{"id":6242,"date":"2015-08-27T10:00:53","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T14:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/?p=6242"},"modified":"2015-08-26T16:31:51","modified_gmt":"2015-08-26T20:31:51","slug":"the-life-of-jesus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/2015\/08\/27\/the-life-of-jesus\/","title":{"rendered":"The Life of Jesus?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Img0002\"<\/a>L\u00e9o Taxil was actually the pen name for Gabriel-Antoine Jogand-Pag\u00e8s, a man born in Marseille who was educated by Jesuits in the mid 19th-century. \u00a0He became extremely disillusioned with the Catholic faith during his time among them\u00a0and eventually became known for his anti-Catholic writings of books like La vie de Jesus<\/em>. \u00a0The volume was originally published in 1882 by his own house, Libraire Anti-Clericale, and our copy is from 1900.<\/p>\n

The volume points out from Taxil’s perspective the errors, inconsistencies, and false beliefs in a satiric style about the life of Jesus. \u00a0It has direct quotes from the Gospels along with Taxil’s critiques.<\/p>\n

\"Img0007\"<\/a> \"Img0005\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"La<\/a>This color poster is\u00a0presumably promoting\u00a0the volume and appears to take\u00a0Taxil’s criticism and disdain of the Catholic Church even further if you look at the image compared to the title page of the volume. \u00a0The comic illustrations in the text are by someone named P\u00e9pin and enhance\u00a0this critical viewpoint.<\/p>\n

Taxil is also famous for\u00a0what is known as the Taxil Hoax. \u00a0The Hoax centered on Taxil’s\u00a0fake conversion to the Roman Catholic religion after a\u00a0long history of anti-clerical publications. \u00a0After this conversion he began\u00a0publishing materials accusing\u00a0Freemasons of being\u00a0in league with Satan by making up eyewitness accounts of their participation in satanic rituals. \u00a0The amazing part is that this hoax went on for a little over ten years from the point where Taxil apparently underwent his “conversion” until he confessed on the front\u00a0page of\u00a0Le Frondeur,\u00a0<\/i>a Parisian newspaper, in 1897. \u00a0Taxil later stated that he made up such grotesque accounts to mock the Freemasons, but to his surprise people took his outlandish\u00a0and outrageous statements as truth.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What is even more unbelievable is that even in present day the\u00a0information and accounts from Taxil’s books are\u00a0used in other anti-Masonic writings as authentic proof, even though Taxil admitted that he made it all up over 100 years ago! \u00a0It would appear that the zeal of persecuting Freemasons completely erased any need for checking the authenticity of their source material.<\/p>\n

If you want to read the original French text of\u00a0La vie de J\u00e9sus<\/a> \/par L\u00e9o Taxil ; dessins comiques par P\u00e9pin. Paris : Librairie Anti-Clericale, [\u00a91900]\u00a0BT304.95.T39 1900 it can be found in Historical Collections at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Alison Harris, Julio Mario Santo Domingo Project Manager and Nell Carlson\u00a0from Andover-Harvard Theological Library,\u00a0for contributing this post.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection. L\u00e9o Taxil was actually the pen name for Gabriel-Antoine Jogand-Pag\u00e8s, a man born in Marseille who was educated by Jesuits in the mid 19th-century. \u00a0He became extremely disillusioned with the Catholic faith during his time among […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4490,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[142218],"tags":[142225,142224,72720,142221,142219,142222,142223,142220],"class_list":["post-6242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-andover-harvard-theological-library","tag-freemasonry","tag-freemasons","tag-julio-mario-santo-domingo-collection","tag-la-vie-de-jesus","tag-leo-taxil","tag-life-of-jesus","tag-masonic","tag-taxil-hoax"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5TUly-1CG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4490"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6242"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6366,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6242\/revisions\/6366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}