Book Review

This is a book review I recently wrote on Amazon for WH Uffington's The Greatest Lie Ever Told.
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I've recently been reading a bit about early Christian history and the evolution of pagan ritual and iconography which effected those in Christianity. My first stop along the way was to read Edward Carpenter's Pagan and Christian Creeds: their origin and meaning which describes an origin to Christ mythology in very early sun god worship and how that took shape out of a combination of agricultural and astronomical phenomenon. I've also read Bart Ehrman's Lost Christianities : The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew and I'm very comfortable with the idea that The Bible is not a literal interpretation of the word of God and that has also been manipulated over time to meet people's political and economic ambitions.

I picked up Uffington's The Greatest Lie Ever Told expecting it to be a bit more scholarly than it ended up being. On the surface it seems extremely well researched and the author is careful to cite sources for most of what he presents. I'm always glad to see that, but there are several ideas in the book with which the author makes some great leaps of imagination, leaving the realm of sure footed research and diving headlong into the untested waters of wishful thinking.

The book has a central thesis that I find both appealing and potentially realistic. Uffington's idea is that:

1. The single generation of monotheism established by the pharaoh Akhenaten around 1,300 BC was kept alive after his death by priests and scribes who did not want to revert to polytheism.

2. These Aten worshipping priests left Egypt and settled in Canaan and over several hundred years their ideology evolved into early Judeism.

3. The early Judaic mythologies of the Old Testament about Jewish slavery in Egypt and the Exodus out of Egypt were a complete fabrication by Jewish writers in the 7th century BC for mostly political reasons.

4. Other influential aspects of Egyptian mysticism were kept alive over the centuries and collected together in Alexandria after the Ptolemy dynasty built the library there. Greek philosophers (Pythagoras, Plato, etc.) studied in Alexandra and brought these ideas back and spread them around the Hellenized world.

5. In the 500 years or so before Christianity, this mysticism took the shape of the many "Mystery Cults" that existed all over the Mediterranean and Middle East regions. These cults generally had a central hero or mythological figure with common characteristics, such as a virgin birth on or around December 25 and a death plus resurrection in the spring. Uffington contends that the priests of these cults understood an allegorical meaning behind their myths which was not to be taken literally, however...

6. After Rome sacked the Jewish homelands and brought back many slaves into Rome itself, the Jewish people's latched on to these allegorical myths and adopted them as literal teachings. Uffington makes a case for Jesus never existing, even as a historical figure and that Christianity became a literal bastardization of a set of allegorical mystical teaching that originally began in Egypt a long time before. Finally...

7. The original allegorical mysticism was kept alive through a sect of gnostic Christians who passed it on to the Templar knights and the Freemasons who encoded their symbols on many Christian monuments and cathedrals. Thus, this passing down of the original Egyptian mysticism explains why we continue to have Egyptian symbols on our money and around our government buildings.

If this were Uffintgon's only argument I would find it compelling. In and of itself it isn't enough for me to believe it to be "true", but it is enough for me to want to read more on the subject so that I can come to a more informed opinion later. At the very least I find it pretty clever and I do enjoy theories of how religion and mythology evolve over time and are carried on from one group of people to the next.

However, Uffington goes a bit further and makes two claims that throw the whole argument into the realm of wishful thinking. These are:

A) That the "original" source of Egyptian mysticism came from ancient aliens who helped build the sphinx and the pyramids about 10,000 BC, and,

B) That the truth behind the Egyptian mysticism and the mystery cults really actually IS TRUE and if we can figure out what that truth is then we can really understand how the universe operates for the betterment of all mankind.

This is where the book is at its weakest. Uffington's argument for an unusual interpretation of the development of monotheism along with subsequent Judaic and Christian history is both interesting and worth consideration. I would have preferred it if the author would have kept his personal desires for universal truth separate from his historical research.

I actually think it would be cool if aliens HAD visited ancient peoples on Earth and gave them technology and culture. But I've never been convinced that this is what happened. Like they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, whether those claims are about God or aliens. (One thing that has always puzzled me is this: If aliens gave so much technology to the ancient Egyptians, why didn't they also give them some basic engineering knowledge like the wheel or the pulley or the arch? Why help them levitate giant stone blocks and not give them the wheel?)

At the end of the book Uffington uses one of his several appendices to describe his version of cosmic truth. His idea (not a new one) is that human souls evolve in much the same way life evolves and that, as we learn to master the lessons of one plane of existence we evolve after death into a new, higher, plane of existence with more "lessons" to master. I'm a little murky on the details, but if I understand him correctly, I believe he is suggesting that God is not a separate entity who created the universe, but is instead the collective consciousness of all living things and that our goal through the process of life (or lives) is to reunite with and become one with that God. (If you google search the world "gnosticism" you'll find more information on that idea.)

I'm religiously agnostic and I've never been a member of a major religion. If I had to choose a way for the universe to operate I would certainly find these ideas appealing. They at least are more attractive to me than the morality plays of the Judeo-Christian tradition with their promises of eternal salvation and their threats of eternal damnation. But, just because I like the ideas doesn't make them true. At the very least this brand of gnosticism that Uffington is selling promotes the idea people should work together for the betterment of ALL of us; that there are no "chosen" members of an elite religion and that we should respect and tolerate our differences because of that. This is a very humanistic ideology and I respect it for that.

So, in the final analysis, I'm very glad to have read this book. I found it fascinating and often compelling and I'll be thinking about it for some time. I'm just not ready to drink all the Kool Aid that Uffington is selling. There are a lot of questions for which the answer "I don't know" is really the best option. It's really tempting to fill in all the gaps in our knowledge with all the things we wish were true, but we should take that leap very carefully and be honest with ourselves when we do so.