Kuhn argues that earliest Christianity was an esoteric, allegorical teaching in the lineage of the ancient mystery schools — above all Egypt's — and that in the third century the church literalized its myths into pseudo-history, losing the original meaning and casting the long "shadow" of his title. Drawing on Egyptian and Greek sources, he reads the Gospels as spiritual symbolism rather than biography. Kuhn, a Columbia-trained theosophist who ran Academy Press himself, made the book a cornerstone of his lifelong revaluation of Christian origins.
Author: Alvin Boyd Kuhn · Original publisher: Academy Press, Elizabeth, NJ, 1949 (full title: *Shadow of the Third Century: A Revaluation of Christianity*)
