01 — The Author: The Two Careers of Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph Patrick Farrell (b. 1957) is at once a genuinely trained Oxford patristics scholar — translator of Photius’s Mystagogy and author of Free Choice in St. Maximus the Confessor — and, from around 2001, a prolific author of alternative-history and esoteric books. This section documents both careers factually, because the first is the foundation of God, History, and Dialectic and the second is materially relevant to its reception.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (modern theological literature; author-biography)

Overview

Everything about how to read God, History, and Dialectic is bound up with the unusual shape of its author’s life. Farrell is not an amateur: he took a D.Phil. in patristics at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1987, studied under Timothy (Kallistos) Ware, taught at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, and produced translations and a monograph that this repository cites as serious scholarship in its Photius and Maximus collections. He is also, and more publicly, the author of the Giza Death Star books and a large shelf of Nazi-survival and esoteric literature. This collection holds both facts at once, refusing both the ad hominem that would dismiss his theology because of his later books and the omission that would present him only as a patristics scholar.

Files in This Section

  • From Oxford to St. Tikhon’s: Farrell the Patristics Scholar — the documented first career: John Brown University and Oral Roberts University, the Oxford D.Phil. under Ware, the Maximus monograph and Disputation translation, the Mystagogy translation, the St. Tikhon’s professorship, and the carefully stated ecclesial affiliation.
  • The Second Career: Alternative History and Its Bearing on the Book — the post-2001 turn to alternative history (the pyramid “weapon hypothesis,” the Nazi-survival literature, Adventures Unlimited Press), stated plainly, with a precise account of why it bears on the book’s reception without deciding the truth of its theology.

See Also