The Jesus Mysteries

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The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God? is a 1999 book by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy that attempts to reconstruct the true origins of Christianity. It relies heavily on the Gnostic gospels found at Nag Hammadi. Prior to publishing Jesus Mysteries, Freke and Gandy had collaborated in writing books on mysticism and paganism.

The cover of The Jesus Mysteries features a gem of Dionysus/Orpheus. This gem was pronounced a forgery by Otto Kern (discussed below).
The cover of The Jesus Mysteries features a gem of Dionysus/Orpheus. This gem was pronounced a forgery by Otto Kern (discussed below).

The authors suggest that a number of pagan mystery religions, such as those of Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, and Mithras, were all manifestations of a single cult of a dying and rising "godman" myth, whom they call Osiris-Dionysus. The authors also assert that Jesus did not really exist, but was instead a syncretic re-interpretation of the fundamental pagan "godman" by the Gnostics, who were the original sect of Christianity as a consequence. Freke and Grandy, therefore, offer their own argument in support of the Jesus myth theory. Orthodox Christianity, according to them, was not the predecessor to Gnosticism, as conventional wisdom states, but a later outgrowth that rewrote history in order to make literal Christianity appear to predate the Gnostics. They describe their theory as the "Jesus Mysteries thesis."

The book, originally published in the UK, gained a favourable reputation amongst UK broadsheets - it became Sunday Times bestseller, and Daily Telegraph book of the year. It also became a top 18 bestseller in the US, and an Amazon.com surprise bestseller. Its sequel, Jesus and the Lost Goddess, has been included by Dan Brown in a list of books relating to The Da Vinci Code.

Contents

[edit] The Jesus Mysteries Thesis

Freke and Gandy base the Jesus Mysteries thesis partly on a series of parallels between the biography of Osiris-Dionysus and the biography of Jesus drawn from the four canonical gospels. Their reconstruction of the myth of Osiris-Dionysus, compiled from the myths of ancient dying and resurrected "godmen," bears a striking resemblance to the gospel accounts. The authors give a short list of parallels at the beginning of the book:

Later chapters add further parallels.

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.) 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. Later, when they encountered groups who had retained the Inner Mysteries, the "Literalist Christians" attacked the "Gnostics" for claiming what the Literalists saw as false knowledge and false initiations. The Literalists won out, nearly exterminating the Gnostics, and became the Roman Catholic Church and its modern descendants.

[edit] Criticism and Support

Critics have labeled the claims of The Jesus Mysteries far-fetched and based on insufficient research. For example, David Allan Dodson, a reviewer for CNN, found the book to be interesting, he stated that "while the authors discuss many examples of elements of Osiris/Dionysus in the Jesus story, they virtually ignore the more direct ties to Jewish tradition and prophecy. This oversight undermines the credibility of many of their arguments, and could have the tendency to mislead the novice reader in this subject". (CNN.com, "Review: Jesus -- man or myth?", September 21, 2000). However, while Dodson wasn't fully convinced by the authors that Jesus was completely fictional, he did end his review with the following supportive remarks: "The Jesus Mysteries left this reviewer more convinced than ever that the life of Jesus as we know it is filled with mythological, political, and even polemical elements. Freke and Gandy succeed in bringing some important points about Christianity to the public in a readable, compelling book. Perhaps their willingness to state 'the unthinkable thought' will lead to more objective thinking about religion and tolerance. If so, The Jesus Mysteries is a worthy effort indeed".

According to some critics, Freke and Gandy make selective use of quotations (suppressing those that count against their thesis), use out of date scholarship, and are driven by a new age and anti-Christian agenda. Another matter pointed out is that the image on the cover of the book of a 4th century amulet showing Orpheus crucified is suspected of being a fake by some scholars. Peter Gandy has admitted that he did read about these allegations during his research but chose to ignore them. [2]

The book has 63 pages of citations in the endnotes which constitutes a hefty 18% of the entire book; however, critics like australian Bishop Paul Burnett, New Testament scholar who has authored several books on the historical Jesus, have argued that a good proportion of them are out of date, stating that "Like the Gnostics, Freke and Gandy have a mystical mindset and therefore oppose Christianity as grounded in history," and "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."[1]

[edit] More reviews

  • "An erudite and well-researched book stuffed with controversial ideas" (Fiona Pitt-Kethley - a noted UK poet, Daily Telegraph).
  • "Whether you conclude this book is the most alarming heresy of the millennium or the mother of all revelations, The Jesus Mysteries deserves to be read" (Fort Worth Star-Telegram).
  • "This is not for readers with a delicate nervous system. The book is shock treatment in paperback" (Marie Mares, New Vision).
  • "The theory is not new. For two centuries at least, scholars have been aware of the intriguing parallels between the accounts of Jesus' life and that of preceding and contemporaneous figures such as Osiris, Dionysus and Mithras. What is new is the powerful scholarship brought to the issue by authors Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy in The Jesus Mysteries, just published in Australia. The result, which draws strongly on the Gnostic gospels discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, is so persuasive that is doubtful whether theological scholarship will ever be the same" (Robert Macklin, The Canberra Times, "Panorama," 1 July 2000).
  • "A provocative, exciting and challenging book" (Right Reverend John Shelby Spong, Bishop of Newark)
  • "An assemblage of outdated and incorrect ideas compiled in an effort to revive the discredited 'pagan borrowing' thesis... One thing that can be said for the Jesus Mysteries is that it has a long bibliography and lots of notes. This is an essential part of any scholarly work but sadly in this case it does not live up to its billing. For a start, very many of the books referred to in the notes are extremely old and very hard to get hold of for any one without a first class library at hand." (http://bede.org.uk/books,jmyth.htm#7 Bede's Library, the website of historian and Christian, James Hannam).
  • "Freke and Gandy's breathless tone and anti-Catholic diatribes are distracting, but the parallels they draw between early Christianity and the mystery religions of its time may intrigue a sizable readership." (Steven Schroeder, Booklist, 15 June 2000).
  • "A good illustration of radical liberalism's critical ignorance about, and abuse of, textual criticism can be found in Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy's book, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the 'Original Jesus' a Pagan God? (New York: Three Rivers, 2001), 145. The authors rely on chapter 4, 'How Reliable Are the Manuscripts of the Gospels?' of Graham Stanton's The Gospel Truth? New Light on Jesus and the Gospels (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity, 1995), 33-48. First, they quote the pagan Celsus's complaint (as recorded by Stanont, Gospel Truth? 35) that Christians had deliberately tampered with the text of the New Testament. Their comment on Celsus's complaint is that 'modern scholars have found that he was right. A careful study of over 3000 early manuscripts has shown how scribes made many changes' (Freke and Gandy, Jesus Mysteries, 145). The lone documentation for this assertion is Stanton's Gospel Truth, 35. But Stanton mentions nothing about three thousand manuscripts on this page - and in fact there are nowhere close to three thousand early manuscripts for the New Testament, let alone any other ancient literature! Indeed, Stanton himself does not agree with this assessment. Stanton goes on to quote Origen's response to Celsus that such alterations were made only by heretics. This quotation and Stanton's subsequent discussion are conveniently left out of Freke and Gandy's treatment. Freke and Gandy's selective quoting of the data seems to be driven by the results the authors wish to achieve, rather than by an honest pursuit of the truth. In the next paragraph, they note that 'scholars also know that whole sections of the gospels were added later.' They give the same example we mentioned in chapter 5 - Mark 16:9-20. By 'whole sections' apparently they mean one or two verses - and verses that have been excised from modern translations. There is only one other large block of material that has affected modern translations of the New Testament, the story of the woman caught in adultery. (John 7:53-8:11). While this passage is a favorite of many Christians, whether it is authentic makes no doctrinal difference. Yet, Freke and Gandy clearly give the impression that we simply cannot trust anything about these manuscripts, that skepticism must rule. The reality is that they have not represented Stanton's treatment, the works of other scholars, or the evidence with anything that remotely resembles an honest appraisal. The most charitable verdict is that such works as Freke and Gandy's are sloppy and irresponsible. On p.224 they cite Metzger, Canon of the New Testament, 13, in an endnote (311 n. 105) to back up their contention that 'in the first four centuries every single document was at some time or other branded as either heretical or forged'! But that is not what Metzger says. He is citing a late seventeenth-century Irish author, John Toland, who created a scandal when he made such a proclamation. The clear impression one gets when reading Metzger on this point is one of incredulity at, not agreement with, Toland's viewpoint. If Freke and Gandy are so careless in handling a modern author whose writings are well known and accessible, should we really trust them to handle ancient authors?" (J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, Daniel B. Wallace, "Reinventing Jesus", Kregel Publications, 2006, 300)

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Notes
  1. ^ Freke and Gandy, Jesus Mysteries, p. 5.
  2. ^ "In his review of this book in Gnomon, 1935, 476, Kern recants and expressed himself convinced by the expert opinion of J. Keil and R. Zahn (AGGELOS, Arch. f. neutest. Zeitgesch. und Kulturkunde, 1926, 62 ff.) that the ORPHEOC BAKKIKOC gem is a forgery." W. C. K. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion: A Study of the Orphic Movement, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1952), p. 278, n. to p. 265. This problem was identified by James Hannam; see his comments in this article.
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)

[edit] External links

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