As long as we are discussing what color Santa is, I thought I would throw out a couple of other theories. I can't imagine this will go over well, but let's get started with Santa first - shall we?
Now let's turn to Jesus. John M. Allegro was one of the original scholars to examine the so called Dead Sea scrolls. In 1970, after examining the texts, he published a book entitled
. The book examines ancient texts to arrive at the conclusion that Jesus never existed. The New Testament used coded language to cover a fertility cult, based on the use of Amanita muscaria mushrooms, from the Romans. At the time the book was summarily dismissed and it ruined Allegro's career. But recently people have been re-examining his work, most notable Michael Hoffman. In his book
Hoffman dismisses the early critics of Allergro as unable to correctly state what his theories were. The critics claim he was saying Jesus was the head of a mushroom eating cult. That is not what he said at all. He said Jesus never existed.
The secrets, if they were not to be lost for ever, had to be committed to writing – and yet if found, the documents must give nothing away or betray those who still dared defy the Roman authorities ... The means of conveying the information were at hand [linguistic encoding in wordplay] ... From the earliest times the folk-tales of the ancients had contained myths based upon the personification of plants and trees. They were invested with human faculties and qualities and their names and physical characteristics were applied to the heroes and heroines of the stories.
Some of these were just tales spun for entertainment, others were political parables ... The names of the plants were spun out to make the basis of the stories, whereby the creatures of fantasy were indemnified dressed, and made to enact their parts. Here, then, was the literary device to spread occult knowledge to the faithful ...
Thus, should the talk fall into Roman hands, even their mortal enemies might be deceived and not probe further into the activities of the mystery cults within their territories.
What eventually took its place was a travesty of the real thing, a mockery of the drug’s power to raise men to heaven and give them the longed-for glimpse of God. The story of the rabbi crucified at the instigation of the Jews was accepted as fact – as an historical peg upon which the new cult’s authority was founded. What began as a hoax became a trap even to those who believed themselves to be the spiritual heirs of the mystery religion and took to themselves the name “Christian.” ...
The drug was God himself, manifest on earth. To the mystic it was the divinely given means of entering heaven: God had come down in the flesh to show the way to himself, by himself. ...
Did Abraham, Isaac and Jacob ever exist as real people? Was there ever a sojourn in Egypt of the Chosen People, or a political leader called Moses? Was the Exodus historical fact? ... many other questions are raised afresh by my studies, but ... Far more urgent is the meaning underlying the myths in which these names are found. ...
If the New Testament story is not what it seems, then when and how did the Christian Church come to take it at its face value, and make the worship of one man, Jesus – crucified and miraculously brought back to life – the central theme of its religious philosophy?
... Christianity under various names, had been thriving for centuries before the supposed birth of Jesus.
We are, then, dealing with ideas rather than people [historical individuals such as Jesus, Peter, John, and Paul].. – John Allegro, Sunday Mirror, April 5, 1970, p. 10
... the story of Jesus and his friends was intended to deceive the enemies of the sect, Jews and Romans, it was a hoax, the greatest in history. Unfortunately it misfired. The Jews and Romans were not taken in; but the immediate successors of the first “Christians” (users of the “Christus,” the sacred mushroom) were. The Church made the basis of its theology a legend revolving around a man crucified and resurrected – who never, in fact, existed. – John Allegro, Sunday Mirror, April 12, 1970, p. 10
... [encoded wordplay] was an obvious device to convey to the scattered cells of the cult reminders of their most sacred doctrines ... concealed within a story ... Thus was born the Gospel myth of the New Testament. How far it succeeded in deceiving the authorities, Jewish and Roman, is doubtful. ... at least at the beginning, Jews knew full well what the “Jesus” was that the Christians worshipped [– Amanita]. ...
Those most deceived appear to have been the sect who took over the name “Christian” ... and formed the basis of the modern church. But by then the prime ingredient of their sacred meal had been lost – or suppressed – and its priests offered the initiates in its place a wafer and sweet wine, assuring them that before the Host touched their lips it would have changed into the flesh and blood of God. Foremost among the literary devices used to encode secret names for the sacred mushroom was word-playing or punning. – John Allegro, Sunday Mirror, April 12, 1970, p. 12
... when the time came for the secrets of the mushroom cult to be written down to preserve them intact in a hostile world, it was done in a kind of code. – John Allegro, Sunday Mirror, April 19, 1970, p. 35
... the apparently incontrovertible fact of the existence of one, semi-divine man who set the whole Christian movement in motion, and without whose existence the inauguration of the Church would seem inexplicable. But if it now transpires that Christianity was only a latter-day manifestation of a religious movement that had existed for thousands of years – what then? ...
... the stories of Jesus are no more historically real than those of Adam and Eve, Jacob and Esau and even of Moses ... thanks to these discoveries about the origin of the languages of the Bible – Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and their related tongues – the stories of the New Testament have indeed been exposed as myths. ... when the Gospel writers speak of Jesus, Peter, James and John, and so on, they are really personifying the sacred mushroom – the Amanita muscaria. They are spinning stories from its cult-names. ...
The sacred mushroom cult then went underground, to reappear with even more disastrous results in the first and second centuries AD, when the drug-crazed “Zealots” (another pun on a mushroom name) and their successors again challenged the might of Rome.
A “reformed” Christianity then drove its drug-takers into the desert as “heretics,” and eventually so conformed to the will of the State that in the fourth century it became an integral part of the ruling establishment. By then its priests had forgotten the codes and the true meaning of Christ’s name – and were taking the words of the hoax literally – trying to convince their followers that the Host had miraculously become the flesh and juice of the god. – John Allegro, Sunday Mirror, April 26, 1970, p. 28
So, Megyn Kelly, that is why I think BOTH Santa and Jesus looked like this: [Santa is on the left in this picture.]