GakuseiDon

IIRC one of Acharya's complaints was that Price mentioned Acharya's real name in his review, and she felt that she needed to maintain anonymity due to the controversial nature of her claims.

Unfortunately she seems to have taken down her response to Price's review (where she really pays out on him!), which used to be here:
http://www.truthbeknown.com/firesponse.htm

Does anyone have a copy of her response that they can PM me?

ApostateAbe

She had that page blocked/erased from both the Internet Archives and Google Cache. She has made friends with that guy now, and she probably doesn't want that history to be resurrected.

mens_sana

I picked up a copy of David Leeming's The Oxford Companion to World Mythology (or via: amazon.co.uk) (Oxford University Press, 2005) yesterday. Leafing through the book, I found some very nice sections on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mythology, as well as mythology from Norse, Egyptian, and Mayan cultures, etc.

I also looked through the Bibliography, 16 pages of it, which referenced Campbell, Neumann, Eliade, Hooke, Gaster, Bonnefoy, Propp, et al. Then I checked the Index. Oddly neither the bibliography nor the index made any reference to Acharya S or Gerald Massey. I've been wondering whether I should write to Oxford University Press and ask them about this startling omission. :worried:

GakuseiDon

You know, that's weird. Dr Price makes the same kinds of criticisms about Acharya's "Christ Conspiracy" as he does about her "Suns of God". He just adds some sugary compliments to the second one.

Here is part of Dr Price's review of "Christ Conspiracy":

"Ms. Murdock has read widely in the shadow world of what I like to call Extreme Biblical Studies, books written by eccentrics, freethinkers, and theosophists mainly in the 19th century and kept available today in coarsely manufactured reprint editions by obscure publishers. None of which should imply they are unworthy of regard: far from it! These delightful books are game preserves of otherwise extinct theories, some deservedly dead, others simply never widely known. And Murdock's book, a rehash of points from these books, shares their faults as well as their virtues. Writing at second hand, she is too quick to state as bald-faced fact what turn out to be, once one chases down her sources, either wild speculations or complex inferences from a chain of complicated data open to many interpretations. And sometimes she swallows their fanciful etymologies like so many shiny goldfish at a frat party. Worse yet, she just goofs here and there and betrays a lack of ability to weigh evidential claims.

I love the term "Extreme Biblical Studies"! Compare this with his review of "Suns of God":

Again and again, Acharya finds herself hemmed in by old writers who never elevated their claims above the level of hearsay (as she herself points out). Kersey Graves (The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors) assures the reader that he has before him plenty of original documentation for his claims of crucifixion parallels, but he, er, doesn't have room to include any. And this is the rule, not the exception. Lundy, Higgins, Inman, Graves, Doane, etc., they all claim they have read or heard this or that, but none of them can site a single source document. Acharya seems generously inclined to believe them. I don't. I am not saying they were frauds or deceivers. Acharya suggests that these researchers may have read texts or examined ancient monuments that have since been destroyed by ecclesiastical censors. And she may be right. I certainly wouldn't put it past the Machiavellian ethics of the religious authorities. But did they get rid of all the evidence only after Doane, Graves, and the others had managed to see it? It is not that I distrust these old researchers. It's just that I cannot agree or disagree with their evaluation of evidence they do not share with me.

I've highlighted where Dr Price seems to be making the same criticism, but in a nicer way. As the old saying goes, you can attract more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Malachi151

I need help tracking something down.

On page 50 of SoG Acharya writes:

This passage is not cited of course, but I am unable to find anything like this by Philo. I've searched for the quote, I've searched all of Philo's works for instances of the word sun, and I've read lots of works of Philo, and I see nothing that come close to this.

Am I missing something, or is this just another case of purely made up BS by Acharya as I suspect?

Toto

The idea is set out here: Jesus Christ Sun of God (or via: amazon.co.uk)

Read some of it here:
Google Books

Acharya and this source seem to rely on

Goodenough, An Introduction to Philo Judaeus (or via: amazon.co.uk), chapter 5.

Questia link

I will leave it to you to read to decide if there is anything there.

Jeffrey Gibson

There's nothing. Nowhere in this chapter or elsewhere in the book, let alone on pp 15, 23, 101, and 120 where Goodenough speaks of the Sun and what it represented in Platonic and later Hellenistic Philosophy and to Philo, does Goodenough say that for Philo the Logos was the sun or was to be identified with it.

Jeffrey

Malachi151

Oh god, I'm trying to write a review of The Suns of God and its just torturous. Literally every single sentence of this book is bullshit, and its so bad than its hard to even figure out where to start and how to proceed.

This has to be the worst book I have ever read. Its like a constant train wreck. Its just a rambling jumble of nonsense. One bit of BS leads into another bit of BS, and the chain reaction just keeps going and going and going.

She's constantly jumping to totally unfounded conclusions, which she then uses to prop up other unfounded conclusions, and one innuendo leads to another innuendo, and then her favorite is listing a bunch of similarly spelled names as the smoking gun that X, Y, and Z god are all the same god... which are all the Sun God...

Its like a game of evolution with names. The Syrians worshiped Benjamin or Benhamin or Benham or Behalem or Bethlahem or Bethlehem..., so you see, the god Benjamin was really the god of the location of Bethlehem, and Benjamin represented the zodiac symbol of Taurus the bull in the ancient Assyrian zodiac, thus Jesus is born from the loins of Taurus, symbolizing the movement of the sun through the age of Taurus...

I just made that up, but I mean seriously this is how this book is...

The funny thing about all of her linguistic games is that they are all using English names, and most of the variation in this English names come simply from translational issues. How the hell do you correlate one god to another from a different culture when one god's name is written in Egyptian hieroglyphics the other is written in Greek, the other in Sanskrit, the other in cuneiform, the other in Aramaic, etc...

I'm 6 pages into the review now and I don't know if I'll be able to complete it, its just so draining. I wanted to actually refute several of the claims she makes but its just such a bunch of nonsense. Maybe I should just write a simple 2 page review and leave it at that, but of course that wouldn't satisfy a lot of the people who like her works.

Amaleq13

Do they strike you as the sort open to the possibility that their veneration has been misplaced?

schilling.klaus

No, BS is the stuff made up by those who became anally retentive
against Acharya S.
Proper Christianity is Logos metaphysics,
and it uses astrotheological metaphors,
as already the Pythagoreans and Platonists did.
Philo may not be fully aware of what he's doing,
but the conclusion follows from
comparative studies of philosophy of religion,
which is the right thing to do for understanding the origins
of Christianity.

Acharya's statements are quite on the correct line,


Klaus Schilling