Early church fathers knew the true story!

Egyptologist Gerald Massey unearthed roots of Christianity

There is a spirit within us that wants to see, with our eyes wide open, and will see, and must tear the bandages and blinkers off the eyes to see, each for himself, whether the traditional vision be false or true. Nature gave us eyes to see with; it was men who added the blinkers. — Gerald Massey, The Coming Religion

The Historical Jesus and Mythical Christ

Gerald Massey (1828-1907) studied the extensive Egyptian records housed in the British Museum and eventually taught himself to decipher hieroglyphics. After many years of study he wrote a series of scholarly works on the Religion and Mythology of Ancient Egypt. In 1881 he published in two volumes "A Book of the Beginnings," in 1883 "The Natural Genesis" followed, and finally in 1907 he published in two volumes "Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World".

Through those long years of study, Massey was mentored by the noted Egyptologist Dr. Samuel Birch. He attracted a following of dedicated students who later became his assistants. One of them, Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn, acknowledged that Gerald Massey greatly inspired him. In his posthumous work, "A Rebirth for Christianity," Kuhn praised Massey's research:

"He forced us to ask how the four Gospels of the Christian canon could be the biography of any Messianic personality living in the first Christian century, when he traced their texts back to Egyptian documents that must have been venerable even in 3500 B.C.”

"We are faced with the inescapable realization that if Jesus actually lived in the flesh in the first century A.D., and if he had been able to read the documents of old Egypt, he would have been amazed to find his own biography already substantially written some four or five thousand years previously. Tertullian, Justin Martyr and other writers have noted that the leaders of the Christian movement confessed that many of their doctrines, rites, creeds and symbols were identical with Egyptian antetypes.”

“The late American Egyptologist James H. Breasted testified to similarities between the Old Testament book, Proverbs, and addresses to the Pharaoh of Egypt dating as far back as 3500 B.C. All this confirms Massey's conclusions." Gerald Massey so impressed the novelist George Eliot that she made him the hero of one of her famous romances. Thus Massey became immortalized in literature as "Felix Holt the Radical."

We are finding out that names the most hallowed are spurious counterfeits of the ancient gods. We are learning that the literary fortunes of the Bible were made by Mythology, and filched from the peoples who have been spoiled as Pagans, and accursed as the spawn of Satan. — Massey, The Coming Religion

It’s all about here

Massey spent little time thinking about "the other world" at all, for it was in this world that people needed assistance. Life to him was not worth living if something were not done to further its work. "It is only in helping others that we can truly help ourselves," he said in his lecture, “The Devil of Darkness in the Light of Evolution”. (found here: https://archive.org/stream/GeraldMassey-Lectures/GeraldMassey-lectures_djvu.txt )

Massey was a published poet and a mid-19th century folk hero who forcefully protested the practice of the clergy to continue to preach that man was a fallen creature. He continually pointed out that man could not be saved through prayerful intercession. Every advance made by science for humanity had been carried out through research and perseverance — not by praying to a jealous God.

One of Massey's greatest contributions is his lecture on The Coming Religion. It is poignant with his sincerity. He put his own belief into every word. To him each person must do his own thinking and have absolute freedom of expression. He stressed that the new religion must have "sincerity of life, in place of pretended belief; a religion of science, in place of superstition." This religion will proclaim man's Ascent rather than his Fall. It will be a religion of fact in the present, not of mere faith for the future.

“I lectured upon the subject of Jesus many years ago,” Massey wrote. “At that time I did not know how we had been misled, or that the ‘Christian scheme’ (as it is aptly called) in the New Testament is a fraud, founded on a fable in the Old!

“I then accepted the Canonical Gospels as containing a veritable human history, and assumed, as others do, that the history proved itself. Finding that Jesus, or Jehoshua Ben-Pandira, was an historical character, known to the Talmud, I made the common mistake of supposing that this proved the personal existence of the Jesus found portrayed in the Canonical Gospels.

“But after you have heard my story, and weighed the evidence now for the first time collected and presented to the public, you will not wonder that I should have changed my views, or that I should be impelled to tell the truth to others, as it now appears to myself; although I am only able to summarize here, in the briefest manner possible, a few of the facts that I have dealt with exhaustively elsewhere.”

It has been my aim to penetrate beyond this scaffolding, discover the secrets of the hiding-place, and contradict the false report concerning the builders. And what we do find is that the so-called "Revealed Religion" is simply unrevealed mythology, and that a spurious system of salvation was proffered to those who would accept the ancient mythology transmogrified into Historic Christianity, and be bribed into changing their old lamps for new ones! — Massey, The Coming Religion

A sorceror from Egypt

The personal existence of Jesus as Jehoshua Ben-Pandira can be established beyond a doubt, Massey wrote. "He was born more than a century earlier than the date of birth assigned to the Jesus of the Gospels!”

As the son of a rabbi he fled with his father to Egypt because of a persecution of the rabbis during a civil war in which the Pharisees revolted against King Alexander Jannaeus around 105 BC. His familiarity with the history of the times allowed Massey to conclude both men were declared sorcerors and executed.

According to the Babylonian Gemara to the Mishna of Tract "Shabbath," this Jehoshua, the son of Pandira and Stada, was stoned to death as a wizard, in the city of Lud, or Lydda, and afterwards crucified by being hanged on a tree, on the eve of the Passover. This is the manner of death assigned to Jesus in the Book of Acts.

Massey investigated, to say the least. “The Jewish writers and Rabbis with whom I have talked always deny the identity of the Talmudic Jehoshua and the Jesus of the Gospels. [. . .] Jesus of Nazareth (and of the Canonical Gospels) was unknown to Justus, to the Jew of Celsus, and to Josephus, the supposed reference to him by the latter being an undoubted forgery.

The "blasphemous writings of the Jews about Jesus," as Justin Martyr calls them, always refer to Jehoshua Ben-Pandira, and not to the Jesus of the Gospels.

It is Ben-Pandira they mean when they say they have another and a truer account of the birth and life, the wonder-working and death of Jehoshua or Jesus. This repudiation is perfectly honest and soundly based. The only Jesus known to the Jews was Jehoshua Ben-Pandira, who had learnt the arts of magic in Egypt, and who was put to death by them as a sorcerer.

This was likewise the only Jesus known to Celsus, the writer of the "True Logos," a work which the Christians managed to get rid of bodily, with so many other of the anti-Christian evidences.

The illusion of false ideals is the magical glamour with which Mephistopheles seduces the soul of Faust!— Massey, The Coming Religion

But here is the conclusive fact:

The Jews know nothing of Jesus, the Christ of the Gospels, as an historical character; and when the Christians of the fourth century trace his pedigree, by the hand of Epiphanius, they are forced to derive their Jesus from Pandira!

This proves that in the fourth century the pedigree of Jesus was traced to Pandira, the father of that Jehoshua who was the pupil of Ben-Perachia, and who becomes one of the magicians in Egypt, and who was crucified as a magician on the eve of the Passover by the Jews, in the time of Queen Alexandra, who had ceased to reign in the year 70 B.C.— the Jesus, therefore, who lived and died more than a century too soon.

Thus, the Jews do not identify Jehoshua Ben-Pandira with the Gospel Jesus, of whom they, his supposed contemporaries, know nothing, but protest against the assumption as an impossibility; whereas the Christians do identify their Jesus as the descendant of Pandira. It was he or nobody; yet he was neither the son of Joseph nor the Virgin Mary, nor was he crucified at Jerusalem.

We mean to have a day of reckoning with the unjust stewards of the earth. — Massey, The Coming Religion

It is not the Jews, then, but the Christians, who fuse two supposed historic characters into one! There being but one history acknowledged or known on either side, it follows that the Jesus of the Gospels is the Jehoshua of the Talmud, or is not at all, as a Person.

This shifts the historic basis altogether; it antedates the human history by more than a hundred years, and it at once destroys the historic character of the Gospels, together with that of any other personal Jesus than Ben-Pandira. In short, the Jewish history of the matter will be found to corroborate the mythical. As Epiphanius knew of no other historical Jesus than the descendant of Pandira, it is possible that this is the Jesus whose tradition is reported by Irenaeus.

Irenaeus was born in the early part of the second century, between 120 and 140 AD. He was Bishop of Lyons, France, and a personal acquaintance of Polycarp; and he repeats a tradition testified to by the elders, which he alleges was directly derived from John, the "disciple of the Lord," to the effect that Jesus was not crucified at 33 years of age, but that he passed through every age, and lived on to be an oldish man. Now, in accordance with the dates given, Jehoshua Ben-Pandira may have been between 50 and 60 years of age when put to death, and his tradition alone furnishes a clue to the Nihilistic statement of Irenaeus.

When the true tradition of Ben-Pandira is recovered, it shows that he was the sole historical Jesus who was hung on a tree by the Jews, not crucified in the Roman fashion. [. . .] For I hold that the Jesus of the "other Gospel," according to the Apostles Cephas and James, who was utterly repudiated by Paul, was none other than Ben-Pandira, the Nazarene, of whom James was a follower, according to a comment on him found in the Book Abodazura. Anyway, there are two Jesuses, or Jesus and the Christ, one of whom is repudiated by Paul.

The doom of Historic Christianity is sealed, because it was based upon Dogmas against which the highest instincts of the race will forever rise in insurrection, and Doctrines that are certain to be rejected by the growing moral sense of enfranchised humanity. — Massey, The Coming Religion

(What a pity humankind instead became disenfranchised, bamboozled by the Jews into dazed semiconsciousness.)

But Jehoshua, the son of Pandira, can never be converted into Jesus Christ, the son of a virgin mother, as an historic character. Nor can the dates given ever be reconciled with contemporary history.

So much for the historic Jesus. And now for the mythical Christ. Here we can tread on firmer ground.

Massey’s conclusions

• “The Jesus of our Gospels is but little of a human reality, in spite of all attempts to naturalize the Mythical Christ, and make the story look rational.”

• “The Christian religion was not founded on a man, but on a divinity; that is, a mythical character. So far from being derived from the model man, the typical Christ was made up from the features of various Gods, after a fashion somewhat like those "pictorial averages" portrayed by Mr. Galton, in which the traits of several persons are photographed and fused in a portrait of a dozen different persons, merged into one that is not anybody.”

“It is not I that deny the divinity of Jesus the Christ; I assert it! He never was, and never could be, any other than a divinity; that is, a character non-human, and entirely mythical, who had been the pagan divinity of various pagan myths, that had been pagan during thousands of years before our Era.”

“There has never been a man like Jesus because there never was a man like Jesus.”

 

In the interest of accuracy, portions of this story were taken verbatim and nearly verbatim from the following websites:
https://archive.org/stream/GeraldMassey-Lectures/GeraldMassey-lectures_djvu.txt 
http://stellarhousepublishing.com/who-is-gerald-massey.html 
http://stellarhousepublishing.com/ciepreface.html 
http://stellarhousepublishing.com/who-is-gerald-massey.html