                                Jesus Christ
				     by
                             Barbara G. Walker
			     
  The Jesus who was called Christos, "Anointed," took his title from
Middle-Eastern savior-gods like Adonis and Tammuz, born of the Virgin
Sea-goddess Aphrodite-Maria (Myrrha), or Ishtar-Mari (Hebrew Mariamne).
  Earlier biblical versions of the same hero were Joshua son of Nun
(Exodus 33:11), Jehu son of Nimshi, whom Elijah anointed as a sacred
king (1 Kings 19:16), and Yeshua son of Morah, The Book of Enoch said
in the 2nd century B.C.E. that Yeshua or Jesus was the secret name
given by God to the Son of Man (a Persian title), and that it meant
"Yahweh saves."
  In northern Israel the name was written Ieu. It was the same as Ieud
or Jeud, the "only-begotten son" dressed in royal robes and sacrificed
by god-king Isra-El. Greek versions of the name were Iasion, Jason, or
Iasus -- the name of one of Demeter's sacrificed consorts, killed by
Father Zeus after the fertility rite that coupled him with his mother.
  Iasus signified a healer Therapeuta, as the  Greeks called the
Essenes, whose cult groups always included a man with the title of
Christos. The literal meaning of the name was "healing moon-man,"
fitting the Hebrew version of Jesus as a son of Mary, the almah or
"moon maiden."
  It seems Jesus was not one person but a composite of many. He played
the role of sacred king of the Jews who periodically died in an
atonement ceremony as surrogate for the real king. "The Semitic
religions practiced human immolations longer than any other religion,
sacrificing children and grown men in order to please sanguiary gods.
In spite of Hadrians's prohibition of those murderous offerings, they
were maintained in certain clandestine rites." The priesthood of the
Jewish God insisted that "one man should die for the people... that the
whole nation perish not" (John 11:50). Yahweh forgave no sins without
bloodshed: "without shedding blood is no remission" (Hebrews 9:22).
  Middle-Eastern traditions presented a long line of slain and
cannibalized Saviors extending back to prehistory. At first kings, they
became king-surrogates or "sacred" kings as the power of real
monarchies developed. The Gospels' Jesus was certainly not the first of
them, though he may have been one of the last. One passage hints at a
holy man's understandable fear of such brief, doomed eminence: "When
Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him by force,
to make him a king, he departed again into a mountain himself alone"
(John 6:15).
  This Jesus seems to have made little or no impression on his
contemporaries.  No literate person of his own time mentioned him in
any known writing. The Gospels were not written in his own time, nor
were they written by anyone who ever saw him in the flesh. The books
were composed after the establishment of the church, some as late as
the 2nd century A.D. or later, according to the church's requirements
for a manufactured tradition.  Most scholars believe the earliest book
of the New Testament was 1 Thessalonians, written perhaps 51 A.D. by
Paul, who never saw Jesus in person and knew no details of his life
story. 
  the details were accumulated through later adoption of the myths
attached to every savior-god throughout the Roman empire. Like Adonis,
Jesus was born of a consecrated temple maiden in the sacred cave of
Bethlehem, "The House of Bread." He was eaten in the form of bread, as
were Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, and others; he called himself the bread
of God (john 6:33). Like worshippers of Osiris, those of Jesus made him
apart of themselves by eating him, so as to participate in his
resurrection: "He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth
in me, and I in him" (John 6:56).
  Like Attis, Jesus was sacrificed at the spring equinox and rose again
from the dead on the third day, when he bacame God and ascended to
heaven. Like Orpheus and Heracles, he "harrowed hell" and brought a
secret of eternal life, promising to draw all men with him up to glory
(John 12:32). Like Mithra and all the other solar gods, he celebrated a
birthday nine months later at the winter solstice, because the day of
his death was also the day of his cyclic re-conception.
  From the elder gods, Jesus acquired not only his title of Christos
but all his other titles as well. Osiris and Tammuz were called Good
Shepherd. Sarapis was Lord of Death and King of Glory. Mithra and
Heracles were Light of the World, Sun of Righteousness, Helios the
Rising Sun. Dionysus was King of Kings, God of Gods. Hermes was the
Enlightened One and the Logos. Vishnu and Mithra were Son of Man and
Messiah. Adonis was the Lord and the Bridegroom. Mot-Aleyin was the
Lamb of God. "Savior" was applied to all of them.
  Mystery cults everywhere taught that ordinary men could be possessed
by spirits of such gods, and identifed with them as "son" or alter
egos, as Jesus was. It was the commonly accepted way to acquire
supernatural powers, as shown by some of the charms used by magicians:
"Whatever I say must happen....For I have taken to myself the power of
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the great god-demon Iao Ablanathanalba...for
I am the Son, I surpass the limit....I am he who is in the seven
heavens, who standeth in the seven sanctuaries; for I am the son of the
living God....I have been united with thy sacred form. I have been
empowered by thy sacred name. I have recieced the effluence of
goodness, Lord, God of gods, King,....havein attained that nature equal
to the God's"
  the skeptical Celsus noted that beggars and vagabounds throughout the
Empire were pretending to work miracles and become gods, throwing fits,
prophesying the end of the world, and aspiring to the status of saviors:

  Each has the convenient and customary spiel, "I am the god," or "a
  son of God," or "a divine spirit," and "I have come. For the world
  is about to be distroyed, and you, men, because of your injustice,
  will go (with it). But I wish to save, and you shall see me again
  coming back with heavenly power. Blessed is he who worships me
  now! On all others, both cities and countrysides, I shall cast
  eternal fire. And men who (now) ignore their punishments shall 
  repent in vain and groan, but those who believed in me I shall
  preserve immortal."
  
  Of course this "conspicuously false" doctrine was the central message
of the Gospels too. Persian eschatology passing through a
Jewish-Essenic filter predicted "the Son of Man comeing in a cloud with
power and great glory" (Luke 9:27, 21:27). Jesus promised the end of
the world in his own generation. The rest of the Gospel material was
largely devoted to the miracles supposed to demonstate his divine
power, since religions generally "adduce revelations, apparitions,
prophecies, miracles, prodigies and sacred mysteries that they may get
themselves valued and accepted." Even these miracles were derivative.
Turning water into wine at Cana was copied from a Dionysian ritual
practiced at Sidon and other places. In Alexandria the same Dionysian
miracle was regularly shown before crowds of the faithful, assisted by
an ingenious system of vessels and siphons, invented by a clever
engineer named Heron. Many centuries earlier, priestesses at Nineveh
cured the blind with spittle, and the story was repeated of many
diffrent gods and their incarnations. Demeter of Eleusis multiplied
loaves and fishes in her role of Mistress of Earth and Sea. Healing the
sick, raising the dead, casting out devils, handling poisonous serpents
(Mark 16:18), etc., were so commonplace that Celsus scorned these
"Christian" miracles as "nothing more then the common works of those
enchanters who, for a few oboli, will perform greater deeds in the
midst of the Forum. ... The magicians of Egypt cast ou evil spirits,
cure diseases by a breath, and so influence some uncultured men, that
they produce in them whatever sights and sounds they please. But
because they do such things shall we consider them the sons of God?
  Magicians often claimed that their prayers could bring flocks of
supernatural beings to their assistance. Thus Jesus declared that his
prayer could summon twelve legions (72,000) of guardian angels (Matthew
26:53). Magicians also communed with their followers by the standard
mystery-cult sacrament of bread-flesh and wine blood. In texts on
magic, "a magician-god gives his own body and blood to a recipient who,
by eating it, will be united with him in love."
  The ability to walk on water was claimed by Far-Eastern holy men ever
since Buddhist monks praised it as the mark of the true ascetic. The
Magic Papyri said almost anyone could walk on water with the help of "a
powerful demon."  Impossibilities have always been the props of
religious credulity, as Tertullian admitted: "It is believable because
it is absurd; it is certain because it is impossible.
  However, repetitive miracles were not so believable as original ones.
Therefore early Christians insisted that all the older deities and
their miracle-tales were invented by the devil, out of his
foreknowledge of the true religion, so the faithful would be confused
by past "imitations."  Pagan thinkers countered with the observation
that "The christian religion contains nothing but what Christians hold
in common with heathens; nothing new, nor truly great." Even St.
Augustine, finding the hypothesis of the divil's inventions hard to
swallow, admitted that "the true religion" was known to the ancients,
and had existed from the beginning of time, but it began to be called
Christian after "Christ came in the flesh."
  Nevertheless, adherents of the true religion violently disagreed as
to the circumstances of its foundation. In the first feew centuries
A.D. there were many mutually hostile Christian sects, and many
mutually contradictory Gospels.  As late as 450, Bishop Theodore of
Cyrrhus said there were at least 200 diffrent Gospels revered by the
churches of his own diocese, until he destroyed all but the approved
canonical four.  The other Gospels were lost as stronger sects
overwhelmed the weaker, wrecked their churches, killed the believers
and burned their books.
  One scripture, later thrown out of the canon, said Jesus was not
crucified. Simon of Cyrene suffered on the cross in his place, while
Jesus stood by laughing at the executioners, saying, "It was another
who drank of the gall and vinegar; it was not I....it was another,
Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. It was another upon whom
they placed th crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing in the height....
And I was laughing at their ignorance."  Believers in this scipture
were persecuted and forced to sign an abjuration reading: "I
anathematize those who say that Our Lord suffered only in appearance,
and that there was a man on the cross and another at a distance who
laughed." 
  Some Christians interpreted Jesus's noli me tangere ("Touch me not")
to mean he came back from the death as an incorporeal spirit, after the
manner of other apotheosized heroes, such as the Irish hero Laegaire,
who also told his people not to touch him.  Later, an unknown Gospel
writer inserted the story of doubting Thomas, who insisted on touching
Jesus. This was to combat the heretical idea that there was no
resurrection in the flesh, also to subordiinate Jerusalem's numicipal
god Tammuz (Thomas) to the new savior. 
  Actually, the most likely source of primary Christian mythology was
the Tammuz cult in Jerusalem. Like Tammuz, Jesus was the Bridegroom of
the Daughter of Zion (John 12:15). Therefore his bride was Anath,
"Virgin Wisdom Dwelling in Zion," who was also the Mother of God. Her
dove decended on him at his baptism, signifying (in the old religion)
that she chose him for the love-death, Anath broke her bridegroom's
reed scepter, schourged him and pierced him for fructifying blood. She
pronounced his death curse, Maranatha (1 Corinthians 16:22). As the
Gospels said of Jesus, Anath's bridegroom was "forsaken" by El, his
heavenly father. Jesus's cry to El, "My God, God, why hast thou
forsaken me?" seems to have been a line written for the second act of
the sacred drama, the pathos or Passion (Mark 15:34).
  Of course this Passion was originally a sexual one. Jesus's last
words "it is done" from consummatum est which would be better
interpeted as "it is consummated", this was interpreted as a sign that
his was finished, but could equally apply to his marriage (John 19:30).
  As a cross or pillar represented the divine phallus, so a temple
represented the body of the Goddess, whose "veil" (hymen) was "rent in
the midst" as jesus passed into death (Luke 23:45). As usual when the
god disappeared into the underworld, the sun was eclipsed (Luke 23:44).
  In their ignorance of astronomical phenonema, Christians claimed that
the moon was full at the same time -- Easter is still a full-moon
festival -- though an eclipse of the sun can only occur at the dark of
the moon. The full moon really meant impregnation of the Goddess.
  The parting of Jesus's garment recalls the unwrapping of Osiris when
he emerged from the tomb as the ithyphallic Min, "Husband of his
Mother." If Jesus was one with his heavenly father, then he also
married his mother and begot himself.  A 4th-century scripture said in
the underworld he confronted his mother as Death, Mu. She was also the
Bride disguised as Venus, the evening star, presiding over the death of
the sun. Jews still recall her in a ritual greeting to the evening
star. "Come. O friend. let us welcome the Bride."
  Like Pagans, early Christians identified the Bride with the Mother.
They said Jesus "consummated on the cross" his union with
Mary-Ecclesia, his bride the church. Augustine wrote: "Like a
bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber, he went out with a
presage of his nuptials....He came to the marriage bed of the cross,
and there, in mounting it, he consummated his marriage...., he lovingly
gave himself up to the torment in place of his bride, and he joined
himself to the woman for ever." John 19:41 says, "In the place where he
was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre,
wherein was never man yet laid."  A garden was the conventional symbol
for te body of the mother/bride at that time; and a new tomb was the
virgin womb, whence the god would be born again. On the third day,
Jesus rose from the tomb/womb like Attis, whose resurrection was the
Hilaria, or Day of Joy. Jesus's resurrection day was named after
Eostre (Easter), the same Goddess as Astarte, whom the Syurians called
Mother Mari.
  Three incarnations of Mari, or Mary, stood at the foot of Jesus's
cross, like the Moerae of Greece. One was his virgin mother. The second
was his "dearly beloved" Mary magdalene. The third Mary must have
represented the Crone, so the resembled that of the three Norns at the
foot of Odin's sacrificial tree. The Fates were present at the
saacrifices decreed by Heavenly Fathers, whose victims hong on trees or
pillars "between heaven and earth." Up to Hadrian's time, victims
offered Zeus at Salamis were anointed with sacred ointments -- thus
becomeing "Anointed Ones" or "Christ" -- then hung up and stabbed
through the side with a spear.  Nothing in Jesus's myth occurred at
random; every detail was part of a formal sacrificial tradition, even
to the "processiong of palms" which glorified sacred kings in ancient
Babylon. 
  Far-Eastern tradition were utilized too. The Roman empire was well
aware of the teachings ande myths of Buddhism. Buddha images in classic
Greek style weere made in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the first century
A.D. Buddhist ideas like the "footprints of Buddha" appeared among
Christians. Bishop Sulpicus of Jerusalem reported that, as in India,
"In the dust where Christ trod the marks of His step can still be seen,
and the earth still bears the printy of this feet." Buddhist metaphors
and phrasing also appeared in the Gospels. Jesus's formula, "Dearly
Beloved," was the conventional way for Tantric deities to address their
teachings to Devi, their Goddess.
  Scholars' efforts to eliminate paganism from the Gospels in order to
find a historical Jesus have proved as hopeless as searching for a core
in an onian.  Like a mirage, the Jesus figure looks clear at a distance
but lacks approachable solidity. "His" sayings and parables came from
elsewhere; "his" miracles were twice-told tales. Even the Lord's Prayer
was a collection of sayings from the Talmud, many derived from earlier
Egyptian prayers to Osiris.  The Sermon on the Mount, sometimes said to
contain the essence of Christianity, had no original material; it was
made up of fragments from Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Secrets of
Enoch, and the Shemone Esreh.  Moreover, it was unknown to the author
of the oldest Gospel, pseudo-Mark.
  The discovery that the Gospels were forged, centuries later than the
events they described, is still not widely known enven though the
Catholic Encyclopedia admits, "The idea of a complete and clear-cut
canon of the New Testament existing from the beginning...has no
foundation in history." No extant manuscript can be dated earlier then
the 4th century A.D.; most were written even later. The oldest
manuscripts contradict one another, as also do even the present canon
of synopic Gospels.
  The church owed its canon to the Gnostic teacher Marcion, who first
collected Pauline epistles about the middle of the 2nd century. Later
he was excommunicated as a heretic because he denied that the
scriptures were mystical allegories full of magic words of power. The
epistles he collected were already over a century old, if indeed they
were written by Paul; much of their material was made up of forged
interpolations. 
  The most "historical" figure in the Gosples was Pontius Pilate, to
whom Jesus was presented as "king" of the Jews and simultaneously as a
criminal deserving the death penalty for "blasphemy" because he called
himself Christ, Son of the Blessed (Luke 23:3; Mark 14:61-64). This
alleged crime was no real crime. Eastern provinces swarmed with
self-styled Christs and Messiahs, calling themselves Sons of God and
announcing the end of the world. None of them was executed for
"blasphemy." The beginning of the story probably lay in the traditon of
sacred-king sacrifice in Jerusalem long before Pilate's administration,
when Rome was trying to discourage such barbarisms.
  From 103 to 76 B.C., Jersalem was governed by Alexander Janneaus,
called the Aeon, who defended his throne by fighting challengers. One
year, on the Day of Atonement, his people attacked him at the alter,
waving palm branches to signify that he should die for the earth's
fertility. Alexander declined the honor and instituted a persecution of
his won subjects. Another king of Jerusalem took the name of Menelaus,
"Moon-king," and practiced the rite of sacred marriage in the timple.
Herod also made a sacred marriage, and had John the Baptist slain as a
surrogate for himself.
  If there was a Jesus cult in Jerusalem after 30 A.D., it completely
disappeared forty years later when Titus conquered the city and
outlawed many local customs including human sacrifice. Jerusalem was
wholly Romanized under Hadrian. It was newly named Aelia Capitolina and
rededicated to the Goddess. The temple became a shrine of Venus.
Tacitus described the siege of Jerusalem, but his writing is abruptly
cut off at the moment when Roman forces entered the city -- as if the
final chapters were deliberately distoryed -- so no one knows what the
Romans found there. However, Romans did express disapproval of the Jews
or Christians cannibalistic sacraments. Porphyry called it "absurd
beyond all absurdity, and bestial beyond every sort of bestiality, that
a man should taste human flash and drink the blood of men of his own
genus and species, and by doing should have eternal life."
  From the Christians viewpoint, a real historical Jesus was essential
to the basic premise of the faith: the possibility of immortality
through identifcation with his own death and resurrection. Welhausen
rightly said Jesus would have no place in history unless he died and
returned exactly as the Gospels said. "If christ hath not been raised,
your faith is vain" (1 Conrinthians 15:17). Still, despite centuries of
reseach, no historical Jesus has come to light. It seems his story was
not merely overlaid with myth; it was mythic to the core.
  Like all myths, it revealed much about the collective psychology that
created it. In earlier pagan religions, the Mother and Son periodically
ousted tyhe Father from his heavenly throne. The divine son of
Christianity no longer challenged the heavenly king, but tamely
submitted to his fatal command: "Not my will, but thine, be done" (Luke
22:42). Some early sects said the Father who demanded his son's blood
was cruel, even demonic. These were suppressed, but scholars have
discerned in Christianity "an original attude of hostility toward the
father figure, which was changed in the first two Christian centuries
into an attitude of passive masochistic docility.
  If orthodox Christianity demanded subordination of the Son, it was
even more determined to subordinate the Mother. The Gospels Jesus
showed little respect for his mother, which troubled the in its
Renaissance efforts to attract women to the cult of Mary. "Any hero who
speaks to his mother only twice, and on both occasions addresses her as
`Woman,' is a difficult figure for the sentimentalbiographers."
Together with Jesus's avowed opposition to marriage and the family
(Matthew 22:30; Luke 14:26), women's primary concerns, New Testament
sexism tended to disgust educated women of the old world.
  But the Jusus who emulated Buddha in advocationg poverty and humility
eventually became the mythic figurehead for one of the world's
pre-eminent money-making organizations. The cynical Pope Leo
X exclaimed, "What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us!"
  Modern theologians tend to sidestep the question of whether Jesus was
in fact a fable or a real person. In view of the complete dearth of
hard evidence, and the dubious nature of the soft evidence, it seems
Christianity is based on the unbiquitous social phenomena of credulity:

  An idea is able to gain and retain the aure of essential truth
  through telling and retelling. This process endows a cherished
  notion with more veracity than a library of facts...Documentation
  plays only a small role in contrast to the act of re-confirmation
  by each generation of scholars. In addition, the further removed
  one gets from the period in question, the greater is the strenth
  of the conviction. Initial incredulousness is soon converted into
  belief in a probability and eventually smug assurance.
  
        -- W. Arens  The Man-Eating Myth. 