Frustrated with Latest Java Version, Spring Context does not load

Thanks in advance to any one who reads this and can help.

I have an existing code base that I have to update to Java8, it runs in AWS EB. So I am trying to run it under a Java8 + Tomcat8 ami. When the app starts up, Spring throws an error on init:

Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'config' defined in ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/spring/servlet-context.xml]: Invocation of init method failed; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: The resource path [META-INF/MANIFEST.MF] is not valid

Maven Generated Manifest file looks like this:

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Archiver-Version: Plexus Archiver
Created-By: Apache Maven
Built-By: mgriffith-contractor
Build-Jdk: 1.7.0_71
artifactId: quirinus
build-id: 
build-number: 
build-tag: 2.0-${BUILD_NUMBER}
build-time: 2015-03-25_18-40-13
groupId: com.zappos
version: 2.0

This error does not show up when the code is compiled and run under Java 7 using Tomcat8. Google is not being cooperative -- so if you can offer any insights, any/all replies are apprciated.