This discovery occurred in 1963 as Swiss citizen and then world-traveler, Eduard Albert Meier, and his older friend, an ex-Greek-Orthodox lay priest, Isa Rashid, were walking along a roadway just south of the Old City of Jerusalem late one afternoon. Through sub-conscious telepathic promptings received unknowingly from the Pleiadians/Plejarens, Rashid had previously been informed of the approximate location of the site. Upon reaching this site, Meier himself was prompted to glance up

Photo of Meier in the 30 Sept.,1964, Delhi newspaper. From FIGU Press Information

the slope and notice a small opening in the ground amongst the rocks and shrubs. According to Meier's much later recollection in August of 1997, this hole was about 30 cm, or a foot, on a side. Being curious, he reached into his packsack for his flashlight and peered into the hole to notice that it continued inwards. So he and Rashid proceeded to dig away rocks and earth until the hole was large enough that they could crawl inside. It was an old tomb site, half filled in with earth. After further digging and exploring inside it they discovered, buried underneath a flat rock, a bundle which they took back with them to Rashid's abode; it was about 60 cm in length and 25 cm wide. The bundle turned out to contain the Talmud of Jmmanuel (or TJ) in the form of rolls of written sheets, along with a few small artifacts. They had been wrapped up together in animal skin which was in turn encased in resin, by then dry and crumbly, but recalled to have been black on the outside and yellowish-brown on the inside. There were four rolls, each of which contained many leaves or pages of Aramaic writing. They were obviously old and fragile but the writing was legible. Meier recalls that each leaf was roughly 30cm by 40cm in size, or somewhat larger than the European AID A4 size of paper, which is 21cm by 29.4cm. He is not sure if they were made of very thin, translucent parchment or of papyrus.

Rashid, who could read most of the old Aramaic due to his Palestinian background on his father's side, soon noted that the TJ was heretical in several respects. For one, its title involved Jmmanuel (i.e., Immanuel, spelled with a J symbol supplying the "i" sound in place of the Aramaic/Hebrew letter "Ayin") rather than Jesus or Y'shua. For another, its writer was given as Judas Iscariot, the supposed betrayer. For a third, it mentioned that Adam's father had been Semjasa, the leader of the celestial sons, who were El's or God's guardian angels, and who were "distant travelers." Thus it was apparent from the beginning that if they wished this document ever to become public, its translation would have to proceed in secret. The Old Testament God had been an extraterrestrial leader rather than a "Father" in heaven. We shall be referring to him by his title of El, as in Immanuel.

Isa Rashid in the rear, Meier on the right. Photo taken in Jordan in 1963, from Plate 18 of Geheimnisse des Gemeindepfarrers by Hans Georg Lanzendorfer.

Meier's interest in the document was very strong, as he not only had been self-schooled in earth's major religions while working his way around Asia and the Mideast, and was seeking spiritual truths, but he had been informed seven years before that he would become the disseminator of this document (more on this in the following section). Rashid spent a few months reading through the TJ rolls to glean their highlights, which he reported to Meier. Then the two agreed in August of 1963 that Rashid would translate the TJ into Meier's language (German, a language which Rashid understood) and would retain custody of the Aramaic document, while sending his translations to Meier for him to disseminate. So Rashid started the long task of rendering a translation of satisfactory quality, while Meier then continued his travels and first-hand religious learning, particularly under the Buddhist leader, V.B. Dharmawara,

Meier and family in 1975. Here Meier poses in his uniform as a security guard, a job he held at the time. From Wendelle Stevens' UFO Contact from the Pleiades

at the Ashoka ashram in Mehrauli, India, working his way along through doing odd jobs. The 1964 New Delhi newspaper article about Meier can be read here. In 1965 Meier lost his left arm in a bus accident in Turkey. Later that year he met a Greek girl, Kalliope, eloped with her in 1966 and, after further working/traveling their way around Asia, returned to Switzerland to continue raising a family there and obtain employment in the town of Hinwil.

The translations up through the TJ's 36th chapter reached Meier in Switzerland through circuitous mail some time around 1970. They had been sent to the address Rashid remembered for Meier's parents. But Meier did not hear from Rashid himself until in a letter in September of 1974. This letter briefly explained that his translation project had become known to certain authorities, forcing him to flee from Jerusalem, together with his family, the TJ rolls and further translations, to a refugee camp in Lebanon. But his presence there became known to Israeli authorities, and the camp was heavily bombed, forcing him to flee again, this time to Baghdad, where he posted the letter to Meier. However, he and his family, like the other refugees, had to flee so suddenly that Rashid had no time to retrieve the Aramaic rolls or his further translations of them, and they were destroyed in the resulting conflagration.

In 1976 Meier learned that Rashid and his family were assassinated in Baghdad,

1978	1992	1996	2001	2007

making him (Meier) the only known surviving witness to the TJ's discovery and historicity. About this time he started preparing the TJ translations for self-publication, and the German edition came out in 1978. A combined German-English version was published in 1992, and another edition, with improved English translation, was published in 1996 by Wild Flower Press. A further improved German-English translation, the TJ's 3rd edition, came out in November of 2001, and a 4th edition, further improved and augmented, was published in 2007 from its new publisher, Steelmark. Meier insists that publications of non-German translations of the TJ include the side-by-side German edition, so that discrepancies or distortions in translation be less likely to creep in.

Click here for links to discussions of large numbers of TJ verses having parallels within the Gospel of Matthew, along with comparative analyses of the two.