A book by Nathan Anderson

I Just Keep Asking Why?

Everyone around me believed without question.

I just kept asking why.

This is where the answer took me.

A church kid from East London follows the money behind the Bible, from the gods that came before the God you were taught, to Constantine's councils and King James's slave ships, and finds the same trick running through faiths across the world. God was never the problem. The middlemen were.

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The Forbidden Fruit Tastes Sweet by Nathan Anderson

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A woman stepping through an open doorway into the light

This isn't here to take your faith. It's here to show you where it came from.

The Bible didn't arrive in one piece. It was written, copied, chosen, translated and argued over by people, across thousands of years. Some of that history made it into Sunday school. A lot of it didn't.

This book goes back for the rest. The roots, the history, the parts that got left out. Come and look at it with me, then decide for yourself what it means for your faith.

What this book actually does

So what's actually in it?

A woman at her kitchen table, hand to her mouth, absorbed in The Forbidden Fruit Tastes Sweet

Meet the gods behind the God you thought you knew.

Where the God of the Bible came from, who his family was, and how he became the only one.

Follow the men who rewrote God.

Paul, Constantine, the councils, King James. Learn who changed the message, what they changed, and who profited.

III

Find out why the villain might be the hero.

The light bringer, the ones who brought knowledge. How yesterday's beloved gods became today's devils.

Go back to where it started.

Africa. The inheritance you were taught to fear, and what was buried under it.

What you walk away with

The receipts. Read the Bible knowing who wrote what, when and why.
The trick, exposed. Spot the old tricks when they're used on you today, at the altar, on your timeline, in the group chat or in the office.
The bigger picture. Understand why the same stories keep turning up across the ancient world, under different names.
Your history, before they rewrote it. Kemet, Nubia, Mali and Timbuktu, and what Africa was teaching before anyone claimed to save it.
Questions without guilt. Ask what you've been sitting on for twenty years, and know you're not the first.
Your ground to stand on. Hold your own when someone quotes a verse at you to end the conversation.
What's actually yours. Your time, your money, your judgement, and your own connection to God. Nobody needs to stand between you and God.

Nobody is asking you to stop believing. I'm giving you the tools to stop being manipulated by anyone who stands between you and God.

Have a little read before your first bite

It's not just the church.

Christianity is where my story begins, because it's where I grew up. It's not where the story ends.

CanaanEl, Baal and the divine family, before there was only one.
BabylonA flood survivor called Utnapishtim, long before Noah.
KemetIsis. The mother they couldn't kill.
PersiaHeaven, hell and the end of the world, and how those ideas travelled into Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
GreecePrometheus, punished for bringing fire to humanity.
EthiopiaAn ancient Christianity, and a Jesus who looks like the people who carved him.
ArabiaThe correction that repeated the problem.
West AfricaYoruba, Dogon and the wisdom carried across the Atlantic.
MesoamericaQuetzalcoatl, who brought knowledge to humanity.
Australia65,000 years of continuous culture, and what colonisation did to it.

Different robes. Same trick.

This isn't blasphemy.

Blasphemy is putting words in God's mouth. This book checks who actually did that.

Jesus flipped the tables in the temple and called it a den of thieves.

“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”1 Thessalonians 5:21

Hands resting on an old Bible in a dim church

Who taught you to believe?

You didn't choose it. You were three. You were handed a God, a rulebook and a seat you weren't allowed to leave.

When it didn't add up, we filled the gaps ourselves. That's what kids do. We watched our mums pray through things that should have broken them and we thought, that's the proof right there.

And it was proof. Of them. Of their strength. Not of the story they were sold.

Then we got old enough to ask. And that was exactly when we were told not to.

A man raising his hand with a question in a church service

Asking was never the sin. Getting caught asking was.

Question the church and it feels like you're questioning God. That isn't an accident, it's the design. Blur the two together and no man behind the altar can ever be challenged again, because who are you to argue with the Almighty?

So the questions go quiet. They don't go away. They sit there for twenty years while you sing.

Bring them. All of them. Nothing in this book gets to hide behind holy.

They taught you to fear your own inheritance.

Africa didn't need saving. Africa was teaching.

Kemet, Nubia, Mali. Isis, Amma, Olodumare, Apedemak, Chukwu. Creation stories, a judgement of the dead and a moral code, written down while most of Europe was still working out the alphabet. Timbuktu had a university and libraries people crossed deserts to reach.

Then the Moors crossed into Spain and brought it with them. Mathematics, medicine, astronomy, irrigation, public bathhouses, universities. Europe's great awakening had a reading list, and it wasn't a European one. Scholars came from all over the continent to sit and learn.

Then came the fires.

Take the knowledge. Burn the receipt. Put your own name on it.

And a few centuries later the same knowledge came back to us with a new label, carried by men who told our grandparents they were savages who needed religion, trousers and a governor.

It's still happening. January 2013, Timbuktu. Armed men torched the Ahmed Baba Institute on their way out of the city and destroyed over four thousand manuscripts, some of them eight hundred years old. Different flag, same instinct. Knowledge you can't control is knowledge you burn.

They only got four thousand. Abdel Kader Haidara and a team of librarians and smugglers had already moved three hundred and fifty thousand out in footlockers, by road and by river, hidden in safe houses. Same way families had been hiding them for generations. Buried in sand. Stored in back rooms. Passed down and kept quiet.

African scholars wrote these manuscripts. African families and librarians risked their lives to save them. The armed extremists who burned them don't get to define that inheritance. The people who protected it do.

Ask yourself who needed civilising.

Have a little read before your first bite.

The first 15 pages, free, right here in your browser.

Open the book

A man reading the book on a London Underground platform

Nothing is exempt. Including you. Including me.

They used your fear. Your hope. Your grief. Your Sunday and your wages.

Learn how the trick works, and you'll start recognising it elsewhere. At the altar, on your timeline, in the group chats, in the office. Knowing the trick doesn't make you immune. It gives you a chance to catch it before it costs you, and to question yourself when you'd rather not.

That means checking your own assumptions too. And mine. Don't take a thing on trust just because a confident man said it in a good suit.

Then take back what they've been charging you for. Your time, your money, your judgement. Spend it on something that's actually yours.

Who wrote this book?

Meet Nathan Anderson

I'm Nathan. Stratford, East London. Jamaican family. Church every Sunday whether I fancied it or not.

I was the kid at the back doing the maths. Watching women who had nothing put money in a bucket for a man who had everything. Watching people find genuine strength in that room, and genuine fear in it too. Nobody could tell me why.

So I went and found out. Years of it. Ancient texts, court politics, dead empires, and a fair few of my own assumptions taking a beating on the way.

I've spent my life in music and working with young people, so I know exactly what it's worth to be heard and to think for yourself.

My gran prayed for me to have wisdom, knowledge and understanding. She got what she asked for. I don't think this is quite what she had in mind.

Nobody in your church lied to you.

They passed on what they were given, the same way it was passed to them.

The changes happened long before any of us were born, in rooms none of us were invited into.

They put themselves between you and God. Then charged you for the introduction.

Real Bible study. Not the version they hand out in a church.

You know the verses. You can quote them under pressure. But nobody ever told you who chose them. Who sat in the room. Who paid for the room. Who walked out of it with a crown, an empire and a brand new reason why no one could question him.

Follow the money. It goes back further than you think.

Before the God you were taught, there were the gods he came from. Behind the church, the councils. Behind the councils, emperors with tax problems. Centuries later, kings with slave ships, and men who worked out the oldest trick there is. Say God said it. Now nobody can argue.

That's not faith. That's a business model with a hymn book.

And here's the part they really don't want you to reach. Take out the hijackers, the middlemen and the men who monetised your obedience, and God doesn't disappear. He gets closer. Closer than you have ever been allowed to get.

I'm not attacking your faith. I'm showing you who took it.

The forbidden fruit tastes sweet. Trust me. I've tried it.

This is about finding, not losing.

Nobody is asking you to stop believing. I'm asking you to stop being managed.

“I’ve learned to separate my identity from my beliefs. My beliefs are tools, when I find better tools, I upgrade. My ego used to call that betrayal; now my intelligence calls it spiritual growth and evolution.”
From Part 13: Plant The Seeds! Reclaiming You

They banned the fruit that makes you see clearly.

Ask yourself why.

Ancient worlds. African traditions. Stories you could recite in your sleep, standing in a light you've never seen them in.

Familiar faces start turning up in much older books under different names. The gaps get harder to ignore. And somewhere in the middle, the questions about God quietly become questions about people.

Expect history with personalities. Contradictions worth checking. Jokes where you really weren't expecting them.

Then expect the uncomfortable part. How much of a two thousand year old power grab is still running your life this week.

They told you one bite would kill you. Adam lived to 930.

Have a little read before your first bite

Pre-orders open soon

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The publisher

Drongo Books

Small black bird. Doesn't scare.

The drongo is a fraction of the size of an eagle, and it chases eagles anyway. Other birds build their nests near it, because it's the one that won't back down.

It also knows the oldest trick there is. In the Kalahari, drongos copy the alarm calls of other animals. The meerkats hear the warning, drop their food and run. The drongo eats.

A false alarm from a voice you trust, and you hand over what's yours. Sound familiar?

Drongo Books is an independent imprint for people who can spot the call. No gatekeepers. No permission asked. The Forbidden Fruit Tastes Sweet is our first title.

And yes, in Australia a drongo is an idiot. We'll take it. Every idea worth having got called stupid first.