Jesus and the Goddess
The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians
By Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy

Timothy Freke has a honours degree in philosophy and is an authority on world spirituality and the author of more than twenty books. Peter Gandy has an MA in Classical Civilisation. For more information about the authors, their books, lectures and seminars, visit www.jesusmysteries.demon.co.uk

The idea of some sect ‘making up’ the Jesus story may seem strange today, but this is because we no longer think of myths in the same way as did our ancestors. To us myths are irrelevant fantasies, but the ancients regarded them as profound allegories encoding mystical teachings. Mythical motifs represented philosophical principles. They were an archetypal vocabulary with which to think. Creating new myths was a way of exploring new ideas. Reworking old myths and syncretising them to create new ones was a major preoccupation of Pagan, Jewish and Christian Gnostics. Epiphanius, for example, describes the Christian Gnostics as using ‘allegorical interpretation’ to freely ‘recompose’ Jewish scriptures and ‘Greek epic mythology’, which are precisely the two sources used to create the Jesus myth.