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The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold [Paperback]

Acharya S
3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (301 customer reviews)

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Book Description

July 1, 1999
Controversial and explosive, The Christ Conspiracy marshals an enormous amount of startling evidence that the religion of Christianity and Jesus Christ were created by members of various secret societies, mystery schools and religions in order to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion! This powerful book maintains that these groups drew upon a multitude of myths and rituals that already existed long before the Christian era and reworked them into the story the Christian religion presents today-known to most Westerners as the Bible.

Author Acharya makes the case that there was no actual person named Jesus, but that several characters were rolled into one mythic being inspired by the deities Mithras, Heracles/Hercules, Dionysus and many others of the Roman Empire. She demonstrates that the story of Jesus, as portrayed in the Gospels, is nearly identical in detail to those of the earlier savior-gods Krishna and Horus, and concludes that Jesus was certainly neither original nor unique, nor was he the divine revelation. Rather, he represents the very ancient body of knowledge derived from celestial observation and natural forces. A book that will initiate heated debate and inner struggle, it is intelligently written and referenced. The only book of its kind, it is destined for controversy.

Chapters in The Christ Conspiracy include:
  • The Quest for Jesus Christ
  • The Holy Forgery Mill
  • Biblical Sources
  • Non-Biblical Sources
  • Further Evidence of a Fraud
  • Physical Evidence
  • The Myth of Hebrew Monotheism
  • The Characters
  • Astrology and the Bible
  • The Son of God is the Sun of God
  • The Disciples are the Signs of the Zodiac
  • The Gospel Story
  • Other Elements and Symbols of the Christian Myth
  • The Patriarchs and Saints are the Gods of Other Cultures
  • The Meaning of Revelation
  • The Bible, Sex and Drugs
  • Essenes, Zealots and Zadokites
  • Alexandria: Crucible of Christianity
  • Enter Rome
  • The Making of a Myth, etc.
This book contains a table of contents, bibliography and index, and includes over 1,100 citations and 30+ illustrations. Primary sources discussed include the Bible, Dead Sea Scrolls, Talmud, Book of Enoch, Gospel of the Hebrews, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of the Infancy, Epistle of Barnabas and Shepherd of Hermas, as well as Josephus, Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius, Justin Martyr, Marcion, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Augustine, Eusebius, Porphyry, Celsus, et al.

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The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold + Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled + Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Acharya S has done a superb job in bringing together this rich panoply of ancient world mythology and culture, and presenting it in a comprehensive and compelling fashion. She grabs the reader from the first page and doesn't let go. --Earl Doherty

The Christ Conspiracy--very, very scholarly and wholly researched--is a book for today... --Rev. B. Strauss, ex-Catholic priest, Chicago, IL

Acharya S has done a service to forensic anthropology similar to what Euclid did for geometry. She has pulled together all available materials to reveal the inner workings of perhaps the biggest folly of Western man. I enjoyed it immensely. --EBTX

Acharya S pulls no punches, beating her adversary to a bloody pulp... This war of words, it seems, is a battle the author takes most seriously in her righteous quest to undo 2000 years of mental slavery inflicted upon humankind. --Adam Gorightly

Acharya brings in secular [and] church history, archaeology, theology, mythology, linguistics...to provide plenty of backing for her theses. An essential book for anyone who wants to know the reality behind the world's dominant religion. --Russ Kick

Drawing together an amazing amount of research, Acharya S...demolishes the facade of Christianity, showing that it is 100% mythology. -- You Are Being Lied Too, April 1, 2001

From the Author

Ever since The Christ Conspiracy was published in 1999, I have striven to demonstrate many of its major and minor contentions in a variety of books, articles, blogs, forum posts, videos and radio programs. I have spent countless hours tracking down sources as far back as possible in history, including to the earliest written records. I have sifted through thousands of ancient texts in numerous languages, including ancient Greek, Latin, Egyptian, Hebrew, Sanskrit and others. I have also pored through thousands of modern resources from highly credentialed authorities in a number of relevant disciplines. Over this past decade-plus, again, I have provided this information in freely available articles and ebooks, as well as in several follow-up books such as: Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled; Who Was Jesus? Fingerprints of The Christ; Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection; and The Gospel According to Acharya S.

For the most part - and with great difficulty - I have succeeded in bringing to light the sources from which came many of the contentions in The Christ Conspiracy. Some of the original, corroborative material was very challenging to find, such as various writings of ancient Church fathers and others that back up the claims in "The Characters" chapter, one of the most controversial in the entire book. This chapter discusses several ancient figures considered mostly mythological whose "lives" strangely resemble that of Jesus Christ from the gospels and Christian tradition, including Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Indian gods and godmen. From the attention and reaction this single chapter has gotten, it would seem that it alone is enough to reveal Christianity as a rehash of earlier, mythical traditions, which is the premise of this book.

Over the years, common complaints I have addressed include that my sources are "outdated" and are from "19th-century scholars." In reality, I have used primary and ancient sources quite extensively, although at times I have quoted or paraphrased them through the works of more modern scholars from a few centuries ago to the current era. Since writing this book - which was researched from my own private library on a shoe-string budget - I have confirmed these citations in original works as well as in more modern, scholarly resources by the best academic publishers in the world. I refer especially to those found in my most recent works, including Who Was Jesus?, Christ in Egypt and The Gospel.

Who Was Jesus? has an almost all-Christian bibliography and has received many accolades from knowledgeable and qualified individuals such as theology professors, ministers and New Testament scholars. Christ in Egypt contains 2,400 footnotes from 900 sources, including thousands of pages of ancient Egyptian writings and the works of highly credentialed individuals from a number of relevant disciplines, such as numerous well-respected Egyptologists from around the world.

My follow-up book to The Christ Conspiracy, Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled, delves into some fascinating information that again spans the range of time from antiquity to today. The tome represents a bridge between Christ Con and Christ in Egypt, researching further into the claims of the latter while recounting hard-to-find tales of skulduggery in the field of Jesus mythicism dating back centuries, revealing why this information is so difficult to find, as well as tantalizing hints of more that has been buried, lost or lied about. It also provides much evidence of the ancient religious worship of astrotheology, which to any student or scholar of religion should prove highly intriguing.

Over these past several years, a trend developed with the criticisms of Christ Con, which was that many of my critics had not actually read my work but were jumping on bandwagons of others who also had not read my work or who were clearly biased, such as a number of Christian apologists. Not a few of these critics who had either not read my work or who have been true believers with an axe to grind posted reviews that made claims already refuted many times over. We find this pattern of disingenuousness or bias in many places on the internet.

There have been other, more subtle reasons for bias, as remarked upon by David Mills, author of Atheist Universe, who in his review of my book Who Was Jesus? remarked, "Having given a fair hearing to some of her online detractors and their 'rebuttal' videos, I have detected not only a lack of knowledge on the part of her critics, but also, in some cases, a thinly disguised misogyny."

While some of the details have changed, from my intense investigation over the years I maintain that the scenario put forth in The Christ Conspiracy represents as close to true early Christian history as anyone has gotten so far. The extensive research backing up many germane elements from the "Characters" chapter - as can be also be found in my "ZEITGEIST Sourcebook" - clearly demonstrates that Christ is a mythical rehash, albeit a unique one, of numerous motifs and characteristics of earlier gods, goddesses and godmen, along with various mysteries and wisdom sayings. All of this mythmaking was hung on the framework of "messianic scriptures" from the Old Testament and Jewish intertestamental literature, which I likewise discuss in The Christ Conspiracy.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 430 pages
  • Publisher: Adventures Unlimited Press; Edition Unstated edition (July 1, 1999)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0932813747
  • ISBN-13: 978-0932813749
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (301 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #113,587 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

D.M. Murdock, also known by her pen name, "Acharya S," is the author of several books on comparative religion and mythology, including "The Christ Conspiracy," "Suns of God," "Who Was Jesus?" and "Christ in Egypt." She is also the author of "The Gospel According to Acharya S," which seeks to answer some long-held questions concerning the nature of God, religion and humankind's place in the world.

Murdock is an alumna of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, where she studied Classics, Greek Civilization. She has lived in Greece and is also an alumna of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece. Acharya has excavated at Corinth, Greece, where tradition has St. Paul addressing the Corinthians, as well as at a Paleo-Indian site in the U.S. She speaks, reads and/or writes to varying degrees English, French, Spanish, ancient and modern Greek, Latin, German and other languages.

Acharya/Murdock has several websites, including TruthBeKnown.com, StellarHousePublishing.com, TBKNews.blogspot.com and FreethoughtNation.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
205 of 239 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Exciting and Provocative February 21, 2000
Format:Paperback
The further one goes into this book, the more one recognizes how vast is the mythological background of the ancient world that the modern era has completely lost sight of. Those who imagine that the Gospel story represents singular historical events are in for a shock when they realize the degree to which the Christian myth of Jesus of Nazareth was a reflection of mythical motifs and traditions which saturated ancient and even prehistoric cultures. There is barely an original or virgin bone in Christ's body, and Christians in the early centuries were regularly assailed by pagan detractors who accused them of reworking old ideas and copying from a host of predecessors.

The other thing the reader comes to recognize is that Acharya S has done a superb job in bringing together this rich panoply of ancient world mythology and culture, and presenting it in a comprehensive and compelling fashion. Moreover, she grabs the reader from the first page and doesn't let go. Her style is colorful, bold, occasionally (and justifiably) indignant, even a touch reckless at times, but never off the track--a little like an exciting roller coaster ride. It may take a fair amount of concentration to absorb all this material, but even if you don't integrate everything on first reading, the broader strokes will leave you convinced that the story of Jesus is simply an imaginative refashioning of the mythological heritage of centuries and that no such man ever existed.

She covers a wide range of interesting and provocative topics, with plenty of stimulating insights. Especially effective is her attention to elements of the Old Testament that one doesn't usually encounter in biblical studies: astrology in the bible, the mythological nature of much of the Old Testament material, the falsity of the idea that the Hebrews were monotheistic, even a chapter on Sex and Drugs. She delves into Egyptian and Indian precedents for the possible derivation of many of the bible's traditions. When she ranges even further afield and notes the astonishingly widespread commonality of certain religious and cultural motifs from one end of the planet to the other, extending back into very ancient times, we are on intriguing if speculative ground, but for the most part the author simply lets the data speak for itself, and readers can draw what conclusions their own adventurous spirits might wish.

As for her detailed picture of how Gospel elements closely conform to astrological and mythological symbols in the atmosphere of the time, or how the story of Jesus parallels the features of other savior gods: if even half of these things were in the minds of the Gospel writers when they fashioned their symbolic tale (to which one could add the midrashic borrowing of passages from the Hebrew scriptures to provide so much of the Gospel structure, its `events' and even their wording), there can be no doubt that such writers were well aware that their work had nothing to do with history.

There are those who have expressed some uncertainty about the scholarship which originally presented some of the subject matter dealt with in this book, since much of it comes from the 19th and early 20th centuries. But there is a prominent reason why today's researcher is inevitably thrown back on this early period of investigation. The so-called History of Religions School was a feature of that period, represented by such luminaries as Reitzenstein, Bousset and Cumont, and other, less famous scholars. Its conclusions about the relation of Christianity to the thought and religious expression of the time, especially in regard to the mystery cults and even solar mythology, proved very unpalatable to mainstream New Testament study. That was also the period of intense examination of the idea that no Jesus had existed at all (J. M. Robertson, Arthur Drews, the Dutch Radical School, etc.). The result was a backlash and a circling of the wagons, creating a fortress mentality against such scholarship for the latter three-quarters of the 20th century. As a result, there has been little recent investigation of that History of Religions material, especially sympathetic investigation. Acharya may draw to some degree on that older scholarship, but while certain aspects of it are necessarily a little dated, one of the things which struck me in her quotations from it (and more and more of it is now being reprinted) is how perceptive and compelling most of it continues to be. We sorely need a new History of Religions School for the 21st century, to apply modern techniques to this important ancient material. Perhaps this book will help bring that about.

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128 of 151 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent work BRAVO!! May 29, 2001
By janet
Format:Paperback
I am 53 years old, was once a catholic, and I have been studying Comparative Religions for over thirty years. My library contains works by Robertson, Whelas, Carpenter, Frazier, Campbell, Smith, Keller, Kolb and too many others to mention, but if I had to recommend ONE book to the interested student who wished to have her/his eyes opened to the unfiltered truth about christianity in particular and religion in general, that one book would be The Christ Conspiracy, by Acharya S. It takes many years of thought and effort to wade through the complete works of Josephus, various translations of the bible, numerous texts (some enlightening - some inane and dogmatic) in an honest and scholarly examination of the major creeds that exist on this planet at this point in time. If you wish to just 'skip to the end of the search' where the judeo/christian theology is concerned (or should I say astro-theology),then buy a copy of this book, read it twice, and then loan it to a friend. Archarya's work is one of the most heavily documented texts I have yet studied, and unlike some reviewers who claim to have had some difficulty verifying quotes and context where notations are concerned, I had none of these difficulties. Moreover, I found that her conclusions, where drawn, were accurate and reasoned. A certain 'spirit' in the style of her writings is refreshing. The reader must keep in mind however, that this is a purposefully confrontational and brutally eye-opening text. If you are content believing that the Creator of the entire inner and outer universes found it necessary to "atone" for human "sins"by impregnating a little virgin girl 2000 years ago, growing into a God/man so that It could be tortured to death by the humans, and further, that this God wishes humankind to drink blood and eat God flesh on a regular basis as a remembrance of the holy death, then don't buy this book! If you suspect that the true meaning of life, and God's plan has nothing to do christianity, or any other religion for that matter, then gain some strength by getting some truth - read Christ Conspiracy and bolster that knowlege with any of the other texts referenced by Acharya. I loved it, and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a wide ranging - yet easy read on this fascinating subject.
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345 of 426 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars Surprised and disappointed at previous reviews January 27, 2001
By A Customer
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
First of all let me state I am not a Christian, I have no axe to grind. I am very interested in the time of Christ and the early church as historical study, nothing more and nothing less. ....

The Author is tackling a very controversial, but not original thesis in claiming that Jesus never existed and the Christian religion was influenced by earlier religions such as Paganism and the beliefs in Egypt.

Claims such as this have been made before, and for these claims to stand there should be clear documented historical evidence, and this is where the book falls very short.

Time after time the author makes extraordinary claims with no references to back them up other than previous authors of the same genre. For example, she quotes an author named Martin Larson from a book written in 1977. He claims that early church fathers such as Jerome, Antony and Martin were definitely psychotic. From this, the author draws the following conclusion, and I quote "Thus, deceiving, mentally ill individuals basically constitute the genesis of Christianity." Now, I ask the reader, is this research or is this a sentence from an author whose conclusion was drawn before the book was even begun.

She also writes that the gospels of the New Testament are dated much later than the time of Christ. For any scholar of that period, this is not earth shattering news. This has been known for many years. She does however date them almost 100 years later than even one of the most liberal of Christian scholars (Burton Mack) and uses no references or historical data to back up the claim....

When I read this type of book, I expect solid historical research. I am not interested in reading books full of nothing but opinion, such as you get from many Christian apologists. In my opinion, this book is nothing but the opposite side of the same coin.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent product
Excellent product, quality service from Amazon.com
I liked the fast delivery
I'm still reading the book, but it is amazing. Read more
Published 7 days ago by Eduardo Garcia
4.0 out of 5 stars another view
This is a pretty interesting book... if you are open to new concepts and ideas about Jesus and not just believe "blindly" on the bible and the Jesus story.
Published 21 days ago by Carlos E. Rodriguez
1.0 out of 5 stars Started off great, but fails on primary sources
I am a critic of organized religions, and not naive about cover-ups, social conditioning, etc. However I also believe in rules of evidence and rational thought (although these are... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Conrad Hoss
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic
One of the most enlightening books I've ever read. Can sometimes read a little too "academic" for many casual readers but extremely good information overall. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Kevin Casey
5.0 out of 5 stars Very insightful
This book has changed my life and gave me that push that I needed. I study religion and read anything about it. This book has verified a lot for me
Published 2 months ago by Queen
5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting take on an agelong debate.
The writer's expertise and arguments are very compelling. She uses archeology and anthropology to argue a controversial claim. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Lamont A. Timmons
5.0 out of 5 stars Great single source
I wish I would have had this volume when I started a rather in depth study. I admire the scholarship that went into this book, and I have numerous others that I am also pleased... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Duane C. Buchholz
2.0 out of 5 stars Some Good but Unoriginal Ideas but also Negatively Overwhelming
I liked some of her presentations; however, digressing to astrology in the bible and an ancient global civilization is to me is not relevant to the conspiracy by the christian... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Susan Phillips
5.0 out of 5 stars A mind-opener - great X-mas present
I have had this book for years and always pull it out at Christmas (which I celebrate) to share passages with my family and kids to remind ourselves that whatever its name in... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Voice O. F. Reason
1.0 out of 5 stars Woefully ill informed
I am not sure how anyone can take this work as being a serious scholarly work. The author bases their "theories" not on fact, but on wild assumptions and vague accusations. Read more
Published 5 months ago by James
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Other Sources Besids the Bible? Be the first to reply
religion
So, your a Pantheist then.
Mar 11, 2009 by ZAROVE |  See all 4 posts
Another Factual Issue Be the first to reply
How would you compare this to "The Jesus Mysteries"?
I have read neither, but you should get something of value from my book, "Saviors". See: saviors-robertwahler.com for an excerpt
Dec 15, 2009 by Sahansdal |  See all 2 posts
An Interesting Coincidence
You say the "Christian and Celtic Cross". But, the Celtic Cross is Christian, and one of the known variants of the Cross used by Christians over the years. Despite its usurpation by modern Neo-Pagans, the Celtic Cross was not Pre-Christian in any regards. Its just one of the regular... Read more
May 5, 2008 by ZAROVE |  See all 3 posts
the universe is god Be the first to reply
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