Jesus and the Lost Goddess

Building on the startling discoveries contained in their first book, The Jesus Mysteries, Freke and Gandy probe the pagan origins of Christianity even further and relate another illuminating fact: The original Christians revered not just a Godman, but also a Goddess, Sophia. They show through studies in comparative literature and religions up to that time, from the stories of Isis, to the teachings of Plato to the letters of St Paul (earlier Saul), that the myth of the Godman and the Goddess is clearly a literary synthesis of ancient Egyptian, more recent Greek, and then-contemporary Jewish myths.

The authors' research also proves that those early Christian Gnostics regarded what has now become The New Testament, as a collection of stories for spiritual beginners; an understanding of its messages is a completion of only the first step on the road to enlightenment and it should not be seen as completion of the ultimate lesson in Christian teaching. In fact, in their view, the highest level of spiritual wisdom could be sought through reading other gospels that were later excluded from The New Testament by the Holy Roman Church because they were deemed heretical. Contained in these other gospels is the story of a mystical marriage between a Godman (whom we might recognize from our reading of The New Testament as Jesus, the Son of God) and a Goddess, Sophia, (whom we can recognize is not one, but two women, Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene, the unholy sinner).

What is important here is that in the early Christian story of Jesus and Sophia, Sophia is not merely a character in the story of the Godman, she is central to the lesson to be learned. In other words, each ofus is meant to recognize ourselves, at various stages of our human existence from birth to death, as the two "personalities" of Sophia, the early pure woman who later becomes the downtrodden prostitute, wandering through life giving herself to the wrong men -each of whom represent mistaken notions of faith. God sends his son, the Godman, to rescue Sophia and through their union, she comes to recognize who she is essentially i.e. that she is also God, for God lives in each of us, God is who we all are. God is also eternal and so, therefore, are we unfettered by the limitations of a purely corporal existence.