'The greatest cover-up in history'
Jesus Christ is a myth
and his life is a metaphor
1 2
01Aug2003 -
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this article.
The
Dutch in the original
article has been translated into English by Marienella Meulensteen.
In this article we will pursue in more detail
the question that was at the center of the previous part of this
series: Is Jesus Christ a myth and his life a metaphor? The
authors of The Jesus Mysteries think so. Their book was chosen Book
of the Year by
The Daily Telegraph in 1999; one fifth of the more than 300
pages consists of notes written down in a small font. The book is
not in stock but until that time we can pursue the matter more deeply
thanks to a 'brief overview of the book' in
the form of an article of
the authors.
Following are a few out-takes.
'On the same
spot where the Pope celebrates the Catholic mass, Pagan priests had also
celebrated a symbolic meal of bread and wine in memory of their
saviour who, just like Jesus, had declared "He who will not eat
of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made one
with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation." When
we began to uncover such extraordinary similarities between the
story of Jesus and Pagan myth we were stunned.
[...] We have become convinced that
the story of Jesus is not the biography of an historical Messiah, but a
myth based on perennial Pagan stories. Christianity was not a new and
unique revelation but actually a Jewish adaptation of the ancient Pagan
Mystery religion.' To beat the critics to the punch, they write: 'It
is firmly based upon the available historical sources and the latest
scholarly research. Whilst we hope to have made it accessible to the
general reader, we have also included copious notes giving sources,
references and greater detail for those who wish to analyze our arguments
more thoroughly'.
Different names, same story
Long before anyone talked about Jesus the Christ, there were known
mysteries about a godly man who died and rose again, write the authors.
He was known in different times and in different cultures under
different names. The names differed, but the elements
of the story were always the same:
* Osiris-Dionysus is God made flesh, the saviour and
'Son of God'.
* His father is God and his mother is a mortal
virgin.
* 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 ot 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 honour 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. [...] We had collated
such a comprehensive body of similarities that there
remained hardly any significant elements in the biography of Jesus that
we did not find prefigured by the Mysteries. On top of this, we discovered
that even Jesus' teachings were not original, but had been anticipated by
the Pagan sages!'
Emperor
decides: take the Christ story literally
The authors of the book The Jesus
Mysteries discover
during their research that during the centuries after Christ two groups
of Christians were active: the Gnostics and they who took the Jesus
story literally. The Gnostics 'claimed to know the secret Inner
Mysteries of Christianity which the Literalists did not possess, and
were repressed and finally disappeared, together with a stack of
apocrypha from Christian history, after Emperor Constantine raised
the Christianity of those who took the story of Christ literally, by decree,
to a world religion.
The myth is the form, but it is all about the content,
the purpose
The authors ask themselves: 'Why should we consider the
stories of Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Attis, Mithras and the other Pagan
Mystery saviours as fables, yet come across essentially the same story
told in a Jewish context and believe it to be the biography of a carpenter
from Bethlehem?' Good point. For thousands of years already, myths
circulate about godly people with exactly the same details as in the
Christ story. These myths are the form to the purpose
of inner transformation. That
process of transformation is divided and each part has a
beginning, a middle and an end. To make this process known, it is
presented in a story form. Think of a novel like The Lord of the
Rings, or
a story like the one about Adam and Eve. Only very few people take that first
bible story literally these days. Stronger, it shows a lack of respect for the
author if you would take a story like that -also like Animal Farm for
example- literally.
The greatest cover-up in
history
The authors do further research into the truth of the story
about Jesus Christ: 'We found ourselves embroiled in a world of schism
and power struggles, of forged documents and false identities, of letters
that had been edited and added to, and of the wholesale destruction of
historical evidence. [...] It was becoming increasingly
obvious that we had been deliberately deceived, that the Gnostics
were indeed the original Christians, and that their anarchic mysticism
had been hijacked by an authoritarian institution which had created from
it a dogmatic religion - and then brutally enforced the
greatest cover-up in history. [...] We have
kept the form, but lost the inner meaning'.
The authors end the article with the words: 'Our hope is that this book
can play some small part in reclaiming the true mystical Christian
inheritance.' With that they aim at the inner mystery that lies
hidden in the outer mystery, as we know it through Christianity:
'Initiates of the Inner Mysteries had the mystical meaning of the
rituals and myths of the Outer Mysteries revealed to them, a process
which brought about personal transformation and spiritual
enlightenment.' Transformation after initiation by an insider.