AW! Epistles
From Acharya S
Abstract
Wednesday, September 06, 2000
Your site at:
http://www.askwhy.co.uk/christianity/0310SunGod.html
was directed to me. While I appreciate your efforts, I must "ask why" you have plagiarized my work without attribution? I refer to the following paragraphs, although there is more that is only slightly altered. I note that there are other passages, including some from Barbara Walker and Gerald Massey, that are also not attributed. Such constitutes very sloppy "scholarship." You will note that my original dissertation had over 100 footnotes.
Please accept my apologies for citing you without attribution. Plagiarism is done intentionally and this was not but merely because I had no reference with the notes I found. Sloppy, perhaps, but until IE5, pages were downloaded with no indication of their source and I must have downloaded one of your pages and not noted the source. Barbara Walker, I do not understand because I have never read her, though I know she wrote a book for women. Perhaps her citations are also from your page.
I added my page about Jesus as a sun god for completion, because he was given the attributes of a sun god and would be more than glad to give a link to the paper (Truth Be Known) to which you are referring. I thought your list was concise.
On the points of scholarship and Gerald Massey, I deliberately avoid distracting the reader with multitudes of endnotes, most of which could be omitted as irrelevant, or, if relevant, should be part of the argument. It is a pretension that borders on pseudoscholarhip. For the same reason I do not feel the need to give references to ancient work that has settled down to the bedrock of received wisdom. Already most biblical scholarship is purely pretentious. Biblical scholars seem to get their degrees from the number of citations they can pack into a thesis.
Note added Monday, 24 June 2002: I now think there are no references left that came from your page that were inadvertantly in the original article. It has been utterly updated.
There was no Jesus as a "national hero" or at the core of Mark’s gospel, which was based on Marcion’s Gospel of the Lord, which was originally allegorical. The entire gospel story is astrotheological and based on these older gods, as I demonstrate in my upcoming book The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold
(http://www.truthbeknown.com/christ.htm).
There is no core to the onion, so the evemerist theory is incorrect.
I look forward to reading your book. As you will doubtless know, someone called Earl Doherty has an extensive site that covers what sounds like the idea you advocate, but since there are immense problems to be answered if there is no historical Jesus and only a solar myth, I cannot agree with you about euhemerist theories. I suggest you read my book, The Hidden Jesus, which interprets Mark in detail on the basis that the first gentile bishops were pious liars, hiding the historical truth about Jesus, and that set the model for Christians ever since.
