Martin Alfred Larson (March 2, 1897 in Whitehall, Michigan - January 15, 1994 in Phoenix, Arizona) was an American historical revisionist and freethinker. He specialized in the history of Christianity and wrote on its origins and early theological history, best known for his assertion that Jesus Christ and John the Baptist were Essenes. Larson was a long-term member of the Institute for Historical Review. Biography Larson was originally from a fundamentalist Christian Evangelical background but "rejected its dogmas and practices" when he was about twenty years old. Following service in the United States Navy, he graduated from Kalamazoo College in Michigan, after which he earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Michigan in 1927 with a thesis on the unorthodoxies of Milton, whom he found to have rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. He retired from a career in business at the age of 50 to devote himself to private study, lecturing and writing. A long-time friend of historian Harry Elmer Barnes, Larson was a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of the Institute for Historical Review's Journal of Historical Review from its first issue in 1980 to his death. Larson was also a tax critic and tax expert who was popular with the Tax protester movement for his books on the tax immunity of organized religion, the Federal Reserve, and how to fight the IRS. His articles have appeared in Parade Magazine, Fortune Magazine, Reader's Digest and other publications, and he had a regular column in The Spotlight entitled "Our World In Conflict". He spent the final years of his life with his wife Emma in Phoenix, Arizona. Theories Larson's lifelong body of work constructs a complete historical theory of the origins of Christianity and the genesis of its theological controversies, detailing its evolution from the pagan cults of Osiris and Dionysus to modern times. This includes a synthesis of ideas, deities, and personalities that show how they combined to favor the rise and dominance of Christianity over religious competitors such as Mithraism, which lacked a human founder and excluded the general public, and Manichaeism, which invited the general public but lacked a deified founder. The thrust of his work is to show that Christianity evolved from pagan religions and Judaism rather than arose full-blown from the mind of a single religious prophet. Although he had no advanced degree in the subject, his works were popular