ZEITGEIST: THE MOVIE

D.M. Murdock, Who was Jesus?, Stellar House Publishing, 2007.
Earl Doherty, Jesus Neither God Nor Man: The Case for a Mythical Jesus, Age of Reason
Publications, 2009.
Robert M. Price, Deconstructing Jesus, Prometheus, 2000.
Freke and Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries, Three Rivers Press, 1999.
Herbert Cutner, Jesus: God, Man or Myth?, Book Tree, 2000.
John E. Remsburg, The Christ Myth, BiblioBazaar, 2009.
57. “...the Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a
man whom they call Christ, in place of the sun, and pay him the same adoration
which was originally paid to the sun...”
This quote is from famous Anglo-American philosopher and revolutionary statesman Thomas Paine‘s
―Origin of Freemasonry‖ and can be found in The Theological Works of Thomas Paine, p. 283.
58. The reality is, Jesus was the solar deity of the Gnostic Christian sect, and like all
other Pagan gods, he was a mythical figure.
The mythical nature of Christ is concluded from a lack of evidence for his existence and the
preponderance of his alleged characteristics and deeds clearly being part of Pagan mythology, and has
been demonstrated throughout this Sourcebook.
In this regard, in Man Made God, Barbara Walker says:
During the past century or so, scholars have shown that all these ―known‖ details of Jesus‘s life
story are mythic: That is, they were told for many centuries before his time about many previous
savior-gods and legendary heroes in pre-Christian lore. Not a single detail of Jesus‘s life story
can be considered authentic. Some investigators have tried to peel away the layers of myth in
search of a historical core, but this task is like peeling the layers of an onion. It seems that there
is no core. The layers of myth go all the way to the center. 339
For additional discussion of the who‘s and where‘s of this fascinating religious mystery, see the works
cited here. As concerns the Gnostic and Essenic origins of Christianity, see also the works of John
Allegro, one of the select few who were initially allowed to analyze the famed ―Dead Sea Scrolls‖ found in
1947, which appear to be dated from between the second century BCE to the 1 st century AD/CE.
In a work about these ancient texts called The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, Allegro
describes what was learned about the ―Essene/Gnostic Christians‖ and presents the idea that the biblical
―Jesus‖ of the gospels is a fictional interpolation of a prior Gnostic or other brotherhood figure, possibly an
Essene teacher:
…What is new, thanks largely to the Dead Sea Scrolls, is our ability now to recognise in the socalled
intertestamental period (that is, in the crucial centuries between the most recent books of
the Old Testament canon, say Daniel in the second century BC, and the earliest writings of the
New Testament, the letters of St. Paul) that the Essene movement provided just the right mix of
early Canaanite folk-religion, prophetic Yahwism, Babylonian magic, and Iranian dualism to have
produced gnostic Christianity. What it could not produce, and never did, was an historical
Joshua/Jesus Messiah living in Palestine during the first century AD and bearing any real
resemblance to the...prophet that popular imagination has largely created out of the Gospels.
Behind the Jesus of western religious tradition there did exist in history an Essene Teacher of
Righteousness of a century before... 340
But, of course, it is not him who is being recorded in the New Testament, and this ―Teacher of
Righteousness‖ is only one of several figures who were drawn upon in order to create the fictional
character called ―Jesus Christ.‖ For more information on who created Christianity, see Murdock‘s
―Essenes, Zealots and Zadokites,‖ ―Alexandria: Crucible of Christianity‖ and ―Enter Rome‖ in The Christ
339 Walker, B., MMG, 144.
340 Allegro, 190-191.