Michael Baigent - Jesus Papers

The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History

Michael Baigent, co-author of Holy Blood, Holy Grail that Dan Brown cribbed from to write his much-loved and reviled Da Vinci Code, uses his dealings with the antiquities black market as a point of departure to trace the intentionally hidden origins of Christianity. Along the way he disposes of the Nicaean creed, the primacy of Rome, the myth of papal succeassion from Peter and the current Pope, Nazi Youth troop leader cum Chief Inquisitioner Pope "Benny" Ratzinger. This book is an equal-opportunity offender against mainstream religious sentiment: rabbinical Jews, Catholic and Protestant Christians and Muslims should all find something to get angry about within its pages.

Baigent plays fast and loose with the various Second Temple/New Testament-era Jewish sects, and fails to explain much about the Jewish hippies in Egypt Josephus called the Theraputae, but then, not much is really certain about any of these groups in any case. His idea Jesus was connected with the Jewish hippie camp west of Alexandria makes a lot more sense than most of the Essene/Zealot theories and has the advantage of providing a bridge between Jewish mysticism, Jesus and the Gnostic interpretations of the Old Testament as allegorical. Thankfully, he doesn't try to tie everything up neatly with Jesus and the Cathars in France, and leaves it to the reader to decide.

A very enjoyable read.

Author: Michael Baigent
Language: English
Pages: 372
ISBN-10: 0061150347
ISBN-13: 9780061150340
Format: PDF

What if everything you think you know about Jesus is wrong? In The Jesus Papers, Michael Baigent reveals the truth about Jesus's life and crucifixion. Despite--or rather because of--all the celebration and veneration that have surrounded the figure of Jesus for centuries, Baigent asserts that Jesus and the circumstances leading to his death have been heavily mythologized.

As a religious historian and a leading expert in the field of arcane knowledge, Baigent has unequaled access to hidden archives, secret societies, Masonic records, and the private collections of antiquities traders and their moneyed clients. Using that access to full advantage, Baigent explores the religious and political climate in which Jesus was born and raised, examining not only the conflicts between the Romans and the Jews, but the strife within the different factions of the Jewish Zealot movement. He chronicles the migrations of Jesus's family, his subsequent exposure to other cultures, and the events, teachings, and influences that were most likely to have shaped his early years. Baigent also uncovers the inconsistencies and biases in the accounts of the major historians of Jesus's time, including Josephus, Pliny, and Tacitus. The enduring influence of these accounts in forming our most common conceptions of Jesus reveals that spin is not a new phenomenon.

Taking us back to sites that over the last twenty years he has meticulously explored, studied, and in some instances excavated for the first time, Baigent provides a detailed account of his groundbreaking discoveries, including many never-before-seen photos. The evidence he has uncovered has lead him to make shocking new assertions that threaten the conventional account of Jesus's life and death and shake the very foundation of Western thought, based as it is upon the assumption of Jesus's divinity. Ultimately, his investigation raises the hope that we may gain a new understanding of Jesus.