Product Description

The Hiram Key is a book that will shake the Christian world to its very roots. When Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, both Masons, set out to find the origins of Freemasonry they had no idea that they would find themselves unraveling the true story of Jesus and the original Jerusalem Church. As a radically new picture of Jesus started to emerge, the authors came to the startling conclusion that the key rituals of modern Freemasonry were practiced by the early followers of Jesus as a means of initiation into their community.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56737 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

About the Author
Christopher Knight was born in 1950 and completed his education with a degree in advertising and graphic design in 1971. He has always had a strong interest in social behavior and belief systems. For many years he has been a consumer psychologist involved in the planning of new products and their marketing. In 1976 he became a Freemason and is now the managing director of a marketing and advertising agency.

Dr Robert Lomas was born in 1947 and gained a first class honors degree in electrical engineering before taking up research into solid state physics. He later worked on guidance systems for Cruise missiles and was involved in the early development of personal computers and has always had a keen interest in the history of science. He currently lectures at Bradford University Management Centre. In 1986 he became a Freemason and quickly became a popular lecturer on Masonic history in lodges in West Yorkshire.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction:

Henry Ford once declared that ‘all history is bunk’. It may have sounded a little abrupt but when it comes to the ‘facts’ of the past which most Westerners are taught in school, it turns out that Mr. Ford was right.

Our starting point was a private piece of research to find the origins of Freemasonry — the world’s largest society that today has almost five million male members in regular Lodges and has in the past included many great men amongst its number, from Mozart to Henry Ford. As Freemasons, our goal was to try to understand a little about the meaning of Masonic ritual: those strange, secret ceremonies carried out by mainly middle-class, middle-aged men from Huddersfield to Houston.

At the center of Masonic lore is a character called Hiram Abif who, according to a story told to every Freemason, was murdered almost three thousand years ago at the building of King Solomon’s Temple. This man is a total enigma. His role as the builder of King Solomon’s Temple and the circumstances of his horrible death are clearly described in Masonic history, yet he is not mentioned in the Old Testament. For four of the six years we spent working on this research, we believed that Hiram Abif was a symbolic creation. But then he materialized out of the mists of time to prove himself very real indeed.

Once Hiram Abif emerged from the distant past, he provided nothing less than a new key to Western history. The intellectual contortions and labored conclusions that have previously formed Western society’s collective view of the past gave way to simple and logical order. Our researches led us first to reconstructing the ancient Egyptian kingmaking ritual of four thousand years ago; that in turn led us to uncover an assassination that took place around 1570 BC, which gave rise to a resurrection ceremony that is the direct antecedent of modern Freemasonry. As we tracked the development of this secret ritual from Thebes to Jerusalem, we uncovered its role in the building of the Hebrew nation and in the evolution of Jewish theology.

In startling contrast to what is currently held to be fact, the Western world actually developed according to a very ancient philosophy encoded into a secret system that has come to the surface at three key moments over the last three thousand years.

The final proof of our findings may well turn out to be the archaeological find of the century. We have located the secret scrolls of Jesus and his followers.

Customer Reviews

Free at last
I read The Hiram Key a few months ago and I cannot in any number of words say how interesting it was. I was raised in a very strict church that believed only in a literal translation of the Bible. The content of The Hiram Key shocked me. Instead of being turned off, I read hungrily. Believing the authors to have honorable intentions, I finished the book and then researched every avenue I could via the footnotes,etc. It all proved out.I was amazed at how long some of this knowledge has been out there and how long it took to come to the eyes of the general public. I am 48 years old and feel released for the first time in memory. I finished The Second Messiah last week and last night started Uriel's Machine. Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas are refreshing, intellegent, courageous and so much more. I will read anything they write and wish I could share with them the dept of effect they have had on my family and many of our friends. Of course, I read the other reviews that would make them out to be of the devil or some such nonsense as that and surely there are many who would agree. It is threatening to read substantive material that flys in the face of all the beliefs that make up our eternal retirement plan. Truth doesn't set everyone free. Everyone can't handle the responsiblity. Hurray for these men and thank you so very much.

One step forward, two steps back
There is a lot of evidence out there that the 'traditional' Christian view of World History is at best inaccurate, at worst deliberately distorted. And possibly this is the definitive and most accurate account yet of how things actually happened. The problem is, it's impossible to tell from this work. Badly sourced and referenced, this is a work that fails to meet all accepted standards of academic and scholarly argument. In particular the authors have a nasty habit of confusing terms like 'possible' with 'proven'. There are numerous occasions within the book where a theory is presented as a possible interpretation of events - so far, so good. The problem is that on the next page a sentence will begin along these lines 'As we have already proven...' and the possibility is now upgraded to an established fact. Once would be a problem, but their argument as a whole consists of a linear trace through history, which ends up as a heap of suppositions all transformed like this into facts, tottering on top of one another. Remove ONE of these guesses and the whole edifice comes down. In many other places ideas are presented as accepted facts, when a closer reading (on your own initiative, and not at the authors instigation, as most of these are unsourced) reveals that the point in question may be hotly contested or dismissed by most scholars. There are some nice ideas in the book. Some of it may be right. But personally, I found that from about page 70 onwards I was reading it as I would a novel, suspending disbelief, with every few pages causing a sharp intake of breath as another conclusion is drawn without the help of Occams Razor, or another supposition metamorphasises into fact over the course of a few paragraphs. Read it by all means, but keep your critical faculties handy at all times.

Creative speculation that merits consideration
While authors Knight and Lomas can get dangerously speculative at times, their conclusions are plausable.

The Hiram Key persents many theories to complete it's 'presented' history; and while it's unlikely that all of their speculation is true many of the statements undoubtably are correct.

The prinicpal value of the Hiram Key would be to as a starting point for further academic research in an environment that lends itself to such study (ie, a University). To the casual reader it might spark an interest in other works on related topics.

Unfortunatly, due to it's speculative nature and controversial subject matter, this book will come under fire (with whatever ammunition) is available ) by those who find the topic offensive or dangerous. But, despite it's speculative nature I would reccommend the material to anyone willing to further thier understanding of either Free Masonry or the modern Christian church.