The Jesus Mysteries

Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God?

    By Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy

   Reviewed by Theresa Welsh

A number of discoveries and new scholarship in modern times has raised questions about the accuracy of the usual story line of early Christianity. Did Jesus' followers gather themselves into a church that declared him the Son of God? Did these "Christians" agree on the meaning of Jesus' life and death on the cross? Did basic Christian doctrine that "Jesus died for our sins" and "believing in Jesus" brings salvation originate with his disciples?

The revelations from the Dead Sea Scrolls and more specially the Nag Hamadi documents found in the 1940s have taken many years to develop and be digested, but consensus is building that early Christians were far from organized and did not constitute a "church" as such. They tended to fall into two distinct groups: Gnostics and the traditionals who won out in the end and became the Roman Catholic Church, supposedly descended from the apostle Peter.

THE JESUS STORY IS NOT UNIQUE   What the authors of this book have done is trace the history of the understanding of the Jesus story back to the earliest time. What they found is something that other authors have also pointed out, that the Jesus story of a "suffering savior" who is rejected by his own people and is put to death but rises again is a common theme in ancient religions. The Jesus story is similar to that of other ancient "god-men" such as Egyptian Osiris, Persian Mithras or Greek Dionysus. Attis, Adonis and Bacchus are others. These movements were known collectively as "Mystery Religions" which sought to find a deeper spiritual meaning to the story of the god-man. Followers had to be initiated into the mysteries, a process designed to bring about a "knowing" of the truth, rather than "mere belief."

Gnostic Christians saw the Jesus story as a type of mystery religion, with both an outer and an inner meaning to the story. The spiritually immature can adopt the external story of a god-man who comes to help humanity, suffers and dies, and offers salvation to those who believe. But the inner story is available to those "with eyes to see" and "ears to hear." It offers the story as an allegory of a deeper spiritual experience of dying to your old self and being "resurrected" to a new spiritual self. It does not involve an actual "God-Man." What it offers is "gnosis" or "knowing" the truth through use of the "story."

DID JESUS ACTUALLY EXIST?   So far, so good, but Freke and Gandy take this a step further and say the Jesus story was a variation on the Pagan Mysteries adopted by Jews who were the first Gnostics. They say there was no "Jesus of Nazareth" as a real person who walked the earth, just like there was no Osiris or Mithras. These "saviors" are simply mythical stories invented to teach spiritual truth and lead to real knowledge. But the Christian version became something more as it spread beyond its Jewish base via St. Paul and others who originally taught the story as allegory. As a few hundred years passed, more followers just accepted the outer story, and, as Christianity became Rome's state religion under Constantine, the doctrines were "carved in stone" via the Council of Nicea in 325. By this time the disorganized Gnostics had been labeled as "heretics" and were eventually persecuted out of existence.

I've been interested in the topics of Christianity and spiritually for many years and had been exposed to most of the background to the authors' hypothesis, but I still found it difficult to accept that Jesus had actually never lived, never been a real person and was based entirely on mythical characters from previous spiritual movements. Yet the authors build a credible case. They examine what documents we have from the time period when Jesus supposedly lived. And they found pretty much nothing to corroborate his existence as a flesh and blood person.

The evidence that early "Christians" actually held a variety of beliefs about Jesus and the meaning of his story is overwhelming. But I find the shakiest part of the authors' contention is that the Jesus story could have arisen solely from the Pagan Mysteries. It seems to me that there is a fair amount of variation in all these ancient deities who suffered, died and were resurrected. While the authors reject the idea that these ideas were simply grafted onto the story of a wandering Jewish teacher who the Romans put to death by crucifixion, I think there is still room for that interpretation. They also raise confusion when they quote what Jesus supposedly said or taught in the New Testament scriptures. Did the Gospel writers take a Gnostic teacher (Jesus) and rewrite his words to match the theology created later? There's been a lot of efforts to find "historical Jesus" but it seems we can only speculate as to who actually wrote the words attributed to Jesus in Christianity's accepted scriptures and only guess at their motives.

Did Jesus actually exist? To the church that insists he "died for our sins" to bring us salvation, there is no room for interpretation. But here in the twenty-first century, more of humanity is rejecting this archaic theology. More people are "spiritual, but not religious." It's hard to say if the authors of this book (which I avoided reading for a long time, not wanting to consider whether Jesus had never existed) make a compelling case because the world is ready for it or because they have taken the parallels between Jesus and some ancient cults a bit too far. But this voluminously documented and well-written book deserves a fair hearing.

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