The True Origins of Jesus

The original version of this searching study was published by the late Geoff Roberts under the title Jesus 888 in 2012. It draws on wide reading over decades of research into the origins and development of Christianity and the historical figure of Jesus himself. I read the work of Sir J.G. Frazer and a small book by Grant Allen entitled The Evolution of the Idea of God was my first introduction over 40 years ago to mythological motifs and archetypes informing the gospel story. More recently, I reviewed in these pages a brilliant scholarly critique of Orthodox Christian history by James McDonald, Beyond Belief. Also, The Jesus Myth, by Tim Freke and Russell Gandy. What these books have in common is the insight that gospel story and especially the figure of Christ are shaped by previous exemplars, especially from the Middle East and Egypt. Another radical book cited here is J.M. Robertson’s Pagan Christs, published over 100 years ago and which I found in a second-hand bookshop.

The strength of this book lies in summarising the various lines of evidence in an accessible manner that will appeal to the general reader as well as specialists.

An important starting point is the author’s argument that the Christian story developed from a Gnostic beginning in the vision of St Paul of a spiritual figure rather than a historical person. The Gnostics sought oneness with this Divine Spirit through gnosis. In The Gnostic New Age, April DeConick also argues that Paul’s experience was gnostic, and ‘it directly conveys a pneumatic (spiritual) that unites the human spirit with the spirit of Christ and transfigures the human mind.’ (p. 119) It is well established that Paul’s genuine epistles (some were later forgeries) predate the gospel story, which the author argues was constructed for political purposes by Ignatius and others as an argument against Docetism (Christ as only spirit) and Gnosticism more generally. He shows that the contemporary evidence for the historical Jesus is patchy among the leading scholars of the time. However, as Karen King argues, there were multiple oral traditions about Jesus’s life and teachings circulating that were only later written down. The ascendancy of Catholic orthodoxy was only sealed at the Council of Nicaea convened by the Emperor Constantine in 325. Many Gnostic Gospels were destroyed or lost for hundreds of years until the discoveries at Nag Hammadi in 1945 (some came to light earlier, and for me these gospels include The Gospel of the Beloved Companion as the complete Gospel of Mary Magdalene, only published in 2010.) In the Gnostic Gospels, Jesus comes across as a wisdom teacher rather than the sacrificial Lamb of God.

I think we are now experiencing a spiritual revival of Gnosis and gnostic approaches based on direct mystical experience. This is consistent with the overall argument of this book that the core of Christianity was in fact gnostic, and Gnostics were people open to many spiritual traditions and steeped in the ancient mysteries that circulated throughout the Mediterranean, especially in Egypt and Greece. Many essential elements from previous godlike figures in terms of their powers and the shape of their lives were incorporated in the gospel story, the patterns of which would have been familiar to educated people. The parallels drawn in this book are striking, to say the least. They include the virgin birth, miracles, death on a tree and subsequent resurrection (often related to vegetation gods and spring rites). Comparisons are drawn with Dionysus (‘the archetypal image of indestructible life’ according to Karl Kerenyi), Osiris, Horus, Mithras, Krishna, Buddha, Apollonius of Tyana and others. The Christian critic Celsus argued that there is nothing unusual about Christian beliefs, ‘except that they believe it to the exclusion of more comprehensive truths about God.’ (p. 70) Andrew Benson observes (p. 86) that all mystery religions shared common beliefs and got along harmoniously. It was only Christianity that ‘prohibited its converts from belonging to other religions.’ This intolerance and exclusivity led to disastrous persecutions, as has a fundamentalist emphasis on literalism. The messianic traditions of the Essenes were brought together in a syncretistic process to produce a ‘Hellenised Judaism’.

Two of the later chapters on Sun symbolism and gematria are especially revealing. The author explains the origins and nature of ‘astrotheology’ in terms of Zodiac Ages. It is significant that Mithras symbolism involves the death of the Bull (Taurus) while Christian symbolism draws on the sacrificial lamb of god (Aries) and Fish iconography (Pisces). Sun gods are traditionally born at the Winter solstice, then at midnight on the 24^th the constellation of Virgo (Virgin Birth) rises, while the three kings represented by Orion’s belt point towards Sirius, the brightest star in the sky (‘I am the Light of the World’). As already mentioned, the vernal equinox marks the resurrection of nature, while John the Baptist is born at the summer solstice (‘he must increase, but I must decrease’). Hence, ‘The early concept of vegetative gods and the living and dying cycle of the crops eventually fused with the Sun’s life story and then saviours were created to maintain the eternal cycle of life and death.’ (p. 192) Interestingly, the earliest representations of Jesus picture him with a lamb around him, and not until the seventh century do we find a man dying on the cross.

Greek culture was already steeped in numbers and sacred geometry, representing a harmonious relationship between heaven and earth, also signified by the Logos. John Michell made an enormous contribution with his work on sacred numbers relating to the Earth, Sun and Moon. The number 888 is attributed by gematria to Jesus as a triplicity of 8, which is the number of regeneration and resurrection. Even Irenaeus in Against Heresies mentions that the name Jesus is arithmetically symbolic. The gematria of the word dove is 801, corresponding to Jesus as Alpha and Omega, where alpha is 1 and omega 800. 153 is the number of fish caught in John 21:11 (this chapter was added later), while the ratio of the symbolic vesica piscis is 265:153, known as the number of the fish. Significantly, 666 is the number of the solar masculine, which needed to be balanced by the lunar 1080. By itself, ‘the uncontrolled power of the masculine solar 666 would be disastrous’, leading to tyranny and chaos. Translated into the language of Iain McGilchrist, 666 is the manipulative left hemisphere, which needs to be balanced by the right – Anne Baring’s soul of the cosmos.

For readers new to this historical approach to Christian origins, this book will be a revelation and an invitation to an expanded view while appreciating the pervasive influence of the mysteries and earlier spiritual traditions on the gospel story. It would have been useful to have an index and also a bibliography at the end of books mentioned in the text. Ultimately, the book’s message brings our focus back to our own inner experience and journey that involves questioning authority and examining open-mindedly the evidence presented here in order to draw our own conclusions.