John Fisher and John Baptist parallels

 

 

by

Damien F. Mackey

  

 

The most obvious similarity between Thomas More and James the Greater

is the death by beheading (Acts 12:2) – that, at least, is how the Apostle James

is generally considered to have been killed.

 

And under the Herod-like Henry VIII.

 

 

Yesterday (22^nd June, 2026) was the feast day of Saints Thomas More and John Fisher.

And, once again, it set me thinking.

 

I have already shown parallels between John the Baptist and Bishop John Fisher, in:

 

Chewing over the House of Tudor

 

(4) Chewing over the House of Tudor

 

which article I opened with the exclamation: “Talk about parallel lives!”

 

And I have just found something similar here from Dr. Taylor Marshall, Dean of Fisher More College in Fort Worth, Texas:

The Parallel between St John Fisher and St John the Baptist - Taylor Marshall

 

Saint John Fisher was born in Beverley, Yorkshire, England in 1469, the eldest son of Robert Fisher, a modestly prosperous merchant of Beverley, and Agnes Fisher. He was named after Saint John the Baptist.

He was the only bishop in England who faithfully defended the Pope against the adulterous tyranny of King Henry VIII. All the other English bishops apostatized. John Fisher, even more valiantly than Thomas More, defended the valid marriage of Henry to Catherine of Aragon and vehemently opposed Henry VIII’s assumption of the title “Supreme Head” of the English Church.

As early as 1530 Saint John Fisher began to preach that he was willing to die like Saint John the Baptist in defense of the sacrament of matrimony. You’ll remember that John the Baptist received martyrdom for protesting King Herod Antipas’ adulterous marriage to Herodias.

Henry VIII was the new Herod

Ann Boleyn was the new Herodias

John Fisher was the new John the Baptist

When John Fisher was convicted of “treason” he was, of course, sentenced to death. Henry, as Head of the Church” had already defrocked John Fisher and deposed him of his bishopric. Pope Paul III responded by naming John Fisher as a cardinal of the Catholic church. This infuriated Henry VIII who said that the Bishop of Rome did not need to send the cardinal’s hat to Fisher – Henry would instead send the Fisher’s decapitated head to Rome!

Accounts say that Fisher was sentenced to die on June 23 or 24. However, June 23 is the vigil of St John the Baptist and the 24th is the feast of Saint John the Baptist. Englishmen began to snicker at the irony. John Fisher truly was a new Saint John the Baptist and would even share a feast day with him.

Henry VIII panicked and had the sentence moved up to June 22 so that the parallel would not be obvious. This is the day of Fisher’s glorious death for the sake of Christ.

Saint John Fisher is a saint of our time. He is the only cardinal who was also a martyr. Moreover, he died defending the liberty of the Pope and the sanctity of Holy Matrimony. What better saint for our time!

Saint John Fisher, pray for us.

 

What makes all of this even more weird are the historical problems associated with the House of Tudor (see above article) and with the regal members of this House.

On this, see e.g. my article:

 

Horrible Histories: Turpitudinous Tudors

 

(4) Horrible Histories: Turpitudinous Tudors

 

Not to mention that:

 

Henry VIII’s palaces [are] missing

 

(4) Henry VIII's palaces missing

 

Saint Thomas More

 

If John Fisher smacks of a new John the Baptist, then, to a lesser, not More, extent, but with reference to a Greater, Thomas More has some things in common with the Apostle, James the Greater.

 

The most obvious similarity between Thomas More and James the Greater is the death by beheading (Acts 12:2) – that, at least, is how the Apostle James is generally considered to have been killed.

 

And under the Herod-like Henry VIII (see Taylor Marshall’s comparison above).

 

Then there is the name similarity, Thomas (through Tames to) James.

And the similarity of surname/epithet, More and Greater.

 

Not much appears to be on offer, though, as regards personality type, with the humorous Thomas More a stark contrast to the seemingly dour and strict Saint James.

 

Readers may be able to suggest some further likenesses.

 

 

Neanderthals were not a different species

 

 

“… some human populations such as Australian aboriginals indeed share with archaic humans like Neanderthals a robust skull with pronounced brow ridges, which [led] Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Huxley (in Lyell 1863), to compare

them with Neanderthals”.

Günter Bechly

 

  

This comes as no surprise whatsoever to me (Damien Mackey).

See e.g. my articles:

 

Neanderthals need to be re-written

 

(5) Neanderthals need to be rewritten

 

Messing with the Neanderthals

 

(5) Messing with the Neanderthals

 

Neanderthals could speak

 

(5) Neanderthals could speak

 

See also Dr. Jack Cuozzo’s book (Buried Alive).

 

We read at:

New Evidence for Human Nature of Neanderthals | Science and Culture Today

 

Fossil Friday: New Evidence for the Human Nature of Neanderthals

_{Günter Bechly}

_{February 2, 2024}

 

The reconstruction of Neanderthal appearance and behavior has quite a checkered history. After an initial controversy over whether the fossils really represent ancient humans or just malformed modern humans, Neanderthals were described in 1864 as distinct hominin species, Homo neanderthalensis. For a long time they were considered as brutish cavemen with a club and almost gorilla-like appearance.

 

Then the scientific opinion shifted and Neanderthals were more and more recognized as human-like and even as geniuses of the ice age (Husemann 2005, Finlayson 2019), based on an avalanche of new evidence for complex human behavior (Nowell 2023, Vernimmen 2023). We now know that Neanderthals used fire (Angelucci et al. 2023), buried their dead (Balzeau et al. 2020, Dockdrill 2020), created stone circles (Jaubert et al. 2016, Callaway 2016) and bone tools (Soressi et al. 2013), made jewellery from eagle talons (Radovčić et al. 2015, Rodríguez-Hidalgo et al. 2019) and used feathers as body decoration (Peresani et al. 2011, Finlayson et al. 2012), made cave art with paintings and engravings (Rodríguez-Vidal et al. 2014, Hoffmann et al. 2018a, Marquet et al. 2023), played music with bone flutes (Turk et al. 2018), used ochre as pigment (Roebroeks et al. 2012, Hoffmann et al. 2018b) and sophisticated fibre technology (Hardy et al. 2020), produced flour from processed plants (Mariotti Lippi et al. 2023), dived for seafood (Villa et al. 2020), cooked food and self-medicated with herbal painkillers and antibiotics (Hardy et al. 2012, Weyrich et al. 2017), and even produced glue from birch bark with a complex chemical procedure (Blessing & Schmidt 2021, Schmidt et al. 2023).

 

New Anatomic Data

 

But it is not just new evidence for Neanderthal behavior that overturned our previous crude image of Neanderthals as dumb brutes, but also new anatomic data. Contrary to earlier beliefs, more recent studies have demonstrated a fully upright posture with typical human spinal curvature called lordosis (Haeusler et al. 2019). The latter authors concluded that “after more than a century of alternative views, it should be apparent that there is nothing in Neandertal pelvic or vertebral morphology that rejects their possession of spinal curvatures well within the ranges of variation of healthy recent humans.” 

 

There even exists compelling new evidence for hearing and speech capacities (Conde-Valverde et al. 2021), which “demonstrates that the Neanderthals possessed a communication system that was as complex and efficient as modern human speech” (Starr 2021).

 

Correlated with this fundamental rethinking of Neanderthals (Nowell 2023) in terms of their anatomy, culture, and mental capabilities, their classification has also changed over time. At first they were considered as a different species, Homo neanderthalensis, then they were just considered as a subspecies of modern humans, Homo sapiens, and since the late 1990s again as “an unambiguously demarcated morphospecies” (Tattersall & Schwartz 2006; also see Harvati et al. 2004, Márquez et al. 2014, and Wynn et al. 2016). The new field of paleogenomics brought insight into their DNA (Green et al. 2010), which was considered as sufficiently dissimilar to warrant a separate species status again (Clarke 2016), even though there was also evidence for hybridization and genetic admixture with modern humans (Meneganzin & Bernardi 2023). Paleogeneticist and Nobel laureate Svante Pääbo (2014) called the controversy of the species status of Neanderthals as unresolvable, because of the arbitrariness and fuzziness of species concepts (also see Meneganzin & Bernardi 2023, Nowell 2023, and Stringer 2023). The controversy still continues as is evident from a recent article titled “Are Neanderthals and Homo sapiens the same species?” (Heidt 2023), which discusses the fact that “scientists have been vollying the question back and forth for more than a century”. Nowell (2023) wrote: “From their initial discovery until today, Neandertals have shifted between “being recognized as human or being pushed to the constitutive outside of humanness,” what Drell (2000, p. 15) describes as “the oscillating dichotomy of Same and Other.”

 

Of course, the undeniable evidence for significant and common genetic admixture (Kuhlwilm et al. 2016, Villanea & Schraiber 2019, Callaway 2021), which makes up 1-4 percent of the modern human genome (Reilly et al. 2022), would suggest that Neanderthals and modern humans shared a common gene pool and belonged to the same biospecies. Even the skeptic and ID opponent Michael Shermer (2010) agreed in an article for Scientific American that the genomic evidence suggests that our Neanderthal brethren were not a separate species. Strong reproductive isolation barriers that limited the amount of introgression were proposed by Overmann & Coolidge (2013), but many experts remain unconvinced. Paleoanthropologist Bence Viola from the University of Toronto said (quoted in Vernimmen 2023): “Homo sapiens clearly recognized Neanderthals as mating partners, which suggests they thought of them as humans — maybe ‘the weird guys living behind the mountains,’ but still, fellow humans.”

 

But what do we make of the anatomical differences between Neanderthals and modern humans? Don’t they support a separate species status? Actually, this would not follow even if the differences lay outside the range of variability of modern humans, because that is also the case in many other subspecies of living animals. However, some human populations such as Australian aboriginals indeed share with archaic humans like Neanderthals a robust skull with pronounced brow ridges, which [led] Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Huxley (in Lyell 1863), to compare them with Neanderthals.

 

Of course this also had some typical Darwinist racist connotations. Just like Neanderthals, native Australians were considered primitive and inferior. Nevertheless, the similarities are real and have been confirmed by modern anatomical studies (e.g., Wolpoff & Caspari 1996), which concluded that “the interpretation of Neanderthals as a different species is very unlikely.” ….

 

 

Neanderthals could speak

 

 

 

“As well as archaeological artefacts, researchers also point to similarities

in their vocal anatomy with modern humans and their known cognitive abilities. Neanderthals had larger brains, on average, than modern humans and while

this doesn’t mean they were necessarily smarter, it does suggest they were

a highly intelligent species - just like us”.

 Will Newton

 

  

This comes as no surprise whatsoever to me (Damien Mackey).

See e.g. my articles:

 

Neanderthals need to be re-written

 

(5) Neanderthals need to be rewritten

 

Messing with the Neanderthals

 

(5) Messing with the Neanderthals

 

See also Dr. Jack Cuozzo’s book:

 

And, again:

 

New Shocking Discovery About Neanderthals Changes EVERYTHING!

 

Recent discoveries have revealed that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in the mid-Middle Paleolithic Levant not only coexisted but actively interacted, sharing technology, lifestyles, and burial customs. These interactions fostered cultural exchange, social complexity, and behavioral innovations, such as formal burial practices and the symbolic use of ochre for decoration. The findings suggest that human connections, rather than isolation, were key drivers of technological and cultural advancements, highlighting the Levant as a crucial crossroads in early human history.

 

We read at:

They interbred – but could humans and neanderthals actually talk to each other? | Discover Wildlife

 

They interbred – but could humans and neanderthals actually talk to each other?

 

Our ancestors lived alongside Neanderthals for nearly 200,000 years [sic], often interbreeding with them. But could they understand one another?

….

Will Newton

 

Published: May 25, 2026 at 2:46 am

---

 

We might be the only species of human alive today, but just a few hundred thousand years ago [sic] there were a handful of different species living across the world.

 

The Neanderthals were one of these species, and … they’re our closest cousins.

 

….

 

How closely related are we to Neanderthals?

 

It was long thought that we (Homo sapiens) evolved from Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and that these stocky ‘almost-humans’ were a transitional phase between chimpanzees and modern humans. This ‘March of Progress’-style image is often how our evolutionary history is depicted, but it couldn’t be further from the truth.

 

• "They wore clothes, wielded fire, and created art; they may have even been smarter than us..." Just who were our closest cousins?
• Is the human race truly one species or the lovechild of various prehistoric hook-ups? Just how interbred are we?

 

Instead, modern humans and Neanderthals are sister species that evolved from the same common ancestor [sic], diverging from one another roughly half-a-million years ago. As a species, Neanderthals emerged earlier than modern humans, roughly 400,000 years ago compared to 300,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until 130,000 years ago that ‘classic Neanderthals’ really appeared.

….

Regardless of who this common ancestor was, genetic studies show that Neanderthals are our closest relatives and share up to 99.7% of our DNA. These similarities run so deep that some suggest Neanderthals may actually represent a subspecies of Homo sapiens and should be renamed Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.

 

Could Neanderthals speak?

 

The linguistic ability of Neanderthals has long been debated. From their discovery in the mid 19th century until quite recently, they were often portrayed as dim-witted ‘cavemen’, their communicative abilities thought to be limited to grunts and simple gestures.

….

 

It’s clear from the wealth of archaeological artefacts left by Neanderthals alone that this was simply not the case. The discovery of clothes, jewellery, weapons, and sophisticated homes crafted by Neanderthals paint a picture of people who could not only communicate, but collaborate and even create art.

 

As well as archaeological artefacts, researchers also point to similarities in their vocal anatomy with modern humans and their known cognitive abilities. Neanderthals had larger brains, on average, than modern humans and while this doesn’t mean they were necessarily smarter, it does suggest they were a highly intelligent species - just like us.

 

In order to find out just how well Neanderthals could speak, a team of researchers from the University of Iowa examined their genetic code for genomic regions known as ‘human ancestor quickly evolving regions’, or HAQERS. These aren’t genes, rather sequences that affect how and when certain genes are expressed, and they’ve been shown to have a large effect on human language development.

 

What these researchers found as part of a study published in April, 2026, surprised them. Neanderthals not only had HAQERS, but they were even more prominent than those found in humans today ….

 

If that was the case, and Neanderthals were capable of language, surely they could have found ways to communicate with the humans they bumped into - right?

 

Could humans and Neanderthals communicate?

 

It’s clear, based on the genetic evidence, that humans and Neanderthals regularly ‘bumped’ into one another - in more ways than one…

 

In 2010, researchers successfully sequenced the Neanderthal genome and discovered that modern humans of non-African descent carry roughly 2% Neanderthal DNA in their genomes. Some populations carry even more: the proportion in East Asian populations can be as high as 4%!

 

This genetic evidence proves that humans and Neanderthals interbred quite regularly, and suggests some may have even lived together in mixed groups. The individuals living in these mixed groups, nurturing and raising hybrid offspring, must have been able to communicate to some degree. ….