Who Was Jesus? Fingerprints of the Christ
By Acharya S

A book review
By Mriana

D. M. Murdock, aka Acharya S., has done it again with her new book called Who Was Jesus? The Fingerprints of the Christ. This time she did what I always believed could be done and that is we can take the Bible and show how it is a work of fiction. She does this by using various Christian authorities, apologists, and evangelicals, such as Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan.  She shows various misinterpretations from Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as, how the stories were made from blueprints of other stories and the contradictions of the Bible.

The book starts out as a very easy read for novices and momentum builds as she goes into a deeper understanding of how the stories cannot be taken as the literal inerrant word of God, inspired by God, but rather errant and inspired by humans. She starts each chapter with quotes by well-known scholars, appreciated by most Christians, and works from there showing how their statements convey the stories as fables and no more historical value or truth than John Jakes's North and South or Aesop's Fables.

As Acharya, goes through Gospels she relates the story of Jesus to previous stories in the Old Testament and shows how those stories are templates for the New Testament stories. She also shows how the Gospels not only contradict each other, but also do not have the same stories or even tell them same way, thus showing they are not actual eyewitness accounts, but rather various midrashes and rewrites of other stories. Finally, she shows the relationship between other dying and rising gods of previous stories, such as the Egyptian gods Osiris and Horus. She also uses other sources outside the Bible that point to forgeries and interpolations, by using scholars who have studied Pliny, Flavius, and others, and found in them statements that the founders of Christianity manipulated to impose the religion on the masses and make it look historical, when in fact it was not.

Finally, her knowledge of ancient languages appears as she explains various words or even sentences that were translated inaccurately. In fact, some ancient manuscripts do not have some verses and ancient church fathers showed no knowledge of these verses or are total mistranslations. In some cases, Acharya gives a translation of some verses or statements originally in Greek or Latin, by showing both the original and the translation. Other times she shows us the mistranslated word or words and tells us the actual word in the ancient documents.

Acharya has done a fascinating job on her latest book as she explains all the fallacies, misconceptions, and errors concerning the story of Jesus. This book shows she has put in many hours of research to assist in the many questions and inquiries concerning the contradictions, similarities to past stories, and actual or rather not actual historicity of the Bible. In the end, the logical conclusion is, in Robert Price's words, there never was an actual historical Jesus or if there ever was, he is too buried in myth to ever find him.

Truth Be Known (Acharya's Website)

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