This interview with Timothy Freke, co-author with Peter Gandy of
The Jesus Mysteries and
Jesus and the Lost Goddess, includes this key statement regarding Gnosticism: (4:30) “Once I got over the shock that the most famous man who ever lived didn’t, what I found was that there is this incredible depth of mystical wisdom available through the Western tradition that I hadn’t been able to see before… The Gnostics are carrying the real tradition, the literalists are an imitation church… The Jesus story is allegory with serious political overlays… we’ve been caught up in false memory syndrome… honour the Gnostic thread to create a more loving and more unified world”
This talk starts out by referring to Jesus of Nazareth, even though evidence suggests Nazareth did not exist in the early first century. Rene Salm argues persuasively in
The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus that Nazareth was named after Jesus the Nazarene, and did not exist at the time of Christ. My view is that Nazareth was invented to provide plausible deniability for Gnostic Christians who were under persecution from Rome, in order to deny membership of the proscribed Nazarene Gnostic sect. The archaeology of Nazareth strongly supports this claim of its establishment well after Christ. There has been nothing found in Nazareth dated to Hellenistic times before 100 AD, when Jews moved there following the Roman obliteration of Israel and Jerusalem. Only when Empress Helena asked to see the Potemkin Nazareth in the fourth century did the locals oblige with Jesus sites so the Christendom myth could be manufactured. The leading Christian theologian Origen lived in the second century in a town near Nazareth but did not know where it was.
Even Jesus the Nazarene is almost certainly an ideal myth, an invented fictional character designed as avatar of the Age of Pisces, as argued especially by Frank Zindler and DM Murdock. This ideal makes complete sense of the pre-existent Logos, given that astronomers could see the movement of the spring point towards Pisces for hundreds and probably even thousands of years before Christ.
Movie Nerd wrote: If I may, I would like to ask for some more texts I could look at to support your claim here.
There are several claims in my quoted post:
Robert Tulip wrote:Don't take the Book of Acts at face value. It should be considered as fiction.
Richard Carrier’s new book
On The Historicity of Jesus, Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, includes a chapter on Acts as Historical Fiction. Earl Doherty’s excellent book
Jesus Neither God Nor Man goes through the contradictions between Acts and the Epistles of Paul.
Robert Tulip wrote:Saint Peter is presented as a Stalin-like demagogue. When Ananias refuses to give up his money Peter curses him and he dies. That is the totalitarian tyranny which results from the alleged primitive communism of the early church. quote="Acts 5:3-5"
That is my personal view about Peter. I am particularly interested in Orwellian analysis of how modern communism based its methods and structures on the Roman Catholic Church. The terror that Peter strikes into the community is very similar to Stalin’s dogma of the liquidation of the kulaks as a class in this case.
Robert Tulip wrote:
Acts is shoddy propaganda aimed to destroy memory of the Gnostic origins of the Christ Myth. The primitive communism of the pentecost community is presented as unsustainable against the need to mobilise an institutional hierarchy of orthodox bishops and priests.
Freke and Gandy are among the best writers on this theme of the evolution of Christianity from enlightened Gnostic wisdom to political Orthodox conformity. Also, while
The Gnostic Paul by Elaine Pagels is careful to avoid overtly political claims, it presents a strong case that Paul wrote at two levels, esoteric and exoteric, and that the exoteric reading became the authorised exclusive interpretation for Orthodox faith.
The Christ Conspiracy by Acharya S is an excellent analysis of the early church, but was an early work for which a revised edition is planned.
