THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE MYTHICAL CHRIST (1886)
by
Gerald Massey (1828-1907)
English poet, Historian, Egyptologist

Much of the Christian History was pre-extant as Egyptian Mythology. p1

I lectured upon the subject of Jesus many years ago. 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! p1

The personal existence of Jesus as Jehoshua Ben-Pandira can be established beyond a doubt. p2

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. p3

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 altogether, with so many other of the anti-Christian evidences. p3

The mythical Messiah was always born of a Virgin Mother - a factor unknown in natural phenomena, and one that cannot be historical, one that can only be explained by means of the Mythos, and those conditions of primitive sociology which are mirrored in mythology and preserved in theology. p4

Such history, however, does not show that illicit intercourse was the natural mode of the divine descent. p5

All that is non-natural and impossible as human history, is possible natural and explicable as Mythos. p5

The birthplace of the Egyptian Messiah at the Vernal Equinox was figured in Apt, or Apta, the corner; but Apta is also the name of the Crib and the Manger; hence the Child born in Apta, was said to be born in a manger; and this Apta as Crib or Manger is the hieroglyphic sign of the Solar birthplace. Hence the Egyptians exhibited the Babe in the Crib or Manger in the streets of Alexandria. The birthplace was indicated by the colour of the Equinox, as it passed from sign to sign. It was also pointed out by the Star in the East. When the birthplace was in the sign of the Bull, Orion was the Star that rose in the East to tell where the young Sun-God was re-born. Hence it is called the “Star of Horus.” That was then the Star of the “Three Kings” who greeted the Babe; for the “Three Kings” is still a name of the three stars in Orion’s belt. Here we learn that the legend of the “Three Kings” is at least 6,000 years old. p7

The same tradition of the Coming One is extant amongst the Millenarians and Adventists, as amongst the Moslems. It is the tradition of El-Mahdi, the prophet who is to come in the last days of the world to conquer all the world, and who was lately descending the Sudan with the old announcement the “Day of the Lord is at hand,” which shows that the astronomical allegory has left some relics of the true tradition among the Arabs, who were at one time learned in astronomical lore. p8

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. And as fast as the composite Christ falls to pieces, each feature is claimed, each character is gathered up by the original owner, as with the grasp of gravitation. 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. p9

The Canonical Gospels are only a later literalised réchauffé of the Egyptian writings; the representation in the Mysteries, and the oral teachings of the Gnostics which passed out of Egypt in Greece and Rome. p21

The Christian dispensation is believed to have been ushered in by the birth of a child, and the portrait of that child in the Roman Catacombs as the child of Mary is the youthful Sun-God in the Mummy Image of the child-king, the Egyptian Karast, or Christ. The alleged facts of our Lord’s life as Jesus the Christ were equally the alleged facts of our Lord’s life as the Horus of Egypt, whose very name signifies the Lord. p21

The Christ is a popular lay-figure that never lived, and a lay-figure of Pagan origin; a lay-figure that was once the Ram, and afterwards the Fish; a lay-figure that in human form was the portrait and image of a dozen different gods. The imagery of the Catacombs shows that the types there represented are not the ideal figures of the human reality! p23

The Christian Theology was responsible for substituting faith instead of knowledge; and the European mind is only just beginning to recover from the mental paralysis induced by that doctrine which came to its natural culmination in the Dark Ages. p24

The Christian religion is responsible for enthroning the cross of death in heaven, with a deity on it, doing public penance for a private failure in the commencement of creation. It has taught men to believe that the vilest spirit may be washed white, in the atoning blood of the purest, offered up as a bribe to an avenging God. It has divinized a figure of helpless human suffering and a face of pitiful pain; as if there were naught but a great heartache at the core of all things; or the vast Infinite were but a veiled and sad-eyed sorrow that brings visibly to birth in the miseries of human life. But “in the old Pagan world men deified the beautiful, the glad;” as they will again, upon a loftier pedestal, when the fable of this fictitious fall of man, and false redemption by the cloud-begotten God, has passed away like a phantasm of the night, and men awake to learn that they are here to wage ceaseless war upon sordid suffering, remediable wrong, and preventable pain; here to put an end to them, not to apotheosize an effigy of Sorrow to be adored as a type of the Eternal. For the most beneficent is the most beautiful; the happiest are the healthiest; the most God-like is most glad. The Christian Cult has fanatically fought for its false theory, and waged incessant warfare against Nature and Evolution - Nature’s intention made somewhat visible - and against some of the noblest instincts, during eighteen centuries. Seas of human blood have been spilt to keep the barque of Peter afloat. Earth has been honeycombed with the graves of the martyrs of Free thought. Heaven has been filled with a horror of great darkness in the name of God.
Eighteen centuries are a long while in the life-time of a lie, but a brief span in the eternity of Truth. The Fiction is sure to be found out, and the Lie will fall at last! At last!! At last!!! p25