The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name

by Brian C. Muraresku

In The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist, published in 2001, Ruck devotes almost a hundred pages to this subject in a chapter titled “Jesus, the Drug Man.” It’s actually a decent translation of “Jesus,” whom the Greeks knew as Iesous (since they never heard of the letter “j”). Iesous, in turn, was a spin-off of Iesoue, the Greek word for Joshua, the Israelites’ leader following the death of Moses.3 But according to Ruck, the true origin of Jesus’s Greek name is the root for “drug” or “poison” (ios), which supplies the Greek words for “doctor” or iatros (ἰατρός). Ruck says the “drug man.” Either way, it’s unlikely a Greek speaker of the first century AD would have heard the name Iesous and not thought of Ieso or Iaso, the Greek goddess of healing and the daughter of Asclepius, who was taught the art of drugs, incantations, and love potions by the centaur Chiron.