Awake in our Mythology, The Christ Conspiracy, DM Murdock

Religion and Secularism
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Lausten, I’ve listen to that first video a couple times now. I looked up DM Murdock because she really impressed me, came up with the following. You know recently I was saying how the scholarly stuff present no attraction to me. Gotta modify that after listening to this stuff, this stuff stirs my blood, seems to me a real key to appreciating the human story that no one has enunciated before, well at least not to me awareness.

 

Awake in our Mythology, The Christ Conspiracy Part 1

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<div id="owner-container" class="style-scope ytd-video-owner-renderer">Shadow Walker</div> Published on Apr 6, 2016
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<div id="description" class="style-scope ytd-video-secondary-info-renderer">Acharya S. aka DM Murdock, lost the fight recently with breast cancer (Dec. 25, 2015). Our condolences go out to her son, husband, extended family & friends. She authored the following books which helped shed more light on the astro-mythological roots Judeo-Christianity: "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" "Suns of God: Christ, Krishna, Buddha Unveiled" "Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection" "Did Moses Exist?: The Myth of the Israelite Lawgiver" The following interview was recorded some ten years ago now and is centred around her first book "The Christ Conspiracy". Part 2 of this video can be found in the following post:</div>
</div> What a shame about DM Murdock, what a loss to the studies and humanity for that matter, bet she'd have had plenty more to offer.
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Murdoch died not too long ago, this looks like a much younger video. When I first came across her, her stuff was full of anger about mistreating women and burning pagan churches. Her central thesis is based on one guy’s notes from an expedition to Egypt in 1890 or something. The family of that guy has tried to get her to cease and desists. It’s very simple connecting of dots of sun god stuff and some hieroglyphic thing with 12 people in it. She has a certain appeal, and Robert Price liked her, but in the end, it’s pseudo-history.

Not too long before she died I listened to her get interviewed by Price and she really bombed it. She had trouble answering questions about her own work. She had softened her tone a lot by then, which I’ll give her credit for, but also had the appearance of backtracking without acknowledging she was wrong. I linked to it and criticized her in a couple forums, maybe even this one, and she saw it and put a message on her own site to go attack me. I felt kind of bad, picking on an old lady, but she could have addressed me directly and spoke to the facts instead the tone.

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I watched most of the interview last night and I can see the intrigue. The problem is, once you start trying to track down anything she says, you find that it’s only her or some other person like her, saying it. Price used to have, and maybe still does, a weekly podcast where he answered many write-in questions. I asked him for his sources once and he gave a very sarcastic answer, directing me to “Attis and Cybele” and noting that copies of it are hard to find and therefore expensive and maybe I could go hungry so I could afford to buy one. There are a number of people who base their speculation on these very few sources.

Carrier and Ehrmann are two good sources trying to fix this, and Carrier acknowledges the early work of David Fitzgerald and Earl Doherty. With these guys, if you keep digging into what they say, you’ll get to a point where you have to get a degree in ancient history and greek language to be able to understand or argue with them. If you read the people who are arguing against them publicly, you can see that they are cherry picking the weakest parts of their arguments and using classic apologetics and high school level history.

I should also mention, Carrier and Ehrmann are teachers. If you want to learn what he does, he holds an online class every month. It’s cheap, and not many people are doing it, so I have received some very direct tutoring. Ehrmann has great books, an interactive website, and lots of other material available.

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Oh, that’s interesting. I had the impression that DM Murdock had documented her sources pretty well and that it covered a lot of ground. Are you saying that ain’t so?

And yes of course when laypeople like me look at this, we’re sort of dependent of listening to what other academics familiar with the topic have to say and form our opinions around that - well that and how well the argument resonates with ones own outlook. - <i>We can learn a lot from encyclopedia’s, but they’ll never make us as smart (let alone smarter) than the experts who wrote them.</i>

For me, I was aware that many bible stories occurred in earlier history. So when I hear this scholar who’s read many original texts from many different ancient people, start listing off this stuff and it turns out to be way the hell more extensive than I ever knew. Well, it made me take note. Are you saying her research is in question among serious experts?

As for why it resonates so well, it starts with what I recognize as a more realistically consideration of earlier peoples and their actual day to days, rather than the usual christian sanitized cartoon. Like realistically, how do you get lost in small desert for 40 years, it wasn’t the breath of the Sahara they were going across, and even that shouldn’t take 40 years, christ they had the sun and stars. And of course the reality of all those countless pulses of humanity leaving Africa since forever, all going through that little strip, there’s bound to be more borrowing than not.

Another thing that made me take notice is all those historians who lived during the time of Jesus, yet nothing was written about Jesus or the amazing events that are told in the Bible. Either that’s real and based on the works of contemporary Roman histories and writers - there are there some? A Scott Savage shows some impressive timelines at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcPiUGGd25s

 

I’ve listen to a little of Carrier, made a good first impression, I’ve had “Why Invent the Jesus? Richard Carrier” on hold at 29:49 since last evening - I get that way, he said something that sent me off in another direction. I have like five windows open with a growing listening list, waiting their turn.

I’ll pay more attention to him. Thanks for the tip.

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I’ll add to this later. I shouldn’t be tough on Murdoch. She embodies a change in the culture that you usually don’t see happen in one person. Her early work, I’d say it was very shoddy. She did not so much recant, but she did revamp her website. She toned down the anger and took out some of the looser connections she had claimed. Of course she’s right about many things and her work has helped to move the culture but when you make the kind of broad statements she makes I don’t find it helpful.

She appears in the Zeitgeist movie for example, which has been panned by believer and non-believer alike. It focuses on things like Christmas, which has nothing to do with early Christians, the formation of the church, or anything significant about the Christ myth. It’s tacked on centuries later. You could go to any, except the most fundamentalist, church and ask the preacher if Dec 25 is Jesus’ actual birthday and they’ll tell you it’s not.

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Very cool, thanks Lausten. My kind of gal. I think you get my drift. Passion is okay, getting a little pissed and ruffling a few feathers, gotta do that now and then, lordie knows I can relate. But, sounds like she learned and matured and most important stayed true to serious search for better understanding in her field. As opposed to celebratory and profiteering. Oh, Carrier was a good tip, I’ve listened to a few of his talks now and enjoyed them, illuminating even. Kind of pushed Murdock to the side, but I’ll get back to some of her interviews.

I haven’t watched the Zeitgeist movie though I see it advertised. You know the details, such as the date of Jesus’s, all that’s totally irrelevant to me. It’s already all tribal stories to me, things that tell us about who wrote them, but nothing about any actual God of Light and Time, Life and Love. It’s our shadow plays, beautiful in their own right, but non-transferable.

What I’m loving is the insights all this is giving me into the development of these religions and the curious stories they hand down. What it tells us about the earlier people which always turns out to be way more interesting than we originally think. The rhyme and reason for how these things came to pass.

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Here’s a good one from Carrier. He discusses the elements of Christianity that existed in the region at the time the gospels were written. He mentions Mithras, a “dying and rising god” that Archarya leans on heavily for her thesis, but he says that one only contained some Christian elements, not as much as some other myths that Murdoch seems to be unaware of. He doesn’t mention Murdoch by name, rather says something about “things you find on the internet.”

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Yeah Carrier was a good suggestion. I’ve found his videos interesting, and he’s easy to take seriously, which I can’t say for others. When I got back to Murdock, turned out there were mostly interviews, rather than lectures - and I’ll have to admit some of the company she keeps is not of my taste. Too much fanfare, hotair and weirdness. I’ve concluded I’ll have to see if I can get one of her books in audio.

I’ll check out that video, thanks!

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Remember Davy Jones of the Monkeys. I gotta think of him now and then as the thrill of a new idea fades back into the day to day for me.

Like the thrill of a new cutie, until time does its thing. ;- ) keeps life interesting.

 

<i>Still, I do have a slightly deeper perspective on the formation of Christianity, i believe…</i>