I ran across the following tweet from dsurman:
Before Jesus, there was a god of Gaul named Hesus.An ancient statue of this god was found with a cross depicted on it's chest.Total coincidence? [link]
I tweeted him back and asked for the documentation he was using. He responded back with two tweets:
@mmcelhaney It is in "The Jesus Puzzle" by Earl Daughtery, and two other books I have on ancient gods.U can google it for web photos..
@mmcelhaney Hesus is a well known vegetation god of Gaul.. Look it up.. The cross is suspected to represent the S. Crux constellation
I decided to take him up on his challenge and see what I could really find about Hesus. Is there any correlation between Hesus and Jesus?
In a word: "No". There is the temptation to look at the similarity in the names "Jesus" and "Hesus" and think that one derives from the other. But you have to remember that name of the god in question from Gaul is in the Gaelic language not English. Scholars usually spell the name "Esus" not "Hesus". "Jesus" is transliterated from Greek "Iesous" which was transliterated from the Hebrew/Aramaic "Yeshua". Those "scholars" who like the idea of Jesus being a made-up figure plagiarized from earlier pagan myths like Earl Daughtery have tried to draw many parallels between Esus and Jesus. Here is an except of the claims:
One site says, "The Celtic Druids depict their god Hesus as having been crucified with a lamb on one side and an elephant on the other, and that this occurred long before the Christian era (834 B.C.)" Another site says the Druids reenacted this crucifixion annually; yet another says Hesus was born of a virgin. Most of this, if not all, is apparently taken from Graves' 16 Crucified Saviors.
The problem is that experts in Druid history and culture disagree with these claims of Esus. They can't find any evidence of Esus being crucified but they do know the following beliefs about him.
- Esus was a real nasty-gram to deal with. The first-century writer Lucan refers to the "uncouth Esus of the barbarous altars." He didn't call them "barbarous" because they needed decorating help from Martha Stewart: Esus was a guy who liked human sacrifice.
- What kind of human sacrifice? Victims would be suspended from trees and ritually wounded. Omens were read based on the pattern of the blood spurting out.
- Esus is often linked to Mercury and/or Mars as a god of war.
- Esus is depicted as a woodcutter (i.e., a lumberjack) in one early carving.
- Esus' favorite animal was neither lamb nor elephant -- he preferred birds with long necks like cranes and egrets.
- Esus is sometimes connected with Chu Chulainn.
sources here were McKillip's Dictionary of Celtic Mythology and Anne Ross' Celtic Britain.
It's fairly obvious that no credible parallel can be drawn between Esus and Jesus...and be honest or factual anyway. I was also amazed how little information we really have about Esus: 2 statutes, a section in Lucan's Bellum civile explaining how sacrifices were offered to Esus; the Gallic medical writer Marcellus of Bordeaux may offer another textual reference to Esus in his De medicamentis (from the 5th Century) - the sole source for many Gaelic words; given name "Esunertus" ("strength of Esus") occurs at least once as an epithet of Mercury on a dedicatory inscription and a possibly Esuvii of Gaul, took their name from this deity. Seems really sketchy to me. We don't know nearly as much about Esus as we do about Jesus and the manuscript evidence is really, really poor. No way did Christianity conjure up Jesus Christ from Esus.
References:
Hesus of the Druids. No Parallel To Christianity.
Esus - Wikipedia
Esus
