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 claims 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.
The cover of The Jesus Mysteries features a gem of Dionysus/Orpheus.

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 propose 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. Orthodox Christianity, according to them, was not the predecessor to Gnosticism, as almost all scholars believe, 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, apparently sold quite well in the UK and US[citation needed]. 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 their suggested biography of Osiris-Dionysus and the biography of Jesus drawn from the four canonical gospels. Their suggested 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.) They 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, the "Literalist Christians" attacked the "Gnostics" for claiming what the Literalists saw as false knowledge and false initiations. They claim that the Literalists won out, nearly exterminating the Gnostics, and became the Roman Catholic Church and its modern descendants.

[edit] Criticism and Support

Some 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. [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] 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)
  • The Gospel of the Second Coming (2007)
Critique

[edit] External links

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