Three Codes ... with One Stone
GRAY: HAILE SELASSIE’S OVERTHROW IN 1974 ENDED TWO HISTORIC REIGNS — one 45 years old, one 3,000
Selassie’s “Nonfulfillment” of Lion of Judah, Messianic Prophecy in Kebra Negast Casts Queen of Sheba Story in Doubt, Writer Says
by JANET DEVLIN
TANATA co-editor
Gray says he’s “not a redneck, not anti-feminist, not a fundamentalist and has no axes to grind.” He just “calls ‘em” as he “sees ‘em.”JUNE 15, 2008 — A Tennessee researcher of ancient manuscripts and a former Naval intelligence specialist in the Middle East says he believes he has solved not only the Da Vinci Code, but the Mary of Magdala and Queen of Sheba “codes” as well. Magdala, Ethiopia is about 200 miles south of where Mr. Gray used to live and work.
“They aren’t codes so much as they have all been campaigns,” says Randall Carter Gray, of IMO Ministries of Chattanooga (In My Opinion), who previously lived and worked in Ethiopia. He uses the word “campaigns” as in “intentional deceptions launched within the context of history for a specific anti-Christian purposes,” according to Gray.
Gray believes both the Hebrew scriptures (Tanakh) and the New Testament have been tampered with for the purpose of discrediting Jesus, from beginning to end, and will prove this in a screenplay “Who Put All Those Things In Your Head?” He adds that these alterations may have been made possible by time travel.
Gray rejects as “very probably invalid” these biblical stories involving women on the basis of his research and his witnessing while on active duty “an historic non-fulfillment” of a messianic prophecy in Ethiopia. Gray was stationed in the Ethiopian Highlands and Massawa, a very ancient seaport on the Red Sea. Selassie’s overthrow in September of 1974 was led by the Derg, “a Marxist, Islamic brigade, in effect.”
There and then he actually witnessed two historical events “for the price of one” — the end of the 45-year rule of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, also known to his devoted followers as the Lion of Judah and Ras Tafari, and the subsequent end to the nearly 3,000-year-old Solomonic line of kings which is presumed to have begun with the birth of a son, Menelik I, to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
But this prophecy, which appears in the Kebra Negast (“the Glory of the Book of Kings” or “the Story of the Queen of Sheba and Menelik I”), the former Navy cryptographer and field specialist said, contains sometimes “laughably outrageous passages that read like fantastic fairy tales,” though it is considered an important ancient Ethiopian document by Rastafarians, devoted followers in Jamaica, Europe and Africa of Selassie.
His suspicions also grow out of the fact that the African document was edited in 1922 by “an odd little Englishman,” a “notorious figure for his questionable ancient language translations,”
“A man with a name that Dickens might have created: ‘E.A.W. Budge,’” said Gray, an English and rhetoric major. “He was a brilliant man, apparently, but many college professors will say, rightly or wrongly, that if you have any of Budge’s translations in your libraries … throw them out. He apparently was a frustrated writer of fairy tales.”
So how does Budge’s work has anything to do with the Bible, we asked Mr. Gray. “Do you really want me to use the ‘C’ word? That word does not exist in my vocabulary. It is too often mistaken and misused. I believe there is a profound spiritual, supernatural force that wants to defeat another one.”
“The biblical Queen of Sheba story is a Gnostic yarn to throw a wrench into the messiah sweepstakes and obscure the fact that Bathsheba and her son Solomon were dark-skinned, though some of it is beautifully written,” Gray said, a compliment he does not extend to the so-called “secret gospels,” which are also Gnostic in origin.
“With the secret gospels the ghostwriters try so hard to be writing scripture,” he said. “But alas it is very strained and awkward. It reads like stuff high-school kids would write. Sorry to all I might just have offended. But the artistry, the poetry, the multiple layers of literary meaning, typology just being one, is too profound in the Bible, despite its error … to discount it as anything by the work of A Poet, THE Poet.”
Further, he says “the Queen of Sheba story, expounded upon in the Kebra Negast, is so heavily laced with the occult (“The queen has one foot which is a cloven hoof”) and so prominent in the rituals of Freemasonry that “it requires thoughtful and discerning reading” — and “maybe a couple of glasses of wine.” Gray’s declaration of false means the Bible story found in 2 Chronicles Nine is “a fabrication, and that the Bible has been tampered with that beings capable of transcending time, which means death, has organized in the present or future, and go into the past to make these changes.”
“The ultimate goal was to hide Solomon’s dark skin. When people called Jesus ‘son of David’ that’s what they were referring to. There’s your reason why skin has been a problem. Because Jesus is the Messiah. Boy, some people sure don’t like Jesus. But the other side tells lies, so that sort of ends the debate, in my book.”
By its nature, “the occult is evil and deceptive,” says Gray, because those who practice it have secrets they can’t tell you … “unless you join the group,” Gray said. “Someone has been telling them this, obviously, from on high to do this bad PR job, which works on some … but not all. Who knows what fireworks these people may have seen. I’d be impressed, too … if I wasn’t more impressed with the artistry of the word of God and the peace of Jesus.
“How do I know these things? My parents were Freemasons, my mother a member of the Order of the Eastern Star, and I tell a story in my screenplay and my book about what happened when, during and after, I was taken into a Masonic temple for a Christmas party, which had been arranged for children. And me and my brothers were the only children there. We were supposed to exchange gifts with other kids. We ended up taking home the presents … and it was a book I said seen my mother wrap, and told her that it was a dumb gift for a kid.
“My mom is a sweetie, and a good Christian woman, honest and devoted to her family, still alive, but she has battled all the way. My dad was a wonderful Christian man, a deacon, but very insecure and fiercely angry at times, though he was a clown and everybody loved him.
“My parents were just young and stupid at one time. And I paid for it. All my brothers have.”
Gray, a psychologically disabled veteran, admits that his mind sometimes digresses. This malady stems from the problem he has as a result of an untreated head and brain injury which he sustained in the Ethiopian-Eritrean civil war. He says he is only capable of functioning mentally, which is his “passion,” with the “designer medicines available for people with some brain injuries and psychoses.
“So, back to the topic,” he said.
“More than the occult angle, of course, is the fact that Haile Selassie never became the Lion of Judah, which the Queen of Sheba prophecy called for. It is the reason in the eyes of the Ethiopians that the Queen of Sheba story ever existed in the first place. When Selassie fell … a lot of people were shocked. They realized that they had been lied to, and they ran in the millions, fleeing Ethiopia, making all of them refugees.
Selassie “was not the messiah or a messiah, even by his own public admission. Therefore, the whole Solomon/Queen of Sheba courtship which appears in the Bible and in the Kebra Negast is highly questionable if not an outright fraud.”
After his overthrow, Selassie was found a decade later buried beneath a toilet in the palace — “hardly a resurrection,” Gray observed.
Gray says he is only able to make this dim assessment of the tale involving Solomon and the presumed Ethiopian queen, which appears in the book of 2 Chronicles in the Hebrew Scriptures (Tanakh), because he makes the same bleak assessment of the New Testament, which, in his words, “is also a mess, full of disagreements thanks to tampering,” but, he adds, the New Testament “does contain the clues that unlock” both the Da Vinci and Mary Magdalene codes — or rather “debunk them.” These clues, he said, are “findable and provable.
“But more than that, the Gnostics don’t even come close to touching the resurrection. Because it happened. Because it is so cool and beautiful, that they decided to exploit it instead.
“Go see my movie and find out,” added the former film major at the University of Georgia. “As soon as an executive producer will take me to lunch, and we sign the contracts, and then hire a producer and then start shooting. Ha. And all the Jesus rockers will do my soundtrack. I think there’s probably one or two out there somewheres. McGuinn, I think. Some guy named … Bob? Barker.”
He calls his code “The Moor’s Code,” having identified the patron of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” as Ludovico Sforza, the former Duke of Milan, who had Moorish features. Hence the nickname given at birth to Ludovico “il Moro” or “the Moor.”
Adding even more intrigue to Gray’s hypothesis, which is the topic of a screenplay, “Who Put All Those Things In Your Head?” which he calls an Ethiopian “Catch 22,” is the possibility that Ludovico, “the Moor,” may have inspired Shakespeare’s tragic interracially charged play, “Othello, the Moor” — which Gray calls “the bard’s last and best tragedy.” This link comes through Phillp Massinger, the writer says, an Elizabethan playwright who borrowed heavily from “Othello” and called his play “The Duke of Milan.”
“One of the characters in ‘Othello’ is named Ludovico,” Gray said, “but that wouldn’t be much by itself. Ludovico and his wife were well known, of course, because the Leonardo’s Mona Lisa … was the Moor’s real wife.
“The relationship Ludovico apparently had with Mona Lisa was comparable to that which we find in Othello and Desdemona. He was African … and she was white. Adam and Eve, dare I say it, may have had the same arrangement.
“That’s real art history, which proves that art imitates life and life imitates art … and on and on.”
Janet Devlin
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