The Mythical Life of Jesus

By Reverend Larry Marshall

Based on the writings of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn, The Mythical Life of Jesus Christ provides an interpretation of the Bible that shows the full, clear, and hidden meaning of ancient mythology and religion. It describes how the Bible is not a record of objective historical occurrences, but rather a collection of allegorical, mythical, dramatic, and symbolic sagas.

Author Larry Marshall has compiled the writings of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn, a lecturer, teacher, and scholar. Kuhn claims the roots of Christianity can be found in the Egyptian religion. Through his writings, Kuhn shows there is no historical evidence for Jesusthat his life is instead based on the Egyptian god Horus. He further claims that the New Testament of the Bible and its eventsthe virgin birth, the baptism, the temptations, the crucifixion, and resurrectionshould be interpreted allegorically.

Marshall believes Kuhn has unlocked the essence of Christianity and, as a result, challenges the churchs fraudulent orthodoxy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Mar 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781426952975

Reverend Larry Marshall

Larry Marshall earned a BA and an MDiv in theology from the University of Toronto. As an ordained member of the clergy, he has extensively studied Christianity and mythology. Marshall is a wedding and funeral chaplain. He and his wife, Lynda, have three children and live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Appendix One

Appendix Two

Acknowledgments

To Dr. Alan Pert for his gracious permission to use his Introduction to Kuhn’s thought. Many thanks.

To Juan Schoch for making the works of Alvin Boyd Kuhn available on the Internet for the first time, starting in 1995. He is the first in history to do so, and there is a story behind it. He can be contacted at [e-mail].

To my Monday and Tuesday evening book and Bible study groups. Thank you for your helpful comments and discussions.

To Tom and Susan Harpur for their friendship, encouragement, and hospitality. Many thanks.

That which is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients and never did not exist; from the very beginning of the human race until the time when the Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed, began to be called Christianity.

—St. Augustine

But that there should be certain doctrines not made known to the multitude, which are revealed after the exoteric ones have been taught, is not a peculiarity of Christianity alone, but also of philosophic systems, in which certain truths are exoteric and others esoteric.

—Origen

My point … is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally. They knew what they were doing; we don’t.

—John Dominic Crossan

Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born

But not within thyself, thy soul will be forlorn.

The cross on Golgotha thou lookest to in vain

Unless within thyself it be set up again.

—Angelus Silesius

We don’t need to demythologize the Gospels; we need to remythologize them.

—Tom Harpur

True Christianity, the religion of the Christos, is far older than the Christian Church.

—Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn

A Personal Note

Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn never wrote a book called The Mythical Life of Jesus, but he did make numerous references to the mythical Jesus in his many books, essays, and articles. I have gathered these scattered references and put them in one book under chapters entitled The Mythical Birth of Jesus, The Mythical Childhood of Jesus, The Mythical Baptism of Jesus, The Mythical Ministry, The Mythical Passion, The Mythical Death, and The Mythical Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus. I have added a concluding chapter called The Future of Christianity.

The purpose of this book is simple: to introduce as many readers as I can to the magnificent works of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn. A gifted teacher, lecturer, and scholar, Kuhn deserves recognition. He is an original thinker. The breadth of his knowledge is vast; his use of the English language is masterful, at times reaching poetic heights. Many of his passages are inspirational; some are devotional; some are heated and angry; some are sarcastic and caustic. For any who appreciate the color of the English language, Kuhn’s style is a gift.

Why hasn’t Dr. Kuhn been recognized and read? Perhaps it’s because of his PhD thesis, Theosophy, A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom. Some scholars are embarrassed by anything too esoteric and arcane. They fear being contaminated or compromised by subjects they deem too spiritual or too irrational to be taken seriously. But scholars such as Tom Harpur and a growing number of other writers are convinced that Kuhn deserves a hearing. It is certain that the church will not appreciate Kuhn, and fundamentalists especially will hate what he has to say. Most conservatives will dismiss his ideas as well. And liberals? They’ll not be sure what to say.

But Dr. Kuhn must not be fobbed off; he needs to be engaged by New Testament scholars and theologians. Even more importantly, he needs to be read by clergy and laity alike. The time has come for such a thinker to be heard. I believe that all those who read Kuhn will come to the same conclusion that others and myself have: Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn was one of the great religious thinkers of our time.

In this book, Kuhn is the author. The words are his words; the style is his; the lofty vocabulary is his. The writing is his, not mine. In only a few places have I inserted a word or a phrase in order to clarify a concept or an idea, but I have done this with his voice in mind. If Dr. Kuhn had written a book on Jesus’s life, this would be it. As Montaigne has put it, I have here made only a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the string that ties them.

My motives for writing this book are not in small part from my anger, disappointment, and frustration at the church. I charge the church with dishonesty, fraud, and outright lying. It has manipulated the truth and misled countless millions of believers. But a far greater motive is my desire to publicize the works of this great thinker. In my opinion, Kuhn is one of the great unsung thinkers of our time. Again, Kuhn needs to be read, studied, and discussed by theologians, clergy, and lay alike. It is my intention to make his name known.

Kuhn had no personal animosity against Christianity, nor do I. The church? Yes! Christianity? No! As he put it in his preface to The Shadow of the Third Century, he wishes to repudiate the suggestion that he is inspired by a hostile animus against Christianity. He confesses, as do I, to a natural animus against bigotry, superstition, narrow hatreds, persecution, tyranny, war, murder, slaughter, lying, and sickening hypocrisy, the more so when they are perpetrated in the name of Jesus and under the disguise of holy religion. Since Christian history is in the main a record of these horrible things, we are free to express our dislike of them. But these things are not part of a true Christianity or a true church, and so it cannot be charged that we are prejudiced against that which is true Christianity and true church. We have been misled by a kind of Christianism and churchism.

I count myself a committed Christian and served the church for over thirty years as an ordained clergy. But in my spiritual journey, I discovered that much of the truth was either denied me, or I chose not to admit it into my thinking. As the years passed, my doubts grew until I finally had to quit the institutional church out of fear for my emotional and spiritual health. As Tom Harpur says, Church can be bad for your health. As Matthew Fox reminds us, Religion can be toxic. I left the church, but I have never left Christianity. I sensed that there was truth deep in this tradition, and so I began my search from inside the faith.

The ancients tell us that when the pupil is ready, the teacher appears. And so it was that I discovered Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn. As I read his words, my spirit leaped. Here was what I had been looking for: comprehensive, intellectual, spiritual analyses of Christianity. I was hooked. I read everything of his that I could lay my hands and heart on. What you are about to read is Kuhn’s profound understanding of Christianity. It’s my conviction that Dr. Kuhn has come closer to the essence of Christianity than any other scholar I have ever read. It goes without saying that this is a book the church would rather you not read. It threatens the very foundations of the ecclesiastical establishment. They will not be happy campers.

This life of Jesus is written to present the available evidence of the mythical life of Jesus. As Kuhn says, This truth will not be welcome or pleasant to most. Fundamentalists, Conservatives, and even Liberals will rise up with voices and arms shaking. Truth seeking is one of the supreme tests of our worthiness to take on the responsibilities and enjoy the liberties of a democracy. The Christ within all of us must not continue to be clouded with a fog of hypocrisy and deceit. I’m convinced that in due season the mighty power of the Christ within will dispel the lies. A new day is coming. To my mind, that day is overdue.

Preface

Christianity introduced to the world not one single item, doctrine, or revelation of moral and spiritual truth that had not already been in the cult religions and the sacred books of antiquity for a long time prior.

Studies of comparative religion and mythology reveal that not a single teaching of the Christian faith is new or unique. Every element of this so-called revelation was extant before the first Christian century. For instance, L’Abbe Huc, the first Christian to enter Turkistan, was shocked to find that the Tartar natives were celebrating the Eucharist with bread and wine. Cortez ad Pizarro found Aztec and Mayan rites and beliefs similar to those of the Roman Catholic system. Christians who celebrate Holy Communion are perpetuating the aboriginal tribal custom of cutting up and eating the body of their god in order to incorporate his spirit in their own natures. In both cases, the tribal and Christian, the interpsychological dynamic of the allegory was lost, and only the outer enactment of the rite was sustained. The rite became an empty shell due to the failure to pierce through the outer practice to discern the spiritual truth within. It is true that Christianity never offered up human or animal sacrifices, but it did hesitate to torture and burn millions of people for their honest and courageous dissent from declared dogma. Victims were sacrificed on the altars of Christianity in the name of the Prince of Peace.

True Christianity, the religion of the Christos, is far older than the Christian Church is. The first thesis is that Christianity took the human Jesus and made him to be very God; the second is that it took the Hellenic spiritual Christos and personified it into a human being, Jesus. A third solution is that the spiritual nonhuman Christos could have been humanized even if there had been no living figure of Jesus. The absence of authentic historical evidence of Jesus’s existence argues strongly for this third suggestion. It was felt that the abstract Christ was too remote, that the essence of tis divine saving principle should be personalized. Most of the evidence seems to point to the humanizing of the divine, rather than the reverse.

Christianity has demonstrated the inadequacy, the irrationality, and the unseemly incongruity of its thinking in not seeing that the merely human villager of Galilee could not be expected to carry the world load of the Christos, much less the Logos. For that was an office, a dignity, that no human being could encompass—a cosmic role beyond the scope of mortal flesh and blood.

How did Christianity take the place of paganism? Christianity is not only a copy or adaptation of this old paganism, with every single one of its doctrines rooted in an ancient item of symbolic portrayal of truth, but sad to say, it is a vitiated and degraded copy of the shining original. This answer has never been given before. Christianity, grievously enough, took the place of paganism because it swept an overpowering wave of fanatical resentment against the aristocracy of the esoteric intellectual mysteries and drowned it out. This is the truth of the matter, so long submerged. The episode contends for the honor of being perhaps the direst tragedy of world history. The recrudescence of the esoteric movement widespread in the world today is the most general effort in sixteen centuries to regain what was then lost. And all the forces of the intervening centuries of obscurantism, reaching right up to the present and opposing the light now as then, are set to block the recovery.

Jesus may be like the Christos—that is, he may be as nearly a human reflection as was or is possible—but he is not the Christos, which remains undiminished, eternal, inviolate … An abstract principle of spiritual consciousness cannot be a concrete thing of flesh, no matter how closely the two are conjoined; however, if the concrete symbol and the abstract quality can never be completely identified, there is still a way in which they can be unified in relationship. In the depths of our awareness, the man Jesus may attach to himself the essence of the quality known as Christliness. His life, his actions, his speech, and his graciousness may lead us to an appreciation of what Christliness can mean. What could be expressed through a human being could never be absolute divinity; the human order can only express that degree and quality, that aspect of the Divine Being. Is it not said that when God incarnated in man, he took on man’s limitation, he circumscribed his infinitude within the tiny capacity of human nature? He took our nature on himself.

The Life and Writings

of Alvin Boyd Kuhn

Alvin Boyd Kuhn was born in 1880 on a farm in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Princeton and studied the Greek language, to which he later attributed great importance regarding his interest in theology. Kuhn’s graduation address, The Lyre of Orpheus, focused upon Jason, the Argonauts, and the Golden Fleece. This speech, he later felt, would prime his interest in ancient wisdom and the mystery religions.

For the next twenty-five years, Kuhn was a high school teacher of foreign languages. In 1927, he enrolled at Columbia University, where, in 1931, he received his PhD. His thesis, Theosophy: A Modern Revival of the Ancient Wisdom, was the first instance in which an individual had been permitted by any modern American or European University to obtain his doctorate with a thesis on Theosophy.

The Lost Light, an exposition of the allegories, parables, events, and characters of biblical Christianity as having been extant in pre-Christian paganism under different forms and names, was deemed by the chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Ohio University to be the greatest of theological works to have occurred in the English language. In September of 1963, Dr. Kuhn passed away in Morristown, New Jersey, just after completing what he considered his best work, The Ultimate Canon of Knowledge.

Kuhn’s greatness is that he provided penetrating insight into the human condition and the cosmic purpose of human life. He was convinced that we need an understanding of the ancient wisdom in order to restore our earthly life.

Note: For an understanding of Kuhn’s theological and philosophical concepts, please go to the appendix. There you will find an excellent summary of Kuhn’s thinking by Dr. Alan Pert of the University of Sydney. Dr. Pert has given his gracious permission for me to use his work. Also, a word is needed regarding references. Because I have assembled The Mythical Life of Jesus from the many books and articles of Kuhn, it would be an inconvenience to the reader to have the flow of Kuhn’s thought interrupted by constantly quoting sources. Consequently, I have not referenced every quote in order that the eloquence of Kuhn’s writing is appreciated. It is my hope that the omissions may invite the reader to read the books and articles of Kuhn.

Chapter One

The Mythical Birth of Jesus

The Advent of the Messiah

On the day of the advent, heaven’s arches rang with the proclamation of peace and amity among humanity on the basis of the fact that a fragment of divinity had been lodged in the holy of holies of the temple of each human body. Emmanuel had come to dwell with humanity. But the exuberant joyousness of all mortal hearts over the event has been clogged. Only the shadow of the truth, no longer the substance, remains to kindle Yuletide ecstasy. The allegory of the birth in the stable or cave was devised to keep humankind in exultant memory of its divinity. Alas! It speaks no more of our divinity. It extols the godly nature of but One. The paeans of sacred hilarity that are raised for the birth of our Savior are appropriate and efficacious only as that Savior stands as a symbol of the glorious birth within ourselves.

Long ago, Angelus Silesius, a Christian mystic, admonished Christendom with these words:

Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born

But not within thyself, thy soul will be forlorn.

The cross on Golgotha thou lookest to in vain

Unless within thyself it be set up again.

If the birth of the god in each individual heart is not the interior meaning of the nativity, then we celebrate the event to no purpose. No amount of adoration accorded to a newborn king in Judea will avail to redeem a single wayward heart if the Christ child is not eventually domiciled in the breast of the individual. The King of Righteousness must be cradled in the manger of each human self ere the myth can work its magic in the world.

Christmas celebrates the emergence of the divine order of conscious mind in the human race and crowns the former pure animal level of existence. Christmas marks the entry of mind, reason, and the completely vast potential of the activity of thought into human motivation, installing the intellect as king over human action. The interior meaning of Christmas can never be grasped until it is understood that it celebrates the coming of mind as king over the lower instincts, and passions of the primitive animal stage of evolution. The Christmas advent of the Prince of Peace eventuates finally in the Easter crowning of the King of Love, for the mind is to be glorified in the end by the sweet aura and radiant light of love.

The Word Christmas

Christmas (Christ-mas) does not mean the Mass of Christ. The word is traced to the Egyptian word mes, or mas, meaning to steep, anoint, and also to be born. Messu was the Egyptian word for the anointed initiate in the mystery rites. Mess-iah or Mess-Jah means the newborn Jah, or Jehovah God.

The Haunting Ghost of Egypt

The Church cannot escape the evidences that its foundations and ceremonies were drawn from Egypt; the Virgin Mother, the Son, and gods of Egypt were sealed up in the very corner stone of the church; the haunting ghost was in the church itself. In the book Natural Genesis, Massey puts it this way: "But it is well known as a matter of history that the worship of Isis and Horus descended in the early Christian centuries to Alexandria, where it took the form of the worship of the Virgin Mary and the infant Savior and so passed into the European ceremonial. We have, therefore, the Virgin Mary connected by linear succession and descent with that remote zodiacal cluster in the sky, the constellation Virgo.

The Egyptian Roots of Christmas

The fundamental thesis underlying the sun festival of divine rebirth can be traced back to the archaic Egyptian religion. Present everywhere in Egypt’s religious system was the theme of the coming of Messiah Horus, the central Christ figure in the texts. He was described as he who ever comes or he who comes regularly and continuously or he who comes periodically. In some hymns, Horus is hailed as The Comer! The Comer! Isis, the goddess mother and queen of heaven entreated him to come and lift her out of her desolation.

Of infinite significance is knowing that in all the antecedent and prophetic literature and religious ritual stemming into Judaism and Christianity from the lore of old Egypt, the messianic coming always refers to the advent of a new higher dispensation that would supervene on Earth from the birth of a spiritual principle (Messiah-Christ) in human beings. It was never referring to a physical birth of any personal Messiah.

Study of the ancient filed of religious literature reveals no notion that the Messiah would come to Earth in the form of a baby. This concept did not arise until about the second and third centuries of the Christian era, and then only in the region around the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Tersely, it can be stated as verifiable truth that the conception of the Messiah-Christ as a human being of flesh and blood had not been extant in the ancient world until it took form in the degenerative philosophy of the early Christian centuries.

The Egyptian Christmas Story

Fully five thousand years before Mary nursed the infant of Bethlehem that haloed Madonna and Child were extant in Egypt as Isis holding her infant Horus. On the walls of the Temple of Luxor, at a