Customer Reviews

The Gospel of the Second Coming

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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.

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."

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.

A non-reverent novel about Jesus coming back to the disciples after 2000 years. With humor, Freke and Gandy make a fine case for the contemplative, mystical, gnostic view of spirituality. Recommended for all those who want to go deeper spiritually, and who can muster a sense of humor about Jesus.

Although literally flooded with the New Testament version of events for most of my life, I never really understood the complete truth about Christianity until I read "The Gospel of the Second Coming." Through this modern parable, Freke and Gandy present the Gnostic point of view, which finally tells the whole story of the 1st century CE. "God" is not the jealous, cruel, vengeful dictator of the OT and "Jesus" is not the literal person, being born without a father, performing miracles, and rising from the dead. Instead, these are stories that teach spiritual truth: Love/Oneness is man's essential birthright.

Most people are "asleep" and do not realize the unity of the Universe and of all humankind. It is only when we "wake up" that we "know" who we really are, who everyone else is and what kind of relationships we could be having with each other. "Love God" and "Love your neighbor" is not only the message of the 2nd "Coming," but also it is the message of the 1st. The New Testament compilers distorted the truth in order to establish an authoritarian Church. The NT version is authoritarian, but the Gnostic teachings are decidedly about individual freedom. Therefore, ne'er the two shall meet.

Christians may choose whom they will serve: On one hand is the literal "Jesus" of the Bible/New Testament. On the other hand is the "Gnosis", the "Word/Logos," the "Spirit of Truth," the "Christ" that dwells in the heart. Many have already met this "Christ" within, but often confuse Him with the literal "Jesus" in the NT. The former is "real" and can be experienced by everyone. The latter is a character in a story that must be "believed" in spite of lack of credibility and historical evidence.

Read "The Gospel of the Second Coming" and decide for yourself how plausible it is. You may find that it is just as plausible as the NT story, maybe even more so.

I loved this book. It was entertaining from start to finish and yet held so much information as well. I was raised as most, a christian, to believe in a loving & merciful God that somehow would send you to the depths of hell, fire and brimstone if you did not do everything just right. This book was an excellent and fun way to help clear the fog in my head from all that childhood "brainwashing".

This was an attempt to be funny by writers not talented at being funny. Humor is really hard to pull off, and these two don't manage it. They do what many people who are not naturally funny do when they want to be funny. They have their characters (Jesus and company, in this case) say things that only modern people would say or understand, like modern slang expressions. And this is supposed to make us laugh because it's coming from biblical Israelites. But it doesn't. Humor requires more than the juxtaposition of two disparate elements. The two elements have to somehow actually turn out to be related in a way that makes you laugh.

Now, I like and highly recommend their other books. Serious works on gnosticism. You can find some of their conclusions from those books scattered throughout this book, but you have to put up with the "humorous" parts to get to them. So just read their other books instead. But if you don't beleive me, read an excerpt from this. If you find it funny, then by all means read on.

Its funny, but I always click to the lowest reviews first to see what people write. The lowest review was some angry fundamentalist that knew for a fact when they bought the book they would hate it and is all excited they are right. The other guy is upset about adverbs. I don't care how many adverbs Freke and Gandy used....so what if their Harvard literary professor would give them bad marks. Its a fun read in a conversational tone.

Gnostic in composition and thought, a good read to buy and quietly set on the grab table at your local fundamentalist church.

This is the best book I've read on the subject yet. It brings the subject to life in a great new sense. It's about time we got out of the box.

"The Gospel of the Second Coming" is a breath of fresh air among the stench of dogmatism in today's church.

In order to get the full ironic impact of this fourth installment to the Freke and Candy series, the books: "The Jesus mystery"; "Jesus and the Goddess"; "The Laughing Jesus" are strongly recommended prerequisites. Especially to the reader who is less than knowledgeable about the history of the Christian and Islamic faiths.

This is the true story of the way the Christian church could have been, had it not been for the followers of the Gnostic philosophy being, utterly, wiped off the face of the earth by the most brutal, totalitarian regime ever to come down the Pike... The Holy Church of Rome.

"The Gospel of the Second Coming" takes all the ideas presented in the previous books and presents them as a dialog among Jesus, Mary Magdalen, and Peter with cameos by St. Paul and the Bishop Irenaeus (look it up).

In my opinion, Freke and Candy prove the old adage" "History is Written by the Victors."

EDinWAState