Rating: 
Summary: Ancient voices telling tall tales
Review: I've always been turned off by the dogma and blinkered nature of formal religion - this book revives something lost by the literalist tradition. If Freke and Gandy's ideas are not correct - they deserve to be in a way that the literalist faith does not.The notion of myth moving and motivating the ancient world of our forebears is a revelation... it cuts to the heart of what it is to be human - the quest for meaning and personal growth. I am an atheist and yet to be human is to feel a sense of the mystery of the world. I am struck with the similarities between the mythical world of Greece and the world of story and fiction we see every time we go to the movies. Read "The Writer's Journey" by Christopher Vogler or Joseph Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" - we live the same myths today. Somehow these 'myths' speak to us with a voice thousands of years old. That these perenial tales are still important to us reveals we have changed so little in all these years - this is a more profound 'proof' that the Jesus Mystery notion is real than all the arguments of the literalist tradition. The mystery tradition is alive and living within us because it is part of what we are. The Jesus Mysteries crystalised a whole train of thought for me - and that is why it gets 5 stars. It speaks to something is me I thought lost - the Jesus Mysteries deserve to be true. And it has got me reading the books of the people that lived the mysteries - I'm reading Plato's "Republic'"now and finding it more modern and relevant than the dogma I was taught at Sunday School.... perhaps one day I will return to the bible and read it with a truer understanding of its context as a mystery... And .... I'll enjoy the journey reading through the Classics - perhaps I'll find the Christ in me too.....
Rating:
Summary: Christian or Agnostic? You won't be after reading this!
Review: If I had any semblance of religion in me before reading "The Jesus Mysteries"...it is gone now and for good. This book is written in language that will suit even the newest reader and is loaded with references. The book is a MUST READ!
Rating: 
Summary: Ummm...I like it
Review: I like the fact that the authors are willing to question such a closely guarded subject. I don't believe it's out of malice, but simply asking questions that ought to be asked given the infomation that's available in history. Even if the story of Jesus proves to be less that factual, what it teaches us about the nature of God remains intact. And that nature is love and compassion which would draw all souls back into oneness with itself. Let's all learn to trust in the basic goodness of our universe a little more...Ok?
Rating: 
Summary: Worth reading, however...
Review: When reading a book such as this one of the best things to do is read the Bibliography and check out the sources. After doing this then proceed. As many people who read the Bible tend to proof-text certain Scriptures (while ignoring others how taking their chosen verses out of context) in order to back up their views, eisegesis I believe this is called, so too does it appear the authors here do the same. It is a very coherent thesis and well-documented and supported. However, what is missing is the other side. The views of 'Literalists' are given passing mention, if at all. This seems to weaken the validity of their argument when reading this book. It is as if what they are proposing is 'gospel' rather than providing insight that may actually benefit Bible believers. There is a dichotomy established by the authors that is flawed at best and a straw-man argument at worst. While it is recommended reading for drawing out facts oftentimes shunned by the mainstream Christian establishment, be careful when drawing conclusions from these facts. Oftentimes the views derived from this can be more extreme than the views of the accused.
Rating:
Summary: A great place to start
Review: I found this book very enlightening. In the beginning, I did not know that much about the pagan origins of the Christian religion. I knew that they were very prominant in ritual and form, but was unknowledgeable about the specific characteristics. The book was very well formed via a hypothesis, and then working to verify said hypothesis. The authors are well versed in world and mystic religions, and their correlations are top notch. The only reason I count it down a star is due to the fact that this book could have been twice as big with all of the research presented. Some areas were skimmed, and left me wanting more. That merely forced me to research on my own, which is always a good thing. I appreciate these two mens' efforts, and look forward to reading more from them. May peace be with you today...
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Summary: A book the whole world ought to read
Review: This is an outstanding book, and the scholarship of the authors is superb. Freke is a prolific writer, having written numerous books on Spirituality. Aside from some fanatic fundamentalists, even Christians will likely find the book fascinating. The authors' purpose is to reveal that the Jesus Story is just that, a story, albeit a mystery myth very like the story of Osiris/Dionysus, the God-Man who transcended death. All these mystery myths are to teach initiates ways to attain immortality. However, the trouble begins when you interpret them as being historical and not allegorical. Then it not only loses its beauty and mystery, it becomes downright hateful and ugly. Raja Bhat
Rating:
Summary: A Restoration of the Sublime
Review: Bravo to the authors Freke & Gandy! My undergraduate degree is in philosophy & an MA in psychology. This books parallels my own private research over the last 25+ years into the "mysteries" of Christianity and comparative religion in general. My own experience of a Christian upbringing is that there were alot of unanswered questions,incongruities & outright contradictions if one approaches Christianity from a literalist or fundamentalist viewpoint. Freke & Gandy's writing genius is that they have taken a subject that has been long known in the scholarly circles and have made it available in an interesting format to the general reader. It reads like a murder mystery as the undeniable revisionism of Christianity is exposed for all to see, except those who chose to deny, despite the exposed 'corpus delicti.' It's no accident that the Church coined the term 'Propaganda' and the sowed the seeds of religious & intellectual intolerance. This well footnoted book lays it all out for those who honestly seek the mystery of our being in the spiritual tradition of the west known as Christianity. It restores the dignity of the sublime in Christianity in an otherwise 'vulgaried' version that has suffered at the hands of 'spiritual' demagogues over the last 1,800 years.
Rating: 
Summary: fiction disguised as truth
Review: I am reviewing this book from Romania. After reading the book and reading the other reviews posted here, it seems as a lot of people are desparate to find some reason to not believe in Jesus Christ. There are many glaring faults with the logic applied here, but one of them is the section on why the Gospels must not be true because they conflict. Yet anyone who understands anything about forensic psychology will tell you that testimonies which are exactly the same are less reliable than those which conflict. The reason for this is simple, everyone has a different opinion on what they see, and a different perspective. If four people witness a car accident, they will all tell of details which may be different, would one then assume the accident didn't happen? This is the conclusion the authors try to make. One might look at the issue differently. Why would anyone write a book in which the authors are depicted as powerless and flawed, and that those in power should become meek, and a book which represents a need for all to find salvation through anothers death? If this story of jesus was falsified, then an even simple look at human history would indicate the story would be very different than it is depicted here. I think rather, that the differences in the Gospels actually provide more evidence of truth than if those differences did not exist. The whole book is build on suppositions and fiction, but the authors try very hard to disguise this fiction as objective works, and some poeple who want to find any evidence which may absolve them of their responisbility to God will actually believe it. That is sad.
Rating:
Summary: Complete nonsense.
Review: To put it bluntly, this was one of the silliest books I have ever read. To disentangle the whole web of fallacy, error, and pure nonsense that is Freke and Gandy's argument, would be like puting a bowl of spaghetti back into the package, minus meatballs and sauce. Let me just straighten out a few of many messes: 1. First, the authors call the Nag Hammadi manuscripts a "whole library" of Gospels, and ask, "Why hasn't every Christian rushed out to read these newly discovered words of the Master?" The obvious answer is, those of us who have read some of them, find nothing like the Gospels, or words of Christ at all. Rather, we find weakly disguised didactic fiction. (Very much like the alleged sayings of Confucius in the Daoist anthology called the Zhuang Zi.) As for the Gospels themselves, it is obvious to any experienced and sensible reader that at their core, at least, they are quite unlike Gnostic or any other ancient fiction. In reference to ancient Near Eastern literature, skeptic A. N. Wilson calls them "a unique literary genre." In reference to ancient and medieval fiction, C. S. Lewis ("The best-read man of his generation") wrote of John, "I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths, all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this." In my reading of Eastern religious texts, I find the same. This book is based on the inability of Freke and Gandy to even notice the most obvious qualities of the books they attempt to refute -- the flare for reality in the Gospels. 2. To maintain their skepticism, the authors stack the deck relentlessly. They appear to have read no modern Christian writers at all. When the text reads, "scholars think," check end notes, and you find someone like Pagels or Wells. They've probably never heard of William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, or N. T. Wright. John Crossan is too reactionary to grace the pages of this masterpiece. Jesus Mysteries is kind of a geological column of arguments against Christianity from bygone eras. No, the Dark Ages were not caused by the victory of Christianity, but by a centuries-long decline in population that early Christianity began to reverse before the barbarians invaded. (See Stark, the Rise of Christianity.) (The author's fantasize that, apart from Christianity, the Mysteries would have encompassed the Roman empire. More likely, I think, we might have wound up with something like the bhakti (devotional) cults of India, amidst a sea of Advetic (or neo-Platonic) philosophy -- and then invasion and lights out.) The authors' treatment of Augustine is symptomatic. Augustine is universally acknowledged as one of the great thinkers in human history. The translators of the Upanishads quote his insights. Steven Hawking and Paul Davies describe him as the first person to realize that time was created with the universe. Many find in his writings "a depth of psychological insight unsurpassed in the Western world." But to Freke and Gandy, Augustine was just another of the bigots and simpletons of the 4th Century orthodox church. Freke and Gandy are like men who go into a mine of diamonds and rubies, and come out with lumps of coal. No, check the end notes, and I find out they never went into the mine at all. They've been panning other peoples' talings, never read Augustine for themselves. Amazing. 3. Using the methods of Freke and Gandy, I could "prove" that Christianity arose from Vedic Hinduism, Chinese tradition, or Southeast Asian minority cultures like the Jiang, Wa, or Dai, or that Lincoln or Gandhi never lived. (See Jesus and the Religions of Man.) 4. Freke and Gandy sort early Christians into two simple groups, literalists (black hats) and Gnostics (white hats). Paul and Clement go in the Gnostic camp. People may have been reading them for centuries without realizing they rejected the historicity or physical resurrection of Jesus. But Freke and Gandy have a special flare for such breakthroughs, like a magic lantern that cuts through all the scholarship. 5. Finally, Freke and Gandy attack a Christianity they simply don't understand. They take Justin Martyr's argument that similarities between Christianity and paganism were invented by the devil as the definitive Christian solution. They never honestly deal with what I call the "fulfillment model," or the Catholic church calls "semina Verbi," (From Justin Martyr! The one thing of value that I gained from this book, was that it encouraged me to read him for myself. Don't accept anything in this book as true until you've checked original sources -- or at least real scholars!) Jesus said, "I have come not to do away with the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill." John, Paul, Justin, Clement, Origin, Augustine, Dante, Michaelangelo, G. K. Chesterton, the present Pope, even the Brothers Grimm, all describe Christianity not as a repudiation of the best things in paganism, but as myth and dream become reality. In Lewis' words, "The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was. . . 'Where have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?'" This is the orthodox Christian paradigm. The authors never substantially engage it, and seldom show they have so much as heard of it. In relating Christianity to mystery religions, the authors have got hold a bit of the truth. But they are like the blind men who feel the trunk of the elephant and think they have a snake. Mohammed described Jesus as the greatest prophet. Buddhists see him as a Zen teacher or bodhisattva, Marxists as a revolutionary, Jews, a teacher of wisdom, and Hindus, the Sanatan Sadguru or an avatar like Krishna or Ram. What do you get when you add all the pictures together? Let me recommend three books that consider this question from a broader perspective: The Crown of Hinduism, Eternity in Their Hearts, and my own book, Jesus and the Religions of Man. The authors say of early Christianity, that it would accomplish things no one "could have imagined at the time." Yet the early Christians did imagine it. When it was still a minor Hebrew sect, they imagined it changing the world. Isn't it just possible they knew something Freke and Gandy don't? d.marshall@sun.ac.jp
Rating:
Summary: "...about as scholarly as an episode of the Teletubbies..."
Review: Being a decently well-read lay Christian, I despise the Jesus Seminar. I deplore the distortions of fact, defiance of logic (e.g., Funk's idea that the betrayal by Judas was an anti-Semitic slur), and theological Prozac exemplified by its leaders. However, I have to give them a nod for not sliding as far as Freke and Gandy have. One can immediately take a good guess at the swill this book contains when one reads the dedication: "This book is dedicated to the Christ in you." I'll let that stand. In the actual text, although the authors fail to hit Dawkinsian levels of arrogance, there is definitely no sense of humbleness or caution with which they approach their thesis. Their own comments notwithstanding, it is at least as old as Celsus (a fact they seem to acknowledge and immediately gloss over), and their book is only different in the prettiness of the pictures. More on those later. The authors (as far as I am in the book -- I can only do a few pages at a time before the pen I use to underline inaccuracies and bad logic runs out of ink) seem to largely build their already weak case on the practices of the Christian church and the patristic writings. The first flaw in this reasoning is that the whole idea of Sola Scriptura is ignored (which means that Protestants, at least, will be rather unimpressed by this hogwash). Second, many of their comparisons to Jesus are from tradition that is KNOWN and ACKNOWLEDGED to be borrowed from pagan traditions (e.g., the celebration of Jesus' birth on Dec. 25). The lovely full-color pictures (twelve in all!) rather tend to injure the case for The Thesis. Indeed, the authors brilliantly destroy the credibility of the Virgin Birth by comparing the similarities between a 13th-century Byzantine Christian icon and some pagan pictures of demigod sons and their goddess mothers. Mother and child. Gee, that's a motif never before used. I guess we should just throw out all such paintings of mothers and their sons. After all, they just MUST be copying off those poor pagan geniuses, eh? I especially like how all the supposed sculptures of Dionysus being "crucified" date, by their words, to the "second or third centuries CE". Any chap can tell you that authors are going to find it challenging, to say the least, to copy off artists living a hundred years in the future. Much is also made in the last two pictures of how Jesus is showed with a pagan wand and how Constantine supposedly said He used such a wand. To this I have to say, "So?" Even granting that such stories existed, pagans always have and always will use Jesus more than any other religious figure as the centerpiece for their religion. Anyone familiar with the Mormons, Muslims, Jehovah's Witnesses, New Age Movement, and "Christian" "Science" will observe this. Also, in my humble opinion, their treatment of the pagan birth stories as similar to the Christian _Virgin_ Birth is tenuous at best. In all cases I have found and seen cited, the pagan cases involved some pagan god getting those "special feelings" right about the groin for some poor mortal woman (hopefully). The always-restrained gods then proceeded to turn themselves into some form of animal (white bull seems to be the preferred method of Zeus -- OW) and got it on with the only-too-happy-to-please-the-gods beautiful Greek maiden of choice. So much for virginity. In short, this is an unscholarly work that is approaching the intellectual caliber of my German Shepherd. For a slightly better review, see ... Cheers, Christinaphylus P.S. Although I rather wish I could take credit for the very apt title, the prize goes to J. P. Holding of tektonics.org.
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