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