Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [0]
The Greatest Story Ever Sold
by Acharya S
Few books present so smooth a blend of clarity and erudition as The Christ Conspiracy. This is a well-crafted, thought-provoking work that belongs in the library of every thinking individual. It should be read by every person concerned about the moral, ethical, and spiritual aspects of our culture; it should be read particularly by those who profess belief in any of the numerous varieties of Christianity. It is a book of true enlightenment.
-Barbara G. Walker, author of The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, The Crone, Amazon, The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, Women's Rituals, Feminist Fairytales, The Skeptical Feminist, etc.
For two millennia, a spurious tale has enslaved the human mind and spirit. It still does. Acharya S's The Christ Conspiracy may well be the most dangerous and important book of our time, for it reveals beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus Christ is not a historical figure but simply a mythological toehold by which powermongers provide the dope of hope to the needy, malleable and violent masses.
-Adam Parfrey, author of Cult Rapture, editor of Apocalypse Culture
The Christ Conspiracy The Greatest Story Ever Sold
Table of Contents
Preface i
1. Introduction 1
2. The Quest for Jesus Christ 12
3. The Holy Forgery Mill 24
4. Biblical Sources 31
5. Non-Biblical Sources 49
6. Further Evidence of a Fraud 55
7. Physical Evidence 77
8. The Myth of Hebrew Monotheism 88
9. The Characters 105
10. Astrology and the Bible 128
11. The Son of God is the Sun of God 149
12. The Disciples are the Signs of the Zodiac 166
13. The Gospel Story 184
14. Other Elements and Symbols of the Christian Myth 215
15. The Patriarchs and Saints are the Gods of Other Cultures 236
16. Etymology Tells the Story 255
17. The Meaning of Revelation 265
18. The Bible, Sex and Drugs 275
19. Essenes, Zealots and Zadokites 296
20. Alexandria: Crucible of Christianity 317
21. Enter Rome 335
22. The Making of a Myth 356
23. Out of Egypt or India? 378
24. Evidence of an Ancient Global Civilization 391
25. Conclusion 407
Bibliography 418
Index 423
Preface
The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe-that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
H.L. Mencken
The search for the conspiratorial origins of the name of this book's author takes a circuitous route. "Acharya" means "teacher," but the title conjures an image of a little old man in India. Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, bestowed the title onto his spiritual heir, Acharya Vinoba Bhave, who began the Bhoodan land movement in India in the early 1950s. More strictly, the word means "preceptor," the head-master or principal of a school. A student could further fine-tune that definition by discovering, only in some dictionaries, that "preceptory" includes reference to the Knights Templar, an order ostensibly founded in 1119 CE to protect Holy Land pilgrims during the Second Crusade until it was banned and went underground two centuries later. Today, Freemasonry continues to claim descent from this medieval brotherhood.
None of this rumination suggests that Acharya S claims title as a preceptor or direct kinship to the Freemasons, although she has helped re-popularize an essay by Thomas Paine regarding Masonic sun-worship. Acharya's preceptory resides in cyberspace, on the web at www.truthbeknown.com, on her discussion list, through her posts in such e-places as konformist.com and Steamshovel Press, of which I am the publisher, and through her non-profit Institute for Historical Accuracy. Acharya S is also not a kindly little old guru. Her writing reflects a wicked wit and the intelligence of a person who