mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
The guards who entered the circus for cleanup the following morning
would have found only the old man’s feet, still nailed to the cross.
The location of Peter’s illegal grave must have been a closely guarded
secret among the early Christian community. But the growing flock
wanted a place to pray close to the body of Jesus’ best friend. Within
eighty years or so of Peter’s death, when rich pagan Romans were building
elaborate garage-sized mausoleums nearby, the Christians erected a
pagan-looking altar above Peter’s humble grave. They could visit the
shrine, pray, eat, and drink in commemoration of the departed, just as
they would have at a pagan grave. No one would have known it was a
forbidden Christian tomb.
During the persecution of the 250s, Emperor Valerian dug up the
body of a Christian saint and threw it into the Tiber. Evidence indicates
that leaders of Rome’s Christian community, fearing he would do the
same to Peter’s bones if he discovered their location, scooped them up
from beneath the altar, wrapped them in a purple shroud, and placed
them in a cavity of the altar wall; other bones were scattered in the
tomb to fool any desecrators.
In the 320s when Constantine decided to erect a huge new church to
honor the saint, Pope Sylvester I told him the secret location of Peter’s
grave but not that the bones were hidden in a wall of the old altar. This
secret, it seems, had died out, or perhaps the pope feared Constantine
might jump back to paganism and dig up the holy bones.
The emperor designed the church so that the high altar would be
located directly over the saint’s grave. Unfortunately for Constantine,
Peter’s tomb was not on the flat area near the circus but on the side of
Vatican Hill, and it would have been a desecration to move the bones
from their initial resting place. Using slave labor, imperial engineers
had to remove a million cubic feet of earth from the top of the hill and
dump it at the bottom to create a flat surface. Around the saint’s tomb
they constructed enormous brick foundation walls seven feet thick and
up to thirty-five feet high.
The church was built in the form of the Roman court of justice, the
basilica, a rectangular building separated into three sections by two
rows of large columns. Indeed, much of early church architecture and
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