CONSPIRACY CLAIM #06

Why does this one keep coming back?
Few claims get shared more often than this one. It goes after Albert Pike, one of Freemasonry’s most important writers, and his book “Morals & Dogma”.

But all is not what it seems. Read the full paragraph that keeps getting quoted, look at its context, and a very different picture appears. Pike had a dry and sometimes peculiar way of writing, especially when he was making observations about the King James Version of the Bible.

First, the book itself. “Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry,” written by Albert Pike in 1871, offers a philosophical and spiritual interpretation of Freemasonry. It ranges across the nature of God, the history of the fraternity and the meaning of its symbols and rituals, and it explores the moral and ethical principles at the heart of the fraternity’s teachings. It is considered one of the most important works on Freemasonry, and members of the fraternity still read it today.

In this book, Pike noticed something rather interesting about a passage in the King James Bible.

Pike was a studious and inquisitive man, and he set down his observation on page 321 of Morals and Dogma. You can see the page in the image alongside:

Read in context, and read carefully, it’s clear what Pike is actually saying. The passage speaks of ‘Lucifer as the Son/Star of the Morning, the bearer of light’. We’ll dig into that in a moment.

Now here is the version that circulates online. It relies on a familiar trick, “taking original text out of context to fit the extremist narrative”: the eye is drawn to the text on the light-coloured background, while the text on the dark background, the part that changes the meaning, is quietly skipped.

So what is Albert Pike referring to?

Pike is pointing at a curious fact about the Bible. Two verses use the same title, ‘Morning Star’ and ‘Son of the Morning’ (which, in context, mean the same thing), for two different figures. One is Jesus. The other is Lucifer. Confused? You’re in good company.

Mauro Biglino argues that the ancient Hebrew scriptures were both misinterpreted and mistranslated by the Christian Church, accidentally on purpose, as he puts it, and that the Church has been slow to acknowledge this (see Mauro Biglino’s explanation here). Meanwhile, readers in the “King James Only” camp hold that the King James Version of 1611 is the most correct Bible there is: no mistakes, no doubts and no inconsistencies, as if written directly by the hand of God. So let’s take them at their word and quote the KJV itself:

• Revelation 22:16 says, in effect, ‘Jesus is the Morning Star’.
Here is the exact verse:

“I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.”

Link to the KJV Bible Verse here: https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Revelation-Chapter-22/#16

But here’s the catch.

• Isaiah 14:12 says, in effect, ‘Lucifer is the Morning Star’.
Here is the exact verse:

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”

Link to the KJV Bible Verse here: https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Isaiah-Chapter-14/#12

Revelation 22:16 uses the morning star as a title for Jesus. Theologically, the morning star is a symbol of hope and light, which Jesus brings to believers as the saviour who guides them through the darkness. The verse presents Jesus as the true morning star: the true light that guides, and the true hope of salvation. Many Christian readers set it beside Isaiah 14:12 and see a contrast between a false light and hope, represented by Satan, and the true light and hope, represented by Jesus. (Revelation 22:16 itself doesn’t mention Satan; the contrast comes from reading the two verses side by side.)

That is exactly what Pike noticed and put into words. On the face of it, it’s a contradiction: Jesus and Lucifer are given the same title. How can that be?

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Here’s a second wrinkle: in the original ancient Hebrew texts, the word ‘Lucifer’ never referred to Satan at all. Don’t take our word for it. Check for yourself:
1/ Obtain the relevant Ancient Hebrew Dictionaries in the ‘recommended book list‘ of this website.
2/ Obtain specific analytical software LOGOS. Click here.
3/ Consult the Masoretic AND Septuagint Texts as a reference to what was changed against (4).
4/ Consult the ORIGINAL ANCIENT Hebrew Text to find the Original words and meanings.
5/ Compare the Original Ancient Hebrew Text to the Masoretic and Septuagint Texts to note what has changed through translation and transliteration.

First, a quick note on how the ancient Hebrew text was translated and transliterated into the Masoretic text.

Source/Verbatim: https://preachersinstitute.com/2015/08/31/masoretic-text-vs-original-hebrew/

Fr. Joseph Gleason and Fr. John A Peck (Director of Preachers Institute – Orthodox) explain the problem. Many people assume the Masoretic Text is a perfect copy of the original Old Testament, the way God divinely preserved the Hebrew Scriptures throughout the ages. In reality, that isn’t the case, for the following reasons:

• The oldest copies of the Masoretic Text only date back to the 10th Century, nearly 1,000 years after the time of Christ.
• These texts differ from the originals in many specific ways.
• The Masoretic text is named after the Masoretes, who were scribes and Torah scholars who worked in the middle-east between the 7th and 11th centuries.
• The texts they received, and the edits they provided, ensured that the modern Jewish texts would manifest a notable departure from the original Hebrew Scriptures.

Historical research reveals five significant ways in which the Masoretic text is different from the original Old Testament:
• The Masoretes admitted that they received corrupted texts, to begin with
• The Masoretic Text is written with a radically different alphabet than the original
• The Masoretes added vowel points that did not exist in the original
• The Masoretic Text excluded several books from the Old Testament scriptures
• The Masoretic Text includes Changes to prophesy and doctrine

(a) Receiving Corrupted Texts

Many people believe that the ancient Hebrew text of Scripture was divinely preserved for many centuries, and was ultimately recorded in what we now call the “Masoretic Text”. But what did the Masoretes themselves believe?  Did they believe they were perfectly preserving the ancient text?  Did they even think they had received a perfect text, to begin with?
History says “no” . . .

Scribal emendations – Tikkune Soferim
“Early rabbinic sources, from around 200 CE, mention several passages of Scripture in which the conclusion is inevitable that the ancient reading must have differed from that of the present text. . . . Rabbi Simon ben Pazzi (3rd century) calls these readings “emendations of the Scribes” (tikkune Soferim; Midrash Genesis Rabbah xlix. 7), assuming that the Scribes actually made the changes. This view was adopted by the later Midrash and by the majority of Masoretes.”

In other words, the Masorites themselves felt they had received a partly corrupted text.
A stream cannot rise higher than its source.  If the texts they started with were corrupted, then even a perfect transmission of those texts would only serve to preserve the mistakes. Even if the Masoretes demonstrated great care when copying the texts, their diligence would not bring about the correction of even one error.

In addition to these intentional changes by Hebrew scribes, there also appear to be a number of accidental changes which they allowed to creep into the Hebrew text.  For example, consider Psalm 145 . . .

Psalm 145 is an acrostic poem. Each line of the Psalm starts with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Yet in the Masoretic Text, one of the lines is completely missing:

Yet the Septuagint (LXX) Greek translation of the Old Testament does include the missing verse. And when that verse is translated back into Hebrew, it starts with the Hebrew letter נ (nun) which was missing from the Masoretic Text.

In the early 20th century, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in caves near Qumran. They revealed an ancient Hebrew textual tradition which differed from the tradition preserved by the Masoretes. Written in Hebrew, copies of Psalm 145 were found which include the missing verse:

(Editor’s note: the Dead Sea Scrolls were actually discovered in the mid-20th century, between 1946 and 1956.)

The missing verse reads:

“The Lord is faithful in His words and holy in all His works.”

This verse can be found in the Orthodox Study Bible, which relies on the Septuagint. But this verse is absent from the King James Version (KJV), the New King James Version (NKJV), the Complete Jewish Bible, and every other translation which is based on the Masoretic Text.

In this particular case, it is easy to demonstrate that the Masoretic Text is in error, for it is obvious that Psalm 145 was originally written as an acrostic Psalm. But what are we to make of the thousands of other locations where the Masoretic Text diverges from the Septuagint? If the Masoretic Text could completely erase an entire verse from one of the Psalms, how many other passages of Scripture have been edited? How many other verses have been erased?

(b) A Radically Different Alphabet
If Moses were to see a copy of the Masoretic Text, he wouldn’t be able to read it.
As discussed in this recent post, the original Old Testament scriptures were written in Paleo-Hebrew, a text closely related to the ancient Phonecian writing system.

The Masoretic Text is written with an alphabet borrowed from Assyria (Persia) around the 6th-7th century B.C. and is almost 1000 years newer than the form of writing used by Moses, David, and most of the Old Testament authors.

(c) Adding Vowel Points
For thousands of years, ancient Hebrew was only written with consonants, no vowels. When reading these texts, they had to supply all of the vowels from memory, based on oral tradition.

In Hebrew, just like in modern languages, vowels can make a big difference. Changing a single vowel can radically change the meaning of a word. An example in English is the difference between “SLAP” and “SLIP”. These words have very different definitions. Yet if our language were written without vowels, both of these words would be written “SLP”. Thus the vowels are very important.

The most extensive change the Masoretes brought to the Hebrew text was the addition of vowel points. In an attempt to solidify for all-time the “correct” readings of all the Hebrew Scriptures, the Masoretes added a series of dots to the text, identifying which vowel to use in any given location.

Adam Clarke, an 18th Century Protestant scholar, demonstrates that the vowel-point system is actually a running commentary that was incorporated into the text itself. In the General Preface of his biblical commentary published in 1810, Clarke writes:

“The Masorets were the most extensive Jewish commentators which that nation could ever boast. The system of punctuation, probably invented by them, is a continual gloss on the Law and the Prophets; their vowel points, and prosaic and metrical accents, &c., give every word to which they have affixed a peculiar kind of meaning, which in their simple state, multitudes of them can by no means bear. The vowel points alone add whole conjugations to the language. This system is one of the most artificial, particular, and extensive comments ever written on the Word of God; for there is not one word in the Bible that is not the subject of a particular gloss through its influence.”

Another early scholar who investigated this matter was Louis Cappel, who wrote during the early 17th century. An article in the 1948 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica includes the following information regarding his research of the Masoretic Text:

“As a Hebrew scholar, he concluded that the vowel points and accents were not an original part of Hebrew, but were inserted by the Masorete Jews of Tiberias, not earlier than the 5th Century AD and that the primitive Hebrew characters are Aramaic and were substituted for the more ancient at the time of the captivity. . . The various readings in the Old Testament Text and the differences between the ancient versions and the Masoretic Text convinced him that the integrity of the Hebrew text as held by Protestants was untenable.”

Many Protestants love the Masoretic Text, believing it to be a trustworthy representation of the original Hebrew text of Scripture. Yet, at the same time, most Protestants reject Orthodox Church Tradition as being untrustworthy. They believe that the Church’s oral tradition could not possibly preserve Truth over a long period of time.

Therefore, the vowel points of the Masoretic Text put Protestants in a precarious position. If they believe that the Masoretic vowels are not trustworthy, then they call the Masoretic Text itself into question. But if they believe that the Masoretic vowels are trustworthy, then they are forced to believe that the Jews successfully preserved the vowels of Scripture for thousands of years, through oral tradition alone, until the Masoretes finally invented the vowel points hundreds of years after Christ. Either conclusion is at odds with mainstream Protestant thought.

Either oral tradition can be trusted, or it can’t. If it can be trusted, then there is no reason to reject the Traditions of the Orthodox Church, which have been preserved for nearly 2000 years. But if traditions are always untrustworthy, then the Masoretic vowel points are also untrustworthy and should be rejected.

(d) Excluding Books of Scripture from the Old Testament
The Masoretic Text promotes a canon of the Old Testament which is significantly shorter than the canon represented by the Septuagint. Meanwhile, Orthodox Christians and Catholics have Bibles that incorporate the canon of the Septuagint. The books of Scripture found in the Septuagint, but not found in the Masoretic Text, are commonly called either the Deuterocanon or the anagignoskomena. While it is outside the scope of this article to perform an in-depth study of the canon of Scripture, a few points relevant to the Masoretic Text should be made here:

• With the exception of two books, the Deuterocanon was originally written in Hebrew.
• In three places, the Talmud explicitly refers to the book of Sirach as “Scripture”.
• Jesus celebrated Hanukkah, a feast which originates in the book of 1 Maccabees, and nowhere else in the Old Testament.
• The New Testament book of Hebrews recounts the stories of multiple Old Testament saints, including a reference to martyrs in the book of 2 Maccabees.
• The book of Wisdom includes a striking prophecy of Christ, and its fulfillment is recorded in Matthew 27.
• Numerous findings among the Dead Sea Scrolls suggest the existence of 1st-century Jewish communities which accepted many of the Deuterocanonical books as authentic Scripture.
• Many thousands of 1st-century Christians converted from Judaism. The early Church accepted the inspiration of the Deuterocanon and frequently quoted authoritatively from books such as Wisdom, Sirach, and Tobit. This early Christian practice suggests that many Jews accepted these books, even prior to their conversion to Christianity.
• Ethiopian Jews preserved the ancient Jewish acceptance of the Septuagint, including much of its canon of Scripture. Sirach, Judith, Baruch, and Tobit are among the books included in the canon of the Ethiopian Jews.

These reasons, among others, suggest the existence of a large 1st-century Jewish community that accepted the Deuterocanon as inspired Scripture. 

(e) Changes to Prophecy and Doctrine
When compiling any given passage of Scripture, the Masoretes had to choose among multiple versions of the ancient Hebrew texts. In some cases, the textual differences were relatively inconsequential. For example, two texts may differ over the spelling of a person’s name.

However, in other cases, they were presented with textual variants which made a considerable impact on doctrine or prophecy. In cases like these, were the Masoretes completely objective? Or did their anti-Christian biases influence any of their editing decisions?

In the 2nd century A.D., hundreds of years before the time of the Masoretes, Justin Martyr investigated a number of Old Testament texts in various Jewish synagogues. He ultimately concluded that the Jews who had rejected Christ had also rejected the Septuagint, and were now tampering with the Hebrew Scriptures themselves:

“But I am far from putting reliance in your teachers, who refuse to admit that the interpretation made by the seventy elders who were with Ptolemy [king] of the Egyptians is a correct one; and they attempt to frame another. And I wish you to observe, that they have altogether taken away many Scriptures from the [Septuagint] translations effected by those seventy elders who were with Ptolemy, and by which this very man who was crucified is proved to have been set forth expressly as God, and man, and as being crucified, and as dying” (~150 A.D., Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, Chapter LXXI)

If Justin Martyr’s findings are correct, then it is likely that the Masoretes inherited a Hebrew textual tradition that had already been corrupted with an anti-Christian bias. And if we look at some of the most significant differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text, that is precisely what we see. For example, consider the following comparisons:

These are not random, inconsequential differences between the texts. Rather, these appear to be places where the Masoretes (or their forebears) had a varied selection of texts to consider, and their decisions were influenced by anti-Christian bias. Simply by choosing one Hebrew text over another, they were able to subvert the Incarnation, the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, His healing of the blind, His crucifixion, and His salvation of the Gentiles. The Jewish scribes were able to edit Jesus out of many important passages, simply by rejecting one Hebrew text and selecting (or editing) another text instead.

Thus, the Masoretic Text has not perfectly preserved the original Hebrew text of Scripture. The Masoretes received corrupted texts, to begin with, they used an alphabet that was radically different from the original Hebrew, they added countless vowel points which did not exist in the original, they excluded several books from the Old Testament scriptures, and they included a number of significant changes to prophecy and doctrine.

It would seem that the Septuagint (LXX) translation is not only far more ancient than the Masoretic Text . . . the Septuagint is far more accurate as well. It is a more faithful representation of the original Hebrew Scriptures.

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A word about the word Satan…
Originally, ‘satan’ didn’t mean an ‘entity’ or a ‘fallen angel’ at all. It described an action, as in “go and do satan to that person”, rather than naming a being. Mainstream scholarship agrees: the Hebrew śāṭān simply means accuser or adversary. Mauro Biglino, who translated Ancient Hebrew for the publisher Edizioni San Paolo, explains that in the Ancient Hebrew texts ‘satan’ indicated a function, and that when it names that role it is used with the definite article: the satan. The function was much like that of a ‘Prosecutor’, used especially when one accuser stood against another.

Often this ‘Prosecutor’ worked for Yahweh. So we’re looking not at ‘Satan, prince of demons adversary of Yahweh’, but at ‘The Satan’, who could have been a “Malat”, that is, one of these ‘Malachim’, or even an ordinary human being. You can watch the role at work in the Old Testament itself: in the Book of Job and in Zechariah 3 the satan acts as a heavenly prosecutor, and in Numbers 22:22 even the angel of the Lord is called a satan, an adversary, standing in Balaam’s way. So the word is there, but as a job description, not as the name of a being. The satan was something like a public prosecutor, often acting on Yahweh’s own instructions against a particular person or people.

Later, as people felt the need for a source of evil that wasn’t Yahweh (the LORD) himself, this role was gradually ‘spiritualised’ and turned into an individual, a figure the Old Testament itself does not contain. Look for it in the ancient Hebrew texts and you won’t find it: there, Satan as an individual (a person, a being with horns and wings) does not exist. That figure grew up afterwards, first in Jewish writings of the Second Temple period such as the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees, and then in Christian theology, which passed it on to everyday believers. Nor is this a well-kept secret: scholars who read ancient Hebrew say so openly, and it is in the standard reference works.

So does this mean Jesus and Lucifer are the same? No. The trouble lies with the word ‘Lucifer’ itself. The Hebrew of Isaiah 14:12 doesn’t say ‘Lucifer’ at all. It says Hêlêl ben Shachar, ‘Day Star, son of Dawn’, a name for the morning star, and the passage is a taunt aimed at the king of Babylon (Isaiah 14:4). When Jerome made his Latin translation, the Vulgate, he rendered it with the ordinary Latin word for the morning star: lucifer. Only later did Christian writers such as Origen read the verse as being about the Devil, and the Latin word gradually became a proper name for Satan. A word that once meant a planet ended up meaning the Prince of Darkness.

So how can anyone claim that Albert Pike was a Luciferian, as well as a Freemason, just because he echoed a verse from the Bible?

Albert Pike was not a Luciferian, and neither are Freemasons. Freemasonry is not a religion, and no worship of any kind takes place in a lodge. Full stop.

To settle it, a handy rule of thumb, the principle of parsimony known as “Ockham’s razor”, can be used, which states “when presented with multiple explanations for a phenomenon, one should select the explanation that makes the fewest number of assumptions.” It is named after the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham, who was one of its originators.

Albert Pike borrowed a phrase from the KJV Bible, and people hostile to the fraternity saw a chance to lift it out of context and use it as a weapon. It really is that simple.
No sinister motive, no hidden agenda, no nothing.

Lifting a line out of its paragraph is, sadly, a common habit among the people who share this claim. Almost any sentence can be made to sound sinister on its own; read in context, Pike’s passage is a reflection on a puzzling pair of Bible verses. Skip the context, and it’s easy to jump to conclusions and attack an innocent observation as if it were heresy. It tends to happen whenever an idea doesn’t fit the story a group already believes.

Study notes: context is king. So is the original meaning.

1/ In Latin, lucifer literally means ‘Light Bearer’. There was no such word in the Ancient Hebrew text to translate, and it only began to be used as a name for Satan in the early Christian centuries, through writers like Origen and Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, roughly 1,600 years ago. Venus has always been known as the ‘Morning Star’ because of the way it appears in the sky. After the Sun and the Moon it is the brightest object in the sky, and it is visible just before sunrise or just after sunset. That makes it look like a “star” in the morning sky, hence the name “Morning Star.”

When it appears just after sunset, Venus is known as the Evening Star instead. It shines so brightly because it is relatively close to Earth and its cloud-covered surface reflects a large amount of sunlight. Ancient civilisations noticed this too, and named it the “Morning Star” or “Evening Star” accordingly.

Thus the name ‘Lucifer’ the “bearer of light” or “light-bringer” is simply the Latin name the ancient Romans gave the planet Venus as the morning star. (The Greeks had called it Phosphoros, which means the same thing.) Its original meaning had nothing to do with Satan the entity, a fallen angel, or any of the meanings theologians later read into it.

2/ More about the Latin word ‘Lucifer’.
Lucifer = Noun
Other Latin words for Lucifer = morning star, day, venus
More meanings for the word Lucifer = dies, lumen, lux, sidus, tempus

As you can see, the word ‘Lucifer’ originally had nothing to do with Satan or anything evil, least of all when the Ancient Hebrew text was written. Its meaning was changed later, by Christian interpretation, into something it never was.

Still not convinced? Watch the videos below by Mauro Biglino, an expert in Ancient Hebrew, Italian, Latin and Greek. Biglino worked as a translator for Edizioni San Paolo, one of Italy’s leading Catholic publishers, translating seventeen books of the Hebrew Bible (the Masoretic text) for its interlinear edition, prepared for scholars and academia, where every word is rendered literally. Where the meaning of a word is not known, no translation is given, and the original name or text is kept instead.

Want to dig deeper? These books analyse the biblical texts in more detail

Quote from Amazon:

Undressing the Bible: in Hebrew, the Old Testament speaks for itself, explicitly and transparently. It tells of mysterious beings, special and powerful ones, that appeared on Earth.

Aliens?

Former earthlings?

Superior civilizations, that have always been present on our planet?

Creators, manipulators, geneticists. Aviators, warriors, despotic rulers. And scientists, possessing very advanced knowledge, special weapons and science-fiction-like technologies.

Once naked, the Bible is very different from how it has always been told to us: it does not contain any spiritual, omnipotent and omniscient God, no eternity. No apples and no creeping, tempting, serpents. No winged angels. Not even the Red Sea: the people of the Exodus just wade through a simple reed bed.

Writer and journalist Giorgio Cattaneo sits down with Italy’s most renowned biblical translator for his first long interview about his life’s work for the English audience. A decade long official Bible translator for the Church and lifelong researcher of ancient myths and tales, Mauro Bilglino is a unicum in his field of expertise and research. A fine connoisseur of dead languages, from ancient Greek to Hebrew and medieval Latin, he focused his attention and efforts on the accurate translating of the bible.

The encounter with Mauro Biglino and his work – the journalist writes – is profoundly healthy, stimulating and inevitably destabilizing: it forces us to reconsider the solidity of the awareness that nourishes many of our common beliefs. And it is a testament to the courage that is needed, today more than ever, to claim the full dignity of free research.

Quote from Amazon:

A new interpretation of the Bible reveals the oldest secret in history.

If you read the Bible literally, everything becomes understandable and plain because the biblical authors did not feel the need, as we do, to advocate for a precise monotheistic theological perspective or a moral authority of religious order.

Through the pages of this book “God” will show himself in a light entirely unsuspected to most readers. The final portrait that will emerge will reveal the image of a character very different from what many of our readers are accustomed to.

The Bible, falsifications and mistranslations

From the necessity of harmonizing the biblical text with the theological and monotheistic conception of God of Western culture arises a whole series of falsifications and mistranslations, in view of which that first innocent printing typo I had discovered twenty-five years ago really seems like a “speck in the eye of the brother.” Instead, here we talk about massive logs that have remained in our eyes for hundreds and thousands of years, so long that we even ignore our blindness.

God or Gods?

In this book, I focus on the identity and character of Yahweh and the meaning of the term “Elohim.” When we read the term “God” in the Bible, this usually comes from the Hebrew term “Elohim.” However, at least when I worked for Edizioni San Paolo, the term “Elohim” was left untranslated into the interlinear edition of the Bible that we prepared for scholars and academia.

In the Bibles available to the public, the same term was translated as “God.” Therefore, where people read “God” and believe that the biblical authors wrote the equivalent of the word “God,” scholars read the term “Elohim.” This was to alert them that this word is problematic, to say the least, for the unbiased translator.

“My reading will result in most passages being unorthodox to a religious perspective. Some would say even heretical. For this reason, for all passages that indicate an unconventional, unexpected, and non-heterodox reading, we reproduce the original Hebrew text with the literal translation verbatim, word for word.”