Modern Myth Origins

Symbols That Changed Sides: The Pentagram, the Seal of Solomon, and the Devil’s Wardrobe

A synagogue in Capernaum carved a pentagram, a six-pointed star, and a swastika into the same stone frieze. All three mean something else now. A follow-up to Guess My Names on how symbols change sides.

Guess My Names: Satan, the Nachash, Lucifer, and the Devil

Ask most Christians who the devil is and you get one composite figure built from five or six passages that were never written about the same thing, plus a costume from medieval art and nineteenth-century opera. Here is what each name actually is.

Science Is Not the Enemy of Your Faith

The claim was wrong, the kids repeated it at school, and the correction took thirty seconds. The war between science and faith was invented in the nineteenth century, and the church is still fighting it.

What Raiders of the Lost Ark Got Right About the Ark of the Covenant

Indiana Jones and the Nazis both believed the same thing about the Ark of the Covenant: whoever holds it holds the power. 1 Samuel 4-6 is the block of chapters written to take that idea apart. Here is what the movie got right, what it inverted, and what would actually have happened in that canyon.

Where Is the Ark of the Covenant?

Raiders of the Lost Ark ends with the Ark crated up in a government warehouse, and every tradition has its own warehouse. Here is every serious claim about where the Ark is today, ranked by what actually backs it, and the verse in Jeremiah that nobody quotes because it tells you to stop looking.

The Gate That Was Never There

You have heard the sermon: a low postern gate in Jerusalem's wall called the Eye of the Needle, where a camel could squeeze through if you unloaded it and got it on its knees. There was no such gate. The claim shows up a thousand years after Jesus said the words, and tracing it turned out to be more interesting than debunking it.