The Church of Christ Cyclist

In the beginning was the wheel – thus the first words in the Archer Manuscript, found among the Dead Sea scrolls from Cave 12 at Qumran, Jordan (Archer 1978). This was the first detailed evidence of the existence of a long forgotten early Christian sect; The Church of Christ, Cyclist. The decription of the scroll followed Beech’s earlier (1969) discovery of an enigmatic fresco in the Church of Saint Lawson, near Malatya in Eastern Anatolia. This appeared to show Christ, his hand raised in benediction, riding a bicycle (figure 1.).

The Archer Manuscript offers a starkly divergent account of the life of Christ. Here, Jesus and his disciples are depicted cycling around Galilee, spreading the Gospel from the saddle. Each with a basket on the handlebars of his machine for carrying loaves and fishes. Mary Magdeleine is also mentioned, occasionally riding a ladies bicycle despite being mocked by the other disciples. The manuscript asserts that Jesus only rode a donkey on Palm Sunday because he had got a puncture outside Nazareth. The manuscript also describes in detail how John the Baptist had invented the pneumatic tyre during his baptismal ministry. The motives for the crucifixion are claimed to be connected with the fact that both the Sadducees and Pharisees regarded the bicycle as blasphemous under Rabbinical law.

 

Needless to say the Church of Christ – Cyclist has been contemptuously dismissed on the grounds of anachronism, specifically what is known as prochronism. However others have pointed to Thomas Aquinas’ contention that anachronism should be considered as a form of miracle; for clearly God, and his son, would be party to knowledge from any time in the past or future. In addition to the frescoes discussed by Beech, other scholars have pointed to the Palmesel figures that were common in Germany in the 15th century. These consist of a statue of Christ on a donkey mounted on a wheeled platform. A fine example can be seen at the Met Cloisters museum in New York (figure 2). Researchers such as Crabtree (1996) believe that these are medieval misreadings of the nature of a bicycle, based on the highly distorted legends of their properties that circulated in the Middle Ages. Recently, considerable excitement among Christ Cyclist scholars was elicited by a heavily corroded object found during excavations at Caeserea Maritima in 2008. This was interpreted as a sprocket and chain set from a first century tandem, though others believe it to be something similar to the Antikythera mechanism. Finally, it has been claimed that the popular phrase “God moves in a mysterious way” is a specific reference to the novel motion of the bicycle.

The original Church of Christ: Cyclist died out shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD (or AB as CCC scholars prefer it). It has been suggested that this was due to a chronic shortage of puncture kits. However, recent reports in both mainstream and social media suggest that Christ Cyclist beliefs have undergone a revival and have been widely adopted among Evangelicals in the mid west of the USA. Popular YouTube videos show large crowds of cyclists embarking on an enthusiastic moral crusade that spans Oklahoma and Nebraska.

References

Archer. S. 1998 A new scroll from Qumran, Jordan. Near Eastern Archaeology 41(3) pp 71-83

Beech, Norman. D. 1969 The frescoes of Saint Lawson, Eastern Turkey. Antiquity 43 No. 170. 47-62

Crabtree, Alan.1996 Medieval misinterpretation of First Century technology. The case of Palmesel. Journal of Material Culture 1(2) pp 195-206