Shadowy
Mr Big behind worldwide criminal organisation. Known variously
as 'Jesus', 'Christ', 'Lord', and 'Saviour'.
Persistent rumours
of
a brief
appearance in Palestine though unknown in official records. Cult
members convince themselves JC is alive today. Intelligence
suggests never actually existed.
"Disconcertingly,
we do not know who any of the authors of the four Gospels were.
The traditions that they were written by Jesus' apostles Matthew
and John, and Paul's companions Mark and Luke, are in any case subject
to
grave and virtually insuperable doubts...
And even though it has
not been possible to establish who the evangelists are, they emerge
as four very distinct individuals – so distinct that
they often seem to present not one Jesus, but four."
– Michael Grant (Jesus, 1977, p180,183)
It
is not merely Christ, divine son of God, that is an article
of faith, but also the so-called "Jesus of history". A
liturgy of carefully crafted "proofs", a hallowed parade
of alleged witnesses, and a handful of dogmatically
interpreted
writings are
the sacraments of this faith.
But what better explains a thousand different Jesuses than
the single word: fiction.
It is intuitively
satisfying to think that someone was behind the
towering legend. Yet like the worship of Horus or Mithras
a human life
was neither necessary nor helpful.
The
teachings of the Jewish prophets – in essence, pronouncements
upon
God's Law and social criticism of their own age – were
re-purposed by the Christians as "fore-telling" their
own would-be hero, centuries into the future.
Every
miracle, every pronouncement and every micro-drama of the
godman's supposed existence was teased out of Jewish
scripture and
a handful of supplementary sources. Traditional pagan
motifs completed the detail.
Rabbis,
radicals and rebels – 1st century Palestine had them in
abundance. But a 'life' conjured up from mystical fantasy,
a mass of
borrowed
quotations, copied story elements and a corpus of self-serving
speculation, does not constitute an historical reality.
The final defeat of militant Jewish nationalism and the
eradication of a Jewish kingdom gave the incipient Christian
churches the final uplift they required.
The "witnesses" who
saw and heard nothing of a historical Jesus
As it happens,
we have an excellent witness to events in Judaea and the Jewish
diaspora in the first half of the first century
AD: Philo of Alexandria (c25 BC-47 AD). Yet Philo
says not
a word about
Jesus, Christianity nor any of the events described in the
New Testament. But a Jewish neo-Platonism fed into nascent Christianity.
Nothing
in the 'Christian message' was original. Brotherly
love and compassion had been taught
by the Stoics for centuries. In fact, Stoicism influenced the ethics of the emerging Christ cult.
All
these
articles and some fifty others are now available as a book.
For your copy: