Martin Alfred Larson

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Martin A. Larson 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 originally from a fundamentalist Christian Evangelical background but left the faith when he was about twenty years old. Following service in the US Navy, he graduated from Kalamazoo College in Michigan, and then University of Michigan, where he earned a PhD in English literature 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 fifty to devote himself to private study, lecturing, and writing.