Acharya S - Misplaced Pages

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Acharya S is the pen name of D. Murdock. A proponent of the Christ-myth hypothesis, she has authored two books and operates a website called "Truth be Known". Her contention is that all religion is founded in earlier myth and that the characters depicted in Christianity are the result of the plagiarizing of those myths to unify the Roman State.

Books

Her 1999 book, The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, is a development of part of her website. A follow-up book, Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled, discusses her views further. It is largely written as an address to critics of her former book. In it, she comments on the Hindu story of the life of Krishna, as well as the life of Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama). She claims parallels to the life of Jesus, presenting this as evidence that the story of Jesus was written based on existing stories, and not the life of a real man.

Claims about Christianity

Acharya denies the historical existence of Jesus Christ, dismissing the New Testament as a work of pure fiction with a hidden subtext. The story of Christ, she maintains, is actually a retelling of various pagan myths, all of which represent "astro-theology" or the story of the Sun. She asserts that the pagans understood these stories to be myths but that Christians obliterated evidence to the contrary through the destruction and control of literature once they attained control of the Roman Empire.

This purportedly led to widespread illiteracy in the ancient world and ensured that the mythical nature of Christ's story was hidden. Scholars of other sects continued to oppose the historicizing of a mythological figure. Where no evidence exists, Acharya claims that this is because the arguments were destroyed by Christians. However, Christians preserved these contentions, she states, through their own refutations.

In "The Christ Conspiracy" she states this theory in twenty-five points, such as "The sun 'dies' for three days at the winter solstice, to be born again or resurrected on December 25th", and "The sun enters into each sign of the zodiac at 30 ; hence, the 'Sun of God' begins his ministry at 'age' 30."

Acharya compares Jesus' history to that of other gods—such as Adonis, Krishna, Quetzalcoatl, Odin—claiming that the similarities result from a common source, the myth of the sun-god.

Claims about other religions

Acharya S is highly critical of certain aspects of Judaism, in particular Hasidism. She writes online about the possible creation of a theocratic New World Order which would impose the Noahide Laws:

If the Hassidic Jewish Movement has its way, the so-called Noahide Laws would be followed to the letter, as would many others found in the "Old Testament," prescribing capital punishment for abortion, euthanasia and "sexual deviation" such as adultery and homosexuality. The punishment, in fact, for breaking any of the Noahide Laws is decapitation .

In another online essay, she quotes allegations by conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints smuggled uranium to Australia "for future use when it would attempt to obtain world conquest and single world government.... The rumor was... that the Mormon Church had arranged to assist Israel in bringing off Armageddon."

Her criticisms have also been directed against Islam and Buddhism:

While the Dalai Lama himself may be a charismatic caring leader, the Tibetan religious system is not devoid of exploitation. When Tibet was autonomous, the firstborn male of every household was required to enter the priesthood, a repressive law that served as one of the justifications by the Chinese for invading Tibet and "freeing" its people from despotic priests.

Criticisms

Critics have claimed her work is based on poor scholarship, and trust in secondary sources.

Robert Price shares her view that the Gospel accounts are borrowed from pagan sources. He writes:

We sometimes feel, in these pages, to be lost in a forest of false cognates. Can it be true, for instance, that “Solomon” is a trilingual synthesis of words for “the sun”? Sol from Latin, Om from Sanskrit, On from Ethiopic. This conceit she derives from John Hazelrigg. Elsewhere she endorses a contradictory theory, from the same writer, that Solomon is instead derived from Suleyman (=universal emperor), a Persian title. It is symptomatic of the “kettle logic” that permeates this book: any argument is good, whether or not consistent with the others in the arsenal, as long as they are all aimed at the same target.

His review as a whole was not so negative. He also said:

Murdock presents us with a whole smorgasbord of “unorthodox” theories, some of them quite legitimate, such as a deconstruction of the Rabbinical apologetic that had us imagining for so long that ancient Israelite religion was monotheistic. It is now clear enough (see, e.g., Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, 1987, or Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God, 1992) that the ancient Hebrews worshipped Yahweh amid a pantheon of gods. If that comes as shocking news to some, so be it. That is a reason neither to reject nor to relish the fact.

See her reply, and also idolatry for a longer discussion of Israelite polytheism.

Life

Acharya S has been described, by the Paranoia Magazine website, as a historian, mythologist, religious scholar, linguist, archeologist; and even, by Internet essayist John Kaminski, quoted on the splashpage of her own site, as "the ranking religious philosopher of our era". While preserving her privacy, she been interviewed on a variety of radio stations, usually discussing her work in The Christ Conspiracy. She is a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion , a division of the Council for Secular Humanism.

She has a Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree from Franklin and Marshall College. In an interview she said she came from a moderate Christian background. Though not traumatic or "Fundamentalist", she described it as "boring" and said she ceased attending church regularly at age 12.

Her inspiration for labeling Jesus Christ a myth was apparently Joseph Wheless's book Forgery in Christianity. Wheless is also one of her primary sources. She then read other freethought works, such as Kersey Graves' The World's 16 Crucified Saviours, which also serves as one of her main references, and Barbara Walker's The Woman's Encyclopaedia of Myth and Secrets, another source she relies heavily upon.

External links

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Religious philosophy and doctrine