THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY AND
THE QUEST FOR THE HISTORICAL JESUS CHRIST

Acharya S *

 

Introduction

Around the world over the centuries, much has been written about religion, its meaning, its relevance and contribution to humanity. In the West particularly, sizable tomes have been composed speculating upon the nature and historical background of the main character of Western religions, Jesus Christ. Many have tried to dig into the precious few clues as to Jesus’ identity and come up with a biographical sketch that either bolsters faith or reveals a more human side of this god–man to which we can all relate. Obviously, considering the time and energy spent on them, the subjects of Christianity and its legendary founder are very important to the Western mind and culture.

The Controversy

Despite all of this literature continuously being cranked out and the significance of the issue, in the public at large there is a serious lack of formal and broad education regarding religion and mythology, and most individuals are highly uninformed in this area. Concerning the issue of Christianity, for example, the majority of people are taught in most schools and churches that Jesus Christ was an actual historical figure and that the only controversy regarding him is that some people accept him as the Son of God and the Messiah, while others do not. However, whereas this is the raging debate most evident in this field today, it is not the most important. Shocking as it may seem to the general populace, the most enduring and profound controversy in this subject is whether or not a person named Jesus Christ ever really existed.

Although this debate may not be evident from publications readily found in popular bookstores1, when one examines this issue closely, one will find a tremendous volume of literature that demonstrates, logically and intelligently, time and again that Jesus Christ is a mythological character along the same lines as the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Sumerian, Phoenician, Indian or other god–men, who are all presently accepted as myths rather than historical figures2. Delving deeply into this large body of work, one uncovers evidence that the Jesus character is based upon much older myths and heroes from around the globe. One discovers that this story is not, therefore, a historical representation of a Jewish rebel carpenter who had physical incarnation in the Levant 2,000 years ago. In other words, it has been demonstrated continually for centuries that this character, Jesus Christ, was invented and did not depict a real person who was either the “son of God” or was “evemeristically” made into a superhuman by enthusiastic followers3.

History and Positions of the Debate

This controversy has existed from the very beginning, and the writings of the “Church Fathers” themselves reveal that they were constantly forced by the pagan intelligentsia to defend what the non–Christians and other Christians (“heretics”)4 alike saw as a preposterous and fabricated yarn with absolutely no evidence of it ever having taken place in history. As Rev. Robert Taylor says, “And from the apostolic age downwards, in a never interrupted succession, but never so strongly and emphatically as in the most primitive times, was the existence of Christ as a man most strenuously denied.”5 Emperor Julian, who, coming after the reign of the fanatical and murderous “good Christian” Constantine, returned rights to pagan worshippers, stated, “If anyone should wish to know the truth with respect to you Christians, he will find your impiety to be made up partly of the Jewish audacity, and partly of the indifference and confusion of the Gentiles, and that you have put together not the best, but the worst characteristics of them both.”6 According to these learned dissenters, the New Testament could rightly be called, “Gospel Fictions.”7

A century ago, mythicist Albert Churchward said, “The canonical gospels can be shown to be a collection of sayings from the Egyptian Mythos and Eschatology.”8 In Forgery in Christianity, Joseph Wheless states, “The gospels are all priestly forgeries over a century after their pretended dates.”9 Those who concocted some of the hundreds of “alternative” gospels and epistles that were being kicked about during the first several centuries C.E. have even admitted that they had forged the documents.10 Forgery during the first centuries of the Church’s existence was admittedly rampant, so common in fact that a new phrase was coined to describe it: “pious fraud.”11 Such prevarication is confessed to repeatedly in the Catholic Encyclopedia.12 Some of the “great” church fathers, such as Eusebius13, were determined by their own peers to be unbelievable liars who regularly wrote their own fictions of what “the Lord” said and did during “his” alleged sojourn upon the earth.14

The Proof

The assertion that Jesus Christ is a myth can be proved not only through the works of dissenters and “pagans” who knew the truth – and who were viciously refuted or murdered for their battle against the Christian priests and “Church Fathers” fooling the masses with their fictions – but also through the very statements of the Christians themselves, who continuously disclose that they knew Jesus Christ was a myth founded upon more ancient deities located throughout the known ancient world. In fact, Pope Leo X, privy to the truth because of his high rank, made this curious declaration, “What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us!”15 (Emphasis added.) As Wheless says, “The proofs of my indictment are marvelously easy.”

The Gnostics

From their own admissions, the early Christians were incessantly under criticism by scholars of great repute who were impugned as “heathens” by their Christian adversaries. This group included many Gnostics, who strenuously objected to the carnalization of their deity, as the Christians can be shown to have taken many of the characteristics of their god and god–man from the Gnostics, meaning “Ones who know,” a loose designation applied to members of a variety of esoteric schools and brotherhoods. The refutations of the Christians against the Gnostics reveal that the Christian god–man was an insult to the Gnostics, who held that their god could never take human form.16

Biblical Sources

It is very telling that the earliest Christian documents, the Epistles attributed to “Paul,” never discuss a historical background of Jesus but deal exclusively with a spiritual being who was known to all gnostic sects for hundreds to thousands of years. The few “historical” references to an actual life of Jesus cited in the Epistles are demonstrably interpolations and forgeries, as are, according to Wheless, the Epistles themselves, as they were not written by “Paul.”17 Aside from the brief reference to Pontius Pilate at 1 Timothy 6:13, an epistle dated ben Yehoshua to 144 CE and thus not written by Paul, the Pauline literature (as pointed out by Edouard Dujardin) “does not refer to Pilate18, or the Romans, or Caiaphas, or the Sanhedrin, or Herod19, or Judas, or the holy women, or any person in the gospel account of the Passion, and that it also never makes any allusion to them; lastly, that it mentions absolutely none of the events of the Passion, either directly or by way of allusion.”20 Dujardin additionally relates that other early “Christian” writings such as Revelation do not mention any historical details or drama.21 Mangasarian notes that Paul also never quotes from Jesus’ purported sermons and speeches, parables and prayers, nor does he mention Jesus’ supernatural birth or any of his alleged wonders and miracles, all which one would presume would be very important to his followers, had such exploits and sayings been known prior to “Paul.”22

Turning to the gospels themselves, which were composed between 170–180 C.E.22a, their pretended authors, the apostles, give sparse histories and genealogies of Jesus that contradict each other and themselves in numerous places. The birthdate of Jesus is depicted as having taken place at different times. His birth and childhood are not mentioned in “Mark,” and although he is claimed in “Matthew” and “Luke” to have been “born of a virgin,” his lineage is traced to the House of David through Joseph, such that he may “fulfill prophecy.”23 He is said in the first three (Synoptic) gospels to have taught for one year before he died, while in “John” the number is three years. “Matthew” relates that Jesus delivered “The Sermon on the Mount”24 before “the multitudes,” while “Luke” says it was a private talk given only to the disciples. The accounts of his Passion and Resurrection differ utterly from each other, and no one states how old he was when he died.25 Wheless says, “The so–called ‘canonical’ books of the New Testament, as of the Old, are a mess of contradictions and confusions of text, to the present estimate of 150,000 and more ‘variant readings,’ as is well known and admitted.”26 In addition, of the dozens of gospels, ones that were once considered canonical or genuine were later rejected as “apocryphal” or spurious, and vice versa. So much for the “infallible Word of God” and “infallible” Church! The confusion exists because the Christian plagiarists over the centuries were attempting to amalgamate and fuse practically every myth, fairytale, legend, doctrine or bit of wisdom they could pilfer from the innumerable different mystery religions and philosophies that existed at the time. In doing so, they forged, interpolated, mutilated, changed, and rewrote these texts for centuries.27

Non–Biblical Sources

Basically, there are no non–biblical references to a historical Jesus by any known historian of the time during and after Jesus’ purported advent. Walker says, “No literate person of his own time mentioned him in any known writing.” Eminent Hellenistic Jewish historian and philosopher Philo (20 B.C.E.–50 C.E.), alive at the purported time of Jesus, makes no mention of him. Nor do any of the some 40 other historians who wrote during the first one to two centuries of the Common Era. “Enough of the writings of [these] authors...remain to form a library. Yet in this mass of Jewish and Pagan literature, aside from two forged passages in the works of a Jewish author, and two disputed passages in the works of Roman writers, there is to be found no mention of Jesus Christ.”28 Their silence is deafening testimony against the historicizers.

In the entire works of the Jewish historian Josephus, which constitute many volumes, there are only two paragraphs that purport to refer to Jesus. Although much has been made of these “references,” they have been dismissed by all scholars and even by Christian apologists as forgeries, as have been those referring to John the Baptist and James, “brother” of Jesus. Bishop Warburton labeled the Josephus interpolation regarding Jesus as “a rank forgery, and a very stupid one, too.”29 Wheless notes that, “The first mention ever made of this passage, and its text, are in the Church History of that ‘very dishonest writer,’ Bishop Eusebius, in the fourth century...CE [Catholic Encyclopedia] admits... the above cited passage was not known to Origen and the earlier patristic writers.” Wheless, a lawyer, and Taylor, a minister, agree that it was Eusebius himself who forged the passage.

Regarding the letter to Trajan supposedly written by Pliny the Younger, which is one of the pitifully few “references” to Jesus or Christianity held up by Christians as evidence of the existence of Jesus, there is but one word that is applicable – “Christian” – and that has been demonstrated to be spurious, as is also suspected of the entire letter. Concerning the passage in the works of the historian Tacitus, who did not live during the purported time of Jesus but was born two decades after his purported death, this is also considered by competent scholars as an interpolation and forgery.30 Christian defenders also like to hold up the passage in Suetonius that refers to someone named “Chrestus” or “Chresto” as reference to their Savior; however, while some have speculated that there was a Roman man of that name at that time, the name “Chrestus” or “Chrestos,” meaning “useful,” was frequently held by freed slaves. Others opine that this passage is also an interpolation.

As to these references and their constant regurgitation by Christian apologists, Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn says:

“The average Christian minister who has not read outside the pale of accredited Church authorities will impart to any parishioner making the inquiry the information that no event in history is better attested by witness than the occurrences in the Gospel narrative of Christ’s life. He will go over the usual citation of the historians who mention Jesus and the letters claiming to have been written about him. When the credulous questioner, putting trust in the intelligence and good faith of his pastor, gets this answer, he goes away assured on the point of the veracity of the Gospel story. The pastor does not qualify his data with the information that the practice of forgery, fictionizing and fable was rampant in the early Church. In the simple interest of truth, then, it is important to examine the body of alleged testimony from secular history and see what credibility and authority it possesses.

“First, as to the historians whose works record the existence of Jesus, the list comprises but four. They are Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius and Josephus. There are short paragraphs in the works of each of these, two in Josephus. The total quantity of this material is given by Harry Elmer Barnes in The Twilight of Christianity as some twenty–four lines. It may total a little more, perhaps twice that amount. This meager testimony constitutes the body or mass of the evidence of ‘one of the best attested events in history.’ Even if it could be accepted as indisputably authentic and reliable, it would be faltering support for an event that has dominated the thought of half the world for eighteen centuries.

“But what is the standing of this witness? Not even Catholic scholars of importance have dissented from a general agreement of academic investigators that these passages, one and all, must by put down as forgeries and interpolations by partisan Christian scribes who wished zealously to array the authority of these historians behind the historicity of the Gospel life of Jesus. A sum total of forty or fifty lines from secular history supporting the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, and they completely discredited!”30a

Of these “references,” Dujardin says, “But even if they are authentic, and were derived from earlier sources, they would not carry us back earlier than the period in which the gospel legend took form, and so could attest only the legend of Jesus, and not his historicity.” In any case, these scarce and brief “references” to a man who supposedly shook up the world can hardly be held up as proof of his existence, and it is absurd that the purported historicity of the entire Christian religion is founded upon them.31 As it is said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”; yet, no proof of any kind for the historicity of Jesus has ever existed or is forthcoming.

The Characters

It is evident that there was no single historical person upon whom the Christian religion was founded, and that “Jesus Christ” is a compilation of legends, heroes, gods and god–men. There is not adequate room here to go into detail about each god or god–man that contributed to the formation of the Jewish Jesus character; suffice it to say that there is plenty of documentation to show that this issue is not a question of “faith” or “belief.” The truth is that during the era this character supposedly lived there was an extensive library at Alexandria and an incredibly nimble brotherhood network that stretched from Europe to China, and this information network had access to numerous manuscripts that told the same narrative portrayed in the New Testament with different place names and ethnicity for the characters. In actuality, the legend of Jesus nearly identically parallels the story of Krishna, for example, even in detail, as was presented by noted mythologist and scholar Gerald Massey over 100 years ago, as well as by Rev. Robert Taylor 160 years ago, among others.32 The Krishna tale as told in the Hindu Vedas has been dated to at least as far back as 1400 B.C.E.33 The same can be said of the well–woven Horus mythos, which also is practically identical, in detail, to the Jesus story, but which predates the Christian version by thousands of years.

As concerns the specious claim that the analogies between the Christ myth and those outlined below are “non–existent” because they are not found in “primary sources,” let us turn to the words of the early Church fathers, who acknowledged that major important aspects of the Christ character are indeed to be found in the stories of earlier, “Pagan” gods, but who asserted that the reason for these similarities was because the evidently prescient devil “anticipated” Christ and planted “foreshadowing” of his “coming” in the heathens’ minds.

In his First Apology, Christian father Justin Martyr (c. 100–165 CE) acknowledged the similarities between the older Pagan gods and religions and those of Christianity, when he attempted to demonstrate, in the face of ridicule, that Christianity was no more ridiculous than the earlier myths:

“ANALOGIES TO THE HISTORY OF CHRIST. And when we say also that the Word, who is the first–birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. For you know how many sons your esteemed writers ascribed to Jupiter: Mercury, the interpreting word and teacher of all; Aesculapius, who, though he was a great physician, was struck by a thunderbolt, and so ascended to heaven; and Bacchus too, after he had been torn limb from limb; and Hercules, when he had committed himself to the flames to escape his toils; and the sons of Leda, and Dioscuri; and Perseus, son of Danae; and Bellerophon, who, though sprung from mortals, rose to heaven on the horse Pegasus. For what shall I say of Ariadne, and those who, like her, have been declared to be set among the stars? And what of the emperors who die among yourselves, whom you deem worthy of deification, and in whose behalf you produce some one who swears he has seen the burning Caesar rise to heaven from the funeral pyre?”

In his endless apologizing, Justin reiterates the similarities between his god–man and the gods of other cultures:

“As to the objection of our Jesus’ being crucified, I say, that suffering was common to all the aforementioned sons of Jove [Jupiter] . . . As to his being born of a virgin, you have your Perseus to balance that. As to his curing the lame, and the paralytic, and such as were cripples from birth, this is little more than what you say of your Aesculapius.”

In making these comparisons between Christianity and its predecessor Paganism, however, Martyr sinisterly spluttered:

“It having reached the Devil’s ears that the prophets had foretold the coming of Christ, the Son of God, he set the heathen Poets to bring forward a great many who should be called the sons of Jove. The Devil laying his scheme in this, to get men to imagine that the true history of Christ was of the same characters the prodigious fables related of the sons of Jove.”

In his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, Martyr again admits the pre–existence of the Christian tale and then uses his standard, irrational and self–serving apology, i.e., “the devil got there first”:

“Be well assured, then, Trypho, that I am established in the knowledge of and faith in the Scriptures by those counterfeits which he who is called the devil is said to have performed among the Greeks; just as some were wrought by the Magi in Egypt, and others by the false prophets in Elijah’s days. For when they tell that Bacchus, son of Jupiter, was begotten by [Jupiter’s] intercourse with Semele, and that he was the discoverer of the vine; and when they relate, that being torn in pieces, and having died, he rose again, and ascended to heaven; and when they introduce wine into his mysteries, do I not perceive that [the devil] has imitated the prophecy announced by the patriarch Jacob, and recorded by Moses? And when they tell that Hercules was strong, and travelled over all the world, and was begotten by Jove of Alcmene, and ascended to heaven when he died, do I not perceive that the Scripture which speaks of Christ, “strong as a giant to run his race,” has been in like manner imitated? And when he [the devil] brings forward Aesculapius as the raiser of the dead and healer of all diseases, may I not say that in this matter likewise he has imitated the prophecies about Christ? . . . And when I hear, Trypho, that Perseus was begotten of a virgin, I understand that the deceiving serpent counterfeited also this.”

And in his Octavius, Christian writer Minucius Felix (c. 250 CE) denied that Christians worshipped a “criminal and his cross,” and retorted that the Pagans did esteem a crucified man:

“Chapter XXIX.–Argument: Nor is It More True that a Man Fastened to a Cross on Account of His Crimes is Worshipped by Christians, for They Believe Not Only that He Was Innocent, But with Reason that He Was God. But, on the Other Hand, the Heathens Invoke the Divine Powers of Kings Raised into Gods by Themselves; They Pray to Images, and Beseech Their Genii.

“These, and such as these infamous things, we are not at liberty even to hear; it is even disgraceful with any more words to defend ourselves from such charges. For you pretend that those things are done by chaste and modest persons, which we should not believe to be done at all, unless you proved that they were true concerning yourselves. For in that you attribute to our religion the worship of a criminal and his cross, you wander far from the neighborhood of the truth, in thinking either that a criminal deserved, or that an earthly being was able, to be believed God... Crosses, moreover, we neither worship nor wish for. You, indeed, who consecrate gods of wood, adore wooden crosses perhaps as parts of your gods. For your very standards, as well as your banners; and flags of your camp, what else are they but crosses gilded and adorned? Your victorious trophies not only imitate the appearance of a simple cross, but also that of a man affixed to it...”

The Jesus story incorporated elements from the tales of other deities recorded in this widespread area, such as many of the following world saviors and “sons of God,” most or all of whom predate the Christian myth, and a number of whom were crucified or executed.33a

·       Adad of Assyria

·       Adonis, Apollo, Heracles (“Hercules”) and Zeus of Greece

·       Alcides of Thebes

·       Attis of Phrygia

·       Baal of Phoenicia

·       Bali of Afghanistan

·       Beddru of Japan

·       Buddha of India

·       Crite of Chaldea

·       Deva Tat of Siam

·       Hesus of the Druids

·       Horus, Osiris, and Serapis of Egypt, whose long–haired, bearded appearance was adopted for the Christ character34

·       Indra of Tibet/India

·       Jao of Nepal

·       Krishna of India

·       Mikado of the Sintoos

·       Mithra of Persia

·       Odin of the Scandinavians

·       Prometheus of Caucasus/Greece

·       Quetzalcoatl of Mexico

·       Salivahana of Bermuda

·       Tammuz of Syria (who was, in a typical mythmaking move, later turned into the disciple Thomas35)

·       Thor of the Gauls

·       Universal Monarch of the Sibyls36

·       Wittoba of the Bilingonese

·       Xamolxis of Thrace

·       Zarathustra/Zoroaster of Persia

·       Zoar of the Bonzes

The Major Players

Buddha

Although most people think of Buddha as being one person who lived around 500 B.C.E., the character commonly portrayed as Buddha can also be demonstrated to be a compilation of god–men, legends and sayings of various holy men both preceding and succeeding the period attributed to the Buddha.37

The Buddha character has the following in common with the Christ figure:38

·       Buddha was born of the virgin Maya, who was considered the “Queen of Heaven.”38a

·       He was of royal descent.

·       He crushed a serpent’s head.

·       Sakyamuni Buddha had 12 disciples.38b

·       He performed miracles and wonders, healed the sick, fed 500 men from a “small basket of cakes,” and walked on water.38c

·       He abolished idolatry, was a “sower of the word,” and preached “the establishment of a kingdom of righteousness.”38d

·       He taught chastity, temperance, tolerance, compassion, love, and the equality of all.

·       He was transfigured on a mount.

·       Sakya Buddha was crucified in a sin–atonement, suffered for three days in hell, and was resurrected.38e

·       He ascended to Nirvana or “heaven.”

·       Buddha was considered the “Good Shepherd”39, the “Carpenter”40, the “Infinite and Everlasting.”40a

·       He was called the “Savior of the World” and the “Light of the World.”

Horus of Egypt

The stories of Jesus and Horus are very similar, with Horus even contributing the name of Jesus Christ. Horus and his once–and–future Father, Osiris, are frequently interchangeable in the mythos (“I and my Father are one”).41 The legends of Horus go back thousands of years, and he shares the following in common with Jesus:

·       Horus was born of the virgin Isis–Meri on December 25th in a cave/manger42, with his birth being announced by a star in the East and attended by three wise men.43

·       He was a child teacher in the Temple and was baptized when he was 30 years old.44

·       Horus was also baptized by “Anup the Baptizer,” who becomes “John the Baptist.”

·       He had 12 disciples.

·       He performed miracles and raised one man, El–Azar–us, from the dead.

·       He walked on water.

·       Horus was transfigured on the Mount.

·       He was crucified, buried in a tomb and resurrected.

·       He was also the “Way, the Truth, the Light, the Messiah, God’s Anointed Son, the Son of Man, the Good Shepherd, the Lamb of God, the Word” etc.

·       He was “the Fisher,” and was associated with the Lamb, Lion and Fish (“Ichthys”).45

·       Horus’s personal epithet was “Iusa,” the “ever–becoming son” of “Ptah,” the “Father.”46

·       Horus was called “the KRST,” or “Anointed One,” long before the Christians duplicated the story.47

In fact, in the catacombs at Rome are pictures of the baby Horus being held by the virgin mother Isis – the original “Madonna and Child”48 – and the Vatican itself is built upon the papacy of Mithra49, who shares many qualities with Jesus and who existed as a deity long before the Jesus character was formalized. The Christian hierarchy is nearly identical to the Mithraic version it replaced50. Virtually all of the elements of the Catholic ritual, from miter to wafer to water to altar to doxology, are directly taken from earlier pagan mystery religions.51

Mithra, Sungod of Persia

The story of Mithra precedes the Christian fable by at least 600 years. According to Wheless, the cult of Mithra was, shortly before the Christian era, “the most popular and widely spread ‘Pagan’ religion of the times.” Mithra has the following in common with the Christ character:

·       Mithra was born on December 25th.

·       He was considered a great traveling teacher and master.

·       He had 12 companions or disciples.

·       He performed miracles.

·       He was buried in a tomb.

·       After three days he rose again.

·       His resurrection was celebrated every year.

·       Mithra was called “the Good Shepherd.”

·       He was considered “the Way, the Truth and the Light, the Redeemer, the Savior, the Messiah.”

·       He was identified with both the Lion and the Lamb.

·       His sacred day was Sunday, “the Lord’s Day,” hundreds of years before the appearance of Christ.

·       Mithra had his principal festival on what was later to become Easter, at which time he was resurrected.

·       His religion had a Eucharist or “Lord’s Supper.”52

Krishna of India

The similarities between the Christian character and the Indian messiah are many. Indeed, Massey finds over 100 similarities between the Hindu and Christian saviors, and Graves, who includes the various noncanonical gospels in his analysis, lists over 300 likenesses. It should be noted that a common earlier English spelling of Krishna was “Christna,” which reveals its relation to ‘“Christ.” It should also be noted that, like the Jewish god–man, many people have believed in a historical, carnalized Krishna.53

·       Krishna was born of the Virgin Devaki (“Divine One”) 53a

·       His father was a carpenter.54

·       His birth was attended by angels, wise men and shepherds, and he was presented with gold, frankincense and myrrh.54a

·       He was persecuted by a tyrant who ordered the slaughter of thousands of infants.55

·       He was of royal descent.

·       He was baptized in the River Ganges.55a

·       He worked miracles and wonders.

·       He raised the dead and healed lepers, the deaf and the blind.

·       Krishna used parables to teach the people about charity and love.

·       “He lived poor and he loved the poor.”56

·       He was transfigured in front of his disciples.57

·       In some traditions he died on a tree or was crucified between two thieves.58

·       He rose from the dead and ascended to heaven.

·       Krishna is called the “Shepherd God” and “Lord of lords,” and was considered “the Redeemer, Firstborn, Sin Bearer, Liberator, Universal Word.”59

·       He is the second person of the Trinity,60 and proclaimed himself the “Resurrection” and the “way to the Father.”60a

·       He was considered the “Beginning, the Middle and the End,” (“Alpha and Omega”), as well as being omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent.

·       His disciples bestowed upon him the title “Jezeus,” meaning “pure essence.”61

·       Krishna is to return to do battle with the “Prince of Evil,” who will desolate the earth.62

Prometheus of Greece

The Greek god Prometheus has been claimed to have come from Egypt, but his drama took place in the Caucasus mountains. Prometheus shares a number of striking similarities with the Christ character.

·       Prometheus descended from heaven as God incarnate as man, to save mankind.

·       He was crucified, suffered and rose from the dead.

·       He was called the Logos or Word.62a

Five centuries before the Christian era, esteemed Greek poet Aeschylus wrote Prometheus Bound, which, according to Taylor, was presented in the theater in Athens. Taylor claims that in the play Prometheus is crucified “on a fatal tree” and the sky goes dark:

“The darkness which closed the scene on the suffering Prometheus, was easily exhibited on the stage, by putting out the lamps; but when the tragedy was to become history, and the fiction to be turned into fact, the lamp of day could not be so easily disposed of. Nor can it be denied that the miraculous darkness which the Evangelists so solemnly declare to have attended the crucifixion of Christ, labors under precisely the same fatality of an absolute and total want of evidence.”63

Tradition holds that Prometheus was crucified on a rock, yet some sources have opined that legend also held he was crucified on a tree and that Christians muddled the story and/or mutilated the text, as they did with the works of so many ancient authors. In any case, the sun hiding in darkness parallels the Christian fable of the darkness descending when Jesus was crucified. This remarkable occurrence is not recorded in history but is only explainable within the Mythos and as part of a recurring play.

The Creation of a Myth

The Christians went on a censorship rampage that led to the virtual illiteracy of the ancient world and ensured that their secret would be hidden from the masses64, but the scholars of other schools/sects never gave up their arguments against the historicizing of a very ancient mythological creature. We have lost the arguments of these learned dissenters because the Christians destroyed any traces of their works. Nonetheless, the Christians preserved the contentions of their detractors through the Christians’ own refutations.

For example, early Church Father Tertullian (abt 160–220 C.E.), an “ex–Pagan” and Bishop of Carthage, ironically admits the true origins of the Christ story and of all other such god–men by stating in refutation of his critics, “You say we worship the sun; so do you.”65 Interestingly, a previously strident believer and defender of the faith, Tertullian later renounced Christianity66.

The “Son” of God is the “Sun” of God 67

The reason why all these narratives are so similar, with a god–man who is crucified and resurrected, who does miracles and has 12 disciples, is that these stories were based on the movements of the sun through the heavens, an astrotheological development that can be found throughout the planet because the sun and the 12 zodiac signs can be observed around the globe. In other words, Jesus Christ and all the others upon whom this character is predicated are personifications of the sun, and the Gospel fable is merely a rehash of a mythological formula (the “Mythos,” as mentioned above) revolving around the movements of the sun through the heavens.68

For instance, many of the world’s crucified god–men have their traditional birthday on December 25th (“Christmas”69). This is because the ancients recognized that (from an earth–centric perspective) the sun makes an annual descent southward until December 21st or 22nd, the winter solstice, when it stops moving southerly for three days and then starts to move northward again. During this time, the ancients declared that “God’s sun” had “died” for three days and was “born again” on December 25th. The ancients realized quite abundantly that they needed the sun to return every day and that they would be in big trouble if the sun continued to move southward and did not stop and reverse its direction. Thus, these many different cultures celebrated the “sun of God’s” birthday on December 25th.70 The following are the characteristics of the “sun of God”:

·       The sun “dies” for three days on December 22nd, the winter solstice, when it stops in its movement south, to be born again or resurrected on December 25th, when it resumes its movement north.

·       In some areas, the calendar originally began in the constellation of Virgo, and the sun would therefore be “born of a Virgin.”

·       The sun is the “Light of the World.”

·       The sun “cometh on clouds, and every eye shall see him.”

·       The sun rising in the morning is the “Savior of mankind.”

·       The sun wears a corona, “crown of thorns” or halo.71

·       The sun “walks on water.”

·       The sun’s “followers,” “helpers” or “disciples” are the 12 months and the 12 signs of the zodiac or constellations, through which the sun must pass.

·       The sun at 12 noon is in the house or temple of the “Most High”; thus, “he” begins “his Father’s work” at “age” 12.

·       The sun enters into each sign of the zodiac at 30°; hence, the “Sun of God” begins his ministry at “age” 30.

·       The sun is hung on a cross or “crucified,” which represents its passing through the equinoxes, the vernal equinox being Easter, at which time it is then resurrected.72

Contrary to popular belief, the ancients were not an ignorant and superstitious lot who actually believed their deities to be literal characters. Indeed, this slanderous propaganda has been part of the conspiracy to make the ancients appear as if they were truly the dark and dumb rabble that was in need of the “light of Jesus.”73 The reality is that the ancients were no less advanced in their morals and spiritual practices, and in many cases were far more advanced, than the Christians in their own supposed morality and ideology, which, in its very attempt at historicity, is in actuality a degradation of the ancient Mythos. Indeed, unlike the “superior” Christians, the true intelligentsia amongst the ancients were well aware that their gods were astronomical and atmospheric in nature. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle74 surely knew that Zeus, the sky god father figure who migrated to Greece from India and/or Egypt, was never a real person, despite the fact that the Greeks have designated on Crete both a birth cave and a death cave of Zeus. In addition, all over the world are to be found sites where this god or that allegedly was born, walked, suffered, died, etc., a common and unremarkable occurrence that is not monopolized by, and did not originate with, Christianity.74a

Etymology Tells the Story

Zeus, aka “Zeus Pateras,” who we now automatically believe to be a myth and not a historical figure, takes his name from the Indian version, “Dyaus Pitar.” Dyaus Pitar in turn is related to the Egyptian “Ptah,” and from both Pitar and Ptah comes the word “pater,” or “father.” “Zeus” equals “Dyaus,” which became “Deos,” “Deus” and “Dios” – “God.” “Zeus Pateras,” like Dyaus Pitar, means, “God the Father,” a very ancient concept that in no way originated with “Jesus” and Christianity. There is no question of Zeus being a historical character. Dyaus Pitar becomes “Jupiter” in Roman mythology, and likewise is not representative of an actual, historical character. In Egyptian mythology, Ptah, the Father, is the unseen god–force, and the sun was viewed as Ptah’s visible proxy who brings everlasting life to the earth; hence, the “son of God” is really the “sun of God.” Indeed, according to Hotema, the very name “Christ” comes from the Hindi word “Kris” (as in Krishna), which is a name for the sun.75

Furthermore, since Horus was called “Iusa/Iao/Iesu”76 the “KRST,” and Krishna/Christna was called “Jezeus,” centuries before any Jewish character similarly named, it would be safe to assume that Jesus Christ is just a repeat of Horus and Krishna, among the rest. According to Rev. Taylor, the title “Christ” in its Hebraic form meaning “Anointed” (“Masiah”77) was held by all kings of Israel, as well as being “so commonly assumed by all sorts of impostors, conjurers, and pretenders to supernatural communications, that the very claim to it is in the gospel itself considered as an indication of imposture . . .”78 Hotema states that the name “Jesus Christ” was not formally adopted in its present form until after the first Council of Nicea, i.e., in 325 C.E.79

In actuality, even the place names and the appellations of many other characters in the New Testament can be revealed to be Hebraicized renderings of the Egyptian texts.

As an example, in the fable of “Lazarus,” the mummy raised from the dead by Jesus, the Christian copyists did not change his name much, “El–Azar–us” being the Egyptian mummy raised from the dead by Horus possibly 1,000 years or more before the Jewish version.80 This story is allegory for the sun reviving its old, dying self, or father, as in “El–Osiris.”81 It is not a true story.

Horus’s principal enemy – originally Horus’s other face or “dark” aspect – was “Set” or “Sata,” whence comes “Satan.”82 Horus struggles with Set in the exact manner that Jesus battles with Satan, with 40 days in the wilderness, among other similarities.83 This is because this myth represents the triumph of light over dark, or the sun’s return to relieve the terror of the night.

“Jerusalem” simply means “City of Peace,” and the actual city in Israel was named after the holy city of peace in the Egyptian sacred texts that already existed at the time the city was founded. Likewise, “Bethany,” site of the famous multiplying of the loaves, means “House of God,” and is allegory for the “multiplication of the many out of the One.”84 Any town of that designation was named for the allegorical place in the texts that existed before the town’s foundation. The Egyptian predecessor and counterpart is “Bethanu.”85

The Book of Revelation is Egyptian and Zoroastrian

One can find certain allegorical place names such as “Jerusalem” and “Israel” in the Book of Revelation. Massey has stated that Revelation, rather than having been written by any apostle called John during the 1st Century C.E., is a very ancient text that dates to the beginning of this era of history, i.e. possibly as early as 4,000 years ago.86 Massey asserts that Revelation relates the Mithraic legend of Zarathustra/Zoroaster.87 Hotema says of this mysterious book, which has baffled mankind for centuries: “It is expressed in terms of creative phenomena; its hero is not Jesus but the Sun of the Universe, its heroine is the Moon; and all its other characters are Planets, Stars and Constellations; while its stage–setting comprises the Sky, the Earth, the Rivers and the Sea.” The common form of this text has been attributed by Churchward to Horus’s scribe, Aan, whose name has been passed down to us as “John.”88

The word Israel itself, far from being a Jewish appellation, probably comes from the combination of three different reigning deities: Isis, the Earth Mother Goddess revered throughout the ancient world; Ra, the Egyptian sungod; and El, the Semitic deity passed down in form as Saturn.90 El was one of the earliest names for the god of the ancient Hebrews (whence Emmanu–El, Micha–El, Gabri–El, Samu–El, etc.), and his worship is reflected in the fact that the Jews still consider Saturday as “God’s Day.”91

Indeed, that the Christians worship on Sunday betrays the genuine origins of their god and god–man. Their “savior” is actually the sun, which is the “Light of the world that every eye can see.” The sun has been viewed consistently throughout history as the savior of mankind for reasons that are obvious. Without the sun, the planet would scarcely last one day. So important was the sun to the ancients that they composed a “Sun Book,” or “Helio Biblia,” which became the “Holy Bible.”91a

The “Patriarchs” and “Saints” are the Gods of Other Cultures

When one studies mythmaking, one can readily discern and delineate a pattern that is repeated throughout history. Whenever an invading culture takes over its predecessors, it either vilifies the preceding deities or makes them into lesser gods, “patriarchs” or, in the case of Christianity, “saints.” This process is exemplified in the adoption of the Hindu god Brahma as the Hebrew patriarch Abraham.92 Another school of thought proposes that the patriarch Joshua was based on Horus as “Iusa,” since the cult of Horus had migrated by this period to the Levant. In this theory, the cult of Joshua, which was situated in exactly the area where the Christ drama allegedly took place, then mutated into the Christian story, with Joshua becoming Jesus.93 As Robertson says, “The Book of Joshua leads us to think that he had several attributes of the Sun–god, and that, like Samson and Moses, he was an ancient deity reduced to human status.”

Indeed, the legend of Moses, rather than being that of a historical Hebrew character, is found around the ancient Middle and Far East, with the character having different names and races, depending on the locale: “Manou” is the Indian legislator; “Nemo the lawgiver,” who brought down the tablets from the Mountain of God, hails from Babylon; “Mises” is found in Syria and Egypt, where also “Manes the lawgiver” takes the stage; “Minos” is the Cretan reformer; and the Ten Commandments are simply a repetition of the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi and the Hindu Vedas, among others.94 Like Moses, Krishna was placed by his mother in a reed boat and set adrift in a river to be discovered by another woman.95 A century ago, Massey outlined, and Graham recently reiterated, that even the Exodus itself is not a historical event. That the historicity of the Exodus has been questioned is echoed by the lack of any archaeological record, as is reported in Biblical Archaeology Review (“BAR”), September/October 1994.96

Like many biblical characters, Noah is also a myth97, long ago appropriated from the Egyptians, the Sumerians and others, as any sophisticated scholar could demonstrate, and yet we find all sorts of books – some even presumably “channeling” the “ultimate truth” from a mystical, omniscient, omnipresent and eternal being such as Jesus himself – prattling on about a genuine, historical Noah, his extraordinary adventures, and the “Great Flood!”98

Additionally, the “Esther” of the Old Testament Book of Esther is a remake of the Goddess Ishtar, Astarte, Astoreth or Isis, from whom comes “Easter”99 and about whose long and ubiquitous reign little is said in “God’s infallible Word.”100 Per Harwood (Mythology’s Last Gods, 230), “Esther” is best transliterated “Ishtar” and “Mordechai” is “Mardukay.” The Virgin Mother/Goddess/Queen of Heaven motif is found around the globe, long before the Christian era, with Isis, for instance, also being called “Mata–Meri” (“Mother Mary”). As Walker says, “Mari” was the “basic name of the Goddess known to the Chaldeans as Marratu, to the Jews as Marah, to the Persians as Mariham, to the Christians as Mary . . . Semites worshipped an androgynous combination of Goddess and God called Mari–El (Mary–God), corresponding to the Egyptian Meri–Ra, which combined the feminine principle of water with the masculine principle of the sun.”

Even the Hebraic name of God, “Yahweh,” was taken from the Egyptian “IAO.”101

In one of the most notorious of Christian deceptions, in order to convert followers of “Lord Buddha,” the Church canonized him as “St. Josaphat,” which represented a Christian corruption of the buddhistic title, “Bodhisat.”102

The “Disciples” are the Signs of the Zodiac

Moreover, it is no accident that there are 12 patriarchs and 12 disciples, 12 being the number of the astrological signs, or months. Indeed, like the 12 Herculean tasks and the 12 “helpers” of Horus, Jesus’ 12 disciples are symbolic for the zodiacal signs and do not depict any literal figures who played out a drama upon the earth circa 30 C.E. The disciples can be shown to have been an earlier deity/folkloric hero/constellation.103 Peter is easily revealed to be a mythological character104, while Judas has been said to represent Scorpio, “the backbiter,” the time of year when the sun’s rays are weakening and the sun appears to be dying.105 James, “brother of Jesus” and “brother of the Lord,” is equivalent to Amset, brother of Osiris and brother of the Lord.106 Massey says “Taht–Matiu was the scribe of the gods, and in Christian art Matthew is depicted as the scribe of the gods, with an angel standing near him, to dictate the gospel.”107 Even the apostle Paul is a compilation of several characters: The Old Testament Saul, Apollonius of Tyana and the Greek demigod Orpheus.108

Was Jesus an Essene Master? 109

As regards Jesus being an Essene according to “secret” Dead Sea Scrolls, even before the discovery of the scrolls, over the centuries there has been much speculation to this effect, but Massey skillfully argued that many of Jesus’ presumed teachings were either in contradiction to or were non–existent in Essene philosophy.110 The Essenes did not believe in corporeal resurrection, nor did they believe in a carnalized messiah. They did not accept the historicity of Jesus. They were not followers of the Hebrew Bible, or its prophets, or the concept of the original fall that must produce a savior. Massey further points out that the Essenes were teetotalers and ate to live rather than the other way around. Compared to this, the assumed Essene Jesus appears to be a glutton and drunkard. Also, whereas according to Josephus the Essenes abhorred the swearing of oaths, Jesus was fond of “swearing unto” his disciples.111 While many Essenic doctrines are included in the New Testament, the list of disparities between the Dead Sea Scroll Essenes and their alleged great master Jesus goes on.112

Qumran is Not an Essene Community

It should also be noted that there is another debate as to whether or not Qumran, the site traditionally associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, was an Essene community. In BAR, previously cited, it is reported that archaeological finds indicate Qumran was not an Essene community but was possibly a waystation for travelers and merchants crossing the Dead Sea. In BAR, it has also been hypothesized that the fervent tone and warrior–stance of some of the scrolls unearthed near Qumran belie any Essene origin and indicate a possible attribution to Jewish Zealots instead. In Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, Norman Golb makes a very good case that the Dead Sea Scrolls were not written by any Essene scribes but were a collection of tomes from various libraries that were secreted in caves throughout eastern Israel by Jews fleeing the Roman armies during the First Revolt of 70 A.D. Golb also hypothesizes that Qumran itself was a fortress, not a monastery. In any case, it is impossible to equate the “Teacher of Righteousness” found in any scrolls with Jesus Christ.

Was the New Testament Composed by Therapeuts?

In 1829 Rev. Taylor adeptly made the case that the entire Gospel story was already in existence long before the beginning of the Common Era and was probably composed by the monks at Alexandria called “Therapeuts” in Greek and “Essenes” in Egyptian, both names meaning “healers.”113 This theory has stemmed in part from the statement of early church father Eusebius, who, in a rare moment of seeming honesty, “admitted . . . that the canonical Christian gospels and epistles were the ancient writings of the Essenes or Therapeutae reproduced in the name of Jesus.”114 Taylor also opines that “the travelling Egyptian Therapeuts brought the whole story from India to their monasteries in Egypt, where, some time after the commencement of the Roman monarchy, it was transmuted in Christianity.”115 In addition, Wheless evinces that one can find much of the fable of “Jesus Christ” in the Book of Enoch116, which predated the supposed advent of the Jewish master by hundreds of years.117 According to Massey, it was the “pagan” Gnostics – who included members of the Essene/Therapeut and Nazarene118 brotherhoods, among others – who actually carried to Rome the esoteric (gnostic) texts containing the Mythos, upon which the numerous gospels, including the canonical four, were based. Wheless says, “Obviously, the Gospels and other New Testament booklets, written in Greek and quoting 300 times the Greek Septuagint, and several Greek Pagan authors, as Aratus, and Cleanthes, were written, not by illiterate Jewish peasants, but by Greek–speaking ex–Pagan Fathers and priests far from the Holy Land of the Jews.”119 Mead averred, “We thus conclude that the autographs of our four Gospels were most probably written in Egypt, in the reign of Hadrian.”120

Conclusion

As Walker said, “Scholars’ efforts to eliminate paganism from the Gospels in order to find a historical Jesus have proved as hopeless as searching for a core in an onion.” The “gospel” story of Jesus is not a factual portrayal of a historical “master” who walked the earth 2,000 years ago. It is a myth built upon other myths and god–men, who in turn were personifications of the ubiquitous sun-god mythos.

“The Christ of the gospels is in no sense an historical personage or a supreme model of humanity, a hero who strove, and suffered, and failed to save the world by his death. It is impossible to establish the existence of an historical character even as an impostor. For such an one the two witnesses, astronomical mythology and gnosticism, completely prove an alibi. The Christ is a popular lay–figure that never lived, and a lay–figure of Pagan origin; a lay–figure that was once the Ram and afterwards the Fish; a lay–figure that in human form was the portrait and image of a dozen different gods.” –– Gerald Massey

______________________________

Footnotes:

1.  In the ‘80s this controversy erupted once again when GA Wells published Did Jesus Exist? and later The Historical Evidence for Jesus, both of which sought to prove that Jesus is a nonhistorical character. An attempt to repudiate Wells was made by Ian Wilson in Jesus: The Evidence, an entire book written to establish that Jesus did exist. (There is a chapter titled, “Did Jesus Even Exist?,” which in itself immediately places a possibly hitherto unknown doubt in the reader’s mind.) It should be noted that no such book would be needed if the existence of Jesus Christ as a historical figure were a proven fact accepted by all.

 

2.  As regards the work of Erich von Daniken, Zecharia Sitchin and others, it should be understood that few of the stories of god-men can be taken literally to reveal actual superhuman “masters” or alien presences and influences. Most of these characters are, to learned mythologists, clearly myths. (See below)

 

3.  “Evemerism,” named after Evemeras, a 4th Century B.C.E. Greek philosopher who developed the idea that, rather than being mythological creatures as was accepted by the reigning intellectuals, the gods of old were in fact historical characters, kings, emperors and heroes whose exploits were then deified. Evemerists have put forth a great deal of literature attempting to prove that Jesus was a great Jewish reformer and revolutionary who threatened the status quo and thus had to be put to death. Unfortunately for historicizers, no historian of his purported time even noticed this “great reformer.” In Ancient History of the God Jesus, Dujardin states, “This doctrine [Evemerism] is nowadays discredited except in the case of Jesus. No scholar believes that Osiris or Jupiter or Dionysus was an historical person promoted to the rank of a god, but exception is made only in favour of Jesus. . . .It is impossible to rest the colossal work of Christianity on Jesus, if he was a man.” The standard Christian response to the Evemerists has been that no such Jesus, stripped of his miracles and other supernatural attributes, could ever “have been adored as a god or even been saluted as the Messiah of Israel.” (Dujardin) This response is quite accurate: No man could have caused such a hullabaloo and hellish fanaticism, the product of which has been the unending spilling of blood. The crazed “inspiration” that has kept the Church afloat merely confirms the mythological origins of this tale. “The general assumption concerning the canonical gospels is that the historic element was the kernel of the whole, and that the fables accreted round it; whereas the mythos, being pre–extant, proves the core of the matter was mythical, and it follows that the history is incremental. . . . It was the human history that accreted round the divinity, and not a human being who became divine.” (Massey, The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ, henceforth, “MC”) The bottom line is that when one removes all the elements of those preceding deities and myths that contributed to the formation of this Jewish god–man – which is what Evemerists insist on doing – there is nothing historical left to point to. As Massey says, “. . . a composite likeness of twenty different persons merged in one . . . is not anybody.” (MC)

 

4.  “Those who denied the humanity of Christ were the first class of professing Christians, and not only first in order of time, but in dignity of character, in intelligence, and in moral influence.” (Taylor) While those who held onto the millennia–old gnostic Mythos of Christ preceded the carnalizers, or sarkolaters (those who made Christ into flesh), having long–established rituals and doctrines, it was they who were accused of being heretics by their younger, ignorant, carnalizing cousins, who were in reality the true heretics. Taylor: “The deniers of the humanity of Christ, or, in a word, professing Christians, who denied that any such man as Jesus Christ ever existed at all, but who took the name Jesus Christ to signify only an abstraction, or prosopopæia, the principle of Reason personified; and who understood the whole gospel story to be a sublime allegory . . . these were the first, and (it is not dishonour to Christianity to pronounce them) the best and most rational Christians.”

 

5.  Rev. Robert Taylor, The Diegesis. Rev. Taylor was an English clergyman widely known for his “heretical” sermons, which he began to deliver after discovering, through a superior classical education, that Christ was a mythological character. He was twice imprisoned in England in the 1820’s for “blasphemy.” Taylor was one of the early “freethinkers,” although he maintained he was a “Deist,” and, therefore, not an atheist. Taylor suffered tremendous persecution for his stance, yet from his prison cell, he composed The Diegesis, a remarkable and scholarly dissertation of the highest quality.

 

6.  Ibid.

 

7.  With acknowledgment to Randel Helms, author of Gospel Fictions.

 

8.  The Origin and Evolution of Religion by Albert Churchward.

 

9.  Forgery in Christianity by Joseph Wheless: “As said by the great critic, Salomon Reinach, ‘With the exception of Papias, who speaks of a narrative by Mark, and a collection of sayings of Jesus, no Christian writer of the first half of the second century (i.e., up to 150 A.D.) quotes the Gospels or their reputed authors.’” In The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You to Read, John Remsburg states: “The Four Gospels were unknown to the early Christian Fathers. Justin Martyr, the most eminent of the early Fathers, wrote about the middle of the second century. His writings in proof of the divinity of Christ demanded the use of these Gospels had they existed in his time. He makes more than 300 quotations from the books of the Old Testament, and nearly one hundred from the Apocryphal books of the New Testament; but none from the four Gospels. Rev. Giles says: ‘The very names of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are never mentioned by him (Justin) – do not occur once in all his writings.’” In A Short History of the Bible, Keeler says, “The books [canonical gospels] are not heard of till 150 A.D., that is, till Jesus had been dead nearly a hundred and twenty years. No writer before 150 A.D. makes the slightest mention of them.”

 

10.  Wheless quotes the Catholic Encyclopedia: “Enterprising spirits responded to this natural craving by pretended gospels full of romantic fables, and fantastic and striking details; their fabrications were eagerly read and accepted as true by common folk who were devoid of any critical faculty and who were predisposed to believe what so luxuriously fed their pious curiosity. Both Catholics and Gnostics were concerned in writing these fictions. The former had no motive other than that of a PIOUS FRAUD.” (NB: “C.E.” denotes “Common Era” and is equivalent to “A.D.,” whereas “B.C.E.” denotes “Before the Common Era” and is equivalent to “B.C.” )

 

11.  Wheless, op cit. Mangasarian states: “The church historian, Mosheim, writes that, ‘The Christian Fathers deemed it a pious act to employ deception and fraud.’ [Ecclesiastical Hist., Vol. I, p. 347.] Again, he says: ‘The greatest and most pious teachers were nearly all of them infected with this leprosy.’ Will not some believer tell us why forgery and fraud were necessary to prove the historicity of Jesus. . . . Another historian, Milman, writes that, ‘Pious fraud was admitted and avowed by the early missionaries of Jesus.’ ‘It was an age of literary frauds,’ writes Bishop Ellicott, speaking of the times immediately following the alleged crucifixion of Jesus. Dr. Giles declares that, ‘There can be no doubt that great numbers of books were written with no other purpose than to deceive.’ And it is the opinion of Dr. Robertson Smith that, ‘There was an enormous floating mass of spurious literature created to suit party views.’”

 

12.  Wheless: “The clerical confessions of lies and frauds in the ponderous volumes of the Catholic Encyclopedia alone suffice . . . to wreck the Church and to destroy utterly the Christian religion. . . . The Church exists mostly for wealth and self–aggrandizement; to quit paying money to the priests would kill the whole scheme in a couple of years. This is the sovereign remedy.”

 

13.  In one of his works, Eusebius provides this handy chapter entitled: “How it may be Lawful and Fitting to use Falsehood as Medicine, and for the Benefit of those who Want to be Deceived.” (Wheless) Wheless also calls Justin Martyr, Eusebius and Tertullian “three luminous liars.” Keeler: “The early Christian fathers were extremely ignorant and superstitious; and they were singularly incompetent to deal with the supernatural.”

 

14.  Wheless. “If the pious Christians, confessedly, committed so many and so extensive forgeries and frauds to adapt these popular Jewish fairy–tales of their God and holy Worthies to the new Christian Jesus and his Apostles, we need feel no surprise when we discover these same Christians forging outright new wonder–tales of their Christ under the fiction of the most noted Christian names and in the guise of inspired Gospels, Epistles, Acts and Apocalypses. . . . Half a hundred of false and forged Apostolic ‘Gospels of Jesus Christ,’ together with more numerous other ‘Scripture’ forgeries, was the output, so far as known now, of the lying pens of the pious Christians of the first two centuries of the Christian ‘Age of Apocryphal Literature’ . . . ‘Almost every one of the Apostles had a Gospel fathered upon him by one early sect or another.’ . . .If the Gospel tales were true, why should God need pious lies to give them credit? Lies and forgeries are only needed to bolster up falsehood. . . But Jesus Christ must needs be propagated by lies upon lies; and what better proof of his actuality than to exhibit letters written by him in his own handwriting? The ‘Little Liars of the Lord’ were equal to the forgery of the signature of their God – false letters in his name, as above cited from that exhaustless mine of clerical falsities, the Catholic Encyclopedia [C.E.] . . . The forged New Testament booklets and the foolish writings of the Fathers, are the sole ‘evidence’ we have for the alleged facts and doctrines of our most holy Faith, as is admitted by C.E.”

 

15.  The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, by Barbara Walker, p. 471. Rev. Taylor, in The Diegesis, reports a slightly different version of Leo X’s admission: “It was well known how profitable this fable of Christ has been to us.” (footnote, p. 35.)

 

16.  Massey, MC: “. . . It was the Gnostics who had faithfully preserved the true traditions. It was they who continued the mythos intact from Egypt; they who made the images in the Christian iconography, and reproduced the Iao–Chnubis and the Kamite Horus on the talismanic stones and the catacombs of Rome . . . “

 

17.  “The entire ‘Pauline group’ is the same forged class . . . says E.B. [Encyclopedia Biblica] . . .’With respect to the canonical Pauline Epistles, . . .. there are none of them by Paul; neither fourteen, nor thirteen, nor nine or eight, nor yet even the four so long “universally” regarded as unassailable. They are all, without distinction, pseudographia (false–writings, forgeries). . . ‘ They are thus all uninspired anonymous church forgeries for Christ’s sweet sake!” (Wheless)

 

18.  Walker: “The most ‘historical’ figure in the Gospels was Pontius Pilate, to whom Jesus was presented as ‘king’ of the Jews and simultaneously as a criminal deserving the death penalty for ‘blasphemy’ because he called himself Christ, Son of the Blessed. . . . This alleged crime was no real crime. Eastern provinces swarmed with self–styled Christs and Messiahs, calling themselves Sons of god and announcing the end of the world. None of them was executed for ‘blasphemy.’” Massey (MC) avers: “The great judge of the dead in Amenti [Egyptian place of afterlife] was designated the Rhat (Eg.), whence the Greek Rhadamanthus. The Rhat with the letter L instead of R is the Lat, and with the masculine article Pi, becomes Pilate, for the judge in Amenti.” Mangasarian states: “A Roman judge, while admitting that he finds no guilt in Jesus deserving of death, is nevertheless represented as handing him over to the mob to be killed, after he has himself scourged him. No Roman judge could have behaved as this Pilate is reported to have behaved toward an accused person on trial for his life.” As to the “Acts of Pilate,” an “apocryphal” and spurious document that purports to relate the trial of Jesus before Pilate, in accordance with the canonical gospel accounts but with greater detail, Mead relates that a scholar named Rendel Harris opined that the scenes in the “Acts” were directly lifted from the Iliad: “. . . Pilate has been turned into Achilles, . . . Joseph is the good old Priam, begging the body of Hector, and the the whole story is based upon the dramatic passages of the twenty–fourth book of the Iliad.” (Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?) Jacolliot evinces, “ . . . the Iliad of Homer is nothing but an echo, an enfeebled souvenir of the Ramayana, a Hindoo poem in which Rama goes at the head of his allies to recover his wife, Sita, who had been carried off by the King of Ceylon.”

 

19.  Massey, ibid., states: “It is demonstrable that Herod is a form of the Apophis serpent called the enemy of the sun. In Syriac Herod is a red dragon. Herod in Hebrew signifies a terror. Her (Eg.) is to terrify, and herrut (Eg.) is the snake, or typical reptile.”

 

20.  Ancient History of the God Jesus by Edouard Dujardin, p. 33.

 

21.  Ibid., p. 36.

 

22.  “Is it conceivable that a preacher of Jesus could go throughout the world to convert people to the teachings of Jesus, as Paul did, without ever quoting a

single one of his sayings? Had Paul known that Jesus had preached a sermon, or formulated a prayer, or said many inspired things about the here and the hereafter, he could not have helped quoting, now and then, from the words of his master. If Christianity could have been established without a knowledge of the teachings of Jesus, why then, did Jesus come to teach, and why were his teachings preserved by divine inspiration? . . . If Paul knew of a miracle–working Jesus, one who could feed the multitude with a few loaves and fishes, who could command the grave to open, who could cast out devils, and cleanse the land of the foulest disease of leprosy, who could, and did, perform many other wonderful works to convince the unbelieving generation of his divinity – is it conceivable that either intentionally or inadvertently he would have never once referred to them in all his preaching? . . . The position, then, that there is not a single saying of Jesus in the gospels which is quoted by Paul in his many epistles is unassailable, and certainly fatal to the historicity of the gospel Jesus.” (Mangasarian) Massey: “The ‘sayings’ [logia] were common property in the mysteries ages before they were ever written down.” (MC) Meaning they were not original with Jesus, also leading one to conclude that “Paul” and crew were not initiates into the mysteries, since they were ignorant of these ages–old logia.

 

22a.  “. . . the New Testament is not a single book but a collection of groups of books and single volumes, which were at first and even long afterwards circulated separately. . . . the Gospels are found in any and every order. . . . Egyptian tradition places Jn. [John] first among the Gospels.” (Mead, The Gospels and the Gospel) See History of the Christian Religion to the Year Two Hundred by Judge Charles Waite, who essentially proves the 170–180 date, and Supernatural Religion by Walter Richard Cassels, for the dating of the gospels and Acts to the last quarter of the second century. The simple fact is that the gospels do not appear anywhere until that time, as Cassels shows quite thoroughly in his scholarly, 1100–page exegesis. Cassels essentially proves that Justin Martyr used not the canonical gospels but older texts, including the Gospels of the Hebrews, and that Martyr’s “Memoirs of the Apostles,” rather than representing the canonical gospels, constituted a single text, like the Acts of the Apostles, that has since perished.

 

23.  Wheless: “Both genealogies are false and forged lists of mostly fictitious names.”

 

24.  Wheless: “Like the whole ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ the [Lord’s] Prayer is a composite of ancient sayings of the Scripture strung together to form it, as the marginal cross–references show throughout.” We might add that the “Scripture” is not only from the Old Testament but is part of the ancient Mythos/Ritual. Many of the concepts within the Sermon, which is held up by Christian defenders as the core of Jesus’ teachings and a reflection of his compassion, can also be found in the Vedas as spoken by the compassionate Krishna, in the doctrines of the Therapeuts, and in the “Dhammapada” attributed to the equally compassionate Buddha. There is nothing new here that would merit such attention as has been given this Jesus character. Also, there is apparently within the Egyptian Hermetic or Trismegistic tradition a discourse called “The Secret Sermon on the Mount,” so it would seem that “Sermons on the Mount” were also a common occurrence within the Mythos and Ritual. (Mead, Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?)

 

25.  There have been “Passions” of many gods. Dujardin: “Other scholars have been impressed by the resemblance between the Passion of Jesus as told in the gospels and the ceremonies of the popular fêtes, such as the Sacæa in Babylon, the festival of Kronos in Greece, and the Saturnalia in Italy. . . . If the stories of the Passions of Dionysus, Attis, Osiris and Demeter are the transpositions of cult dramas, and not actual events, it can hardly be otherwise with the Passion of Jesus.” (See footnote 93 below.) As concerns the accounts of the resurrection, Graves states, “With respect to the persons who first visited the sepulchre, Matthew states that it was Mary Magdalene and another Mary; but Luke says it was ‘Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women;’ while, according to John (and he virtually reiterates it), Mary Magdalene went alone. It will be observed, then, that the first ‘inspired’ and ‘infallible’ witness testifies there were two witnesses; and the second that there were four; and the third witness declares there was but one. What beautiful harmony! No court in the civilized world would accept such discordant testimony!”

 

26.  In the canonical gospels, Jesus himself makes many illogical contradictions concerning some of his most important teachings. First, he repeatedly states the he is sent only “to the lost sheep of Israel,” and forbids his disciples to preach to the Gentiles. Then he is made to say, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” (It is also interesting to note that the Trinity was not adopted by the Church until the 4th century, long after “Jesus’” purported statements concerning it. These proselytizers, then, were awfully slow in their preaching of this doctrine!) Next, Jesus claims that the end of the world is imminent and warns his disciples to be prepared at a moment’s notice. Then he tells them to build a church from which to preach his message. Now, if the end of the world is coming, why should they build anything? We know that this “prophecy” didn’t happen; nor has Jesus returned “soon,” as was his promise. Even if he had been real, he would not have been worthy of listening to. “The Gentile Church of Christ has therefore no divine sanction; was never contemplated nor created by Jesus Christ. The Christian Church is thus founded on a forgery of pretended words of the pretended Christ.” (Wheless) “Again, ‘several of the reported sayings of Jesus clearly bear the impress of a time he did not live to see.’” (Mead)

 

27.  Wheless: “. . . the Hebrew and Greek religious forgers were so ignorant or careless of the principles of criticism, that they ‘interpolated’ their fraudulent new matter into old manuscripts without taking care to erase or suppress the previous statements glaringly contradicted by the new interpolations.” The Church forgery mill did not limit itself to mere writings but for centuries cranked out thousands of phony “relics” of its “Lord,” “Apostles” and “Saints.” The Shroud of Turin, among innumerable others, is counted in this group.”There were at least 26 ‘authentic’ burial shrouds scattered throughout the abbeys of Europe, of which the Shroud of Turin is just one. . . .The Shroud of Turin is one of the many relics manufactured for profit during the Middle Ages. Shortly after the Shroud emerged it was declared a fake by the bishop who discovered the artist. This is verified by recent scientific investigation which found paint in the image areas. The Shroud of Turin is also not consistent with Gospel accounts of Jesus’ burial, which clearly refer to multiple cloths and a separate napkin over his face.” (Freethought Datasheet #5, Atheists United) At one point, a number of churches claimed the one foreskin of Jesus, and there were enough splinters of the “True Cross” that Calvin said the amount of wood would make “a full load for a good ship.” (Walker) The disgraceful list of absurdities and frauds goes on, and, as Pope Leo X claimed, it has been enormously profitable for the Church. And where the fraud failed, fear and force prevailed, as millions were subjected to horrible tortures and murders in the name of the pretended “Prince of Peace,” during an abysmally dark Age of Faith that propelled the world into a state of ignorance.

 

28.  McKlintock and Strong’s Cyclopædia of Theological Literature.

 

29.  Mangasarian. Wheless: “The fact is, that with the exception of this one incongruous forged passage, section 3, the wonder–mongering Josephus makes not the slightest mention of his wonder–working fellow–countryman, Jesus the Christ – though some score of other Joshuas, or Jesuses, are recorded by him, nor does he mention any of his transcendent wonders.”

 

30.  Massey, Mangasarian, Taylor. Zealous defender of the faith Eusebius never mentions the Tacitus passage, nor does anyone else prior to the 15th century C.E. (Taylor)

 

30a.  Who is this King of Glory?, p. 258–9.

 

31.  See Taylor and Wheless for more on the fraudulent nature of these passages. “It has always been unfailing source of astonishment to the historical investigator of Christian beginnings, that there is not a single word from the pen of any Pagan writer of the first century of our era, which can in any fashion be referred to the marvellous story recounted by the Gospel writer. The very existence of Jesus seems unknown.” (Mead, Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?)

 

32.  Gnostic and Historic Christianity by Massey (see below). See also The Diegesis by Rev. Robert Taylor, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves, Pagan Christs by JM Robertson, any works by Hilton Hotema, Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter, and Deceptions and Myths of the Bible by Lloyd Graham. Although some historicizers may glom onto these dates as proof that the research is outdated, this is simply not true. These numbers are provided here to demonstrate that this truth has been known, and has been suppressed by vested interests, for a long time.

 

33.  Graves, p. 15. “‘We cannot,’ says the celebrated Orientalist, Sir William Jones, ‘refuse to the Vedas the honor of an antiquity the most distant.’” (Jacolliot, The Bible in India) Indeed, certain scholars have opined that the Rig Veda contains mention of an astronomical configuration that could only have occurred 90,000 years ago; it true, this would attest that the Veda was recording the experience of someone far too advanced for that period, according to the standardized anthrolopogical perspective, not to mention that the Veda would represent the world’s oldest “historical” recording, although the actual physically extant copies are, obviously, very recent. Ancient scribes India mostly used, as occurs in some places today, leaves to write on, and these were endlessly copied over the thousands of years. As everywhere, knowledge was also passed along orally. This subject opens up the debate as to whether ancient India or Egypt was the progenitor of Western and Middle Eastern culture. Both have claims to extreme antiquity. The question is who came first within the Mythos, Brahma–Krishna or Osiris–Horus? Based on linguistical evidence, many scholars have concluded it was India. However, the ancient Egyptian language is not fully known, nor has the extent of its influence been adequately examined. Walker hypothesizes that “Horus” was “Heruka” of India, indicating that the Horus myth succeeded and was built upon the Indian. The chronology of the Brahmins goes back millions of years, and there has been effort made by such Hare Krishna authors as Thompson and Cremo to push civilization, rather than man’s apelike progenitors, back at least to that period. Obviously, such “Forbidden Archeology” is widely dismissed for seeming lack of solid evidence. What is known is that the Judeo–Christian bible can be found in earlier versions in both countries. Thus, it is the rehash of the well–developed systems and ideologies (Ritual and Mythos) of both nations. (See Jacolliot and Massey.)

 

33a.  Many on this list come from The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Graves. This is not to suggest that all of these god-men characters were utilized in the formation of the Christian myth, as overt contact had not occurred in such places as Mexico or Bermuda. Also, modern orthodoxy does not allow for the dates provided by Graves, i.e., that Quetzalcoatl originates in the 6th B.C.E., a date far too early in the orthodox perspective. However, we utilize this list to demonstrate that the same concepts are found worldwide with and without cultural exchange, because they are derived from the same astrotheological observations. Also, we are in concurrence with the “ancient advanced civilization” theory (“Atlantis”) that would allow for one or more centralized civilizations to have spread throughout the world during a very remote period in protohistory, thus taking with it the well–developed Mythos and Ritual, which would then mutate into the various forms found around the globe.

 

34.  Taylor quotes the letter of Emperor Hadrian (134 C.E.): “The worshippers of Serapis are Christians, and those are devoted to the God Serapis, who (I find) call themselves the bishops of Christ.”

 

35.  Walker: “. . . Later, an unknown Gospel writer inserted the story of doubting Thomas, who insisted on touching Jesus. This was to combat the heretical idea that there was no resurrection in the flesh, and also to subordinate Jerusalem’s municipal god Tammuz (Thomas) to the new savior. Actually, the most likely source of primary Christian mythology was the Tammuz cult in Jerusalem.” The “doubting Thomas” character also finds its place in the Mythos, as the “genius” of the time when the sun is at its weakest (winter solstice). (Taylor)

 

36.  The Sibylline Oracles, books produced over time allegedly by a number of pagan prophetesses called Sibyls, were widely regarded in the ancient world prior to the advent of the Christian era. “The Sibyls are quoted frequently by the early Fathers and Christian writers, Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Clement of Alexandria, etc.” (Catholic Encyclopedia, cited by Wheless) These books or Oracles were often cited by Christians as proof of their religion. For instance, the following is considered a Sibylline Oracle: “With five loaves at the same time, and with two fishes, He shall satisfy five thousand men in the wilderness; And afterwards taking all the fragments that remain, He shall fill twelve baskets to the hope of many. . . .He shall still the winds by His word, and calm the sea as it rages, treading with feet of peace and faith. . . . He shall walk on the waves, He shall release men from disease. He shall raise the dead, and drive away many pains. . .” (Wheless) Although the Christians interpreted this as a prophecy of Christ becoming fulfilled, it is in fact an aspect of the ubiquitous Mythos and was already said of Horus, for one, hundreds of years earlier. It has never referred to an actual man but, once again, is astrotheological. The fact that it purportedly existed prior to the Christian era constitutes proof to those who use logic that the Christians utilized it in creating their Christ character, rather than it acting as a prophecy of their god–man. As they did with other texts, the Christians forged and interpolated many passages into the well–known Oracles in order to cement their fiction and convert followers. It is also amusing to note that the Christians had to resort to despised “pagan” documents for their enterprise, especially since they spent their lives attempting to demonstrate that everything that preceded them was “of the devil.” This then implies that Christianity was also a work of the devil.

 

37.  Pagan Christs by JM Robertson.

 

38.  In Gnostic and Historian Christianity, Massey says, “In . . . Buddhism in Christendom, [author] Mr. Lillie thinks he has found Jesus, the author of Christianity, as one of the Essenes, and a Buddhist! But there is no need of craning one’s neck out of joint in looking to India, or straining in that direction at all, for the origin of that which was Egyptian born and Gnostic bred! Essenism was no new birth of Hindu Buddhism brought to Alexandria about two centuries before our era; and Christianity, whether considered to be mystical or historical, was not derived from Buddhism at any time. They have some things in common, because there is a Beyond to both.” We will add that the Egyptians refined the Mythos in exquisite and overwhelming detail, but linguistical theory has in the past, and now again with the Nostratic theory, traced the origins of Western and Middle Eastern language and culture in large part to India. It is yet difficult to say which came first, Krishna, the predecessor of Buddha, or Osiris–Horus. Certainly Horus was a well–developed savior–god by the time attributed to THE Buddha. There would be no need to build Horus upon Buddha (Egyptian “Putha” or “Ptah”), and it is true that Christianity did not need to rely on the doctrines of Buddhism, having the complete Mythos at hand. However, we do know absolutely that there was cultural exchange between the West/Levant and the Buddhistic world of the Far East prior to the inception of Christianity, in the form of travelers, traders, and monks of the vast brotherhood network, who were constantly exchanging information concerning religion, the esoteric gnosis, and the Mythos and Ritual. Also, it has been suggested that there was at least one group of Brahmanic and Vedic scholars living in the Levant prior to the founding of Christianity. These individuals, who would likely be members of one or more aspects of the brotherhood network, would certainly also be exchanging information about the very ancient Krishna, et al., and contributing to the culture around them. It is not only entirely possible but probable that Hindus ventured to the Levant over the millennia. But they would not have needed to, in order to spread their version of the Mythos, since there were those, such as Alexander the Great, who went to them. Indeed, Louis Jacolliot expertly traces the Judeo–Christian Bible back to India, noting many similarities between the Hindu and Christian priesthoods. (The Bible in India) There are also quite a few similarities between the Catholic and Tibetan Buddhist hierarchies and rituals. The influence from the Far East has come in waves beginning several thousand years ago, and culture may have begun to develop there in in the protohistoric period some 12,000 years ago or more. If the reckonings of maverick Egyptologists are accurate, however, Egypt would have been developing simultaneously with this Indian culture, the origins of both, then, being a possibly much older civilization. There is no question, however, that the archaic Indian language Sanskrit or its Nostratic predecessor has highly influenced many of the Western/Middle Eastern languages. Therefore, there has unquestionably been early and ongoing contact, and with language comes religion. “The ancient peoples of India were Asiatic Ethiopians, and it should not surprise us that they shared common traditions with their brothers in Africa.” (John Jackson, Christianity Before Christ)

 

38a.  Some people have tried to dispute the “virgin” status of Buddha’s mother. However, in the first place, it should be remembered that the “life of the Buddha” does not represent the biography of a person but is an account of a solar hero; thus, the typical solar attribute would be appropriate. In any case, Joseph McCabe relates: “ . . . Mr. Robertson shows from St. Jerome that the Buddhists themselves did call Maya ‘a virgin’ – they believed in a ‘virgin birth’ – and he rightly rejects the statement of Professor Rhys Davids that these Buddhists understood the birth of Buddha quite differently from the Christians because ‘before his descent into his mother’s womb he was a deva.’ That is exactly what Christians say of Jesus.”

 

38b.  See Temple of the Recumbent Buddha for artifacts proving the motif of Buddha and the 12.

 

38.c. Mead, p. 133.

 

38d.  Ibid.

 

38e.  Graves, p. 118.

 

39.  Isis Unveiled by Helena Blavatsky, vol. II, pp. 209, 537–538.

 

40.  Massey, MC, p. 150.

 

40.a.  Mead, p. 134.

 

41.  Walker says, “Of all savior–gods worshipped at the beginning of the Christian era, Osiris may have contributed more details to the evolving Christ figure than any other. Already very old in Egypt, Osiris was identified with nearly every other Egyptian god and was on the way to absorbing them all. He had well over 200 divine names. He was called the Lord of Lords, King of Kings, God of Gods. He was the Resurrection and the Life, the Good Shepherd, Eternity and Everlastingness, the god who ‘made men and women to be born again.’ Budge says, ‘From first to last, Osiris was to the Egyptians the god–man who suffered, and died, and rose again, and reigned eternally in heaven. They believed that they would inherit eternal life, just as he had done. . . . Osiris’s coming was announced by Three Wise Men: the three stars Mintaka, Anilam, and Alnitak in the belt of Orion, which point directly to Osiris’s star in the east, Sirius (Sothis), significator of his birth. . . . Certainly Osiris was a prototypical Messiah, as well as a devoured Host. His flesh was eaten in the form of communion cakes of wheat, the ‘plant of Truth.’ . . . The cult of Osiris contributed a number of ideas and phrases to the Bible. The 23rd Psalm copied an Egyptian text appealing to Osiris the Good Shepherd to lead the deceased to the ‘green pastures’ and ‘still waters’ of the nefer–nefer land, to restore the soul to the body, and to give protection in the valley of the shadow of death (the Tuat). The Lord’s Prayer was prefigured by an Egyptian hymn to Osiris–Amen beginning. ‘O Amen, O Amen, who are in heaven.’ Amen was also invoked at the end of every prayer.”

 

42.  The celestial manger in the Mythos is also thought of as a cave. (Massey) Although Jesus is typically depicted as being born in a manger, early Christian tradition places Jesus’ birth in a cave, like that of many other preceding gods. Walker: “The cave was universally identified with the womb of Mother Earth, the logical place for symbolic birth and regeneration. . . . Like Adonis, Jesus was born of a consecrated temple maiden in the sacred cave of Bethlehem, ‘The House of God.’”

 

43.  Massey, Churchward, et al. Massey (MC) says, “. . . the Star in the East will afford undeniable data for showing the mythical and celestial origin of the gospel history. When the divine child is born, the wise men or magi declare that they have seen his star in the east. The wise men are identified as the Three Kings of other legends who are not to be derived from the canonical gospels. The three kings or three solar representatives are as ancient as the male triad that was first typified when the three regions were established as heaven, earth, and nether–world, from which the triad bring their gifts. . . When the birthplace was in the sign of the Bull [6,000 years ago], the Star in the East that arose to announce the birth of the babe was Orion, which is therefore called the star of Horus. That was once the star of the three kings; for the ‘three kings’ is still a name of three stars in Orion’s belt . . . “

 

44.  Like Jesus, Horus has no history between the ages of 12 and 30. “And the mythos alone will account for the chasm which is wide and deep enough to engulf a supposed history of 18 years.” (Massey, MC) There exists a very old Egyptian papyrus dated to 75 C.E. but based on an older document, which contains a story about the “Son of Osiris” (i.e., the “Son of God”) that parallels in a number of details the gospel narratives. The Son of God is claimed to have wondrous powers and to have outwitted all of the teachers in the Temple of Ptah. In the papyrus is also related a tale of two dead men that closely resembles the biblical fable of Dives and Lazarus (Lk. 16:19–31). (Mead)

 

45.  Massey: “Horus in Egypt had been a fish from time immemorial, and when the equinox entered the sign of Pisces, Horus, was portrayed as Ichthys with the fish sign of over his head.” Dujardin: “The patriarch Joshua, who was plainly an ancient god of Palestine and bore the same name as the god of Christianity, is called the son of Nun, which signifies ‘son of the fish.’” Walker: “The fish symbol of the yonic Goddess was so revered throughout the Roman empire that Christian authorities insisted on taking it over, with extensive revision of myths to deny its earlier female–genital meanings.” Wheless: “The fish anagram was an ancient Pagan symbol of fecundity . . .”

 

46.  Churchward, op cit., p. 365. See also The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You to Read, pp. 15–16.

 

47.  Churchward, ibid., p. 397. See also The Egyptian Book of the Dead by Massey, pp. 13 and 64; MC.

 

48.  Churchward. Massey, MC: “It was the gnostic art that reproduced the Hathor–Meri and Horus of Egypt as the Virgin and child–Christ of Rome . . . .You poor idiotai [idiots], said the Gnostics [to the early Christians], you have mistaken the mysteries of old for modern history, and accepted literally all that was only meant mystically.”

 

49.  Walker: “The cave of the Vatican belonged to Mithra until 376 A.D., when a city prefect suppressed the cult of the rival Savior and seized the shrine in the name of Christ, on the very birthday of the pagan god, December 25.” Shmuel Golding, in The Book Your Church: “Paul says, ‘They drank from that spiritual rock and that rock was Christ’ (I Cor. 10:4). These are identical words to those found in the Mithraic scriptures, except that the name Mithra is used instead of Christ. The Vatican hill in Rome that is regarded as sacred to Peter, the Christian rock, was already sacred to Mithra. Many Mithraic remains have been found there. The merging of the worship of Attis into that of Mithra, then later into that of Jesus, was effected almost without interruption.”

 

50.  Robertson. Wheless: “Mithraism is one of the oldest religious systems on earth, as it dates from the dawn of history before the primitive Iranian race divided into sections which became Persian and Indian . . . When in 65–63 B.C., the conquering armies of Pompey were largely converted by its high precepts, they brought it with them into the Roman Empire. Mithraism spread with great rapidity throughout the Empire, and it was adopted, patronized and protected by a number of the Emperors up to the time of Constantine.” Of Mithraism, the Catholic Encyclopedia states, as related by Wheless: “The fathers conducted the worship. The chief of the fathers, a sort of pope, who always lived at Rome, was called ‘Pater Patratus.”‘

 

51.  Taylor: “‘That Popery has borrowed its principal ceremonies and doctrines from the rituals of Paganism,’ is a fact which the most learned and orthodox of the established church have most strenuously maintained and most convincingly demonstrated.”

 

52.  The Eucharist, or the sharing of the god’s blood and body, has been a sacred ritual within many ancient mystery religions and is part of the Mythos and Ritual. In a standard ritual that was practiced around the world, and which continues in some places, participants in the ritual actually ate and drank the “god’s” body and blood, which was in reality that of a sacrificed human (king) or animal. The Christian form of the Eucharist is very similar to the ritual that was practiced as part of the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, in detail, as is outlined by Taylor. The Eleusinian Eucharist honored both Ceres, goddess of wheat, and Bacchus/Dionysus, god of the vine. The Christians also adopted the Bacchanal symbol IHS (Greek) or IES – Iesu/Jesus. These letters stood for the sun. (See below.) “Mr. Higgins observes, ‘The whole paschal supper (the Lord’s supper with the Christians) was in fact a festival of joy to celebrate the passage of the sun across the equinox of spring.’” (Graves)

 

53.  At this point, the following needs to be addressed: Jesus believers distinguish their god–man from all these others by claiming a historical framework, which gives more credence to their “Savior” being the “right” one. We contend that this is precisely why the sungod mythos was carnalized or made historical in the first place. However, let us pretend that Jesus was historical. Followers of Krishna also claim he was historical, yet his advent predates that of Jesus by hundreds to thousands of years. If we assume both are historical, and both are teaching nearly the identical thing, why should we not go to the source and become Krishna followers? Here we see clearly the ugly head of cultural bigotry, when the Christians claim their god–man superior to one already in existence that is virtually identical. Why not go with Krishna? Because he was not of the “right” ethnicity. The question is moot, however, since both characters are mythological and, by the arguments of the Christians, should then be dismissed. However, we must not dismiss the Mythos upon which they are formulated, as it is true revelation of the workings of the cosmos.

 

53a.  As with “Buddha,” a number of people have disputed the “virgin” status of Krishna’s mother. As Joseph McCabe says, “The orthodox legend of Krishna is that he was born of a married woman, Devaki; but like Maya, Buddha’s mother, she was considered to have had a miraculous conception. . . . Thus one of the familiar religious emblems of India was the statue of the virgin mother (as the Hindus repute her) Devaki and her divine son Krishna, an incarnation of the great god Vishnu. Christian writers have held that this model was borrowed from Christianity, but, as Mr. Robertson observes, the Hindus had far earlier been in communication with Egypt and were more likely to borrow the model of Isis and Horus.”

 

54.  The Book Your Church . . . p. 185. See also Taylor.

 

54a.  Graves, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors: “And we have the statement from Mr. Higgins, that the same assortment of spices (with the gold) constituted the materials offered as gifts to the sun, in Persia more than three thousand years ago; and likewise in Arabia near the same era.”

 

55.  It should be noted that the terrible story of Herod killing the infants as portrayed in Matthew is not found in any histories of the day, including Josephus, who does otherwise expose Herod’s real abuses. The “slaughter of the infants” is yet another part of the standard Mythos. This story is a rehash of the Krishna tale: “[The tyrant Kansa] ordained the massacre in all his states, of all the children of the male sex, born during the night of the birth of Christna. . .” (Jacolliot)

 

55a.  Graves, p. 110.

 

56.  Jacolliot, p. 250.

 

57.  Ibid., p. 306.

 

58.  The Book Your Church; Graves; Taylor. The crucifixion of the god–man between two “thieves” is an element of the Mythos, and is found in a number of sungod traditions that predate the Christian myth. “Anup on one side of Horus, and Aan on the other, are the two thieves on either hand of the Kamite Christ upon the cross at Easter.” (Massey, MC) Anup and Aan are also the two “witnesses” of Horus, and are the predecessors of the two Johns who are Jesus’ witnesses. (Churchward, Massey, ibid.)

 

59.  Blavatsky, Walker, Graves.

 

60.  “At first, Christianity did not hold to the Trinity doctrine. That doctrine developed slowly and did not become officially the creedal fact until C.E. 325.” (Adrian Swindler, The Book Your Church) Walker: “From the earliest ages, the concept of the Great Goddess was a trinity and the model for all subsequent trinities, female, male or mixed. . . .Even though Brahmans evolved a male trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva to play these parts [of Creator, Preserver and Destroyer], Tantric scriptures insisted that the Triple Goddess had created these gods in the first place. . . . The Middle East had many trinities, most originally female. As time went on, one or two members of the triad turned male. The usual pattern was Father–Mother–Son, the Son figure envisioned as a Savior. . . . Among Arabian Christians there was apparently a holy trinity of God, Mary, and Jesus, worshipped as an interchangeable replacement for the Egyptian trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus. . . “ Jacolliot: “The Trinity in Unity, rejected by Moses, became afterwards the foundation of Christian theology, which incontestably acquired it from India.”

 

60a.  Graves.

 

61.  Jacolliot, p. 251. “As we have seen, all these names of Jesus, Jeosuah, Josias, Josué derive from two Sanscrit words Zeus and Jezeus, which signify, one, the Supreme Being, and the other, the Divine Essence. These names, moreover, were common not only amongst the Jews, but throughout the East.” (Ibid., p. 301.)

 

62.  Jacolliot, p. 282.

 

62a.  The “Word” is a very ancient concept and does not originate with Christianity. The term “Logos” is Greek, and it is obvious that the Christian copyists adopted the Word concept directly from the Greeks, whether it be from Plato or applicable to the gods Prometheus and Hermes. However, the Greeks in turn had adopted this idea from more ancient traditions, such as the Indian and Egyptian. Graves states, “. . . the Chinese bible, much older than the Christian’s New Testament, likewise declares, ‘God pronounced the primeval Word, and his own eternal and glorious abode sprang into existence.’ Mr. Guizot, in a note on Gibbon’s work, says, ‘According to the Zend–Avesta (the Persian bible, more than three thousand years old), it is by the Word, more ancient than the world, that Ormuzd created the universe.’ . . . And the ancient Greek writer Amelias, speaking of the God Mercury [Hermes] says, ‘And this plainly was the Logos (the Word), by whom all things were made, he being himself eternal, as Heraclitus would say, . . . He assumed to be with God, and to be God, and in him everything that was made, has its life and being, who, descending into body, and putting on flesh, took the appearance of a man, though still retaining the majesty of his nature.’ Here is ‘the Word made flesh,’ set forth in most explicit terms.”

 

63.  Taylor, The Diegesis, pp. 192–4. Taylor indicates that the following stanza is found in “Potter’s beautiful translation” of Aeschylsus’s play: “Lo, streaming from the fatal tree, His all–atoning blood! Is this the Infinite? ‘Tis he – Prometheus, and a God! Well might the sun in darkness hide, And veil his glories in, When God, the great Prometheus, died, For man, the creature’s sin.” However, this stanza apparently does not appear in modern translations, including Potter’s. It is well–known that the Christians mutilated or destroyed virtually all of the works of ancient Greek and Roman authors, such that we might suspect this stanza has either been removed or obfuscated through mistranslation. On the other hand, it may be a mistake on Taylor’s part or a result of his ambiguous language preceding the passage, or he may have been thinking of another “Prometheus Bound” written after the Christian era, perhaps by Milton. Taylor was in prison when he wrote The Diegesis, thereby having difficulty accessing books, so he is to be excused for errors that invariably creep into anyone’s work.

 

64.  “To get rid of the damning fact that there is no historical basis for their theological fictions, the Christian priesthood have been guilty of the heinous crime of destroying nearly all traces of the concurrent history of the first two centuries of the Christian era. What little of it they have permitted to come down to us, they have so altered and changed, as to destroy its historical value.” (JM Roberts, Esq.) “In some of the ancient Egyptian temples the Christian iconoclasts, when tired of hacking and hewing at the symbolic figures incised in the chambers of imagery, and defacing the most prominent features of the monuments, found they could not dig out the hieroglyphics, and took to covering them over with plaster; and this plaster, intended to hide the meaning and stop the mouth of the stone word, has served to preserve the ancient writings as fresh in hue and sharp in outline as when they were first cut and colored. In a similar manner the temple of ancient religion was invaded and possession gradually gained by connivance of Roman power; and that enduring fortress, not built but quarried out of sold rock, was stuccoed all over the front and made white a–while with its look of brand–newness, and reopened under the sign of another name – that of the carnalized Christ.” (Massey, MC)

 

65.  Wheless, p. 147.

 

66.  Ibid., p. 144.

 

67.  Mangasarian: “The idea of a Son of God is as old as the oldest cult. The sun is the son of heaven in all primitive faiths. The physical sun becomes in the course of evolution, the Son of Righteousness, or the Son of God, and heaven is personified as the Father on High. The halo around the head of Jesus, the horns of the older deities, the rays of light radiating from the heads of Hindu and Pagan gods are incontrovertible evidence that all gods were at one time – the sun in heaven.”

 

68.  Jordan Maxwell, The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You to Read, Pagan and Christian Creeds, by Carpenter, The Diegesis by Taylor. See also Massey, Churchward, Hotema, Graves, et al.

 

69.  The logical question arises: Why, if Jesus is a historical character, are there are presently two dates for both Christmas and Easter? This purportedly well–known character, who set the world on fire, has no birthdate whatsoever, and the “historical” references and genealogies found in the gospel accounts differ from each other. The gospels are not history at all but a retelling of the Mythos. The historical Jesus is a phantom. “These, which cannot both be historical, are based on the two birthdays of the double Horus in Egypt.” (Massey, as related by Jackson) In addition, early Christian “doctors” were constantly contradicting themselves as to when exactly “the Lord” died or “ascended to heaven” after “he” was resurrected. Two of the most powerful early bishops, Irenaeus and Papias opined that Christ lived to be very old, “flatly denying as ‘heresy’ the Gospel stories as to his crucifixion at about thirty years of age.” (Wheless)

 

70.  See above. In “The Truth about Jesus, M. Mangasarian states: “The selection of the twenty–fifth of December as his birthday is not only an arbitrary one, but that date, having been from time immemorial dedicated to the Sun, the inference is that the Son of God and the Sun of heaven enjoying the same birthday, were at one time identical beings. The fact that Jesus’ death was accompanied with the darkening of the Sun, and that the date of his resurrection is also associated with the position of the Sun at the time of the vernal equinox, is a further intimation that we have in the story of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, an ancient and nearly universal Sun–myth, instead of verifiable historical events.”

 

71.  Many of the sungods, including Horus, Buddha and Krishna, are depicted with haloes, hundreds to thousands of years before it became fashionable in Christianity.

 

71a.  Jordan Maxwell, “The Naked Truth.”

 

72.  Mangasarian: “Like the dogmas of the Trinity, the virgin birth, and the resurrection, the sign of the cross or the cross as an emblem or a symbol was borrowed from the more ancient faiths of Asia.” Walker: “Early Christians even repudiated the cross because it was pagan. . . . Early images of Jesus represented him not on a cross, but in the guise of the Osirian or Hermetic ‘Good Shepherd,’ carrying a lamb.” In Christianity, the original occupant of the cross was a lamb, not a man. The man hanging on the cross did not occur until the 7th cent. C.E. “The stave, stake, prop or stay of the suffering sun was the Stauros, which was primarily a stake for supporting, shaped as a cross.” (Massey, MC) This image can be found in crosses that have a circle on them. Taylor: “On a Phoenician medal found in the ruins of Citium, and engraved in Dr. Clarke’s Travels, and proved by him to be Phoenician, are inscribed not only the cross, but the rosary, or string of beads, attached to it, together with the identical Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world.” Graves: “. . . the consecrated twenty–fifth of March is also the day marked in our calendars as the date of the conception and annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.” March 25th was considered the end of the sun’s passing through the vernal equinox, when the sun was “resurrected,” i.e., the day was now longer than the night.

 

73.  “The picture of the New Beginning commonly presented is Rembrandt–like in tone. The whole world around Judea lay in the shadow of outer darkness, when suddenly there was a great light seen at the centre of all, and the face of the startled universe was illuminated by an apparition of the child–Christ lying in the lap of Mary. Such was the dawn of Christianity, in which the Light of the World had come to it at last! That explanation is beautifully simple for the simple–minded; but the picture is purely false – or, in sterner words, it is entirely false.” (Massey, G&HC) Jacolliot: “We have repudiated Greek and Roman mythologies with disdain. Why, then, admit with respect the mythology of the Jews? Ought the miracles of Jehovah to impress us more that those of Jupiter? . . . I have much more respect for the Greek Jupiter [Zeus] than for the God of Moses; for if he gives some examples not of the purest morality, at least he does not flood his altar with streams of human blood.”

 

74.  As it had with so many preceding purveyors of wisdom and ideologies, the Church ripped off both Aristotle and Plato, presenting their known accomplishments in philosophy. The “Logos” is pure Platonism, which refined the “Word” aspect of the extant Mythos, the Logos in Greece being Hermes, who is also found in Egypt as the “Trismegistus.” Cardinal Palavicino is quoted as saying, “Without Aristotle we should be without many Articles of Faith.” It is amusing to consider that the omniscient “Lord,” who came to deliver a “New Dispensation,” needed the writings of Aristotle to determine doctrine for his Church.

 

74a.  As concerns the “Jesus Lived in India” theory by Kersten, et al., it is claimed that in Kashmir is a tomb of a traveling prophet named “Yuz Asaf,” which is an Arab name that some have attempted to link to “Jesus.” Notovich claimed to have found a text in Tibet about the “Life of Saint Issa.” It is also claimed that the tombs of “Moses” and “Thomas” are in India. And there are several places where the “Virgin Mary” purportedly rested and/or died. It should be noted that there were innumerable “traveling prophets” throughout the ancient world, all spouting the same parables and platitudes and doing the standard bag of magic tricks, as do the countless Indian yogis of today. It is difficult to believe that the Indians or Tibetans would be very impressed by such stories, since they have had numerous miraculous god-men of their own. It has also been claimed by the Athenians that the olive tree alive today on the Acropolis was miraculously planted by the goddess Athena, an act for which she was honored by having that city–state named after her; and, there are numberless “footprints” of this Buddha and that throughout Buddhist countries. In addition, in the Notovich text concerning the “Life of Saint Issa,” which is of late date, it says at the very beginning, “This is what is related on this subject by the merchants who have come from Israel,” thus demonstrating both that it is not an eyewitness account of a visit by the Jewish god–man and that there was an extensive trading and brotherhood network which would readily allow for such stories to spread. Again, all around the globe are stories of where this god or that set foot, did miracles, was born or died. This is standard in the world of mythmaking, and it is not an indication or evidence of historicity.

 

75.  The Egyptian Book of the Dead by Massey, pp. 1–2. Morals and Dogma of Freemasonry, p. 78. Taylor: “‘. . . Chrishna in Irish means the Sun.’”

 

76.  “‘Ies,’ the Phoenician name of the god Bacchus or the Sun personified; the etymological meaning of that title being, ‘i’ the one and ‘es’ the fire or light; or taken as one word ‘ies’ the one light. This is none other than the light of St. John’s gospel; and this name is to be found everywhere on Christian altars, both Protestant and Catholic, thus clearly showing that the Christian religion is but a modification of Oriental Sun Worship, attributed to Zoroaster. The same letters IHS, which are in the Greek text, are read by Christians ‘Jes,’ and the Roman Christian priesthood added the terminus ‘us’. . .” (Roberts)

 

77.  Dujardin says, “The title of Messiah is one that the Rabbis seldom apply to the Liberator; it is mainly the Christians who state that the Jews expected ‘the Messiah.’”

 

78.  The Diegesis, p. 7.

 

79.  Introduction to The Egyptian Book of the Dead by Massey, p. 9.

 

80.  Deceptions and Myths of the Bible, by Lloyd Graham, p. 338.

 

81.  Massey, Gnostic and Historic Christianity, p. 3.

 

82.  See Walker, Massey, Churchward.

 

83.  Ibid.

 

84.  See Massey, Churchward and Graham.

 

85.  Ibid.

 

86.  Massey, Mythical Christ, pp. 3–6 Wheless cites the Encyclopedia Biblica: “The author of Revelation calls himself John the Apostle. As he was not John the Apostle, who died perhaps in Palestine about 66, he was a forger.” We would that “died perhaps” is also accurate, in that John “lived not at all.”

 

87.  Jacolliot states that “Zoroaster” is a Persian version of the more ancient Indian “Zuryastara (who restores the worship of the sun) from which comes this name of Zoroaster, which is itself but a title assigned to a political and religious legislator.”

 

88.  Churchward, 399.

 

89.  Ibid., p. 397. There are two astrotheological interpretations of John–Anup the Baptist, neither of which necessarily precludes the other, since the Mythos was ever–changing and evolving. As stated above, John the Baptist was considered the month of Aquarius, the initiation time of the sun, which was “born” in the previous month. The other interpretation, of which the Bible and other Christian–Pagan traditions and rituals serve as evidence, revolves around Saint John’s day, June 25th, which would be precisely the opposite of December 25th; in other words, as the sun is “born again” on December 25th, the edge of the winter solstice, and its strength continues to increase, while on June 25th, the edge of the summer solstice, its strength begins to decrease again. This drama is reflected in the enigmatic statement by John the Baptist at John 3:30: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” This curious remark only makes sense in astrotheological terms, in the sungod mythos.

 

90.  Walker.

 

91.  See the IRES’s “The Naked Truth” video series available at PO Box 7536, Newport Beach, CA 92658–7536 or through Lightworks.

 

91a.  Hotema, Intro, Egyptian Book of the Dead by Massey. Like the New Testament, the Old Testament is also filled with sungod stories, such as the tale of Sampson, or Samson, which means “sun,” whose “hair” (rays) was cut off by Delilah. “Sol–om–on” refers to the sun in three different languages. In 2 Kings 23:11 is clear evidence of Jewish sunworshipping, as the king Josiah, “removed the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun. . . “ More obscure references such as those referring to “eternal light” or any variety of names that mean “sun” are found peppered throughout the Judeo–Christian bible.

 

92.  Walker, p. 5. Dujardin: “Many of the old Baals of Palestine were assimilated by Judaism, which converted them into heroes in the cause of Jahveh [Yahweh], and in fact many scholars agree that the patriarchs of the Bible are the ancient gods of Palestine.”

 

93.  Dujardin and others demonstrate that the Christ drama, with its obvious Passion play, is indeed a play, with its condensed time–frame, stage directions and ritualistic lines. The entire gospel story purports to take place over a period of a few days. In content and form, it is clearly a sacred king drama, based originally on the sun and other elements such as fertility rites, that became a ritual practiced yearly or at some other increment. This sacrificial and/or redemptive drama was acted out in numerous places over the millennia, long before the Jesus story, in much the same form as that presented in the gospels. In an imitation of the earlier Mythos, in which this drama took place in the heavens, with the sun as the sacrificed Son of God, etc., ancient practitioners would sacrifice a surrogate for the god in order to ensure fecundity and prosperity. This “victim” of the sacrifice was at times a human, usually a king or other high official, or an animal or grain offering. When the surrogate was killed, the blood was sprinkled upon the congregation or audience of the play, who would cry, “Let his blood be upon us and our children,” a standard play/ritual line that was designed to ensure future fertility and the continuation of life. Later, wine was substituted for blood. The Passion only makes sense as part of the Mythos and Ritual. As a historical tale about foaming–at–the–mouth Jews calling for the blood of the “gentle” Jesus, it is not only an ugly insult to Jews but a dangerous, unfounded belief that has led to innumerable pogroms and much prejudice against them for nearly 2,000 years, as they have thus been perceived as rabid, evil “Christkillers.” As Dujardin says, “It is absurd to imagine that the crowd would demand the death of an innocent man and would wish his blood to be on their heads and those of their children.”

 

94.  Maxwell, Graham, Taylor, Jacolliot. Jacolliot traces the original to the Indian Manou: “This name of Manou, or Manes . . . is not a substantive, applying to an individual man; its Sanscrit signification is the man, par excellence, the legislator. It is a title aspired to by all the leaders of men in antiquity.” He also says, “We shall presently see Egypt, Judea, Greece, Rome, all antiquity, in fact, copy Brahminical Society in its castes, its theories, its religious opinions; and adopt its Brahmins, its priests, its levities, as they had already adopted the language, legislation and philosophy of that ancient Vedic Society whence their ancestors had departed through the world to disseminate the grand ideas of primitive revelation.”

 

95.  The Mahabharata.

 

96.  The BAR article seeks to prove that the Exodus is historical. Massey: “The Exodus or ‘Coming out of Egypt’ first celebrated by the festival of Passover or the transit at the vernal equinox, occurred in the heavens before it was made historical as the migration of the Jews. The 600,000 men who came up out of Egypt as Hebrew warriors in the Book of Exodus are 600,000 inhabitants of Israel in the heavens according to Jewish Kabalah, and the same scenes, events, and personages that appear as mundane in the Pentateuch are celestial in the Book of Enoch.” Mead: “. . . Bishop Colenso’s . . . mathematical arguments that an army of 600,000 men could not very well have been mobilized in a single night, that three millions of people with their flocks and herds could not very well have drawn water from a single well, and hundreds of other equally ludicrous inaccuracies of a similar nature, were popular points which even the most unlearned could appreciate, and therefore especially roused the ire of apologists and conservatives.”

 

97.  See Walker, Maxwell, et al.

 

98.  There have been floods and deluge stories in many different parts of the world, including but not limited to the Middle East. The so–called Flood of Noah may refer to the annual flooding of the Nile – an event that was incorporated in Egyptian mythology. However, it is also yet another part of ancient mythology. As Walker says, “The biblical flood story, the ‘deluge,’ was a late offshoot of a cycle of flood myths known everywhere in the ancient world. Thousands of years before the Bible was written, an ark was built by the Sumerian Ziusudra. In Akkad, the flood hero’s name was Atrakhasis. In Babylon, he was Uta–Napishtim, the only mortal to become immortal. In Greece he was Deucalion, who repopulated the earth after the waters subsided [and after the ark landed on Mt. Parnassos] . . . In Armenia, the hero was Xisuthros – a corruption of Sumerian Ziusudra – whose ark landed on Mount Ararat. . . . According to the original Chaldean account, the flood hero was told by his god, ‘Build a vessel and finish it. By a deluge I will destroy substance and life. Cause thou to go up into the vessel the substance of all that has life.”

 

99.  Walker, et al., and The Encyclopedia of Religions.

 

100.  Indeed, although professing to contain the history of the universe, the supposedly all–knowing “Word of God” barely mentions the many thousands of years on this planet that the Goddess was recognized and worshipped and only does so in order to disparage her and convert her followers. At Acts 19:27, the author does admit the existence and popularity of the “great goddess Artemis . . . she whom all Asia and the world worship.” In addition, despite all efforts to erase from history the memory of the Goddess in the Old Testament, the truth of her existence slipped by the redactor’s pen at 1 Kings 11:5, where Solomon “went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Simonians.” Regardless of the presence of these few passages and any others concerning the Goddess, the compilers of the Bible certainly did not wish to acknowledge how powerful and widespread was the belief in and reverence for the divine feminine principle. In addition, Wheless has this to say about the books of the Old Testament: “It may stated with assurance that not one of them bears the name of its true author; that every one of them is a composite work of many hands ‘interpolating’ the most anachronistic and contradictory matters into the original writings, and often reciting as accomplished facts things which occurred many centuries after the time of the supposed writer . . . “ Indeed, we would add that the bulk of the Old Testament is as mythical as the entire New Testament.

 

101.  Taylor, pp. 21–22.

 

102.  “ . . . the holy Saint Josaphat, under which name and due to an odd slip of inerrant inspiration, the great Lord Buddha, ‘The Light of Asia,’ was duly certified a Saint in the Roman Martyrology.” (Wheless) Walker: “Medieval saintmakers adapted the story of Buddha’s early life to their own fictions, calling the father of St. Josaphat ‘an Indian king’ who kept the young saint confined to prevent him from becoming a Christian. He was converted anyway, and produced the usual assortment of miracles, some of them copied from incidents in the life story of Buddha. St. Josaphat enjoyed great popularity in the Middle Ages, an ironical development in a Europe that abhorred Buddhism as the work of the devil.”

 

103.  In Antiquities Unveiled, JM Roberts, Esq., reiterates that Christ drama represents “ . . . the passage of the Sun, in its annual course through the constellations of the Zodiac; having his birth in the sign of the Goat, the Augean stable of the Greeks; his baptism in Aquarius, the John the Baptist in the heavens; his triumph when he becomes the Lamb of God in Aries; his greatest exaltation on St. John’s, the beloved disciple’s day, on the 21st of June, in the Sign of the Twins, the emblem of double power; his tribulation in the Garden of Gethsemane, in the sign of the rural Virgo; his betrayal in the sign of Scorpio, the malignant emblem of his approaching death in the stormy and adverse sign, Sagittarius, and his resurrection or renewed birth on the twenty–fifth of December in the same sign of the celestial Goat . . .” Walker states, “Medieval monks tried to Christianize the zodiac as they Christianized everything else, by renaming it the Corona seu Circulus Sanctorum Apostolorum: the Crown of the Circle of the Holy Apostles. They placed John the Baptist at the position of Aquarius, to finish off the circle.”

 

104.  Walker, p. 787: “The myth of St. Peter was the slender thread from which hung the whole weighty structure of the Roman papacy. . . . Unfortunately for papal credibility, the so–called Petrine passage was a forgery. It was deliberately inserted into the scripture about the 3rd century A.D. as a political ploy, to uphold the primacy of the Roman see against rival churches in the east. Various Christian bishropics were engaged in a power struggle in which the chief weapons were bribery, forgery, and intrigue, with elaborate fictions and hoaxes written into sacred books, and the ruthless competition between rival parties for the lucrative position of God’s elite. . . . Most early churches put forth spurious claims to foundation by apostles, even though the apostles themselves were no more than the mandatory ‘zodiacal twelve’ attached to the figure of the sacred king.”

 

105.  “The Naked Truth” video series by IRES. Antiquities Unveiled, above.

 

106.  Massey, MC.

 

107.  Ibid. “The lion is Matthew’s symbol, and that is the zodiacal sign of the month of Taht–Matiu (Thoth), in the fixed year. Tradition makes Matthew to have been the eighth of the apostles; and the eighth (Esmen) is a title of Taht–Matiu. Moreover, it is Matthias, upon whom the lot fell, who was chosen to fill the place of the Typhonian traitor Judas. So was it in the mythos when Matiu (Taht) succeeded Sut [Set], and occupied his place after the betrayal of Osiris. . . . It is to the Gnostics that we must turn for the missing link between the oral and the written word; between the Egyptian Ritual and the canonical gospels; between the Matthew who wrote the Hebrew or Aramaic gospel of the sayings, and Taht–Mati, who wrote the Ritual, the Hermetic, which means inspired writings, that are said to have been inscribed in hieroglyphics by the very finger of Mati himself.”

 

108.  Deceptions and Myths of the Bible by Graham; Apollonius the Nazarene by Raymond Bernard, PhD. Like Bernard, et al., Hotema also claims the “historical” details later added to the sungod mythos were those from the life of Apollonius of Tyana, who was also called “Pol.” According to this theory, “Pol” then serves as a model for both the Christ character and the apostle Paul. It is said that Apollonius brought the New Testament from India, and that he had certain yogic powers which allowed him to do miracles. This theory is, to our mind, unsatisfactorily reconciled at this time. While it may be true that the historicizers, looking back in time, decided they needed to pluck up a quasi–historical character who was still in memory upon which to base their fictions, they would not have needed to add much to the extant sungod mythos and ritual, merely a few “historical” details.

 

109.  “Another popular delusion most ignorantly cherished is, that there was a golden age of primitive Christianity, which followed the preaching of the Founder and the practice of his apostles; and that there was a falling away from this paradisiacal state of primordial perfection when the Catholic Church in Rome lapsed into idolatry, Paganised and perverted the original religion, and poisoned the springs of the faith at the very fountain–head of their flowing purity. Such is the pious opinion of those orthodox Protestants who are always clamouring to get back beyond the Roman Church to that ideal of primitive perfection supposed to be found in the simple teachings of Jesus, and the lives of his personal followers, as recorded in the four canonical gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles. But when we do penetrate far enough into the past to see somewhat clearly through and beyond the cloud of dust that was the cause of a great obscuration in the first two centuries of our era, we find that there was no such new beginning, that the earliest days of the purest Christianity were pre–historic, and that the real golden age of knowledge and simple morality preceded, and did not follow, the Apostolic Roman Church, or the Deification of its Founder, or the humanising of the ‘Lamb of God’ . . .” (Massey, G&HC) “It sounds strange to hear persons in these days express a desire for a ‘return to primitive Christianithy, when all was peace and love.’ There never was such a time.” (Keeler)

 

110.  Indeed, Jesus’ character and many of his actions were utterly contrary to the notion of him being a great Essene healer. “A poor Canaanitish woman comes to him from a long distance and beseeches him to cure her daughter who is grievously obsessed. ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord,’ she pleads. But he answered her not a word. The disciples, brutes as they were, if the scene were real, besought him to send her away because she cried after them. Jesus answered, and said: ‘I was only sent to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.’ She worships him, he calls her one of the dogs.” (Massey, G&HC) We might add that if Jesus only came for the ‘lost sheep of the House of Israel,’ then we may ignore him, for we are not lost sheep, nor are we of the House of Israel.

 

111.  This is another aspect of the Christian character that is conflicted. While Jesus is busy swearing unto, he also exhorts his followers to “swear not at all.” (Matt. 5:34; James 5:12) These are Essenic/Therapeutan dictates that would be appropriate for a spiritual community, such that they were no doubt useful to the Christian copyists in their attempts at making the drama appear to be historical. It is an intricately, if clumsily, woven tale, utilizing everything possible at hand, which is the only explanation for the glaring contradictions.

 

112.  Massey, Gnostic and Historic Christianity. Graves provides numerous examples of Essenic doctrine, such as the Essene writer Philo’s pronouncement, “It is our first duty to seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” (Matt. 6:33; Lk. 12:31) It would seem that, in order to give the sungod mythos the appearance of a historical man heading a spiritual movement, the NT compilers also drew heavily on the Essene spiritual community. (See below.)

 

113.  Taylor: “. . . Eusebius has attested, that the Therapeutan monks were Christians, many ages before the period assigned to the birth of Christ; and that the Diegesis and Gnomologue, from which the Evangelists compiled their gospels, were writings which had for ages constituted the sacred scriptures of those Egyptian visionaries.” While this Therapeut/Essene origins of the autograph or original “gospel” texts would seem to contradict what Massey says about “Jesus” not being an Essene, it is the Essenes of Josephus to whom he refers, rather than the Alexandrian/Egyptian Therapeuts. Of the two differing groups of “healers,” historian Philo opined that the communities in Palestine and Arabia “did not soar to such a lofty height of philosophic and mystic endeavour as the members of the community near Alexandria. . . “ (Mead, DJL) In our opinion, the Essenes of Palestine, i.e., those who may or may not have lived near the Dead Sea, were much simpler and more contemplative than the worldly Therapeuts, who were profoundly engaged in the mystery religions, initiations and rituals. Clearly, while both were called “healers,” these are two different sects, although they were probably connected. The Therapeuts seems to have been a solid part of the brotherhood network that stretched from Egypt to India and up into Europe, while the Dead Sea Essenes – for want of a better term – were isolationists.

 

114.  Massey, MC.

 

115.  Taylor: “The first draft of the mystical adventures of Chrishna, as brought from India into Egypt, was The Diegesis; the first version of the Diegesis was the Gospel according to the Egyptians; the first renderings out of the language of Egypt into that of Greece, for the purpose of imposing on the nations of Europe, were the apocryphal gospels; the correct, castigated, and authorised versions of these apocryphal compilations were the gospels of our [sic] four evangelists.” There is, however, a legend about the Egyptian god Osiris traveling to India in very ancient times and establishing his religion there. This brings up again the “out–of–India” v. “out–of–Egypt” debate. It may very well be that an extremely ancient culture from Africa/Egypt migrated many thousands of years ago to India. In this theory, India would still remain the cradle of Western/Middle Eastern culture, with subsequent migrations back to the west, carrying the mutated Proto–Egyptian/Indian language and the refined Mythos, which would be further refined or change by Egyptians. What cannot be disputed is that India and Egypt have both have a profound impact on Western/Middle Eastern culture and that the original Mythos and Ritual were well developed by both nations.

 

116.  Massey says, “In the Book of Enoch one form of the Messiah is the ‘Son of Woman’; this was Enoch or Enos, the Egyptian Sut–Anush [Set], who had been twin with Horus but was superseded by him.” (MC) Wheless: “The Book of Enoch, forged in the name of the grandson of Adam, is the fragmentary remains of a whole literature which circulated under the pretended authorship of that mythical Patriarch. . . . This work is a composite of at least five unknown Jewish writers, and was composed during the last two centuries B.C. . . .In this Book we first find the lofty titles: ‘Christ’ or ‘the Anointed One, ‘Son of Man,’ the Righteous One,’ ‘the Elect One,’ – all of which were boldly plagiarized by the later Christians and bestowed upon Jesus of Nazareth. . . . It abounds in such ‘Christian’ doctrines as the Messianic Kingdom, Hell, the Resurrection, and Demonology, the Seven Heavens, and the Millennium, all of which have here their apocryphal Jewish promulgation, after being plagiarized bodily from the Persian and Babylonian myths and superstitions, as we have seen confessed. There are numerous quotations, phrases, clauses, or thoughts derived from Enoch, or of closest of kin with it, in several of the New Testament Gospels and Epistles. . .”

 

117.  Wheless, pp. 85–87.

 

118.  In yet another attempt to produce a history for this mythical character, Bible translators have taken to rendering the title “Jesus the Nazarene” as “Jesus of Nazareth,” a village that many scholars opine did not yet exist at the time of Jesus’ purported birth. “There is no such place as Nazareth in the Old Testament or in Josephus’ works, or on early maps of the Holy Land. The name was apparently a later Christian invention.” (Holley) As Dujardin states, “It is universally admitted that Jesus the Nazarene does not mean Jesus of Nazareth.” Massey and Churchward point out that the title “Nazarene” is part of the Mythos, with Horus/Jesus being considered “the plant, the shoot, the natzar. . . . the true vine.” (Churchward)

 

119.  “There is another proof that the Gospels were not written by Jews. Traditionally, Jesus and all the ‘Apostles’ were Jews; all their associates and the people of their country with whom they came into contact, were Jews. But throughout the Gospels, scores of times, ‘the Jews’ are spoken of, always as a distinct and alien people away from the writers, and mostly with a sense of racial hatred and contempt.” (Wheless)

 

120.  The date of Hadrian’s reign (117–138) precedes the period we have ascribed to the appearance of the canonical gospels. However, we are proposing that the texts composed by the Alexandrian Therapeuts were autographs, or originals, upon which the Christian gospels were based. This would mean that these originals were nonhistorical, gnostic texts composed to commit the Mythos and Ritual in its totality to writing. These texts then were transported to Rome, where they were worked upon by historicizers and eventually changed into the Christian gospels.

 

Bibliography:

Ancient History of the God Jesus by Edouard Dujardin

Antiquities Unveiled by JM Roberts, Esq.

Apollonius the Nazarene by Raymond Bernard, PhD

A Short History of the Bible by Bronson C. Keeler

Christianity Before Christ by John G. Jackson

Christianity: The Last Great Creation of the Pagan World by Vernal Holley

Deceptions and Myths of the Bible by Lloyd Graham

Did Jesus Exist? by GA Wells

Forgery in Christianity by Joseph Wheless, Esq.

Gnostic and Historic Christianity by Gerald Massey

Isis Unveiled by Helena Blavatsky

Pagan and Christian Creeds by Edward Carpenter

Pagan Christs by JM Roberts

The Bible in India by Louis Jacolliot

The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You to Read

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth by John Allegro

The Diegesis by Rev. Robert Taylor

The Egyptian Book of the Dead by Gerald Massey

The Great Myth of the Sun–Gods by Alvin Boyd Kuhn, PhD

The Gospels and the Gospel by G.R.S. Mead

The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ by Gerald Massey

The Historical Evidence for Jesus by GA Wells

The Naked Truth video series

The Origin and Evolution of Religion by Albert Churchward

The Truth about Jesus, lecture by M. Mangasarian

The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects by Barbara Walker

The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker

The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves

* About the Author  

Acharya S was classically educated at some of the finest schools, receiving an undergraduate degree in Classics, Greek Civilization, from Franklin & Marshall College. She is a member of one of the world’s most exclusive institutes for the study of Ancient Greek Civilization, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece:

Acharya S has served as a trench master on archaeological excavations in Corinth, Greece, and Connecticut, USA, as well as a teacher’s assistant on the island of Crete.

Acharya S has traveled extensively around Europe, and she speaks, reads and/or writes English, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese and a smattering of other languages to varying degrees.  She has read Euripides, Plato and Homer in ancient Greek, and Cicero in Latin, as well as Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in Middle English.  She has also been compelled to cross–reference the Bible in the original Hebrew and ancient Greek.

Rev. Acharya S has gained mastery in several religions, as well other esoterica and the supernatural, and has a number of students and devotees.  She is also the author of several books, including The Christ Conspiracy, Paradise Found and The Aquarian Manifesto: A Handbook for Survival into and a Blueprint for the New Age. Her current book is Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled. Articles by Acharya S have been published in Exposure, Steamshovel Press, Paranoia, as well as other periodicals and ezines.

Source: http://www.truthbeknown.com/origins.htm

 

Copyright © 2001 Acharya S.  All rights reserved.

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