Reddit reviews The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold
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Used Book in Good Condition
/u/Vesper42 started to hint at a few possible misconceptions. However, there is a much wider theory floating around that was popularized by Acharya S in her book, The Christ conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold. There are others who have made the suggestion that early Christians were following pagan rituals and sun worship, but she pulls a lot of it together.
The gist of it is that many people believe that there are much older religions than Christianity, who all focused on the sun as the primary object of worship. They look at the Christian stories and try to draw parallels to say that Christianity was derived from all of these older religions and simply became more popular than them over time.
Obviously this is terribly wrong and full of bad facts. However, there is some basis for the notion that paganism had infiltrated Christianity in the early days. That is, we see passages like 1 Cor. 8, where the apostles have to address the issue of pagan beliefs (specifically food sacrificed to idols) becoming a problem in the church and causing some people to fall into sin. Likewise, Romans 1 talks about how some people quickly abandon God to worship idols. Much of 1 John 5 is also about discerning genuine faith in Christ from that which allows idol worship to infiltrate our beliefs.
So, yes, paganism infiltrated the early church at different points because of people who were weak in their faith and didn't know any better. The grew up with pagan idol-worship as the only thing they had known and carried some of their personal history with them when they decided to follow Jesus, which was an issue that had to be sorted out by the leaders of each of the churches.
All of these kinks were pretty well worked out until Constantine came around (c306-337). He was famous for "converting" to Christianity and decriminizing Christianity within the Roman Empire. This had the positive effect of allowing Christians the freedom to meet publicly and develop councils, a biblical canon, etc. However, it caused some problems too.
Specifically, the political shift in favor of Christianity caused a lot of people to "convert" for non-faith-based reasons, which eventually paved the way for the status of the church today with respect to numerous faux-Christians who identify as "Christian" and may even attend a church, but whose faith is not genuine. This caused some early problems with respect to non-Christian things creeping into the church.
Constantine himself was one of the biggest examples of this happening. Although he claimed to have converted to Christianity, even after his "conversion" he continued to "worship" other false gods. Some speculate that his adoption of various deities was for the purpose of political unification and he didn't really have faith in any of the religious views he adopted. One of his predecessors, Aurelian, had established a foundation for sun-worship in the late 200s (though the practice was much older), specifically recognizing "Sun-day" for that purpose. Constantine attempted to unify Christians with the sun-worshipers by making Sunday a day when no work would be done except farming.
So, to some degree Constantine had attempted to bring political unity by pressing for religious groups to align their beliefs with one another, much the same way that there is a lot of political pressure today for Christians to start aligning themselves with Muslim views in order to stop the fighting.
Anyway ... that's probably more than you cared for, but it's part of the reason why Christians are falsely accused of being sun-worshiping pagans :p
This book is very good:
https://www.amazon.com/Christ-Conspiracy-Greatest-Story-Ever/dp/0932813747
It's very well researched, high in detail, and low in theory.
Here's a book I found on Amazon that might help:
The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold
I haven't read this book myself, but this might be the closest thing to a "real" source. This book seems to cite a lot of sources.
The religion part of Zeitgeist, Astro-theology is the only part that I still "believe". Religion and myths were the way we passed down certain "knowledge". The precession of the equinoxes being one of them.
I've read the book that it's based on, The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Acharya S. She's incredibly knowledgeable. She's written multiple followup books to explore (and source) concepts that critics felt were lacking, unexplained or unsourced in TCC. The forum on her website is quite interesting too. I posted a couple times, a couple of years ago and actually got responsesfrom her and other knowledgeable people; former clergy, former astrologers, people claiming to be historians, etc. They have me convinced.
And then there's the rest of the trainwreck that is the first Zeitgeist. No, 9/11 was not an inside job. No, returning the banking system to a gold based standard will not improve things.
The other Zeitgeist films are interesting in a Utopian Science Fiction fantasy way but not much else to my interest. A "resource-based economy" sounds nice, but I don't see that happening in my lifetime. The political and social change needed to contemplate that type of economic change is not going to happen quickly. Though the rebound from Trumpism and the "blue wave" might snap the elastic that is the Overton window in the liberal direction.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.amazon.com/Christ-Conspiracy-Greatest-Story-Ever/dp/0932813747&ved=2ahUKEwiF-4XksIjiAhXPnuAKHTodAXgQFjAAegQIBxAC&usg=AOvVaw2sNK8Sg38p-CkmOBZgAg2l
>Any book recommendations on wether a historical Jesus existed ?
The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold
Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled
Who Was Jesus? Fingerprints of the Christ
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
The reflex return in certain circumstances just takes time to wear off,... and the rest of it is a deep-seated fear that got implanted along with the rest.
http://www.amazon.com/Christ-Conspiracy-Greatest-Story-Ever/dp/0932813747/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1292678020&sr=8-3
Read this book if you can, the author makes a good case that there was no historical Jesus. If Jesus didn't exist the remnants fall away.
Good luck, and keep questioning.
A tough view. The use of pop, and children's, culture icon cartoon figures, the distracting background noise, and the really slow presentation of actual information/argument make the first vid hard to watch and really dilutes any message. Though I did like the cameo from the Little Caesars Pizza-Pizza guy. From watching the first vid, there is no topic argument/position statement explicitly made/presented, though if I had to guess as to the final topic position/argument, based upon the way the very sparse information is presented, that an argument will be made that supports the listed or attributed authors of the various books of the NT - this is just a guess, the presentation of introductory material was really incoherent.
> "One of the things I have noticed about critics who say that this or that book in the NT is bogus is that they seldom seem to explain in any detail how we decide who wrote a document."
Say what? I smell a strawman argument.
The above quote was made whilst a slide show of books that discuss the New Testament was shown. Some of these books are recognizable as titles containing literary criticism of the New Testament, many are not. I could not get a good look at the "examples" presented as the screen time was very short (compared to the relatively long time given to worthless animations of smurfs or topic transition special effects), too short to get a good look at the sources that I assume supports the above statement was quoted; I had to do a frame by frame advance to see/read the titles presented.
Let's look at the first few "references" presented:
Just between the book title and lack of authorship identification, without even reading the book description, is enough for anyone discussing NT literary criticism to reject the book as a credible source.Does not seem to be a reference to literary criticism and authorship of the New Testament books. Nope.
A book containing the personal journey of one man losing Religious Faith. Does not seem to be a reference to literary criticism and authorship of the New Testament books.
Examines the documentary hypothesis and other possible sources of much of the narrative of the Bible. Does not seem to be a reference to literary criticism and authorship of the New Testament books.
Look, another Dan Baker book already. A book against the reasonableness and rationality of Christian belief. Does not seem to be a reference to literary criticism and authorship of the New Testament books.
Finally, a book that appears to have sections that may address the authorship of selected New Testament writings (I say appears as I have not read it and am relying upon the publisher description, the TOC, and reviews) - though the book appears to be more directed towards the content of the NT rather than attributed source critism.
Bummer. Out of the first 5 potential references which one would reasonably consider as being presented on the authorship of the NT (you know, the topic/vid title), none (0 for 5) of them seem to be a reference to literary criticism of the authorship of the New Testament books. And I wanted to use the very references presented above to refute the strawman argument presented in the above quote that books/references that perform a literary criticism of the NT authorship (or the Bible in general) "seldom seem to explain in any detail how we decide who wrote a document."
Let's look at a popular writer on the New Testament, Bart D. Ehrman. An example, Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. And look at that, Ehrman does indeed present extensive detail, on the how's of literary criticism and attributed authorship. Granted one example does not a strawman break, however, I have found that references literary criticism, Biblical or other, almost always include a review of the methods used.
> That makes the correlation to Bill Maher documentary even stronger in my opinion seeing how it came out 10 years ago.
bill maher isn't the source.
the source that popularized it was 2007-2011's zeitgeist, which makes such laughably bad point as "the sun" of god is "the son" of god, a pun that only happens to work in english when early christianity was dealing with greek and aramaic/hebrew.
the source for that, in turn, is 1999's the christ conspiracy by DM murdock (AKA acharya s), who seems to have a BA in classics, but lost the plot prior to actually publishing anything academic.
in turn, murdock's work is based on these sources from the 19th century:
> One of the more important aspects of Massey's writings were his assertions that there were parallels between Jesus and the Egyptian god Horus, primarily contained in the book The Natural Genesis first published in 1883. Massey, for example, argued in the book his belief that: both Horus and Jesus were born of virgins on 25 December, raised men from the dead (Massey speculates that the biblical Lazarus, raised from the dead by Jesus, has a parallel in El-Asar-Us, a title of Osiris), died by crucifixion and were resurrected three days later.^[7] These assertions have influenced various later writers such as Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Tom Harpur, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and Dorothy M. Murdock.^[8][9][unreliable ^source?]
>> Christian ignorance notwithstanding, the Gnostic Jesus is the Egyptian Horus who was continued by the various sects of gnostics under both the names of Horus and of Jesus. In the gnostic iconography of the Roman Catacombs child-Horus reappears as the mummy-babe who wears the solar disc. The royal Horus is represented in the cloak of royalty, and the phallic emblem found there witnesses to Jesus being Horus of the resurrection.^[10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Massey
and of course this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Sixteen_Crucified_Saviors
it's important to note that none of these people are proper scholars. and the original sources here seem to have just made things up.
Yep. Misquoting Jesus (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060859512/)
The Christ Conspiracy (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0932813747/)
This book will give you the historical lowdown. http://www.amazon.com/The-Christ-Conspiracy-Greatest-Story/dp/0932813747
Christianity grew out of preceding philosophies and faiths of the time, forced into being by a Roman emperor who wanted a coherent faith equally acceptable to all parts of a very extensive Roman Empire. This author is well versed in all the sources of the new syncretic religion, and all the points you mention are addressed here. Extensively footnoted from primary sources.
You don't mention whether you yourself are Christian. This information can be a shock if you have strong preconceived notions.