Author Description

For millennia the figure of Jesus has dominated the religious consciousness of the Western world, but the Christian belief that the historical Jesus is the unique incarnation of God has long been a source of division within Christendom, and it is now proving a stumbling block to wider ecumenical relations, as Christianity comes into contact as never before with the other great religious systems of the world. But what if the conviction that Jesus is God's only Son were founded in error? What if there never was a historical Jesus? What if the Gospels have been misread for two thousand years? In The Gospel and the Zodiac, Bill Darlison demonstrates that the Gospel of Mark is deliberately structured around the signs of the zodiac, and that was originally an esoteric, not a historical, text, and that its stories were never intended to be interpreted in a literal sense. Rather, they are dramatic representations of stages in spiritual development, and repositories of arcane wisdom. This extraordinary study aims to rediscover Christianity's dynamic character by interpreting the Gospels in the light of the culture in which they were created, rather than viewing them through the distorting lens of contemporary prejudices. As such it is a radical new interpretation of the Gospels and makes an important contribution to the contemporary debate about the existence of Jesus