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For anyone who is not familiar with historical and biblical scholarship of the last half century or so, The Jesus Mysteries will come as something of a shock. Believing Christians will find it disturbing; Evangelicals will be horrified by it; Fundamentalists will no doubt ascribe it to the devil. And yet much in the book will be familiar to scholars.
Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy demonstrate clearly and unambiguously that much of Christian belief and practice, rather than being (as the Church has always claimed) a vast contrast with the Pagan ideas of Greece and the Middle East 2,000 years ago, actually draws on those traditions. It's not just virgin births that were two-a-penny in pre- Christian religions, but baptism, communion, and the very concept of a dying and rising God–man. December 25th was the birthday of Mithras long before Jesus came along. Other gods turned water into wine, stilled stormy waters, healed the sick and raised the dead. Even the teachings of Jesus on love, moral purity, humility and poverty were not wholly original; while Christian beliefs on heaven and hell (and the Catholic Church's purgatory) owe far more to Paganism than they do to the Judaism from which Christianity grew.
All of this, to a greater or lesser extent, has been known for decades; much of it, for example, can be found in a 1920s book called Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning. Where Freke and Gandy develop their theory, though, is more contentious. They conclude that the Christian religion was actually designed as another version of the Pagan religion, that Jesus was simply another variant on Osiris, Dionysius, Mithras and other earlier gods, invented for the Jewish people. This controversial thesis will be dismissed by many readers, but the meticulous footnoting of sources, both ancient and modern, will cause others to wonder if this book ought to be taken more seriously than many recent rewritings of history. --David V. Barrett --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
‘Rarely have the roots of Christianity been disentangled to such disturbing effect. I shall never be able to read the gospels in the same way again.’
ROGER BOULTON, presenter of Radio 4’s The Sunday Programme
‘A provocative, exciting and challenging book.’
The Rt Revd JOHN SHELBY SPONG, Bishop of Newark
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, but...,
By
This review is from: The Jesus Mysteries: Was The Original Jesus A Pagan God? (Paperback)
This book is well researched and provides compelling detail on the origins of Christianity. I've been searching for a book like this for years and I'm glad I've found it. My only quibbles are that it does tend to overstate its case at times (there really is no need; the evidence is clear enough on its own) and the style is a bit sensationalist. The irritating and wholely excessive use of exclamation marks encapsulates both of these faults. However, those are essentially surface points. The meat is in the arguments and evidence. Here, the copious footnotes are invaluable. Ironically, a little less missionary zeal on the part of the authors (and a little less of the occasional speculation presented as fact) would have made their underlying analysis even stronger. Still, if you want a good analysis of this difficult subject, here it is.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gnosticism defended,
By FlyingAspidistra (Essex) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Jesus Mysteries: Was The Original Jesus A Pagan God? (Paperback)
The Jesus Mysteries is a radical reinterpretation of the Jesus story. Freke and Gandy argue that nearly all of the miracles (and the moral teaching given by Christ) were constructed from elements of the surrounding Pagan Greco-Roman culture. Historically, we regard Christianity as being 'set apart' from the Pagan cultures of the classical world and this is perhaps inevitable given the primacy of the Christian church in Western culture. However, when we study the Bible in the light of modern scholarship a very different version of the origins of Christianity emerges from that propagated for millennia by the institution of the church.
For most of the Christian era the 'Gnostics' were the shadowy enemy of the true Church; we only really knew about their beliefs and practices through the writings of their detractors and of course that isn't a very good way of obtaining accurate information. All this changed in 1945 with the discovery of a cache of 'Gnostic' Gospels at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. For the first time in over 1000 years the Gnostics-through these rediscovered writings- could speak for themselves. The fact that the Gnostic Gospels were condemned by what we now think of as the 'mainstream' church doesn't make them any less spiritually interesting or any less spiritually potent. After all, who is to judge that the faith of a small group of early Christians gathered around 'The Thought of Norea' or 'The Gospel of Thomas' was somehow deficient compared to a similar group gathered around 'Mark' or 'Matthew,' though it must be said that the Gnostic Gospels are not all sweetness and light. I'm not sure that Gnosticism offers a better version of Christianity just a very different one (the idea that material world is intrinsically bad, for example) and many of them are of significantly later date than the four canonical works. However, Freke and Gandy's central point is a valid one: people tend to forget that centuries passed before there was such a thing as a fixed Christian Bible. We somehow assume (and we have been culturally conditioned to assume) that the Bible in the form that we have it now was part of Christianity from day one. It wasn't. The Jesus Mysteries I found to be a fascinating read and Freke and Gandy do a good job in reconstructing and defending the beliefs of the Gnostic Christians which they themselves seem to share or at least have sympathy with. Central to the Jesus Mysteries thesis is the idea that Jesus was a mythical and archetypal 'God-Man' not an actual historical person. Indeed, they go so far as to suggest that the Jesus story is-almost-a kind of 1st Century Star Wars. In other words a story with an underlying mystical meaning but essentially a story. Many people would-naturally-dispute this. As other reviewers have helpfully pointed out Freke and Gandy are not the first writers to make these or similar points. Professor Elaine Pagels (who is liberally quoted here) has advanced similar arguments years before Freke and Gandy and decades earlier still the esteemed professor of oriental religions Edward Conze posited the idea that the Gnostics may have been familiar with Hinduism and/or Buddhism. The book also leans heavily on the work of Joseph Campbell. In summary The Jesus Mysteries is an interesting and controversial book though I doubt that it is the final word on this millennia old subject.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very enlightening text,
By Mark Eaton "Mark" (Surrey, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Jesus Mysteries: Was The Original Jesus A Pagan God? (Paperback)
I purchased this book after becoming aware of the similarities between the myths of Mithras, Osiris and Jesus and wanting to look further into it. This book provides a coherent and well researched review of the evidence that surrounds the creation and propagation of some of the most powerful influences on the human mind that have ever existed. It brings to light what has been lost through the adherence to a literalist Christian church, and indeed what had to be lost to enable this form of christianity to survive. It also explains many of the contradictions that exist in christianity that, it seems, very few believers ever seek to challenge or even understand.
What I will say is that after reading this book you will be left with a profound sense that we have lost so much rich culture and that many of the traditions and sayings (from Seventh Heaven to the number of the beast) are actually drawn from a completely different way of viewing the christian myths.
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