The Jesus Mysteries

The Jesus Mysteries
The Jesus Mysteries  
Jesus Mysteries book cover.jpg
The cover of The Jesus Mysteries features a gem of Dionysus/Orpheus.[1]
Author(s) Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Media type Hardback

The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God? is a 1999 book by British authors Timothy Freke, a philosophy and religions scholar, and Peter Gandy a classics scholar. Although it deals with Jesus, this book is not primarily a work of Biblical scholarship, but a rigorous secular investigation of early Christianity prior to the 4th century CE, when direct political intervention by the Roman Emperor Constantine forced various competing Christian sects to unify under a statement of faith (the Nicene Creed). At this time the writings that are today known as the New Testament canon were deliberately selected, and other texts abandoned, due to a lack of agreement on the parts of the negotiators. This book aims to rediscover Christianity prior to political interference from 4th century Rome.

Freke and Gandy systematically examine every conceiveable article of evidence from ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern civilisations, which makes this book especially useful as a bibliographical reference for students of religion, classics and Near Eastern studies. In particular they examine the remarkable similarity of important elements of Jesus' divinity with a number of mystery religions, such as those of the ancient gods Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, and Mithras, apparently manifestations of a single cult of a dying and rising "godman" myth, known to classical scholarship as Osiris-Dionysus. The authors propose that Jesus did not literally exist as an historically identifiable individual, 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, 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."

Contents

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, including Mary's 7 month pregnancy.

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 when the emperor Constantine saw the political merit of 'one empire, one emperor, one god', nearly exterminating the Gnostics, and became the Roman Catholic Church and its modern descendants.


Reception

Chris Forbes, an ancient historian and senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, has criticised the work noting that Freke and Gandy are "not real scholars, they are popularisers.” He notes that their arguments about Jesus are "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.”[3]

Paul Barnett, a 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]

Bart Ehrman, in an interview with the Fortean Times, was similarly asked for his views on the work of Freke and Gandy. He responded by saying, "This is an old argument, even though it shows up every 10 years or so. This current craze that Christianity was a mystery religion like these other mystery religions-the people who are saying this are almost always people who know nothing about the mystery religions; they've read a few popular books, but they're not scholars of mystery religions. The reality is, we know very little about mystery religions-the whole point of mystery religions is that they're secret! So I think it's crazy to build on ignorance in order to make a claim like this.[6]

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".[7] 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".

See also

References

Notes
  1. ^ Guthrie, William Keith Chambers (1952). Orpheus and Greek Religion. London: Methuen. p. 278. 
  2. ^ Freke and Gandy, Jesus Mysteries, p. 5.
  3. ^ http://your.sydneyanglicans.net/culture/thinking/387a/ The Jesus Mysteries - a critique]
  4. ^ The Jesus Mysteries - a critique
  5. ^ N. T. Wright, "Jesus' Self Understanding", in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, Gerald O’Collins, The Incarnation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 48
  6. ^ Bart Ehrman, interview with David V. Barrett, "The Gospel According to Bart", Fortean Times (221), 2007
  7. ^ CNN.com, "Review: Jesus -- man or myth?", September 21, 2000
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

External links


Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

Игры ⚽ Поможем написать курсовую

Look at other dictionaries:

  • The Jesus Papers — The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover Up in History is a book released in 2006 by author Michael Baigent. He explores the detailed history of Jesus life and crucifixion; using papers that, according to Baigent, were covered up. The work… …   Wikipedia

  • Jesus myth hypothesis — Jesus myth links here. For a comparison between Jesus Christ and pagan mythology see Jesus Christ and comparative mythology. The Jesus myth hypothesis, also referred to as the Jesus myth theory , the Christ myth or the Jesus myth is an argument… …   Wikipedia

  • Jesus myth theory — The Resurrection of Christ by Noel Coypel (1700). Jesus myth theorists see this as one of a number of stories about dying and rising gods. Description The …   Wikipedia

  • The Gospel of the Second Coming — is a 2007 book by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. It follows on from their series of books on Gnosticism and the historicity of Jesus, presenting their version of the Jesus as myth hypothesis [http://www.thesecondcoming.co.uk/book.asp] .The book… …   Wikipedia

  • The Blessed Virgin Mary —     The Blessed Virgin Mary     † Catholic Encyclopedia ► The Blessed Virgin Mary     The Blessed Virgin Mary is the mother of Jesus Christ, the mother of God.     In general, the theology and history of Mary the Mother of God follow the… …   Catholic encyclopedia

  • The Blessed Trinity —     The Blessed Trinity     † Catholic Encyclopedia ► The Blessed Trinity     This article is divided as follows:          I. Dogma of the Trinity;     II. Proof of the Doctrine from Scripture;     III. Proof of the Doctrine from Tradition;… …   Catholic encyclopedia

  • The Rosary —     The Rosary     † Catholic Encyclopedia ► The Rosary     I. IN THE WESTERN CHURCH      The Rosary , says the Roman Breviary, is a certain form of prayer wherein we say fifteen decades or tens of Hail Marys with an Our Father between each ten,… …   Catholic encyclopedia

  • The Faithful —     The Faithful     † Catholic Encyclopedia ► The Faithful     (Lat. fideles, from fides, faith.)     Those who have bound themselves to a religious association, whose doctrine they accept, and into whose rites they have been initiated. Among… …   Catholic encyclopedia

  • The Blessed Eucharist as a Sacrament —     The Blessed Eucharist as a Sacrament     † Catholic Encyclopedia ► The Blessed Eucharist as a Sacrament     Since Christ is present under the appearances of bread and wine in a sacramental way, the Blessed Eucharist is unquestionably a… …   Catholic encyclopedia

  • The Apostolic Fathers —     The Apostolic Fathers     † Catholic Encyclopedia ► The Apostolic Fathers     Christian writers of the first and second centuries who are known, or are considered, to have had personal relations with some of the Apostles, or to have been so… …   Catholic encyclopedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”