Gospel of the Second Coming [Hardcover]

Tim Freke (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 2007

Finally this is the Gospel that everyone's been waiting for in which Jesus gets chance to put the record straight and show how the story of life has been manipulated over time by politicians and religious zealots. This is the book that Gandy and Freke believe Jesus would have wanted to have written. In 'his' gospel, Jesus leads people away from the thinking that has birthed hatred and numerous wars towards a true gnosis or knowing of self. Irreverent, challenging, extremely funny, and delicately informed by a profound spiritual message - this gospel is the book that Freke and Gandy have been longing to write. They consider it their best work to date and hope that it will prompt debate, discussion and promote a movement aiming to counteract religious division.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Tim Freke has an honours degree in philosophy and is an internationally respected authority on world mysticism. His previous books include 'The Jesus Mysteries' and 'Jesus and the Goddess' which inspired Dan Brown. He has been featured in numerous TV and radio documentaries. He lectures and leads seminars in the US and UK. Peter Gandy has an MA in classical civilization and is an international authority on the ancient pagan mysteries and early Christianity.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 264 pages
• Publisher: Hay House Publishers (October 25, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401915523
• ISBN-13: 978-1401915520
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,382,846 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Tale of Modern Gnostic Thought, September 16, 2007

By 

George Kuhn (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Gospel of the Second Coming (Hardcover)

This is an amazing and humorous synopsis of much of content of Tim Freke's and Peter Gandy's earlier three books on Gnosticism (which I highly recommend, but not a necessary prerequisite to enjoy this book.) The Gospel is set as a dialogue among Jesus, Mary Magdalene and (Saint) Peter. The book gives an interesting take on Christianity, it's history (and the plethora of misconceptions prevalent today) and what Christianity SHOULD really be. The last chapters in particular are a hilarious parody of fundamentalist Christian thought on the rapture and day of judgement. Those chapters alone are well worth the price of the book, but the reader should avoid skipping to the back because the "Jesus story" (the bulk of the Gospel) contains immense wisdom and plenty of chuckles to boot. Freke and Gandy managed to effectively and humorusly needle many of their critics (including the Amazon reviewer of their "The Laughing Jesus" who criticized them for using too many exclamation points!!!!!)

It's a great read. It's lots of fun but at the same time contains so much wisdom that is spot on essential for humanity to hear and understand in order to grow out of our collective dilemma of materiality and grow into the sprituality that is our true nature. It's time to wake up from the dream, and Freke and Gandy have helped us by providing a delightfully concocted primer that everyone can understand.

70 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Second Coming: Freke and Gandy's career killer, December 18, 2007

By 

Joe Kenney "buttergun" (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gospel of the Second Coming (Hardcover)

Don't be fooled by the low rating. I'm not some fundamentalist Christian who's read the book and gotten on my soapbox, outraged at the blasphemy of suggesting Jesus never existed. Nor am I someone with a personal axe to grind with Freke and Gandy. In fact, I'm on their side. I don't think Jesus existed and I do think Christianity is a misappropriation of more ancient "pagan" religions.

No, this is just some of the worst writing I've ever come across. How this got published is a question as unanswerable as "Why did people fall for Literalist Christianity for two millennia?" Freke and Gandy have been criticized for their use of exclamation points in the past (because nothing says "non-scholarly" like ending every other sentence with "!!?!!"), but here they not only pile on those, but also engage in the cancerous plague known as "adverbs." They've been bad with these before, but in "The Second Coming" they hammer the reader with them; almost every verb is "augmented" by a limp-wristed, hateable adverb (which I've always thought of as The Beach Boys of words...you know, spineless and weak). They even put adverbs in front of the adverbs (ie "clearly absolutely livid"). And the writing gets worse. Characters don't just say things. No, they "exclaim emotionally" or "add provocatively." I don't know how this grade school level of writing got by the editor.

Freke and Gandy appear to aim for a Vonnegut feel, what with the slapstick banter and sarcastic parable approach, but they fall flat on their faces. I might feel differently if their writing was better, but it kills it dead.

The gist of the book is, Jesus comes back to "set things straight." Inspired by the works of Freke and Gandy, he gathers together his disciples and tells them that none of them, including himself, exist. To prove his case he magically calls forth various dramatis personae from Christian past, for example Paul (described as looking like Danny DeVito, which might not be far from the truth) and early Catholic propagandists like Irenaeus and Eusibius. Peter and Mary are the only disciples who take part (a recurring joke is how faceless and immaterial the rest of the disciples are), and, true to the Gnostic texts discovered in Nag Hammadi, they bicker back and forth, Mary on the side of the gnostics, Peter so gung-ho over Literalism that he likes the sound of the Holocaust.

Don't get me wrong, some of this is funny, but all Freke and Gandy are doing is presenting the same theories and arguments as they have in the past, just under a new guise. It's the worst sort of dead-horse flogging. After "The Laughing Jesus," which condensed "The Jesus Mysteries" and "Jesus and the Lost Goddess" into the first half of the book so F&G could expound on their concept of Gnosticism in the second half, I figure the authors didn't know what else they could do. I mean, once you've claimed Jesus doesn't exist and have advanced your proof, there's not much else you CAN do...other than say it over and over again, which is all F&G now seem capable of doing.

Beyond that, the Freke & Gandy method of oversimplification is taken to the extreme here. Their whitewashing is just as bad as that they accuse the Catholic Church of committing centuries ago. For example, they claim point-blank that Irenaeus wrote Acts. This is fine...only Tertullian quoted from Acts before Irenaeus did. Likewise, they have Irenaeus claim he got the idea of compiling the New Testament all by himself, as a means (of course) of consolidating Literalist power, never once mentioning that the idea for a canon of gospels came from Marcion, a GNOSTIC teacher (it seems our New Testament was conceived as a reaction against Marcion's Bible, which consisted of a version of Luke, a few of Paul's letters...and that's it).

Really, there are so many better ways to prove Christianity is a misappropriation of pagan religions. Freke and Gandy could've at LEAST mentioned how, in the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah 7:14 says "behold, the young woman shall conceive, and bear a son, and she shall call his name Immanuel;" it's only in the mistranslated Greek "Old Testament" of the late BC era (the Hellenized Jew-translated Septuagint, which the Hellenized Jew creators of Christianity used and quoted from) that "young woman" is written as "virgin." Meaning, the whole idea of Jesus' virgin birth is from a mistranslated bible. Not only that, but Jesus in the gospels misquotes scripture, even confusing Jeremiah and Zechariah! All this from the supposed Jewish Messiah. There's even more factual proof our authors could've unleashed. But instead Freke and Gandy want to engage you with speculation and mystery...as well as a healthy dose of adverbs and exclamation points.

Worse yet is the self-aggrandizing they torment the reader with. At first it's humorous - Jesus refers to Freke and Gandy and how much he enjoys their work every few pages. But then it becomes tiresome. Finally it becomes infuriating, when Freke and Gandy claim THEY were the first to present the "Jesus was a mythical character" theory. Yes, before Earl Doherty's "The Jesus Puzzle" (published two years before F&G's "The Jesus Mysteries"), before James Morgan Pryse's body of work (published in the early 1900s), even before Celsus and Porphyry (published two...thousand...years...ago), advanced their arguments that Jesus was a composite character of various pagan godmen combined with the Jewish messiah, Freke and Gandy presented their own! Ridiculous. In the past F&G have admitted that with their research they stand on the shoulders of giants. Here they seem to imply they themselves are the giants in the field.

Freke and Gandy present "The Second Coming" as straight-up narrative, without any of the copious notes the authors used in the past. They claim to have done this because notes "scare away readers," and a constant joke is F&G want to cash in on the Da Vinci Code craze and generate massive bucks. But the thing is, if you give this book to a Christian in the hopes that it will shake him up and make him think for himself and revaluate his religion, it's not going to work. The first thing he'll do is look at the author bio and sneer that neither Freke nor Gandy are scholars (as if it takes a scholar to point out the holes in Christianity). Already feeling a bit safer, the Christian reader will flip through the book, and discover with a sense of victory that there are no notes to back up the "wild accusations and claims" that the authors present. The Christian will then hand the book back to you, his faith unsullied, mule-headed as ever.

This of course begs the question: who, then, is this book for? If you're a Christian and want to know how your religion was stolen from other, more ancient religions (and most likely if you are a Christian you DON'T want to know that), then your best bet is to read Freke and Gandy's preceding three books: "The Jesus Mysteries," "Jesus and the Lost Goddess," and to a lesser extent "The Laughing Jesus." But if "The Second Coming" is your first taste of these ideas, it will turn you way (the abhorrent writing alone), because you will hunger for facts, something to substantiate the claims, but you will receive none.

There are better books out there on this subject. Freke and Gandy's aforementioned three books alone. In addition there's Earl Doherty's "The Jesus Puzzle." Better yet is James Morgan Pryse's oeuvre from the early 20th Century, chief among them "The Restored New Testament" and "Apocalypse Unsealed." And if you demand your writer have "scholarly" credentials and all the right letters strung along after his name, then look no further than Robert Price's "The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man." In fact you could just save a bundle and buy his "Pre-Nicene New Testament," which features Price's translations of all the early Christian texts, as well as background data on each - when and where they're most likely from, when they're first quoted, the edits they have suffered over the centuries, etc. It's a bit pricier (and massive), but you could just buy that and have everything you need to prove Jesus was a myth in one tidy package.

I guess I shouldn't be too hard on Freke and Gandy, though. Mostly I'm just crestfallen. After all, ten years ago I myself was (cue dramatic music) a Christian. It was through reading books on the religion's history (among them F&G's previous work) that I gradually realized it's all a sham. A big joke we've been mislead for two thousand years into believing a fact.

So I owe that to Freke and Gandy; "The Jesus Mysteries" was one of the first books on the case for a mythical Christ that made an impression on me. But I fear "The Second Coming" may be a career killer. F&G are already shunned by the academics, and this book isn't going to change that. And if Freke and Gandy are trying to convert the general reader, they aren't going to do it with only the salad of a story...they need the meat of notes and sources to back up their claims. Because, to quote Homer and Bart Simpson: "You can't win friends with salad."

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Knowing the difference can make you free, January 1, 2008

By 

James M. Sorrells - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Gospel of the Second Coming (Hardcover)

For 22 years, approximately 200 Fellows of the Westar Institute, the Jesus Seminar, have attempted to parse Jesus' alleged utterances into categories of possibly said, unlikely to have said, and impossible to have said. Needless to say, this kind of investigation can get very, very weighty.
Instead, Freke and Gandy have given us a delightful book, which I find quite funny in lots of places, that enables the reader to understand the difference between the literal, historical Jesus and the Gnostic Jesus, even if the reader has no formal background or training. And understanding that difference can make a difference between a Chrisitan experience that is guilt-ridden and one that is enlightening. Maybe other reviewers consider this a trivial pursuit, but I bought a dozen copies for my dearest friends.