Eliseo Ferrer, author.
(Book 2021): SACRIFICE AND DRAMA OF THE SACRED KING.
(Genealogy, anthropology and history of the myth of Christ).
…A Judeo-Hellenistic Christianity without evangelical history or “zero point”.
The Messiah-Christ is an ancestral and archaic myth reformulated by the sects of Jewish apocalyptic messianism of Hellenizing character, by Gnosticism and finally transformed by the Church of the second century.
Download Table of Contents, Preamble and Bibliography.
Myth of the Death and Resurrection of the
Divine. A radical critique of the origins of Christianity (2021 Book).
The theory of Christianity proposed in Sacrifice and Drama of the Sacred King presents a system of ideas and beliefs in
continuous socio-cultural evolution, where the “historical figure” of Jesus of Nazareth is excluded (in favor of the exclusively theological and mythical figure of Jesus Christ), and where there is no room for pious mythologies or
fanciful chronicles created by the Church.
In other words, Eliseo Ferrer offers in this work an alternative and critical vision of the foundations of Christianity that is
entirely distinct from the doctrine, stories, and theological “history” transmitted by the Catholic Church and inherited by
the Orthodox Church and the various Lutheran denominations. As
Ferrer explains, situated within the context of Jewish mystical
messianism, the Christianity of the “origins” was an enormously complex phenomenon that had
nothing to do with the simplifications found in ecclesiastical
catechisms, nor with the fictional constructs that 16th-century Lutheran reformers created through their idealized
concept of purity (Urgemeinde).
As the author states, to fully understand the phenomenon of the birth of Christianity in its true dimension, it is
essential first to know what proto-Gnosticism and Christian Gnosticism were, as well as to
understand the role played by Jewish sapiential literature,
intertestamental literature, and apocalyptic
literature within certain Jewish
messianic sects during the final period of the Second Temple.
“In addition to all this—and very importantly—it is necessary to properly assess the events that took place in the year seventy CE with the destruction of the
Temple of Jerusalem during the First Jewish–Roman War; as well as to understand the exegetical techniques
and particular hermeneutics (midrash, derásh, peshar, etc.) employed by the various pre-Rabbinic Judaisms in the interpretation of the Scriptures,
through which the earliest Gospel texts were written.”
“The work—as stated in its introduction—was written from the author’s non-denominational, secular, and non-religious perspective, employing a holistic and dialectical methodology based on criteria of gnoseological materiality.”
Thus, the perspective on Christianity proposed by Sacrifice
and Drama of the Sacred King is divided,
into three parts, which the work presents through three
successive “books: an anthropological theory based on the myth of the Sacrifice of the Sacred King, first; then, a historical-philosophical (mystical) theory based on the Platonism inherited by the Hellenistic tradition, by certain sectors of Judaism and by the Roman Church; and, finally, a historical-critical theory of the Messiah-Christ of Israel through the study of history itself and of the texts (hermeneutics) of the Judaism of the Second Temple and of the different Judeo-Christianisms that existed in the first and second centuries, prior to the establishment of the Church.”
The work starts from the meaning of myths analogous to that of the “Messiah-Christ” throughout prehistory and ancient history, based on the development of the idea of the death and resurrection of the son of Neolithic goddess; and situated within the mythical-ritual complex of the “Sacrifice of the Sacred King” of the cults of vegetation, as was defined its archetype James G. Frazer. Next, he develops the sense and historical significance of the gods of death and resurrection in the mystery religions, derived from those archaic notions. The final part of the work is based on the Gnostic myth, with Platonic foundations, and on the apocalyptic myth, of Persian origin, which, together with the myth of death and resurrection (central in the book), were all reworked by Paul of Tarsus and transformed by the Church at the end of the second century.
It goes without saying, as its author assures in the introduction, that this is not a work of academic consensus; nor is it a work guided by religious faith, nor by the nineteenth-century assumptions of anti-religious and anti-Christian atheism. It is an eminently critical work, based on a rigorous methodology, which radically questions the artificial construction of the Church at the end of the second century and the legendary and fabulous approaches on which it based the origins of Christianity.
Download Table of Contents, Preamble and Bibliography.
More Information (Spanish):
https://eliseoferrer.com/resenyas/
https://eliseoferreratstarpublishers.hcommons.org/
https://sites.google.com/view/libro-rey-sagrado
https://eliseoferrerautorsacrificioreysagrado.hcommons.org/
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Review by: Patricia Aláez. © Messidor Comunicación.
May 16, 2025