Christianity
The Third Quest for the Historical Jesus
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, November 14, 1999, Friday, 14 November 2003
The Third Quest
The “Third Quest”, has been so named since perhaps the 70s. A distinguishing feature is the involvement of Jewish scholars trying to recover the historical Jesus. It claims that critical historical research can lead to who Jesus was by careful sifting of the sources. It places Jesus squarely within the context of first century Palestine and Second Temple Judaism. Geza Vermes’s book Jesus the Jew boldly declares this. S G F Brandon and Hyam Maccoby saw Jesus, like Reimarus, as a Jewish revolutionary, whilst Vermes saw him as a Galilean Hasid, apparently accepting that Jewish holy men could perform miracles.
Gerd Theissen applies sociological analysis to the “renewal movement within Judaism”, Jesus founded. Jesus and some of his followers are depicted as “wandering charismatics”, dependent on sympathizers in the local villages, analogous to wandering Cynic philosophers in the gentile world. They too led a vagabond existence, renouncing home, families and possessions.
Gerd Theissen’s analogy depicting Jesus as a Cynic spawned an industry of pseudo-scholarship. F Gerald Downing found that Cynics must have been active in Galilee in Jesus’s day because Jesus proves it! Jesus can equally be proved to have been an Epicurean, the view of Wolfgang Kirchbach (Was lehrte Jesus? Zwei Urevangelien), according to Schweitzer, or anything else by being suitably selective.
Dominic John Crossan, one of the Jesus Seminar’s chairmen, in The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, written in 1994 and dedicated to the Jesus Seminar, takes up the cynical idea, denying Jesus was a teacher of Judaism but saying he was instead a wandering cynic preacher heavily influenced by Greek thought, a stoic Greek philosopher who gathered disciples around himself. For Crossan, the eschatological Jesus had been foisted on the tradition by the early church, and Jesus himself had rejected the eschatological message of John the Baptist to instead adopt wisdom teaching appropriate to a Jewish peasant.
Crossan concluded that Jesus was a peasant Jewish Cynic, a hippie deriding the yuppies. He bases his conclusions on a series of fantastic revisions of accepted chronology and a vivid imagination. For this “analysis”, Crossan places the Gospels of Peter, Hebrews, Egyptians, Nazoreans, Ebionites, Secret Mark, various fragments, dialogue and apocryphon writings, alongside the four canonical writings and Thomas as having historical worth. That might be true, but it is a question of to what degree, and adequate identification of the historical bits. All gospels cannot count equally as sources. Few deny these are late works and later works are less reliable.
Crossan’s attempt to make the passion narrative of the Gospel of Peter the source of the passion narratives in the canonical gospels has won little support. In short, no one believes a word of it, though it impresses publishers, and it reveals the author’s cynicism, not Jesus’s.
The new element in gospel research comes partly from continuing research on Q and from the Gospel of Thomas. Burton Mack in The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins, focuses on the lost gospel of Q, and increasingly scholars like H Koster see the Gospel of Thomas as containing some traditions earlier than the canonical gospels. Thomas and the collection thought to be Q are remarkably similar. If these are the most authentic traditions and others are secondary myths, a Jesus emerges who is only just Jewish and not focused on eschatological hope.
According to Kloppenborg, Q can be divided into three strata, the earliest of which consisted of a collection of wisdom sayings, expanded secondarily by material with a stronger eschatological flavour. Kloppenborg himself does not argue that the earlier layer existed in isolation from other traditions later introduced into Q, but this has been the conclusion of some scholars, notably Mack.
Mack, by selecting the earliest wisdom layer and supporting it with the Gospel of Thomas, discounts Mark as a fiction, a rationalisation by Mark of Christian failure. By identifying Jesus with the wisdom layer of Q and Thomas’s gospel, Mack supports the idea of Jesus as a sage of the Cynics. He was not interested in eschatology or Jewish law and history but challenged the establishment, like Diogenes.
The Cynics were itinerant preachers of a philosophy of freedom from every constraint and a life lived with minimal requirements “according to nature”. Flouting social convention, often in a way that shocked, they derived their name (kynikoi, “dog-like”) from one of their founders, in the fourth century BC, “the Dog”, Diogenes of Sinope, who went about Athens doing in public all that a dog did, while hurling insults on spectators and public figures alike. One time while behaving like a dog in the market place he said, according to Diogenes Laertius:
Would that it were possible to relieve hunger simply by using the hand.
He was masturbating! The Jews were quite prudish and one of the complaints of the Maccabees against Greeks culture was its lack of prudishness. Jesus’s and Paul’s prudery have come to us in Christianity, so cannot have been absent in the earliest Christians. So, it is absurd to imagine that the first Christians were anything like as liberal as the Cynics.
Marcus Borg, also of the Jesus Seminar, made Jesus a Marxist in that he saw society rather than personal sin as the cause of evil. Borg’s Jesus is more Jewish but is still the model of sage and spirit person that Borg likes to appeal to popular religious feelings of our day.
The weakness in Mack, Crossan, Borg and the Jesus Seminar is their dismissal of the eschatological Jesus though they instead make him into an anarchic and outrageous Greek dissonant. They accept that Jesus began with the eschatological John the Baptist and was followed by an eschatological Church, but tell us Jesus had no interest in eschatology! Christians have always sought to deny Jesus’s eschatological aims because they point too clearly to historical reality. The charge on the cross was not unjust—it was just and legal under Roman law!
One wonders whether these “scholars” are putting their ideas forward for serious consideration or for purely cynical reasons—to obfuscate the truth. Commentators can write off all of these “historical Jesuses” in favour of the twentieth century religious image Christians have, on the grounds that Jesus can indeed have been anything, an Essene, a recluse, a Greek philosopher, a married man with children, an Hillel Jew. Yet all of these proposals are not equal in evidential content. Jesus was a Jew and he was a particular kind of Jew. The evidence for these facts is overwhelming. It is scarcely less overwhelming to anyone except a Christian that Jesus was what he died as—a Jewish rebel. Everything else is a smokescreen.
Jesus the Jew
Another major trend has been to emphasise Jesus’s Jewishness. Jesus’s Jewishness and Torah observance are central. Jesus did not stand outside his own religious tradition. He was not a Christian among Jews—he was a Jew. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary called Jesus a “Jewish preacher”, causing an outcry. A member of the General Synod of the Anglican Church said this was “a rather derogatory term”.
The Jewish scholar, Vermes, acclaimed Jesus’s Jewishness, as a holy man, a hasid, like Honi the circle maker or Hanina ben Dosa. Vermes, was reprimanded by chaplains at an English University for saying Jesus was a Jew! The problem is that Vermes’s rabbinic sources are late.
Sanders too has urged that Judaism should be re-assessed within New Testament scholarship. Torah as God’s gift and the priority of God’s grace seems clear in the early writings. Sanders has made a strong case for understanding Jesus in his Jewish context. Sanders emphasises Jesus’s faithfulness to Torah and his espousal of restoration eschatology.
At his birth, Jesus’s genealogy shows he was a Jew. He was circumcised the eighth day (Lk 2.21), bore a common Jewish name, Yeshua, “Yehouah saves” (Mt 1.21). Yeshua was the fifth most common Jewish name, four out of the 28 Jewish High-Priests in Jesus’s time were called Yeshua. Joseph was the second most common male name and Mary the most common amongst women, this in itself is sufficient evidence to throw doubt on the recently found tomb of “Jesus, Mary and Joseph”.
Mark portrays a clever Jesus engaging in refutation, by wit and aphorism rather than by argument, against extreme legalist positions. Yet, he evidently observed the law, interpreted it defended it wittily, expounded its values all in a way acceptable to Judaism of the time because we find Jews defending him and his followers. He was conservative in sexuality even by Jewish standards and his dealings with gentiles reflect a conservative Jewish background. Jesus never wished to see his fellow Jews change one iota of their traditional faith and remained within the range of acceptable Jewry to his last moment.
Where do we get the idea from that Jesus was a carpenter? Matthew 13:55 based on manuscripts of Mark only describes Jesus as “son of the carpenter” not as the “carpenter, son of Mary”. The early third century church writer Origen writes against Celsus’s assertion that Jesus was a mere carpenter, that “in none of the Gospels current in the churches is Jesus Himself ever described as being a carpenter!” Yet, the earlier church writer Justin cites it in his dialogue with Tryppho the Jew:
He was considered to be the son of Joseph the carpenter; and He appeared without comeliness, as the scriptures declared; and He was deemed a carpenter (for He was in the habit of working as a carpenter when among men, making ploughs and yokes; by which He taught the symbols of righteousness and an active life).
Jesus had brothers and sisters, according to Mark 6:3, James, Joseph, Juda, and Simeon and two sisters. One brother, James, was the head of the church in Jerusalem as testified in the book of Acts. The trouble with this is that if Jesus was a member of a botherhood like the Essenes or the Therapeuts well then his brothers and sisters were not blood brothers and sisters but other members of the fellowship. It is fair to ask why particular ones should be picked out and called his brothers. The main reason is that the gentile church wanted to hide the fact that Jesus was a member of a brotherhood, and so pretended from the outset that references to brothers and sisters in this context meant real brothers and sisters. Naturally, this plan pre-dated the virgin birth and the idea that Mary was a perpetual virgin.
According to the gospel legends, by the age of 12 Jesus was found in the temple precincts “both listening and asking questions” (Lk 2:46). The Jews of Jesus’s era were imitators of the Greeks in comprehensive universal education. Most were taught to read and write. The philosopher Seneca remarked that the Jews were the only people who knew the reasons for their religious faith.
The study of Greek in Palestine in Jesus’s day was not encouraged by pious Jews, although it was a necessity of daily life in the diaspora lands outside of Palestine. Greek philosophy was equally deprecated by Jews who were not Hellenistic. Early church theologians were later to remark “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem” decrying Greek thinking.
Jesus said a blessing at meals (Mt 26:26 and Lk 24:30 which is post resurrection; cf. Didache 10:1). Jewish scholars used to hold that the object of the blessing was not the food but God (Dt 8:10;). When the New Testament inserts “it” or “the bread” in such verses it is not found in the Greek. A Jew would not bless the object rather than the creator. Many such mistakes are made based on the assumption that first century Judaism was Rabbinic. Jesus was an Essene and they treated meals as a messianic meal. The Scrolls (1QSa 2:10) tell us that the Priest blessed the “first fruits of the bread and wine”.
Sanders makes the point that much of Jesus’s teaching makes the law strict. The Essenes had the stricter view of the law. Our Jewish sources also offer examples of the kind of emphasis on attitude in relation to sexual behaviour and anger which characterised Jesus’s teaching.
The eschatological focus of much of the Jesus tradition makes good sense in the light of the diverse eschatological expectations of the day, which crystallised around would-be messiahs or prophets of hope.
Eschatology
Jesus’s eschatology is expressed most often with his favorite term: “the kingdom of God”—the expectation that God would cleanse the land and rule it directly, restoring Israel to wholeness, liberating her from her oppressors, and bringing righteousness and peace. The hope was an expectation of changed reality, especially for the people of Israel—Jews not gentiles—for whom it was Good News. His vision implied a political or military solution, whether God’s alone or one assisted by the Chosen People. His hope was an urgent one like that of John the Baptist. His own ministry indicated that the hope was beginning to be realised.
The imagery associated with this hope in the Jesus tradition reflects prophetic hope for Israel’s restoration, the gathering of the lost and scattered sheep, the eschatological banquet, the renewal or rebuilding of the temple, the establishment of new leadership in Israel, healing and deliverance.
John Bowden, SCM Editor, warns New Testament readers to distinguish between symbolism and history. the darkness at the crucifixion cannot have been an eclipse as interpreters of the stories have often assumed but even some early commentators realised. The darkness comes from the prophecies of the cosmic events that would accompany the End Time (Joel). In the same way, the rising of the saints from their tombs, spoken of in Matthew, symbolises the general resurrection prophesied for the righteous dead (the saints) at the End Time. Bowden urges us to see all of this as sensible and reasonable in terms of Jewish beliefs at the time, but why then cannot the healing of the blind, the deaf and the maimed be seen as equally symbolic rather than as actual miracles? The driving out of devils might be metaphorical too. None of them need to be miracles but all relate to beliefs of the time, beliefs that provided for the Essenes a technical code language based on the Jewish scriptures.
Wright’s work, Jesus and the Victory of God on the historical Jesus, takes Sanders’s notion of restoration eschatology further but, he reassures Christians, Jewish apocalyptic did not imply the end of the world. Jesus was offering an alternative to the way of being Israel, which, if pursued, would lead the nation to disaster.
There is virtually no evidence that Jews were expecting the end of the space-time universe. There is abundant evidence that they… knew a good metaphor when they saw one, and used cosmic imagery to bring out the full theological significance of cataclysmic socio-political events.
It was only warning about Israel’s immediate future. So, all that talk and imagery about a judgement day, resurrection, being at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the restored Israel, and so on simply mean that Jews should take care! How could there be such confusion of understanding of eschatology apparently shared by James, Jesus and John the Baptist, and that of the early church?
The truth is the Essenes saw the kingdom of God as a renovated world. Heaven and earth joined, destroying forever the old wicked world but creating a new one that differed only from the old in being perfect and uncorruptible. The old world ended for the wicked but the righteous were resurrected in uncorruptible and therefore immortal bodies into the purified world—the kingdom! If Wright is correct, the wicked world was not meant to end. People just had to start being good—just what modern Christians want to think.
Christians are preoccupied with titles of authority. They took it as given that Jesus was the messiah then looked for as many titles as possible that they could give him. References to Jesus as messiah are few and so ambiguous that, if Jesus saw himself as messiah, he left no indication of what he understood by it, other than the messiah of Jewish expectation—a leader of god’s armies. The general was soon made king—as they are—and replaced the kingdom of God as the centre of Christian preaching.
What of the expression, Son of Man? It is taken by Christians to mean the vision of Daniel 7. But in Palestine at the time, it was a polite self designation intended to avoid the conceit of using “I”. If this was a common use, then how was the special meaning given it by Jesus meant to be distinguished from the everyday use? Most people will have understood it as derekh eretz—Jewish etiquette.
Clever men Speak of Jesus
J D Crossan admits Jesus was not preaching himself as John’s gospel seems to make out, but was preaching God’s kingdom. E P Sanders agrees, but sees Jesus as an eschatological prophet, preparing the people for the future coming of God’s kingdom. John Meier also agrees except that Jesus was an eschatological teacher for whom God’s kingly rule was already present but not yet complete.
Christians like crazy ideas about Jesus because they can then say that Jesus is anything that people want him to be, so he might as well be the orthodox Jesus Christ of the Christian churches. These writers cited are however more or less correct. No one other than the deliberately obtuse or those desperate to lie for God, can deny that Jesus was an echatological figure calling people to repentance in the immediate expectation of the coming kingdom. The kingdom had not come but was imminent at any moment. The urgency of it was the characteristic message of Jesus deliberately ignored by Christian commentators because 2000 years have passed since, proving that Jesus was wrong in his expectation. Albert Schweitzer might have said, “There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus”, but he was himself certain of one thing—that Jesus thought he was acting in the End Time.
There is no doubt that Jesus came to believe that he was the messiah, and in the sense that the messiah was the immediate instigator of the kingdom of God in earth—that his own actions were initiating the arrival of the kingdom. Borg, Crossan, and Mack were therefore right in thinking that Jesus believed the kingdom was already present in embryo in his ministry, but it had not yet arrived. Meier was right that it was both present and future, and Sanders was right that it was still to come, though soon—very soon!
But Jesus was not preaching any form of reform of society. He saw the kingdom as coming by a revolution against the rule of Rome and the Jewish apostates who collaborated with the Romans. Once Jews showed their true desires by military rejection of the Romans then God would act to secure His bride, Israel. God was forever devoted to Israel as a bride and a groom, whence the importance of marriage and divorce parables. They were parables of the kingdom, not suggestions about how couples should behave.
This kingdom is about God, not Jesus himself, and is on earth. Jesus is a Jew, and the early kingdom movement—the expectation of God’s earthly rule and Israel’s liberation from foreign oppression—is not the founding of a religion called Christianity but a Jewish phenomenon. The historical Jesus and the Jesus of the early church bear little resemblance to one another. The church had to deliberately distort the stories brought by Jews from Judaea after the diaspora of 70 AD. Even more tenuous is the connexion between the historical Jesus and later Christianity.
John the Baptist exerted tremendous influence over Jesus and his message. While contemporary scholars would acknowledge that the relation with the Baptist is one of the most likely authentic pieces of the gospel traditions since the evangelists seem embarrassed by it, Meier develops the idea that Jesus was probably part of the Baptist’s early circle and his fiery apocalyptic theology was a constant in Jesus’s own ministry. Meier fails to understand that the Baptist was Jesus’s predecessor in a movement already established. We know them as the Essenes. Meier thinks that when Jesus left the Baptist to start his own ministry, he took some of the Baptist’s followers with him. In fact, there is no reason not to believe that the Baptist was jailed and Jesus had to take over the leadership from him.
The Spread of Christianity
Jesus’s view of himself differed widely from the early church’s. He came to see himself as the Messiah, but he did not see himself as divine. Sanders remarks that Jesus may have died a disappointed man. The earliest gospel reports his final cry from the cross to be one of utter despair:
My God, my God why have you forsaken me?
It is difficult for a rational mind to see why there should be any doubt about it, except that Sanders wants to dilute the message to avoid offence to the believing masses. As if to emphasize the rejection, the earth went dark, symbolically showing that God—who is light—had indeed forsaken him.
Other apocalyptic leaders have arisen throughout the course of Jewish history—Bar Kosiba and Sabbatai Sevi drew significant numbers of loyal followers—but their movements did not last. The reason is ultimately that the spread of Judaism into the gentile world had happened already and could not happen again. The existing Judaism for gentiles naturally would resist any other.
Moreover, the spread of Christianity depended on a set of circumstances that could not be repeated. The central fact was that the corpse of Jesus disappeared and the followers decided that the revolutuion had actually succeeded. Jesus was the first to rise as prophesied into the kingdom of God. This was obviously the center of Christianity as Paul soon after established without doubt. It was the belief that Jesus had risen that started Christianity.
Crossan denies this. He thinks the remarkable spread of Christianity was the miracle not the resurrection—but without the resurrection there would have been no belief to spread! Claudia Setzer, whose obsevations this is a comment on, concludes that the transformation of some disappointed messianists into a dynamic movement is one of the fascinating stories of history. Indeed it is, and we can explain it now with a good deal of probability of being historically correct.
The Hidden Jesus
Dr Michael D Magee has stiffened the quest for the historical Jesus with a little realism in his 1997 book The Hidden Jesus: The Secret Testament Revealed. He sticks to the earliest tradition we have, as agreed by most biblical scholars, that of the gospel of Mark, and interprets it in the light of the discoveries in the Judaean desert. John is too overlaid with legend to be anything other than secondary and Matthew and Luke are used only to enlarge upon the skimpier material in Mark.
Much of Q, the hypothetical document used by some Jesus seminar scholars to reject a revolutionary Jesus, is considered to be pre-Jesus, being a collection of Essene wisdom sayings many of which were doubtless used by Jesus but tell us nothing about his career except when they are linked to the narrative of Mark.
Ancient history, where important elements of a story have been lost or deliberately destroyed, is a matter of judging probabilities. Dr Magee accepts much of the tradition of Mark, but believes it is not presented at face value as Christians do. Some things are unlikely to be invented, like Jesus’s eschatology and his baptism by John the Baptist. What is embarrassing to Christianity is likely to be genuine because there is no other good reason for it being in the tradition at all. Other embarrassing elements have been purposely distorted, because tales were emerging that had to be explained away.
Though Mark is the earliest and best tradition, it has been deliberately distorted by the gentile bishops to make the gospels acceptable to the Romans and the basis of a universal religion. Dr Magee peels off the pious accretions and interpretative wrappings added by the earliest gentile bishops to the story of the exploits of Jesus.
The truth is peculiarly transparent, although two thousand years of conditioning and the invention of spurious translations of Greek words to suit Christian belief in the so-called New Testament Greek have succeeded in blinding even the most critical of scholars.
The gentile bishops of the embryonic religion were faced with travelers’ tales from Palestine that Jesus was not what he seemed. This oral tradition was strong because Jews were already widespread in the Empire and after the defeat of their rebellion in the Jewish War and their dispersion in 70 AD many more arrived from Palestine.
Pericopes, individual stories about Jesus, kept coming to the bishops and when they did not match their preferred image of a saintly Son of God, had to be “corrected”. The bishops had to say to their flocks:
Ho, Ho, Theophilus, how silly you are. It was not quite like that. No, this is what really happened.
Then they would change a few subjects and objects and retell the tale such that a core remained but the sense favoured the view they were propagating rather than the truth. It still happens today. There never was a gate in Jerusalem called “The Eye of a Needle” but it was invented by clerics to allow the rich to be saved when the plain sense of Jesus’s aside was that he considered it impossible for the rich to be saved.
The resurrection and appearances that gave rise to Christianity are about the disciples’ perceptions. In the minds of the disciples, Jesus had been vindicated through the disappearance of his body and this provided not only evidence of his exaltation to God’s presence as the first fruits of the dead, the first of the Righteous to have been raised up by God in the general resurrection prophesied in Hosea, but also of the truth of his claim that the kingdom of God was at hand.
God’s restoration of the world was a restoration of the sinless world before Adam! The Righteous were resurrected into the world but it was now joined to heaven and was therefore perfect and incorruptible. That Jesus had been resurrected into this higher order of reality proved, for them that history had ended. In summary:
- Was Jesus an Essene? Christians deny it. There are some similarities, they say, but too many differences. This book shows Jesus was indeed an Essene, and one of their leaders, and explains why there were differences from the Essenes described by Josephus, the Roman historian.
- What is the meaning of the word, Nazarene? Does it really refer to a previously unknown hamlet, as Christians believe, or was this an invention to hide its real meaning?
- Did Jesus really try to tell every Jew in Palestine at the time to love their Roman oppressors? Why then do even the gospels contradict this? Was his message intended only for Jews and meant to be a rallying cry against gentiles? The Christian universal faith depends on this being untrue.
- Why do demons get driven out of opponents of Jesus when he and his henchmen arrive on the scene? Why are these people torn and left for dead? Was it because the disciples were doing the tearing and beating to silence the opposition?
- Why are Jesus’s main apostles given such thuggish nicknames? Could it be that they really were thugs, or zealots as they came to be known? Christians pretend they were pacifists but is that because the early church had to paint such a picture to disguise the opposite, and has done so ever since?
- What did Jesus consider to be God’s when he, according to Christians, agreed to pay the tribute money, saying, “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto god what is God’s?” Aren’t the only characteristic possessions claimed by God, His Children and the land he promised them? Jesus was refusing to pay tribute when he uttered this famous sentence.
- What was the unbindable, savage demon that Jesus rendered impotent when it revealed itself to be really 2000 Gadarene swine and to have the name Legion? Is Gadarene, an inland town the correct name for these swine? What was the Field of Akeldama where guts were spilled, gentiles were supposed to have lain asleep and had the nickname the field of blood? Who were the Galilaeans whose blood was spilt in the temple?
- Why did Jesus curse an innocent fig tree? Could it have had anything to do with the fig tree being a symbol of Rome?
Why have these questions not been adequately answered? Forget the obfuscations of the Jesus Seminar. All these and many more questions are convincingly and controversially answered in “The Hidden Jesus” which can be ordered from good booksellers and libraries and is available by mail order at £14.49 inc p&p (UK) or $30 inc shipping and dollar conversion(US)..
This book is a tour de force. For honest reasoning people, though not those who are irrational or emotionally dependent on the traditional image of Jesus, gospel stories will never be the same again-they now make sense. Oddly, the message of many modern Christians is upheld-that God is not an external supernatural entity ready to interfere with the world at a whim or a prayer.
Jesus believed an external God was ready to intervene—he was forsaken or rather mistaken—but Christians have made the same mistake ever since, teaching people to blame devils instead of facing up to their own responsibility for their actions. Our gods and devils are within us and there we must seek and come to terms with them.
This picture of Christ is the most powerful and original one of our century, but it is negative in that Christianity is found to be based on a mistake, and that Jesus was not really the Son of God but merely had that title as a priest and prince. All this is hardly the basis of a religion.
It is because this undesirable but realistic and historic Christ is at the core of the Christian religion that such a profusion of fanciful alternatives have always been sought. Recent years have seen the promotion of a gay Christ, a feminist Christ, Christ as a druggie and Christ as an alien from outer space. The hope of the true believers is that the historic Jesus will turn out to be just another Christ of his times, no “truer” to the original than the cosmic Christ of the Byzantine world.
Then again, no! Many Christian theologians want to get the historic Christ out in the open so that the Christian churches can metamorphose themselves into the purely mystical concoction of mystery beliefs that it rapidly picked up from the religions of the times. For such Christians, the Christ of history was always likely eventually to be exposed by an Alexander who cared not for the conventions and respectabilities of his times and unceremoniously cut through the Gordian knot of lies that Christianity had to be to escape the unpalatable truth. When it happens, they can gulp, breathe a sigh of relief and then get on with it, declaring that nevertheless there is a saviour—it is simply that he is a heavenly one. For people ready to believe in Christ the alien, it will be a great advance.
Thanks to material online by: William R G Loader and Donald A Wells, Ph.D, and others who can be found by searching for “Quest for the Historical Jesus”.
