Timothy Freke

''The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God?'' is a 1999 book by British authors Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, which advances the argument that early Christianity originated as a Greco-Roman mystery cult and that Jesus was invented by early Christians based on an alleged pagan cult of a dying and rising "godman" known as Osiris-Dionysus, whose worship the authors claim was manifested in the cults of Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, and Mithras.

The authors propose that Jesus did not literally exist as an historically identifiable individual, but was instead a syncretic re-interpretation of the fundamental pagan "godman" by the Gnostics, who the authors assert were the original sect of Christianity. Freke and Gandy argue that orthodox Christianity was not the predecessor to Gnosticism, but a later outgrowth that rewrote history in order to make literal Christianity appear to predate the Gnostics. They describe their theory as the "Jesus Mysteries thesis".

Thesis

Freke and Gandy base ''The Jesus Mysteries'' thesis partly on a series of parallels between their suggested biography of Osiris-Dionysus and the biography of Jesus drawn from the four canonical gospels. Their suggested reconstruction of the myth of Osiris-Dionysus, compiled from the myths of ancient dying and resurrected "godmen," bears a striking resemblance to the gospel accounts. The authors give a short list of parallels:
* Osiris-Dionysus is God made flesh, the savior and " Son of God."
* His father is God and his mother is a mortal virgin, 7 month pregnancy.
* 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 of 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 honor 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.

According to ''The Jesus Mysteries'', Christianity originated as a Judaized version of the pagan mystery religions. Hellenized Jews wrote a version of the godman myth incorporating Jewish elements. Initiates learned the myth and its allegorical meanings through the Outer and Inner Mysteries. A similar pattern of "Lesser" and "Greater" Mysteries was part of the pagan Eleusinian Mysteries. Mithraism was structured around seven serial initiations.

Freke and Gandy suggest that, at some point, groups of Christians who had only experienced the ''Outer'' Mysteries were split off from the elders of the religion and forgot that there had ever ''been'' a second initiation, and that, later, when they encountered groups who had retained the Inner Mysteries, these "Literalist Christians" s Freke and Gandy call themattacked the "Gnostics" for claiming that what the Literalists considered false knowledge and false initiations, was, in fact, the original second initiation of primal (Gnostic) Christianity. Freke and Gandy claim that the Literalists won out when the emperor Constantine saw the political merit of 'one empire, one emperor, one god', practically exterminated the Gnostics, and saw to it that 'Literalist Christianity' became the officially-approved Roman Catholic Church and its modern descendants.

Reception

Chris Forbes, an ancient historian and senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney has criticised the work, noting that Freke and Gandy are "not real scholars, they are popularisers." He calls their arguments about Jesus "grossly misconceived, and their attempt to draw links between Jesus and various pagan god-men is completely muddled. It looks impressive because of the sheer mass of the material, but when you break it down and look at it point by point, it really comes to pieces."The Jesus Mysteries - a critique

Paul Barnett, a bishop and New Testament scholar who has authored several books on the historical Jesus, argues that a good proportion of the citations are out of date. "Like the Gnostics, Freke and Gandy have a mystical mindset and therefore oppose Christianity as grounded in history," he wrote. "They hate the idea that the incarnation of the Son of God and his resurrection could have been a matter of actual flesh and blood and time and place."

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