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<-- Controversial and Long Out of Print The Jesus Scroll by Donovan Joyce (New American Library, 1972) Here is a book that provides even more shocking ideas than The Templar Revelation or The DaVinci Code. This book is The Jesus Scroll by Donovan Joyce, an Australian. Ths book is long out of print, but I found a paperback copy in one of my used-book-buying forays, and initially thought the book had very low credibility. However, I've been slowly revising that thought, and have decided not to sell my copy. There may be some wisdom in this small book after all. Joyce begins the book with an incident that happened to him personally. His quest for Jesus was almost forced on him when he visited Israel in 1964. He sought entrance to Masada to research the location for a novel he was writing, but found mysteriously than General Yigael Yadin, who was excavating Masada at the time, denied him entrance. This is the same General Yadin who later purchased the Dead Sea Scrolls for Israel. At the airport, Joyce met a "professor" using a phony name who asked the author to smuggle out of Israel a scroll found at Masada. The author and professor went into the men's room where the professor unrolled the scroll and told the author that it was written at Masada during the final siege by the Romans and listed the author as "Jesus of Genesereth," a man of 80 years old and who claimed to be the rightful heir to the Hasmonean throne of Israel. Joyce was offered $5000 to conceal the scroll in his bags and get it out of Israel. He refused and never saw the scroll again (nor has it resurfaced, to my knowledge). However, back home in Australia, he began looking into the scroll's implications. If this was the Jesus of the Bible, then he would have been an old man. Joyce spent years researching the possibilities and paints an incredible picture that is different from the other alternate history writers. Joyce's Jesus is also married to Mary Magdalene, but his father is not Joseph but Alpheus. After the crucifixion (in which Jesus does NOT die), he and Magdalene do not go to France, but to the Essene community at Qumran where they live out their lives until Jesus goes with the remnant of the community to Masada, where he finally dies along with the others who took their own lives rather than be captured by the Romans. To Joyce, Jesus was thoroughly Jewish, but of the Gnostic cult that flourished by the Dead Sea. Joyce did considerable research (although he did not look in France and gives no exalted role to Mary Magdalene) and though this book bears the copyright date of 1972, he was already aware that the ideas of Christianity had been borrowed from other pagan religions. In his rather caustic manner of writing, Joyce comments "The area had long been familiar with Suffering Saviors and Redeemers and Paul's casting of Jesus in this role broke so little new ground that in fact when he joined the Pantheon Club in heaven, all that old Mithras and Soter and one or two other gods -- who died and were resurrected every year -- had to do was say Hi and make room on the bench." Like other observers, Joyce thinks the Christianity we know today was mostly invented by Paul. The mystery of the real Jesus is interwoven with the more modern mystery of why Donovan Joyce was treated badly by the Israelis and why they would never admit the Jesus scroll existed, and why they would not tell him the real reason he was denied entrance to Masada. Joyce has a lot of bitterness about his treatment and could have written this book as a kind of revenge, but I think it is more than that. Some of his logic and research hold up, but I wonder about the scroll. How could it have been in a good enough condition to unroll in the men's room, and how would the "professor" have been able to translate it so quickly? And more important, what happened to the scroll? To base a rewriting of history on information given in a men's room that is supposedly in a scroll supposedly found at Masada seems quite a stretch. Used copies of The Jesus Scroll |
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are available at amazon.com.
