everything of value, including rare scrolls, to the imperial library. For several days, under the protection of the city guard, the loading of priceless papyri was going on on ships bound for Rome. The remaining Theophilus declared it public domain and ordered to distribute it to everyone for a symbolic payment in favor of the Christian community.
What could have been contained in the "godless manuscripts" and was there a "Gospel of Lucifer" among them?
Apparently, Theon was afraid to send the most seditious compositions to Rome, rightly fearing their destruction. After his death in 405, a large collection of manuscripts remained, with which Theon's daughter Hypatia worked.
After the death of Theophilos, his nephew Cyril became the patriarch. An implacable fanatic, he publicly accused Hypatia of witchcraft and possession of forbidden amulets and manuscripts. In 415, in a theological dispute with the Parabalan monks (a Christian community whose members in the era of early Christianity volunteered for the sick and buried those who died of diseases in the hope of thus accepting death in the name of Christ) from the Egyptian desert, Hypatia inadvertently quoted some scrolls from her father's library … The said terrified the leader of the Parabalans, Peter, and he cried out: "This is a devil!" - after which the monks pounced on Hypatia and brutally killed her.
Roman Pacification Project
Several years ago, the American historian and "scholar of sacred texts" Joseph Atwill presented his book "Caesar's Messiah: A Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus." The author claims that Christianity did not originate as a religion itself, but was created as a sophisticated propaganda tool to pacify the subjects of the Roman Empire. Atwill believes that when the Romans' clumsy and brutal tactics to restore order failed, they turned to more sophisticated and subtle ways to preserve it.
If you accept Atwill's conspiracy theory, it becomes clear what kind of manuscripts could be kept in the Alexandria Library. For example, it could be the memories of Roman aristocratic intellectuals about the creation of an "artificial religion", which turned out to be a rather successful project. Perhaps there was also a plan for the creation of a synthetic cult, which included Mithraism (one of the main rivals of Christianity), the beliefs of the Essenes (one of the Jewish sects that began in the first quarter of the 2nd century BC) and Judaism. This scroll could have been the mysterious "Gospel of Lucifer".