The Jesus Mysteries
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ISBN 978-0609807989 | |
The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God? is a 1999 book by British authors Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy,
The authors propose that Jesus did not literally exist as an historically identifiable individual, but was instead a
Thesis
Freke and Gandy base The Jesus Mysteries thesis partly on a series of parallels between their suggested biography of
- Osiris-Dionysus is God made flesh, the savior and "Son of God."
- His father is God and his mother is a mortal virgin, 7 month pregnancy.
- He is born in a cave or humble cowshed on 25 December before three shepherds.
- He offers his followers the chance to be born again through the rites of baptism.
- He miraculously turns water into wine at a marriage ceremony.
- He rides triumphantly into town on a donkey while people wave palm leaves to honor him.
- He dies at Eastertime as a sacrifice for the sins of the world.
- After his death he descends to hell, then on the third day he rises from the dead and ascends to heaven in glory.
- His followers await his return as the judge during the Last Days.
- His death and resurrection are celebrated by a ritual meal of bread and wine, which symbolize his body and blood.
According to The Jesus Mysteries, Christianity originated as a Judaized version of the pagan mystery religions. Hellenized Jews wrote a version of the godman myth incorporating Jewish elements. Initiates learned the myth and its allegorical meanings through the Outer and Inner Mysteries. A similar pattern of "Lesser" and "Greater" Mysteries was part of the pagan Eleusinian Mysteries. Mithraism was structured around seven serial initiations.
Freke and Gandy suggest that, at some point, groups of Christians who had only experienced the Outer Mysteries were split off from the elders of the religion and forgot that there had ever been a second initiation, and that, later, when they encountered groups who had retained the Inner Mysteries, these "Literalist Christians" [as Freke and Gandy call them] attacked the "Gnostics" for claiming that what the Literalists considered false knowledge and false initiations, was, in fact, the original second initiation of primal (Gnostic) Christianity. Freke and Gandy claim that the Literalists won out when
Reception
Chris Forbes, an ancient historian and senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney has criticised the work, noting that Freke and Gandy are "not real scholars, they are popularisers." He calls their arguments about Jesus "grossly misconceived, and their attempt to draw links between Jesus and various pagan god-men is completely muddled. It looks impressive because of the sheer mass of the material, but when you break it down and look at it point by point, it really comes to pieces."[4]
Paul Barnett, a bishop and New Testament scholar who has authored several books on the historical Jesus, argues that a good proportion of the citations are out of date. "Like the Gnostics, Freke and Gandy have a mystical mindset and therefore oppose Christianity as grounded in history," he wrote. "They hate the idea that the incarnation of the Son of God and his resurrection could have been a matter of actual flesh and blood and time and place."[4]
When the BBC approached N. T. Wright, asking him to debate Freke and Gandy concerning their thesis in The Jesus Mysteries, Wright replied that "this was like asking a professional astronomer to debate with the authors of a book claiming the moon was made of green cheese."[5]
New Testament scholar and secular
James Hannam has noted that one of the artifacts that the authors rely on, a depiction of Orpheus on a cross, is a fake.[8]
Author and activist Richard Carrier has stated that The Jesus Mysteries "will disease" a reader's "mind with rampant unsourced falsehoods and completely miseducate". Although Carrier himself supports the view that Jesus was not a real person, he has condemned the viewpoints on "ancient world and ancient religion" presented in The Jesus Mysteries as ludicrous and without merit.[9]
See also
References
- Notes
- ^ Guthrie, William Keith Chambers (1952). Orpheus and Greek Religion. London: Methuen. p. 278.
- ^ Maurice Casey Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? T&T Clark 2014 FREKE, N.T. and GANDY, L.P. p.17
- ^ Freke and Gandy, Jesus Mysteries, p. 5.
- ^ a b The Jesus Mysteries - a critique Archived 21 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ N. T. Wright, "Jesus' Self Understanding", in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, Gerald O’Collins, The Incarnation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 48 "A phone call from the BBC’s flagship ‘Today’ programme: would I go on air on Good Friday morning to debate, with the authors of a new book The Jesus Mysteries? The book claims (so they told me) that everything in the Gospels reflects, because it was in fact borrowed from, much older pagan myths; that Jesus never existed; that the early church knew it was propagating a new version of an old myth; and that the developed church covered this up in the interests of its own power and control. The producer was friendly, and took my point when I said that this was like asking a professional astronomer to debate with the authors of a book claiming the moon was made of green cheese."
- ^ Bart Ehrman, interview with David V. Barrett, "The Gospel According to Bart", Fortean Times (221), 2007
- ^ ISBN 978-0-06-220644-2.
- ^ Hannam, James. The Orpheus Amulet from the cover of The Jesus Mysteries. First published 2006, last revised 2009.
- ^ "Ehrman on Jesus: A Failure of Facts and Logic". Archived from the original on 17 January 2016. Retrieved 2 January 2016.
- Books by Freke and Gandy on the Jesus Mysteries theme
- The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God? (1999)
- Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians (2002)
- The Laughing Jesus: Religious Lies and Gnostic Wisdom (2005)
- The Gospel of the Second Coming (2007)
- Critique
- Reinventing Jesus, Komoszewski et al., Kregel, ISBN 978-0-8254-2982-8, (2006)