Why Scott Wolter's Scroll Claiming Jesus Confessed to Being a Space Alien Is a Hoax

​During his appearance on A. J. Gentile’s The Basement podcast, Scott Wolter claimed that he had uncovered an old prune juice jar from the 1940s within which he found a nineteenth-century scroll wrapped in a 1950s-era napkin. This scroll allegedly contained an Italian headnote and six pages of scripta continuua cypher representing an English translation of an Aramaic text forming the autobiography of Jesus Christ, who confessed to being a hybrid between a human and a space alien from Arcturus and predicted that he would be cloned. Wolter said that he uncovered a Victorian cypher within the document that allowed him to discover that the cloning and/or the Second Coming of Christ may occur on June 6 of this year (at 6 in the evening!).

Wolter said he would publish the deciphered scroll (which is not really a scroll since it is supposedly three separate sheets with writing on both sides) at some point in the future. Gentile, who speaks Italian, proceeded to read out his own off-the-cuff translation of the head note, with Wolter interspersing lines from his decipherment of the cypher with commentary. It was not always easy to distinguish between the lines of the scroll and Wolter’s comments, but I have done my best to extract and assemble the alleged text of the scroll below. In the text, “MF” supposedly stands for “My Father,” Jesus’ cute nickname for his dad.
 
As Wolter does not claim to be the author of the scroll and asserts that he is mechanically reproducing a simple substitution cypher from 1897, he therefore can assert no claim of copyright over the resulting text, which I reproduce in full. My explanatory notes and clarifications are italicized inside brackets and parentheses:

[Headnote in Italian:] The power of the glorious God is within us and with us and with other people.
 
[Wolter says that a quantum physics equation he does not understand follows, and then a cypher message:] The 325-year compilation of old and new writings is not the infallible word of God, but the fallible compilation of the Roman Catholic Church to support their doctrine.
 
[Alphabetic code]: Translated from the original Aramaic by brother Simon for the the [sic] Poor Nights of Christ (i.e., the Templars), encrypted by Brother Leonidas for the Order of the Grail, 1897.
 
[Numerical code]: MF equals MG.
 
Father, Genesis Chapter 1: Let us make man in our own image, in the image of God made he him. Genesis 1 + 35-16: To make more, he needed a female, so Eve. They made Cain and Abel. Cain slew Abel, and MF put his mark on him, IHN, and banished him to Nod so none there would kill him. But if Adam, Eve, and Cain are the only people, who is in Nod? Know this: Then they were not the first people, but the first Jews. Chapter 6:5. Chapter 6:5 two (sic). And the sons of MF saw the daughters of men, and found them pleasing in their sight, and came and knew them. And they settled in the land of Nod, where Cain was sent. So, their children enjoyed life for its pleasures, both male-female, male-male, and female-female. This does not procreate or honor MF, so he destroyed them all. But flood nor fire succeeded. Thus, the sons and daughters of natural man filled the earth.
 
Yet nowhere did they (i.e., the angels) mate with a Jew till Elizabeth. Seeing it work in six weeks, the Angel Anton came and knew my mother. But Yan and I chose MF. Then know this, Adam and Eve could read or write. Thus, the tree of life was not a tree, but a book that spoke. The fruit chapters numbered 1, 2, 3, etc. So, MF looked like man except for intelligence, hence the book to store it all. MF and his wife Asherah, called Wisdom, rebuked his brother for having led Eve to open the book and send him out of Earth to Arcturus.

But he returns when called, for many follow him here. What of the serpent?

Natural female mated with my uncle, and got the creature with legs that crawled from the waters, and over time came to be natural man, strong and large of stature, worshiping its ancestor. A fork in the road became the snake, another natural man and woman. So if you follow me, whether you turn right or left, you will hear a voice behind you saying, “This is the way. Walk in it.” 
 
As I am allowed to say, I [am] not entirely human. A rupture of the small intestines was not enough to kill me. I slowed my breath and was declared dead. My cousin of my Earth-father’s side had me rest with the family in the family tomb. I healed myself and my wife came and freed me. We traveled to the north and preached a joint religion of male and female. We bore two children, Judah and Sarah. We returned to Jerusalem, and finally, I ascended to my father.

My body returned to my cousin’s family tomb. My spirit will return at the end of the 6th day, June 6, by the new counting, 2,999 at 6 p.m. So said my father, but beware 6626 at 6 p.m. Also, be not fooled by the false P R O F I T, and his clone who will rise on the third day after his death.

Know this: In the beginning was the Word and that Word was God. There was none before him. There was none after him. The Word is eternal.

​Observant readers will note how the obvious hoax appeals directly to Wolter’s special preoccupations. The supposed translator is identified as a Templar (Simon the Templar, i.e. Simon Templar, the Saint!), and it begins with a denial of the Biblical canon established at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE and an attack on the Roman Catholic Church, which of course was not typically so named in medieval times, when it was usually called the Holy Church, the Catholic Church, or the Apostolic Church. Identifying it as “Roman” was more rare, typically connected with the legal authority of the pope.
 
Next, we see an appeal to Wolter’s sexually liberal attitudes, with a confused recounting of the Genesis 5-6 narrative. Here, the author has conflated Cain begetting the evil seed of corruption (uncomfortably identified here as “Jews”) in Genesis 5 with the Sons of God/Nephilim narrative from Genesis 6. The original narrative had the Sons of God (originally understood as angels, later as descendants of Seth) descend and mate with the “daughters of men,” later identified as Cain’s descendants. Here, however, the hoaxer is unaware of the complexities and has flattened the story, creating an origin for the Jews as the Nephilim and seed of Cain, and positing again that these Jews were punished by God for their sexual libertinism, including homosexuality, in what the text calls “flood and fire,” referring incorrectly to the prophecy of fire and flood describing the first and second destructions of the Earth. The destruction by fire did not happen in traditional readings but is the promised future End of Days.
 
Wolter reads the passage as endorsing homosexuality, when the plain reading is that God destroyed the sinners for having gay sex and not procreating.
 
The borderline antisemitic passage concludes with an unnamed “they,” implied to be the angels/aliens, mating with a “Jew,” being Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, as an experiment before begetting Jesus. The modern claim, unknown in Classical Antiquity or medieval times, that Yahweh was originally paired with Asherah as his wife makes an appearance, though Asherah, a fertility goddess, is here confused with Sophia, the Greek wisdom goddess whom Gnostics called the bride of Christ. (Asherah was the consort of El in the ancient Semitic pantheon, but it is unclear whether she retained the role when El became identified with the storm-god Yahweh among the Israelites.)
 
Following this, we get a version of the Gnostic claim that the Serpent in Eden was actually teaching forbidden wisdom and the forbidden fruit was a book. Jesus then describes the evolution of humanity from reptiles and claims there are two lines of humans, echoing the “Serpent Seed” myth popular among fringe writers.
 
At this point, Jesus reveals he is a hybrid space alien from Arcturus, playing into Wolter’s recent transition to an ancient astronaut theorist.
 
Following this Jesus claims to have a wife—Wolter’s primary preoccupation for the last 14 years—and that they preached in the “north,” which Wolter interprets as Scotland. The narrative of Jesus’ death is taken directly from the popular Late Antique story that Jesus faked his own death, a story taken up by several sects later deemed heretical, including the Basilidians and Docetists, as well as Islam. It occurs, for instance, in the Sefer Toledot Yeshu, which was an anti-Christian Jewish polemic, and in the Gospel of Barnabas, as well as the Quran, among many others. The usual story was that he had a body double. The claim that he feigned death on the cross seems to be a modern one, invented by Karl Friedrich Bahrdt in 1782 and popularized by nineteenth-century rationalists. Bahrdt claimed Christ took drugs and then swooning to appear to have died.
 
Naturally, this plays into Wolter’s obsession with the so-called Talpiot Tomb, which he believes to be the place where Jesus’ bones were interred. To square that circle, the scroll helpfully has Jesus be an alien who hid in the tomb while faking his death, briefly returned to Arcturus after his fake death, and then died for real on Earth so he could have his bones interred in the tomb.
 
In the final section, prophesying Christ’s return, the alleged dates are a mess. June 6 is not how anyone in Antiquity or the Middle Ages would have given a date, and there is no indication of what the “new counting” would refer to—presumably the Anno Domini system that did not become standard until after the eighth century CE. The number 6626 Wolter interprets as June 6, 2026, but there is no reason why it should be so. Dates, as I mentioned, were not given this way in ancient or medieval times, nor were Arabic numerals used for dates until Early Modern times. Beyond this, there is no reason to assume “26” refers to 2026 and not 826, 1026, 1926, or 2926.
 
The idea that there is an English-language pun on “prophet” and “profit” in a medieval text, even one encoded in the 1800s, is too ridiculous to bear. The only explanation that would account for it is that the encoder made a mistake. Wolter thinks it intentional, since English is apparently the language of heaven.
 
The reference to a “clone” gives the game away. The word was invented in 1903 to describe a plant grown from a cutting. The genetic meaning became a verb in 1959 and a noun in 1970. Its appearance in this cypher is proof that it is a hoax.
 
The final line of the scroll is a paraphrase of John 1:1-3.
 
Wolter claims that the prophecy is about “now” as in this June.
 
Frankly, the hoax is a cheap amalgam of Gnosticism, fringe conspiracies, and ancient astronaut ideas that accidentally approximated the much more coherent, elaborate, and shocking mythology of Manichaeism. Whoever is pulling the wool over Wolter’s eyes would have been better served by plagiarizing from real Manichaean text than bad Ancient Aliens and Da Vinci Code fan fiction blogs.