Godman – Gestation of a Superhero
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.
Hero of the People
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.
Glory – The Greatest Man Who Never Lived
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
Philo of Alexandria
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.
Seneca and the Stoics
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.
