Minas Papageorgiou

The content of this article is adapted from a facebook post by Sasha Chaitow. A Greek version is also available at Minas Papageorgiou’s blog here.

Sadly there is a curious but pernicious variety of ecclesiastic censorship that persists in Greece, which is one of the primary reasons for which, despite the wealth of material of interest to esoteric scholars, folklorists and religious studies scholars, there is little to no knowledge of this beyond Greek borders. My friend and colleague, investigative journalist Minas Papageorgiou recently published his new book with Εκδόσεις Δαιδάλεος (Daidaleos Publications), an independent publishing house that specializes in quality research publications on a variety of topics including philosophy, religion, folklore, history, psychology, and culture.

Papageorgiou’s new book focuses on the question of the historicity of Jesus and undertakes to present mythicist perspectives on this topic via a series of exclusive annotated interviews with Biblical scholars to a Greek audience. While this is perhaps a well-explored niche in other countries, in Greece it is almost unheard of, and Papageorgiou’s publication is just one of many recent and forthcoming publications from a number of Greek authors who in recent years have been making an effort to introduce the Greek readership to these topics.

The book presentation was due to take place at a municipal community center in the Athens suburb of Papagou-Holargos this past Monday, but following intense pressure from the local church, the community center official in charge of cultural events chose to cancel the presentation. This continues a troubling trend of recent attacks on free expression by factions of the Greek Orthodox community and their sympathizers in government. Greece currently also has two outstanding prosecutions for blasphemy which I write about in detail here.

This has not deterred the author or the publisher, and the scheduled presentation will go ahead at a different venue most likely in the beginning of July.