What Really Happened on the Road to Damascus?

	Book review on The Jesus Mystery: Astonishing Clues to the True Identities of Jesus and Paul by Lena Einhorn Reviewed by Gunnel Minett, 2009 published in Network Review No 100
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In this book the Swedish author and film-maker Lena Einhorn presents a new and quite different hypothesis about the origin of Christianity. By examining contemporary texts, as well as what is written about Jesus in the Bible, she arrives at a very different conclusion than the official Christian version.

Einhorn starts by asking the perhaps most important question - if Jesus really did exist. Was he a real person or simply a mythological fiction? Her conclusion is that Jesus really did exist. There is sufficient evidence in contemporary historical texts, she argues, to say with certainty that Jesus was indeed a historic figure.

Having established that he actually lived seems to be the easy part, however. The accounts in the various gospels vary so much in places that they absolutely contradict each other. This leaves much room for speculation, in particular as regards the perhaps most essential part of Christianity, the crucifixion. This is also the starting point for the Einhorn’s own hypothesis.

By comparing the different accounts of what really took place during the crucifixion, Einhorn speculates that Jesus’ life may not actually have ended the way Christians are taught. Rather than dying and being resurrected Jesus may actually have been saved to re-appear in public years later in the shape of Paul.

An interesting observation here is that although Einhorn draws on the same texts as another recent book on the same topic, Barry Wilson’s How Jesus Became Christian, their conclusions are very different.

Although both books present equally compelling arguments, Wilson’s conclusion is that Jesus and Paul were completely different and did not preach the same message at all. Wilson argues that Jesus’ message was for Jews to follow the Torah in order to bring about the prophecy of God’s kingdom on earth. Paul on the other hand, preached only about his personal inner (holotropic?) experience that he referred to as meeting Christ. Wilson’s suggestion is that the marriage of the two stories was made much later in order to form a solid basis for Christianity.

Although both books are equally convincing in their conclusions, it is obvious that they both can’t be right, which brings the question of the role of contemporary Christianity into focus yet again. With so many problems caused by disagreements between religions around the world, this is yet another example of how the time for a complete review of the world religions is well overdue. Rather than relying on historical events that, most likely, will never be established with absolute certainty, it may be time to start looking for the similarities rather than differences. To extract the essence of all religions (which for the most part is the same) and focus on what we all have in common as one humankind.

The Jesus Mystery is well written and reads very much as a fact-based version of the kind of historic mystery books that the DaVinci code has come to represent.

Gunnel Minett is author of Breath and Spirit.

(order this book from amazon.co.uk)