The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God? is a 1999 book by British authors Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy,[2] which advances the argument that early Christianity originated as a Greco-Roman mystery cult and that Jesus was invented by early Christians based on an alleged pagan cult of a dying and rising "godman" known as Osiris-Dionysus, whose worship the authors claim was manifested in the cults of Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, and Mithras. This thesis is a fringe theory and is not accepted by mainstream scholars.
The authors propose that Jesus did not literally exist as an historically identifiable individual, but was instead a syncretic re-interpretation of the fundamental pagan "godman" by the Gnostics, who the authors assert were the original sect of Christianity. Freke and Gandy argue that Orthodox Christianity was not the predecessor to Gnosticism, but a later outgrowth that rewrote history in order to make literal Christianity appear to predate the Gnostics. They describe their theory as the "Jesus Mysteries thesis".
The book has been extensively criticized by mainstream scholars and historians, who state that the book's thesis is wildly inaccurate, that it is filled with obvious historical errors, that its main points are contradictory, and that it relies heavily on out-of-date sources written by non-experts. These scholars do not regard the book as a work of serious scholarship and instead view it as merely what historian of early Christianity Bart D. Ehrman has called "sensationalist writing driven by a desire to sell books."
Thesis
Freke and Gandy base the Jesus Mysteries thesis partly on a series of parallels between their suggested biography of Osiris-Dionysus and the biography of Jesus drawn from the four canonical gospels. Their suggested reconstruction of the myth of Osiris-Dionysus, compiled from the myths of ancient dying and resurrected "godmen," bears a striking resemblance to the gospel accounts. The authors give a short list of parallels:
⬤ Osiris-Dionysus is God made flesh, the savior and "Son of God." ⬤ His father is God and his mother is a mortal virgin, 7 month pregnancy. ⬤ He is born in a cave or humble cowshed on 25 December before three shepherds. ⬤ He offers his followers the chance to be born again through the rites of baptism. ⬤ He miraculously turns water into wine at a marriage ceremony. ⬤He rides triumphantly into town on a donkey while people wave palm leaves to honor him. ⬤ He dies at Eastertime as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. ⬤ After his death he descends to hell, then on the third day he rises from the dead and ascends to heaven in glory. ⬤ His followers await his return as the judge during the Last Days. ⬤ His death and resurrection are celebrated by a ritual meal of bread and wine, which symbolize his body and blood.
According to The Jesus Mysteries, Christianity originated as a Judaized version of the pagan mystery religions. Hellenized Jews wrote a version of the godman myth incorporating Jewish elements. Initiates learned the myth and its allegorical meanings through the Outer and Inner Mysteries. A similar pattern of "Lesser" and "Greater" Mysteries was part of the pagan Eleusinian Mysteries. Mithraism was structured around seven serial initiations.
Freke and Gandy suggest that, at some point, groups of Christians who had only experienced the Outer Mysteries were split off from the elders of the religion and forgot that there had ever been a second initiation, and that, later, when they encountered groups who had retained the Inner Mysteries, these "Literalist Christians" [as Freke and Gandy call them] attacked the "Gnostics" for claiming that what the Literalists considered false knowledge and false initiations, was, in fact, the original second initiation of primal (Gnostic) Christianity. Freke and Gandy claim that the Literalists won out when the emperor Constantine saw the political merit of 'one empire, one emperor, one god', practically exterminated the Gnostics, and saw to it that 'Literalist Christianity' became the officially-approved Roman Catholic Church and its modern descendants.
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No Idea Is Original/The Ethiopian Book Of The Dead/Kimpa Vita’s Antonian Movement
Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita (1684 – 2 July 1706), was a Kongo Empire prophet and leader of her own Christian movement, Antonianism, this movement taught that Jesus and other early Christian figures were from the Kongo Empire.
Her movement is suggested to have survived in the Congo Christians brought to the America during the slave trade.
posted
I saw a couple of Ethiopian Christians a few years ago debunk the Freke and Gandy "mystery split" theory. Basically the author below makes the same kind of arguments they did.
Article Review Shattering the Internet Mythicists (July 23, 2008)
Having been aware of this so-called "debate" on the Internet (please note: it is entirely an "online debate" not one advanced by serious NT or historical Jesus scholars) since the mid 1990s, I am glad that J.P. Holding has finally transcribed and edited some of his impressive "Tektonics" online articles for an entire book on "Shattering the Christ Myth." He and his amateur scholar contributors have pulled together an excellent set of articles and chapters debunking both the "myth" hypothesis and the "copycat" or "pagan parallel" thesis presented by many an anti-Christian conspiracy buff and uninformed skeptic of historical Christianity.
Chapters include an introduction on the history and origin of the "Christ myth" claims dating from the early 1800s; detailed defenses of the standard non-biblical references to Jesus from the Jewish historian Josephus (his two passages), the Roman historian Tacitus, Lucian, Pliny the Younger, and Papias; responses to the various "silences" argued by "mythicists" from Remsburg to G.A. Wells to Earl Doherty; analysis of the supposed "pagan Christs" from Mithra to Krishna to Horus to Dionysos; reviews and refutations exposing the abysmal scholarship and poor arguments of recent "Christ myth" movies "The God Who Wasn't There" and "Zeitgeist"; and additional material on the city of Nazareth, the academic and Internet mythicists, and more.
This book shows there is really nothing at all to the "mythicist" claims: they are groundless historically, poorly argued based on "silence" and refuted by numerous reliable witnesses to Jesus, and that includes the canonical Gospels and the earliest writings of St. Paul. The real debate among scholars is not whether there was a historical Jesus who was crucified under Pontius Pilate around 30 AD, but on Christ's claims to divinity and being the unique Son of God, the miracles of the Gospels as signs of that divinity, and especially the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ -- i.e. the whole "Jesus of history" vs. "Christ of faith" debate among conservative evangelical and more "liberal" scholarship.
Jeffery Jay Lowder of Internet Infidels: "There is simply nothing intrinsically improbable about a historical Jesus; the New Testament alone (or at least portions of it) are reliable enough to provide evidence of a historical Jesus. On this point, it is important to note that even G.A. Wells, who until recently was the champion of the christ-myth hypothesis, now accepts the historicity of Jesus on the basis of 'Q'." ("Josh McDowell's 'Evidence' for Jesus")
British historian Michael Grant: "...if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned...To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars'. In recent years 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus' -- or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." (Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels [1977], pages 199, 200)
Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright: "It is quite difficult to know where to start, because actually the evidence for Jesus is so massive that, as a historian, I want to say we have got almost as much good evidence for Jesus as for anyone in the ancient world....the evidence fits so well with what we know of the Judaism of the period....that I think there are hardly any historians today, in fact I don't know of any historians today, who doubt the existence of Jesus [aside from one or two]....It is quite clear that in fact Jesus is a very, very well documented character of real history. So I think that question can be put to rest." ("The Self-Revelation of God in Human History" from There Is A God by Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese [2007])
Robert Van Voorst: "Contemporary New Testament scholars have typically viewed their [i.e. Jesus-mythers] arguments as so weak or bizarre that they relegate them to footnotes, or often ignore them completely....The theory of Jesus' nonexistence is now effectively dead as a scholarly question....Biblical scholars and classical historians now regard it as effectively refuted." (Jesus Outside the New Testament [2000], pages 6, 14, 16)
Shattering the Christ Myth is a welcome addition to the many evangelical defenses of Jesus Christ by well-known scholars such as R.T. France (The Evidence for Jesus), Moreland/Wilkins (Jesus Under Fire), and recently Boyd/Eddy (The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition). As a Catholic apologist, I also appreciated the brief chapter on "Leo's Line" explaining the "fable quote" sometimes attributed to Pope Leo X by mythicist skeptics
-------------------- Note: I am not an "Egyptologist" as claimed by some still bitter, defeated, trolls creating fake profiles and posts elsewhere. Hapless losers, you still fail. My output of hard data debunking racist nonsense has actually INCREASED since you began.. Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
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Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
What about our own John G. Jackson? His 1941 work Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth facing the label godless communist. Balls. Jackson ice as cold as ... whoever.
And I say that owning a complete collection of Bible Review and complete to 2010 collection of Biblical Archaeology Review.
Doc ben-Jochannan is extensive. 1970's ... Major Western Religions in particular but a lil bit in all his works. More n a lil bit in Black Man of the Nile (and his Family) 1969-1982 editions. This author will overload you with myriads of detail in minutiae giving you the opportunity to go off into tangential researches of your own.
I'm sure other AfrAms have published work on the topic. It's a long slide from Kandake's ambassador's conversion to Xianity being a or THE white man's religion. Maybe a followup question is which Christianity is de y man's religion.
Get the pamphlet and books above from Black Classic Press or Africa World Press publishers and distributors of Africana and Black Studies material.
Us OG's ree o sku goto is Graves' 16 Crucified Saviors: Christianity before Christ. Everything after this late 1800s book is in it's pioneering debt.
BTW My personal opinion? I think the Christ mythos was laid onto one of several semi-popular 'rebels', of the times, Jesus (Yesh"u), by Saul/Paul displacing Jesus the brother of James (Ya`aqob) and introducing Jesus the Christ Son of God and mass appealing that to Greeks and whomever else was into demi-gods while distancing Judeans sticking to their God that begets-not-nor-is-begotten concept. Haven't looked into it since 2001 with this https://www.amazon.com/James-Brother-Jesus-Unlocking-Christianity/dp/014025773X
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