Acharya S - The Christ Conspiracy
The Christ Conspiracy - The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Acharya S (D.M. Murdock)
Available at http://www.truthbeknown.com
I'm posting this in the Hitchens God is not Great
section because it directly address one of Hitchens' main themes, the veracity of religious claims.
I have just finished reading The Christ Conspiracy - The Greatest Story Ever Sold
by Acharya S (D.M. Murdock). It is a truly wonderful book, and deserves to be widely discussed to inform understanding of the nature of religion. The Christ Conspiracy
is a superb factual compendium for the mythicist understanding of religion, as a detailed study of how Christianity emerged to dominate the ancient world through alliance with the imperial state of Rome and incorporation of the beliefs of many preceding myths in a unified dogma, much of which was historically false and fraudulent.
A theme I find illuminating in this material is the psychology of narrative transmission. Oral traditions mutate when they come into contact. We see this with Christianity, adopted in the common era of the ancient world because of its ability to combine other ideas into a single monolithic belief system, including by giving old Gods subordinate positions as saints. For example Tammuz became Thomas, while Jesus himself took on many of the features of Horus and Krishna. Osiris appears in the Bible as Lazarus.
Acharya's reading of the Bible as an astrotheological document results in what orthodox Christianity has rejected as the Docetist Heresy, the claim that the story of Christ embodied in Jesus is historically false, because the Christ is an eternal idea and Jesus was not in fact a real person. I have to say, I personally hold on to the slim faith that Jesus Christ could have been a real person, despite all the evidence Acharya collects to the contrary. It is simply that the message Christ conveyed was actually so counter-cultural in its day, bringing together different traditions, that a central great teacher could well have been invisible to external historians of the time. However, the absence of Jesus from any non-gospel historical sources does indicate that if he did exist he was supremely capable of concealing the fact.