Gray: House of Sforza 'Soap Opera' Would Have Made Better 'Code' Novel
Details on Life of ‘Last Supper’ Patron Sforza, “the Moor,” Lends New Weight To Theory John Mark is the Mysterious “13th Disciple”; House of Sforza Gave Us Tarot Cards … and Perhaps ‘Mona Lisa’?
by Janet Devlin
TANATA co-editor
JULY 5, 2008 — “The John and Mary problems (or errors)” found in Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” according to a Tennessee Bible researcher, are “mirrored” in all four New Testament gospels. Randall Carter Gray has identified all of these “errors” to be “edits” — a repainting job in the case of “The Last Supper.” Why the painting was altered, as Gray alleges, has a lot to do with the painting’s patron Ludovico Sforza, also known as “il Moro” or “the Moor.”
Perhaps not coincidentally the creator of Hannibal Lector links this grim character to the House of Sforza, which has a rather checkered, unseemly, even ruthless reputation as Italian royal history goes, Gray observed.
The House of Sforza’s influence in Milanese politics was short-lived, but it produced the memorable Duke of Milan Ludovico, Leonardo’s boss for 18 years, whose story, Gray says with dismay, has never been told.
However, there is strong evidence, Gray says, that Shakespeare may have used Ludovico ‘the Moor’ as his inspiration for his tragic play ‘Othello, the Moor.’ Gray says he was led to draw this conclusion because a play by Philip Massinger, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, inspired by “Othello” is called “The Duke of Milan,” and its protagonist, a Milanese duke, who is not a Moor but a white man, is named Ludovico Sforza.
Grays says the suspicious deaths of Massinger and his wife “may unlock secrets as to why Massinger wrote ‘The Duke of Milan,’ calling his protagonist none other than Ludovico Sfroza, no less. Massinger may have been put up to write a misleading play on racial or racist grounds.”
But why is the question Gray has wrestled with. Why has so much trouble been gone to in attempts to hide or misrepresent Ludovico and his racial makeup? Gray suspects Massinger’s play was “subterfuge, as so many other things have been, introduced at various points in history to keep people from making the link between the Moor and John Mark, the mysterous 13th disciple, an African scholar, and Jesus. The link between John Mark and Jesus … may provide us with a link between Jesus … and Adam if Eden was in East Africa as so many scientists believe.
“And, he added, maybe Massinger made a deal with the devil,” Gray said laughing, “because this instance is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of coverups of the Moor Ludovico and who he verly likely asked to be included in the version of “The Last Supper” he commissioned Leonardo to paint, with which Leonardo must have complied. I believe that person was the African scholar John Mark of Cyrene, who is the real disciple whom Jesus loved, and not John, the son of Zebedee. That means John Mark, an African, wrote not only Mark’s Gospel, but the Gospel of John and the Revelation, as well. And we have been led for 1,900 years to think otherwise. There’s your Da Vinci Code … right there.
“And it is all based on hiding the race of Jesus, whom I believe was a composite of all races, as Adam was. That certainly would have made the DNA in Jesus blood valuable, and perhaps some was collected in that holy grail we here so much about … for genetic purposes, for growing a new messiah. It sounds crazy, but we’ll see.”
“Making Faustian or Daniel Webster-like deals has apparently happened a lot, Dan Brown comes to mind … and almost always creative success is offered in exchange for doing something to keep the truth quiet about the accomplishments of blacks, I’ve found. Creative people are more open to freaky things.
“Such deals are being done everywhere and have been, all over America,” Gray said, “going back to Benjamin Franklin, apparently, at least that far back, and George Washington, both of whom were in bed with the French in a big, big way, Masonically, of course, which shows up in the layout of the city by L’enfant, which does everything but have a flashing goat’s head, and certain spots in Washington are lined up with different cities and other points around the world.
“Regarding the French,” Gray quipped, “now I understand why they’re so mad and mean to all the tourists, even those who speak a little French. They’re probably living on top of hell, like the poor do at the city dump.
“At any rate, the Ludovico Sforza’s story is well worth telling, with a number of interesting aspects to it for those who love political intrigue, scandal, bastard children details and profound questions which go unanswered. Such as … why do all of his portraits, including the one used on Wikipedia, depict him as lily white, for example, when neither he, nor Jesus, nor apparently John Mark were?
“The English knew what blackamoor meant, and so did everyone else in civilization at that time, and that is … African — as in black African. In light of this, curiously enough there are people who make a lot of apologies for Ludovico, and say he must have been called the Moor because of his black hair. No way, Jose — that would be a call anyone would make because of a baby’s black hair. He was called the Moor from the get-go. Why is a question worth asking and reasking? Because it explodes The Da Vinci Code and its true purpose for being written, which was not to thrill book buyers, or necessarily make all the money which they hoped to make, but to put out propaganda to discredit Jesus.
“Again, pointing out that John Mark is the disciple whom Jesus loved and the writer of John, and, Mark, and the Revelation, provides a racial link to Jesus, which was, what? … the same all-inclusive DNA which Adam possessed? And, so, John Mark had to be hushed up. Identifying John Mark provides the link between Jesus and Adam. Or, at least, it has for me.”
Beyond pointing up errors in the New Testament “meant to obscure” African scholar John Mark, whom Gray says is the “13th disciple” missing from the painting, his research has revealed “The Last Supper’s” patron to be the grandson of Flippo Maria Visconti, who commissioned the first deck of Tarot cards, used in the occult for divination, more commonly known as fortune-telling. Consequently the mother of the patron of “The Last Supper,” Bianca Maria Visconti-Sforza, came to be known as “Lady Tarot.” Equally intriguing is how Bianca, a name which means “white” and “modesty,” became illicitly pregnant not by her husband Francesco Sforza I, and proceeded to give birth to a bastard son nicknamed, “il Moro” or “the Moor.”
Ludovico Sforza, oddly enough, is the protagonist’s name in The Duke of Milan, written by Shakespeare wanna-be Elizabethan playwright Massinger. This strongly suggests, Gray points out, that the patron of “The Last Supper” may have been the inspiration for the Bard’s tragic play “Othello, the Moor,” about a jealous black man and the object of his love, who happens to be white.
The apparent African features of “The Last Supper’s” patron provided Gray with a valuable clue, one which tied together Leonardo’s sacred “masterpiece” and an absent “thirteenth disciple” named John and the obscuring of the same man within the context of the gospels. “Not surprisingly, the lion’s share of the obscuring edits” to be found appear in the gospels of John and Mark — “because our mystery thirteenth disciple is none other than John Mark, of Cyrene, which is now known as Libya.” Gray said John Mark founded the Coptic Orthodox Christian church in Alexandria, Egypt, and also wrote the Apocalypse of John, the book of Revelation.
The obscuring of John Mark, or St. Mark, whose contributions to the spread of Christianity in his native Africa make him the Christian Bible’s “most unsung hero, if not a black sheep, second only to Jesus, has been perpetrated purely for racial purposes,” Gray says, by enemies of Christianity, some of whom have existed and still exist in the Roman Catholic church.”
Answers to the question of why, with “an uncertain spiritual future looming ahead,” Gray says, are imperative to non-believers as they are to believers. If John Mark and Jesus have been hidden due to race, we ought to know why. I believe the best answers have an eschatological basis.”
It is here, says Gray, a former intelligence specialist assigned to Ethiopia and the Middle East in the mid-70s, where the plot truly thickens and spreads out even beyond this untapped aspect of Renaissance history, not to mention the life of Leonardo, and how it dovetails with the errors found not only in the New Testament, he says, but in the telling of the story of the Queen of Sheba and her alleged son by King Solomon, Menelik I, whose reign initiated a 3,000-year-old line of Ethiopian kings, which Gray said ended abruptly with no messiah with the 1974 deposing of proclaimed Lion of Judah, messianic figure Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, an event which Gray says he witnessed. As a result, says he, there have been some casualties along the course of his research since 2002, namely two women also presumably of African descent, the Queen of Sheba and the woman known as Mary of Magdala, a Ethiopian name which once identified the location of a mountain fortress from which the British and the Scots looted the nation’s national archives and treasures in 1868.
“There’s a reason why the English and the Scots in London, the British Museum, and others,and the University of Edinburgh don’t wish to give these materials back,” said Gray, a man with a “not-too-distant” Cherokee ancestry who considers himself an anglophile. “The reason is, shall we say, Edenic, Adamic,” which forms the foundation of Gray’s “house of cards.”
“Once the first card fell,” he said, “as part of a much larger picture containing more than just a fictional code, the whole house fell, at least for me — and where it has taken me has left me stunned, back to the beginning, back to the time of the Crusades, back to the first century, all the way back to Eden. “
The former daily newspaperman, who was drafted in 1972 and approached during testing in
boot camp about intelligence work, everything from being an air-traffic controller to a Navy SEAL, credits his discoveries to his year’s tour in the Ethiopian Highlands which he almost didn’t survive.”Being drafted ended my college and marital plans at one time,” he said. “It’s only by God’s grace that I’ve been able to get back to square one after a nervous breakdown. Unfortunately, now I’m 54 years old, with no agent, living in the middle of nowhere,” says Gray, who makes his home on the Cumberland Plateau in southeast Tennessee with his wife and a dog named Harley.
Janet Devlin
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