The Jesus Mysteries: Was The Original Jesus A Pagan God?

Today it falls around 22 December. The annual celebration of the nativity of the Mystery godman celebrated the death of the old year and its miraculous rebirth as the new year on the date of the solstice.

Belief in the Jesus story was originally the first step in Christian spirituality — the Outer Mysteries.

There was quite a dispute in early Christianity about whether the birth of Christ was 25 December or 6 January. Was this because no one could remember? Or could it be simply because early Christians were unsure whether to synchronize it with the birth of Mithras or with the birth of Aion, both of whom were different representations of the perennial

The Magi bring Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. The Pagan sage Empedocles speaks of worshipping God with 'offerings of unmixed myrrh and frankincense, casting down also on the ground libations of golden honey'.[49] Myrrh was used as the sacred incense during the festival of Adonis. In some myths he was said to have been born from a myrr

These can be broadly categorized into two different schools. On the one hand there were those we will call 'Literalists', because what defines them is that they take the Jesus story as a literal account of historical events. It was this school of Christianity that was adopted by the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE, becoming Roman Catholicism

We found ourselves studying strange esoteric tracts with titles such as Hypostasis of the Archons and The Thought of Norea. It felt as if we were in an episode of Star Trek — and in a way we were.

The myths of Osiris-Dionysus should not be understood as just intriguing tales, therefore, but as a symbolic language which encodes the mystical teachings of the Inner Mysteries. Because of this, although the details were developed and adapted over time by different cultures, the myth of Osiris-Dionysus has remained essentially the same.

The Roman Church created a history of the triumph of Literalist Christianity in much the same partisan way that, two millennia later, Hollywood created tales of 'cowboys and Indians' to relate 'how the West was won' not 'how the West was lost'.

We had been brought up in a culture which portrays Paganism and Christianity as entirely antagonistic religious perspectives. How could such astonishing resemblances be explained?