Mistaken Messiahs

Provides textual evidence that forges a new understanding of the roots of Judaism and early Christianity. It shows how the historical truth has had meaning endlessly imposed on it, clouding the intentions of the original authors who were writing for an audience of their time.

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In this provocative, rigorous but highly readable work of scholarship, Dr Paul McGrane provides fresh insights and textual evidence that together forge a new understanding of the roots of Judaism and early Christianity. Adopting an entirely rationalistic approach, a close reading of the texts, not only the Bible but other contemporaneous sources, show how the historical truth has had meaning endlessly imposed on it, clouding the intentions of the original authors who were writing with very different historical criteria and for an audience of their time. There has never been anything like this in scope, in approach, and in its findings. A stunning, often riveting account of the foundations of the religion that preoccupies a third of the world’s population, it will leave the reader staggered that so much has been, wilfully or otherwise, misunderstood and misrepresented for generations.


Mistaken Messiahs is the second volume in a three-book series called A Bonfire of Inanities: The Bible Dismantled

Many modern scholars have concluded that the Jesus of the Gospels never existed, but was a fiction concocted from Old Testament stories and contemporary events. This volume summarises the evidence for this 'mythicist stance' but then seeks to explain why this happened. It finds the answer in Old Testament references to another Jesus entirely who lived more than 500 years before the gospels were written. It then traces the early decades of the Christian religion, as related in the Book of Acts and the letters of the Apostle Paul from the New Testament, to show that the key events in the Christian story took place a decade earlier than thought, making possible identifications of people and events hitherto regarded as unrelated, and in particular explaining the troubled relationship between the Apostle Paul and other early Christian leaders. Almost nothing in the traditional accounts of Jesus and Paul emerges unscathed.

It may be possible to continue in Jewish or Christian belief in the light of this trilogy, but it would be a very different kind of religious faith from the one normally espoused. Each volume has been written to stand alone, but there is a natural sequence to the arguments developed which is facilitated if they are read in order.
Volume One, Ancestral Tales, analyses the Books of Moses in the Old Testament in conjunction with non-Biblical records, and separates history from myth. It traces the true ancestral and religious history of the Israelites and in particular, it identifies among much else, the Pharaoh of the Exodus, and the historical figures behind Joseph and Moses.
Volume Three, Apocalypse Postponed, focusses on the Christian belief in imminent apocalypse and traces how thoroughgoing misunderstanding of the relevant Old and New Testament texts has led to two centuries of fallacious expectation.