The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God?

[BurtWorm]

This is the title of and question asked in a 1999 book by two British scholars of mysticism, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. It's an excellent summary of the mythological (i.e., non-historical) argument about the origins of Christianity, and a heartbreaking history of the religion as it developed, as well, no matter which side of the debate you're on.

The basic argument is this: Jesus shares an astonishing number of characteristics with Pagan godmen like Osiris, Dionysis, Adonis, Mithra, etc., including virgin birth (on the same day--Dec. 25th or Jan. 6th (ancient winter solstice, depending on the calendar)!); a life spent wandering and performing miracles (changing water into wine at a wedding, raising the dead, healing the sick, feeding the masses with a loaf of bread, catching a miraculous number of fish); and being put to death (on a tree, usually), then rising after three days. Pagans--especially the ones who were initiated into the mysteries around these characters--did not believe that the heroes of the religions were anything but symbols; the stories about them were a means of drawing potential initiates into the mysteries, which would lead them to spiritual enlightenment. Initiates into the Mithra cult (based originally in Persia), for example, would understand that they were on the same mystical journey as those in the Osiris (Egypt) or Dionysis (Greece) cults. The form didn't matter, but the content was universal (among Mediterranean Pagans, anyway).

The Jesus Mysteries hypothesis is that, like Pythagoras who brought the Osiris cult from Egypt (the mother cult of these mystery religions) to Greece to create the Dionysis cult, Alexandrian Jews around 2,000 years ago intended to modernize Judaism by investing it with Pagan ideas, which at that time were the most cutting-edge in the world. These were Jews who read the Torah in Greek (the Septaguint). Not having a pantheon of Gods to pick from to put the godman myth on, the Jewish myth-makers went to the most obvious candidate for godman status, the Messiah figure (Christ, in Greek).

Freke and Gandy lay this out very well in the book, which is written for a nonspecialist audience (but with scrupulous footnotes), asking themselves questions along the way: Can there have been a real person Jesus is based on? What is the evidence of a historical Jesus in the Roman and Jewish record? What did Paul believe?

At the same time, they examine what happened to Christianity itself, how it got separated from its Pagan roots to the extent that it viciously demonized Paganism and turned the gnostic founders of the religion into despised (read: persecuted) heretics. The simple answer to what happened is Literalism, a reading of the scriptural texts as literal history, which is quite a trick considering how strange and inconsistent they are, even internally. Consider that Christianity in Rome was concerned primarily with becoming the state religion, with developing a single way of reading the text and doing the religion, with rooting out heresies and heretical documents, and with "fixing" the record. Consider that virtually all Christians, even today, whether Catholic or Protestant, fundamentalist or mainstream, measure their faith according to how "true" they find the Nicene creed!

As a person who was inclined to subscribe to the mythological argument myself, I found this book totally fascinating. A balm, you might even say, for a skeptical mind. But I would think those of you on the historical side would want to check this book out as well. I'd be suprised if it didn't open some eyes.

Here's a link to the author's home page. Check out their links page, as well.

http://www.jesusmysteries.demon.co.uk/home.html

[BurtWorm]

1. I realize this is not about breasts or a member of the Jackson family

so I thought I better kick this to give it another chance in Boobville.

[Beaker]

2. looking into the history of Christianity-

and other faiths like Mithracism and the like is what turned me from a parochial school educated good little christian into an atheist.

[Exultant Democracy]

4. LOL, the irony is sweet.

[Az]

8. Back in my debating days

Many of my fellow atheist debaters arrived at their position because they were pursuing lives in the clergy. Over exposure to the doctrine turned them on to all the contradictions therein and they found their way clear as a result.

[BurtWorm]

6. These guys believe returning to the Pagan roots would actually

make Christianity more spiritual. They believe that a historical Jesus is more of a burden on Christians' spirituality than a myhtological one. Seems plausible to me, but then, I'm an atheist myself.

[Az]

3. My position

is that Jesus was the result of a combination of effects. I do not believe that anyone lived the life that the gospels tell us about. In fact I suspect that Mark (the oldest of the gospels) may well have been derived from Homer's works and retold inverting the warrior prince as a pacifist prince. Perhaps taking his basis from some individual in recent history and then applying the story frame from the Illiad and the Odyssey.

As to how xianity seperated from paganisim I believe the answer there lies in its experential nature. Paganism was often a more externalised explanation for the nature of the world and human interaction. The gods were proposed as examples spelling out how things happened and how people should behave. Thus they were moralistic tales for people to learn from. The state insisted on adherance to these gods because it was a way to enforce a code of standards. If you swore feality to the gods they had assurance that you were obeying the same code of ethics.

The ancient Romans saw the early xians as a rather odd set. They were more involved in the idea of communing with their god and attempting to open a dialog with him. Early xians practiced all manner of rites to achieve this communion with god including drug, orgies, physical exertion, meditation, starvation, and a host of other means that may make some squeemish. All these activities strove for a now understood neurochemical reaction that would lead ones mind to short circuit in a manner. This short would cause the brains ability to discern self as seperate from the world around them to freeze up. The mind would continue but the brain could not recognise its funciton as self. It would then apply whatever culturally learned identity it had for disenbodied messages from beyond.

Thus we had a comeptition between an intellectual but experentially vacant set of gods set forth before the people and a god that one could experience and commune with. The monotheistic god had a much better hook. Add in the fervor of a few zealots that could easily tap into the voice of god and you have the makings of an unstoppable movement. Overtime the social pressures to expand required a more stable basis and the more extreme means of communing were snuffed out through internal struggles. We are left with a few relics of these practices though in the forms of prayer, wine, waifers, and fasting.

Some forms of modern xianity still make use of these experiential aspects of the religion. The pentecostals and other Holy Spirit sects lean on these heavily accessed through physical exertion and social connectivity.

Reading material:

The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark by Dennis R. MacDonald
The Christians as the Romans Saw Them by Robert Louis Wilken
The "God" Part of the Brain by Matthew Alper
Also see research in Epyleptics conducted at UCLA SanFransico re Experential nature of religious events.

[BurtWorm]

9. The Jesus Mysteries hypothesis seems more plausible to me.

There was nothing new under the Christian sun. It's Paganism. All that "experiential" stuff you're talking about was being tried for hundreds of years in Egypt, Greece, Persia, Anatolia, etc. From what I understand, what the Romans found odd about Christianity is that they (the Literalists ones, anyway) tried to assert that their godman was unique and real.

[Az]

11. It was not new

It was just another flavor of the month religiously speaking. But it hit the right chemistry by the time it got to Rome. And the Romans found a lot of issues odd about the xians. But where they ran into serious trouble is when the Romans tried to get the xians to swear an oath on the pagan gods.

Due to anamolies within that arose within their beliefs they would not acknowledge the authority of these pagan gods over theirs. This came from association with the Hebrew god. As I mentioned the identity of the experential entity they believed they were in communion with is typically attributed to whichever social entity dominated the group at the time. Thus once association with an authoritative god is made the experential nature ramps up the belief in the teachings.

[Solomon]

5. Not to worry Burt. I have this book, along with the other book they also

wrote. They are real latecomers to the subject. I have books written by Gerald Massey and Godfrey Higgins, and Albert Curchward and Kersey Graves, written in the 1800's and early 1900s. There were at least 16 crucified saviors in the world, all sharing most of the same characteristics, i.e. born in a cave or manger from a virgin, crucified and rose again.

The general public has no clue about these things since our education is so eurocentric. It's too threatening to the social order to teach about these "gods" as well. My parents are thoroughly frustrated with me because they can't understand how there could be more than one christ. And my response is that's because you think that "christ" is actually a person.

The ancient egyptians were worshiping christ more than three thousand years before christianity.

Awww. I gotta stop. This subject is one of my lifetime pursuits and there's just too much to talk about. To make a long story short, studying some of the worlds oldest sacred books, which includes the temples and monuments all over egypt and the sudan, I was finally led
to astronomy, because the night sky, is, after all, the oldest book there is. No errors or translations here buddy. It is what it is.

I believe that our ancient ancestors relied on the stars so much, that our religious mythology grew out of the science of watching the stars. So I had to stop to study some astronomy in order to get any further. And believe me, a lot of mysteries are solved when you start to understand what the Winter and Summer solstices are, and the equinoxes. The angles of the Sun across the sky at different times of the year. The moon and it's phases. Try and think how important the stars were when we didn't know anything. They told us when to sow the seeds, when to harvest, when to hunt, when to migrate, where to migrate, they were everything. And I'm not talking about astrology. Ahhhh. See There I go. Can't shut up. I'll shut up.

[BurtWorm]

7. I know they're latecomers, but they've made up for lateness

by making an excellent argument.

Earl Dougherty's The Jesus Puzzle is what opened my eyes. Joseph Wheless's "Forgeries in Christianity" is pretty convincing too.

[jimbo fett]

10. No doubt that the writers of the Bible co-opted some mythology but I don't

think that he was a product OF mythology. The early writers used culturally shared stories like mythology to reach a wider (ie. non-Judaic) audience. By using stories familiar with the illiterate masses they were able to make theological points without having to give a lot of background to the non-Semites.

Even the stories in the Old Testament did this. Many Sumerian mythos were incorporated including the story of Moses and his basket ride in the Tigris River.

There's too much actual historical records to imply that Jesus was a mythological invention though.

[Az]

13. Heheh

To be specific. There is no verifiable contemporary accounts of Jesus' life. There are no writings of his that have survived. The records we do have suggesting he may have lived have been put through one of the most notorious purge and edit systems in history. The accounts we have remaining are third hand at best.

Sorry. I have been through this historical Jesus argument too many times.

[BurtWorm]

14. There's too little historical record

contemporaneous to Jesus's timeframe. There's too much about the Jesus "biography" in the Gospels that is virtually identical with the Pagan godmen, too little unique about him, to take this "biography" at face value. Even his philosophy is not new. It's Platonism, which was rampant in Alexandria and the Mediterranean world. What is unique about Jesus is his Jewishness. What was unique about Mithra was his Persianness, about Dionysis was his Greekness, etc.

[markses]

12. The supposed "structural similarities"

between early Christianity and the mystery religions of the ancient world has long been a subject among classicists, and has long been disputed as well. See, for example,

Richard Reizenstein. Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen nach ihren Grundgedanken und Wirkungen (1910)

and, on the allegedly pre-Christian cult of the Mandaneans, see Reizenstein again, Die Vorgeschicte der christliche Taufe (1929).

Carl Clemen. Die Einfluss der Mysterienreligionen auf das alteste Christentum (1913).

You can also check out Hugo Rahner's rather forceful refuation of the thesis in "The Christian Mystery and the Pagan Mysteries" (1946), or, more recently, Walter Burkhert's work on ancient mysteries ( Ancient Mystery Cults , 1993). I find Burkhert's argument truly fascinating: he basically shows that Christianity was, in fact, a radical break with the religious practices of the pagan mysteries, since it installed a permament center of religious power throughout the society and called for an abstract, rather than strictly practical use, of ritual. So, even though certain structural forms maintain a degree of similarity, the way they were organized and inflected shows the emergence of something absolutely new in Christianity...truly the slave revolt in morality, as Nietzsche has described it.

[Solomon]

16. Hell, even christians refute each other. That's not saying anything.

Ever wonder why there's all them black madonna and child figures all over europe? Because the egyptians practiced christianity before there was a jesus christ.

[BurtWorm]

23. Freke and Gandy argue that Christianity's success

owed to its being perfectly suited for an imperial religion, mainly because the Literalist branch of it required absolute fealty to the creed and brooked absolutely no dissent or heresy. It became an utterly authoritarian church. All form, no content, as Freke and Gandy put it.

[On the Road]

15. There Was a Real Jesus

He had a brother, and the emperor Domitian looked for his physical relatives or descendants to see if they constituted a political threat. Jesus was an anti-Roman zealot, although most of his anger was directed at the upper-class Jewish collaborators. He may or may not have advocated an actual uprising.

Paul's version of Jesus is where all this pagan stuff started. Paul was basically thrown out of the movement as a heretic, and decided to just start his own church with people from the outside. The descendants of the people who actually knew Jesus apparently did not believe in th Virgin Birth, and may not even have believed in a physical resurrection.

The Jesus supporters who stayed Jewisha and continued to observe the law were mostly killed in the two uprisings against Rome (67 and 135 AD). Paul's church disassociated itself from the Jewish movement to the point of abandoning Sabbath observance.

Constantine introduced even more pagan elements into Christianity, but he was the emperor, so no one could complain. For example, Constantine also worshiped Sol Invinctus, a sun god, even after becoming a Christian.

So I have no trouble recognizing the pagan elements in the gospels -- I just think there was a real Jewish Jesus who bore very little resemblance to the stories people eventually told about him.

[Az]

17. Oh

(said while wearing a Columbo raincoat) Ok. Didn't realise. Sorry to have bothered you. ... er just one thing. You do have evidence to support this right.

[Beaker]

19. I'm sure there probably was a jewish jesus-

just look at how many mexican ones there are.

[BurtWorm]

20. If you're interested in the subject, look into this book.

It makes a very good case for taking any historical arguments about Jesus, which tend to be based almost entirely on speculation, with a grain of salt.

[blindpig]

18. literalism

what an interesting observation! I've got a book at home about Christianity & paganism in the 3rd to 7th centuries CE which observed that Christianity really took off with the ruling class after the Dioclecian(sp!)reform of the empire. The author's point was that this reform quadrupeled the number of imperial officials and as there were not enough qualified folk available in the upper classes that it was necessary to admit many poorly educated persons into the imperial apparatus thus "dumbing down" the upper class. I'll provide title & author when I get home this evening.

[blindpig]

24. Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries

by Ramsay Macmullen

[MountainLaurel]

21. Nice big syncretic pagan kick!

:hi:

[corporatewhore]

22. I tend to agree with joeseph cambells take that each religon had the same

players just different names

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

25. He had to go somewhere for those 30-odd missing years, no?

Maybe he became a master of the healing arts, thus accounting for His miracles and resurection.
I happen to be a Christian, but with very liberal interpretation of The Book. I am also open to other possibilities and other religious beliefs.
I am not into this "my way or the highway" shit. God is God, I don't care what you call Her.
For those of you agnostics, well, hey, you might be right. God may be a physial law or something, but it is still something, which is where you lose me.
Anyway, my reasons for religion have much to do with raising my kids to understand that there is someting which can help them find their way when things get tough.
Yadda, yadda.

[BurtWorm]

26. Hey, Scooter, I appreciate your yadda-ing about this!

:hi:

Just wanted to say I'm now finishing another book on a similar subject relevant to your final statement, to whit: "Anyway, my reasons for religion have much to do with raising my kids to understand that there is someting which can help them find their way when things get tough."

This one's called "Without God, Without Creed," which despite its polemical-sounding title is actually an intellectual history of unbelief in nineteenth-century American. I've just finished a section about how nineteenth-century agnostics like Charles Eliot Norton and Robert Ingersoll developed their unbelief directly out of a conviction that agnosticism is at base moral. These were guys who felt they were being dishonest to say they believed, and who held honesty with the self to be one of the highest moral qualities. Does that make sense.

I only post this to argue, in a friendly way, with your suggestion that morality requires religion. It really doesn't. But of course I have no argument with however anyone wants to raise their kids when the objective is essentially moral, however you want to interpret "morality."

[Bridget Burke]

27. Pagan elements in the Jesus story are not news....

Whether or not there was a "real" Jesus at the center of the legend.

Has anybody read "King Jesus" by Robert Graves? His version of the story tells of a man--truly born to be King of the Jews--who became involved in mysticism & missed his destiny.

It's a novel, written with the wit & erudition one would expect from the author of "I, Claudius". Also included--a warning not to insult the Goddess.