IN 1999, UNDER THE nom de plume Acharya S, D. M. Murdock published the breathless conspirator’s dream: The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold.16 This book was meant to set the record straight by showing that Christianity is rooted in a myth about the sun-god Jesus, who was invented by a group of Jews in the second century CE. Mythicists of this ilk should not be surprised that their views are not taken seriously by real scholars, that their books are not reviewed in scholarly journals, mentioned by experts in the field, or even read by them. The book is filled with so many factual errors and outlandish assertions that it is hard to believe that the author is serious. If she is serious, it is hard to believe that she has ever encountered anything resembling historical scholarship. Her “research” appears to have involved reading a number of nonscholarly books that say the same thing she is about to say and then quoting them. One looks in vain for the citation of a primary ancient source, and quotations from real experts (Elaine Pagels, chiefly) are ripped from their context and misconstrued. Still, in opposition to scholars who take alternative positions, such as that Jesus existed (she calls them “historicizers”), Acharya states, “If we assume that the historicizers’ disregard of these scholars [that is, the mythicists] is deliberate, we can only conclude that it is because the mythicists’ arguments have been too intelligent and knifelike to do away with.”17 One cannot help wondering if this is all a spoof done in good humor. The basic argument of the book is that Jesus is the sun-god: “Thus the son of God is the sun of God” (get it—son, sun?). Stories about Jesus are “in actuality. ased on the movements of the sun through the heavens. In other words, Jesus Christ and the others upon whom he is predicated are personifications of the sun, and the gospel fable is merely a repeat of mythological formula revolving around the movements of the sun through the heavens.”18 Christianity, in Acharya’s view, started out as an astrotheological religion in which this sun-god Jesus was transformed into a historical Jew by a group of Jewish Syro-Samaritan Gnostic sons of Zadok, who were also Gnostics and Therapeutae (a sectarian group of Jews) in Alexandria, Egypt, after the failed revolt of the Jews against Rome in 135 CE. The Jews had failed to establish themselves as an independent state in the Promised Land and so naturally were deeply disappointed. They invented this Jesus in order to bring salvation to those who were shattered by the collapse of their nationalistic dreams. The Bible itself is an astrotheological text with hidden meanings that need to be unpacked by understanding their astrological symbolism. Later we will see that all of Acharya’s major points are in fact wrong. Jesus was not invented in Alexandria, Egypt, in the middle of the second Christian century. He was known already in the 30s of the first century, in Jewish circles of Palestine. He was not originally a sun-god (as if that equals Son-God!); in fact, in the earliest traditions we have about him, he was not known as a divine being at all. He was understood to be a Jewish prophet and messiah. There are no astrological phenomena associated with Jesus in any of our earliest traditions. These traditions are attested in multiple sources that originated at least a century before Acharya’s alleged astrological creation at the hands of people who lived in a different part of the world from the historical Jesus and who did not even speak his language. Just to give a sense of the level of scholarship in this sensationalist tome, I list a few of the howlers one encounters en route, in the order in which I found them. Acharya claims that: The second-century church father Justin never quotes or mentions any of the Gospels. This simply isn’t true: he mentions the Gospels on numerous occasions; typically he calls them “Memoirs of the Apostles” and quotes from them, especially from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The Gospels were forged hundreds of years after the events they narrate. In fact, the Gospels were written at the end of the first century, about thirty-five to sixty-five years after Jesus’s death, and we have physical proof: one fragment of a Gospel manuscript dates to the early second century. How could it have been forged centuries after that? We have no manuscript of the New Testament that dates prior to the fourth century. This is just plain wrong: we have numerous fragmentary manuscripts that date from the second and third centuries. The autographs “were destroyed after the Council of Nicaea”. In point of fact, we have no knowledge of what happened to the original copies of the New Testament; they were probably simply used so much they wore out. There is not a scintilla of evidence to suggest that they survived until Nicaea or that they were destroyed afterward; plenty of counter evidence indicates they did not survive until Nicaea. “It took well over a thousand years to canonize the New Testament,” and “many councils” were needed to differentiate the inspired from the spurious books. Actually, the first author to list our canon of the New Testament was the church father Athanasius in the year 367; the comment about “many councils” is simply made up. Paul never quotes a saying of Jesus. Acharya has evidently never read the writings of Paul. As we will see, he does quote sayings of Jesus. The Acts of Pilate, a legendary account of Jesus’s trial and execution, was once considered canonical. None of our sparse references to the Acts of Pilate indicates, or even suggests, any such thing. The “true meaning of the word gospel is ‘God’s Spell,’ as in magic, hypnosis and delusion”. No, the word gospel comes to us from the Old English term god spel, which means “good news”—a fairly precise translation of the Greek word euaggelion. It has nothing to do with magic. The church father “Irenaeus was a Gnostic” . In fact, he was one of the most virulent opponents of Gnostics in the early church. Augustine was “originally a Mandaean, i.e., a Gnostic, until after the Council of Nicaea”. Augustine was not even born until nineteen years after the Council of Nicaea, and he certainly was no Gnostic.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Aug 2013 15:57:59 +0000
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