Acharya S and the real Christ Conspiracy

[hjalti]

For what it's worth, I like having someone who reads Acharya's work and posts stuff like "The pope is the head of the masonic order.". It's like the poor people at RightWingWatch who watch The 700 Club and post Pat Robertson's wackiest moments on YouTube.

Thank you Gakusei.

[Blood]

For what it's worth, I like having someone who reads Acharya's work and posts stuff like "The pope is the head of the masonic order.". It's like the poor people at RightWingWatch who watch The 700 Club and post Pat Robertson's wackiest moments on YouTube.

[GakuseiDon]

For what it's worth, I like having someone who reads Acharya's work and posts stuff like "The pope is the head of the masonic order.". It's like the poor people at RightWingWatch who watch The 700 Club and post Pat Robertson's wackiest moments on YouTube.

Thank you Gakusei.

You're welcome. As I wrote earlier, there is much more to Acharya S's worldview than "the pope is the Grand Master-Mason of the Masonic branches of the world"; but a lot of it isn't really relevant to either Biblical cricticism or history. However, I will be including those details in an article that I will be including in my Reviews section on my website.

[Eric]

Thank you Gakusei Don, your comment here is far more balanced and informative than some of your previous statements about this material. I have quoted your comment in full at Acharya's Discussion Board Free Thought Nation, as it certainly deserves discussion and response in an environment where fundamentalist delusion is excluded.

I disagree with your conclusion about the Christ conspiracy as an assertion by Acharya that “groups stretching back several thousands years have been involved in building and promoting the Christ Myth, as a way of controlling humanity.”

Mr. Tulip: The above sentence is such a true statement based on critical thinking that sums up the Christ Conspiracy. Thank you for posting.

To my reading your statement wrongly conflates two quite different areas of historical conspiracy.

The first is the ancient mystery religions, whereby secret societies conveyed oral teachings. While there has always been an element of social control in priestcraft, the pre-Christian approach was bound up much more with a scientific sense of awe and reverence for the natural universe, and a sense that the mass of illiterate people could not comprehend these mysteries so they were best kept hidden. This mystery tradition included a sense of divine kingship, anointed salvation, which evolved into the myth of Christ Jesus. It was a conspiracy in the sense of being a secret tradition, but not necessarily a means to obtain political control of the state.

The second area of historical conspiracy is much more directly about the political control of the Roman Empire. The widespread secret mystery tradition of Christ Jesus had come to anthropomorphise Sol Invictus as an esoteric myth within the various Gnostic Nazarene Therapeut traditions. What happened then was a real political conspiracy, akin to how the Bolsheviks conquered Russia, with an orthodox cabal falsely insisting that the esoteric allegory within the Gospels was literal history, and organising to suppress, deny, obliterate and forget the real secret message. This actual conspiracy of the Christian church was so successful that it constructed the dominant paradigm of western civilization for two thousand years, with the false meme of Jesus Christ as historical man continuing to drive culture in ways that are only partially understood.

So I don’t think your analysis is correct that the original mystery groups who later became the Masons were aimed at social control, although that is the case for the actual conspiracy which became the Roman Church.

Further, readers of The Christ Conspiracy should recognise that Acharya caveats a number of her speculative comments, presenting them as possible themes for discussion rather than as solid conclusions. I would put the hypothesis of a relation between the Pope and Freemasonry in this category.

[Robert Tulip]

I have just re-read the chapter in The Christ Conspiracy where these comments about the Pope being a mason are made. Acharya’s footnote 28 on page 342 links her reference to the Pope to Godfrey Higgins, but the reference in his 1836 book Anacalypsis may be from a different edition.

Nonetheless, this raises important questions regarding method in the history of religions. Acharya’s chapter about the role of Rome highlights the numerous conceptual links between Christianity and Masonic thinking, just in terms of masons as workers in stone. These links have distant secret mysterious origins, for example in the vast accurate unknown construction of the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt. In the Bible itself, the description of Joseph as Tekton or Grand Master Architect has more than an echo of masonic identity, as do the ideas in Job and Hebrews and elsewhere of God as designer, upholding the universe by his word of power, the suggestions from Christ to build upon rock, the description of Christ as the rock the builder rejects, the whole discussion of Solomon’s temple, and the very origin of the Catholic church in the masonic ideas of Peter as rock and key. To these core Biblical masonic themes we can add the mystery of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe, built and designed by stone masons. There is abundant speculative material about all this on the actual role of freemasonry, for example here

Despite all that, the overt situation today is that the Roman Catholic Church and Freemasonry are in institutional conflict. We therefore see a clash between the visible temporal reality of the organisations and what we might call their hidden essence. The problem this raises in historiography can be seen as a conflict between coherence and cogency, which I define here as a conflict between reason and evidence as historical sources. By this I mean that a coherent claim is one that fits into an overarching theoretical rational framework, while a cogent claim is one that has solid evidentiary grounds, even if it lacks narrative explanation. So the link between Christianity and Freemasonry is coherent but not cogent. Coherence is not sufficient to be convincing, but cogency alone has limited explanatory power. For example it may be coherent to speculate that Joseph was an architect, but this claim lacks cogency in terms of forcing assent to any actual historical claim about the alleged father of Christ.

In the example of the links between Christianity and Freemasonry, there is abundant coherence but limited cogency, in that secrecy and loss of data mean that the tantalizing clues such as in cathedral architecture do not really compel assent. Responses to this situation vary, with academic traditions emphasising that discussion should focus on the cogent. Unfortunately, evidence about Christian origins is fragmentary, and often was subject to deliberate targeted destruction, as the orthodox church sought to conceal Gnostic influence. What Acharya began in The Christ Conspiracy was a continuation of a scholarly effort to put the pieces back together, to explain how the jumbled fragments tell a coherent story. It is natural that cautious religious academics and dogmatists will deride this effort as eccentric, in view of their vested interests in maintaining the credibility of traditional claims. But in terms of paradigm theory, the traditions are simply incoherent, so real efforts to understand the evidence have to look again at how the pieces fit in a bigger picture.

[Peter Kirby]

The Josephus problem is simply resolved by the fact that Origen of Alexandria specifically discussed the actual chapter in which the Jesus text is found, but did not mention it, in a book devoted to proving Jesus existed.

Citation needed.

[Robert Tulip]

Earl Doherty comments in Jesus Neither God Nor Man that it is simply unbelievable that Origen of Alexandria in the early third century discussed in detail the very chapter of the Antiquities of the Jews in which the Testimonium Flavianum is located but apparently did not notice it.
The text from Origen's Contra Celsus, Chapter 47, is at http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/t ... en161.html

Origen writes: "in the 18th book of his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus bears witness to John … [and says] disasters happened to the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus (called Christ), …. Paul … regarded this James as a brother of the Lord, not … by blood … as because of his virtue and doctrine. If, then, [Josephus] says that it was on account of James that the desolation of Jerusalem was made to overtake the Jews, how should it not be more in accordance with reason to say that it happened on account (of the death) of Jesus Christ."

If “Josephus bears witness to John", it is hardly credible that Origen, whose apologetic purpose in this book was to critique pagan attacks on Christianity, and defend the argument that there exists solid evidence and proof for Christ, would have failed to mention, in text laden with devotion, that Josephus also bears witness to Christ, if Josephus had in fact done so within this very same Chapter of AJ.

Instead, Origen emphasizes that Josephus says the calamity of the Jews was due to the death of James the Just, whom Origen says was a brother of Christ in ‘virtue and doctrine’, not in blood. Origen does not make clear if this sibling relation was alleged by Josephus, but he does make clear that Paul did not regard this James as a physical brother of Jesus Christ, cutting out another major pillar of Christ literalism. And then Origen expands on how the story of Jesus is in ‘accordance with reason’, without, despite all his comments about evidence and proof for Jesus, taking this prime opportunity to note that an early historian, living close to the time of Christ, had actually mentioned Christ in the same passage that he is discussing. The supposed "evidence" for Jesus evaporates before your eyes.

It seems to me quite plausible that Eusebius’ interpolation of the Testimonium Flavianum owed not a little to the need to explain this strange passage in Origen. Origen, despite later being excluded as a heretic, was one of the greatest of early Church fathers, precisely because of his deep knowledge of and faith in the Gospels. Living two centuries after the purported events, Origen accepts the Gospels on face value. In Contra Celsum, we see that Origen makes use of Celsus as a pagan who also had passing knowledge of the Gospels, which are taken as the primary source of evidence.

Of course the Gospels are not primary evidence, and Origen sees that external commentary from Josephus gives weight to the ‘witness to John’. Yet he does not notice that Josephus also gives witness to Christ in the same chapter. This yawning gap in the Contra Celsum must have been a source of great embarrassment to Christians. Pagan readers of Origen could well have asked – If Josephus bears witness to John, why does he not bear witness to Jesus? The easiest way to deal with this devastating question was to alter Josephus by adding in the mention of Jesus at the appropriate point, where Josephus speaks of bearing witness to John.

Origen goes on to criticise Greeks who wish us “to believe them without any reasonable grounds, and to discredit the Gospel accounts even after the clearest evidence. For we assert that the whole habitable world contains evidence of the works of Jesus”. He says if a critic “demands of us our reasons for such a belief, let him first give grounds for his own unsupported assertions, and then we shall show that this view of ours is the correct one.” Here again is perfect opportunity passed up to say that Josephus gives evidence for Christ.

Key questions raised by Celsus are quoted by Origen as including “What credible witness beheld this appearance? What proof is there of it, save your own assertion, and the statement of another of those individuals who have been punished along with you?" In response, Origen says Josephus bore witness to John, but omits to say Josephus bore witness to Jesus, which would be a far more pertinent and logical rejoinder if it were true. Origen speaks of “a manifest proof that these things are done by His power”, ignoring the supposedly manifest evidence that a credible independent historian mentioned Him.

[Peter Kirby]

The Josephus problem is simply resolved by the fact that Origen of Alexandria specifically discussed the actual chapter in which the Jesus text is found, but did not mention it, in a book devoted to proving Jesus existed.

Citation needed.

Maybe I'm just being too literal.

By chapter, what is meant is book 18 of Antiquities. Okay, that makes sense.

By "a book devoted to proving Jesus existed," what is meant isn't a book devoted to proving Jesus existed but rather Contra Celsus.

[Blood]

Instead, Origen emphasizes that Josephus says the calamity of the Jews was due to the death of James the Just, whom Origen says was a brother of Christ in ‘virtue and doctrine’, not in blood. Origen does not make clear if this sibling relation was alleged by Josephus, but he does make clear that Paul did not regard this James as a physical brother of Jesus Christ, cutting out another major pillar of Christ literalism.

Isn't it odd that the Gal 1:19 crowd never cite this highly inconvenient passage from Origen?

[hjalti]

The word for "river" in Greek is "potamos," which is very close to the Potomac river in North America. (p. 397)

From Wikipedia:

"Potomac" is a European spelling of an Algonquian name for the Patawomeck, a tribe that inhabited what is now Stafford County, Virginia, in the vicinity of Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Although in this case the source seems (she doesn't directly attribute it but she references this author in the previous sentence) to be from the 20th century, although it's an expert in Atlantis and "Ancient Aliens".