APOTHEOSIS SCROLL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS and RECOMMENDED READING

I thank my wife, Bethany Evans, my muse, for her editing and coaching. Her education, intelligence, critical mind, and sensitive insights proved crucial to this project.

I am grateful to all those who purchased original artwork and prints. Their patronage paid the substantial costs to produce this work that sprang from the independence of my own imagination and conscience in a time of widespread social censorship and institutional power.

I would also like to thank Noble Coleman for offering emotional encouragement when the task grew increasingly ambitious. I am grateful to the study group who showed up month after month for two-hour long lectures where the ideas in this Scroll were vocalized and diagrammed on the church chalkboard. I thank them for the probing questions and for their openness. I also offer my profound thanks to Bill at the business formerly known as Salem Blue.

Understanding beyond my own religious tradition was often greatly accelerated by explanatory visions and transmissions of whole thoughts, often when I was about to wake from sleep or while drawing. When I find I was wrong about a detail in a drawing or painting, I have tried to correct it as best I can after research. I have tried to demonstrate a little about what this process can look like by showing the “blueprint” of a painting alongside the finished work. My primary source is the canonized scriptures of the Holy Bible and my personal belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. The significance of the Doctrine and Covenants, (a canonized scripture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other Mormonism movements) to this work came as a complete and indispensable surprise. I am an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am a member of said church because it is a carrier of the mystery, and it is where my people are. This work, however, does not speak for or about the Church. It is my own opinion and, I presume, will be completely unfamiliar to any official practice, tradition, or curriculum of the ecclesiastical church. It is primarily a work of imagination to demonstrate the process of syncretization and astronomical conceptualization that contributed to the formation of the Christian gospel. Such a process should produce infinite variations of the Christian mystery.

The following authors, in no particular order, have contributed to my thinking about The Apotheosis Scroll. Their type of contribution varies widely, and I certainly don’t assume any of them would agree with what I see. The Jewish Wars with Rome are thematic to this work. Reverberations of this horrifying historical period still echo through the world with repeated violence upon violence for generations. The scholars whose thinking have had the greatest impact on my thinking as pertains to this Scroll are Dr. Margaret Barker, Dr. James E. Tabor, and Dr. Robert Eisenman. Their work illuminates the complexity of Judaism and Jewish messianic movements in the decades and centuries leading up to the Christian movement in the first century AD. It will never be my intent to contribute in any way whatsoever to antisemitism, or any sort of racism at all. I hope that my work here will be generously interpreted despite my flaws and shortcomings, and through the prism of how complicated and nuanced the subject of Judaism to Christianity, and religion in general, has always been. I hope through this work to inspire passionate discussion in order to increase belief in God, wherever God represents the mutually shared, highest aspirations of the human imagination and soul.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Luca Amendola

• Mithras and the Zodiac, in the Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology, 5/2018

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Roger Beck

• The Religion of the Mithraic Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Robert Eisenman

• James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: William Reginald Halliday

• The Pagan Background of Early Christianity

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Margaret Barker

• The Great Angel
• The Woman Clothed with the Sun in the Book of Revelation (YouTube)
• Theosis and Divinization (YouTube)
• The Mother in Heaven and Her Children (YouTube)
• Mary and the Temple (YouTube)
• Creation Theology in the Bible (YouTube)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Hugh Nibley

• One Eternal Round Lecture Series BYU The Interpreter Foundation
• Pearl of Great Price Lecture Series BYU (YouTube)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: James D. Tabor

• Paul and Jesus
• The Jesus Dynasty

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Filip Holm

• Let’s Talk Religion: What is Zoroastrianism?

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Neal A Rappleye

• Serpents of Fire and Brass: A Contextual Study of the Brazen Serpent Tradition in the Book of Mormon

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: The Mormon Tabernacle Choir/The Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square

• Various Hymns and Performances

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: James S. Valliant and CW Fahy   

• Creating Christ

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy

• Jesus and the Lost Goddess

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Christine Hayes

• Yale Courses Online: The Old Testament (YouTube)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Joseph Smith, Jr.

• Lectures on Faith
• King Follett Sermon and The Sermon in the Grove (also called The Sermon at the Stand)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Martin Luther King Jr.

• A Study of Mithraism (Crozer Theological Seminary)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Manly P. Hall

• Ancient Mysteries and Secret Societies, Part 3: The Rites of Mithras, from an anthology of articles called, An Esoteric Reader
• The Secret Teachings of All Ages

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Nikos Kazantzakis

• The Saviors of God
• The Last Temptation of Christ

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Dennis Newton

• The Teachings of Silvanus: A Little-known Gem from Nag Hammadi

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Terence L. Donaldson

• Religious Rivalries and the Struggle for Success in Caesarea Maritima

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: D. John Butler

• In the Language of Adam

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: William Donahue

• Numerous sermons on YouTube about the hidden mystery of the Gospels in regards to the brain anatomy and the ancient wisdom traditions associated with the pineal gland

Robert J. Bull

• Caesarea Maritima: The Search for Herod’s City

Justin Sledge

• Esoterica Channel on YouTube, various presentations

Academic-accelerator.com

• Mithraism

Allan Di Donato

• Mithraic origins of Christianity (YouTube)

David Graeber and David Wengrow

• The Dawn of Everything

Mary Beard

• SPQR

David Ulansey

• The Cosmic Mysteries of Mithras (YouTube. Video of public slide-lecture based on his book, “The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World”)

Kristine Wardle Frederickson

• Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World (YouTube)

Becky Holderness Tilton

• Moses as Midwife: What the Exodus Birth Story Teaches About Motherhood and Christ

Jean Paul Sartre

• The Flies

Carl C. Jung 

• Man and His Symbols
• Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self

Philip L. Barlow, Maxwell Institute Associate Director, BYU

• Whose suggestion and encouragement that I research and paint the War in Heaven was very fruitful.

The Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies

• Mithra and Mithraism: The Seven Grades of Initiation

Joseph Smith Jr. and Unknown Authors

• Selections from the Doctrine and Covenants of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Joseph Smith Jr. and Unknown Authors

• Selections from The Book of Abraham in The Pearl of Great Price of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann

• The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries

Richard Smoley

• Forbidden Faith

Royal Skousen

• Book of Mormon Critical Text Project, The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, and Tyndale Versus More in the Book of Mormon

Jan J. Marten

• The Congregation and church of England? William Tyndale’s approach to lexical and ecclesiological reform between 1525 and 1535

Michael S. Schneider

• A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe

Russell M. Nelson, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

• Addresses to the General Conferences of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in his role as Prophet, Seer, and Revelator.

Dean C. Jessee

• The Earliest Documented Accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision

Graham Hancock

• Magicians of the Gods
• America Before

Terryl Givens and Fiona Givens

• The God Who Weeps

H. P. Blavatsky

• Isis Unveiled, Volumes I and II

C. S. Lewis

• Mere Christianity

BYU Maxwell Institute

• Ancient Christians: An Introduction for Latter-day Saints

John S. Thompson

• The Lady at the Horizon (YouTube)

Valerie Hudson

• The Two Trees (YouTube)

William Dever

• Did God Have a Wife? (YouTube)

Christopher Blythe

• Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints & the American Apocalypse

Van C. Evans

• Wiraqocha and the Rites of the Raqchi Temple in Peru

Van Morrison

• In the Garden (Song)

World History Encyclopedia

• Egyptian Afterlife- The Field of Reeds
• Amun
• Ancient Egyptian Religion
• Mithraism
• The Soul in Ancient Egypt
• Zorvanism
• Nabu
• The Myth of Adapa

Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechend

• Hamlet’s Mill

Encyclopedia Britannica

• Mithraism
• Ba’al: Definition, Myths, Worship, and Facts

Wikipedia

• John the Presbyter
• Roman imperial cult

Joseph Atwill

• Caesar’s Messiah

Marvin Meyer

• The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus

Jiddu Krishnamurti

• Freedom From the Known

Jordan B. Peterson

• Biblical Lecture Series- Old Testament (YouTube)

Jeffrey M. Bradshaw

• The Apocalypse of Abraham (YouTube) and extensive essays on The Book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price (Articles)

Lance S. Owens

• Joseph Smith and the Kabbalah: The Occult Connection (1994 Article)

David John Buerger

• “The Fulness of the Priesthood”: The Second Anointing in Latter-day Saint Theology and Practice

Daniel C. Peterson

• Nephi and His Asherah

Andrew C. Skinner

• Serpent Symbols and Salvation in the Ancient Near East and the Book of Mormon

M. A. Hill

• The Seven Chakras: Balancing, Colors and Meaning

Val Larsen

• Hidden in Plain View: Mother in Heaven in Scripture

Richard Lyman Bushman

• Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling

Rob Fotheringham

• YouTube Video series questioning the LDS orthodox and anti-Mormon Joseph Smith polygamy narrative by analysis of the Joseph Smith Papers

Whitney Horning

• Joseph Smith Revealed: A Faithful Telling: Exploring an Alternative Polygamy Narrative

Jack Miles

• God: A Biography
• Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God

James E. Talmage

• Jesus the Christ

H. L. Haywood, J.S.M. Ward, C.W. Leadbeater, Manly P. Hall

• Freemasonry, Mithraism, and the Ancient Mysteries

Noel B. Reynolds

• Lehi and Nephi as Trained Manassite Scribes

William Henry

• The Ascension Keepers 
• Arcanum (Video Series on GAIA)

Tom Holland

• Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

Giulia Enders

• Gut: The Inside Story of our Body’s Most Underrated Organ

Andrew Bolton

• Anabaptism, the Book of Mormon, and the Peace Church Option

See also by Kamron Coleman

• Terrestrial Lost and Found https://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleColemanLostFound.html