Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, March 09, 2000

Where is Jesus?

An alleged event in the past can be regarded as historical only when testimony of it is many, varied and essentially consistent. Otherwise we cannot be sure that something really happened. The same criteria apply to people. We cannot be sure that someone really existed if the evidence is sparse or inconsistent. Much of the Christian record is like that.

Few independent records survive from the time when Jesus Barabbas lived. From what little evidence there is, it is not easy to get the truth because most of the scholars researching it are Christian theologians or, at least, committed Christians who willfully or subconsciously do not want to come to conclusions which contradict their faith. How many Christians could accept that much in the Bible was not intended to illuminate the truth but to veil it. Christians suppressed anti-Christian and even non-Christian works. After the beginning of the fourth century AD when the church reached political power, reports hostile to Christianity were expurgated or destroyed.

No non-Christian or anti-Christian record of the events of the time of Jesus remains today unless J L Teicher’s theories of the Dead Sea Scrolls are correct. Josephus, Pliny the Younger, Suetonius and Tacitus are the nearest authors in time to Jesus’s life but are later and much of their evidence scholars regard as doubtful. None of them except Josephus refers to a “Jesus”, only to someone called Christ which is merely Greek for Anointed and therefore Messiah. We cannot always be sure whether a reference to “Christ” implies Christians or messianic Jews generally.

Classical texts have remarkably little to say about events in the New Testament. Herod’s murder of the Innocents, in which the New Testament attests he ordered the slaughter of hundreds of children, is not mentioned anywhere else, including the histories of Herod’s reign. Even obscure Jewish sects, some not mentioned in the Christian gospels, have been faithfully chronicled in their day. If a god were crucified by Pilate in about 30 AD surely we could expect more information about him from contemporary sources.

We find nothing explicit in Rabbinical literature, nothing in Philo of Alexandria, no mentions in Roman works until Tacitus writing about 120 AD. Pliny the Elder allegedly had read 2000 books, loved marvels and noted them assiduously in his Historia Naturalis compiled about 40 years after Jesus’s death. But he made no mention of any of the miracles of Jesus.

Justus of Tiberias, a Galilaean historian born only a few years after Jesus and whose works are now lost, made no reference to him that has been quoted by polemicists for or against. Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century, was surprised not to find any reference to Jesus in Justus’s work. There are only two passages in all the work of Josephus (about 93 AD), one of which looks like a later addition and the other might also have been.

Even when contemporary writers are discussing matters to which the gospel accounts are relevant, they make no mention of them. Josephus does not mention the Christians when he discusses Jewish religious sects; Paul and Clement do not cite Jesus even though the teachings of Jesus that we know would strengthen their argument; Seneca and Pliny the Elder do not allude to the darkness at the crucifixion even though they are chronicling eclipses and earthquakes.

Neither Paul’s nor any of the early epistles suggest any familiarity by the author with an historical person and they say little about Jesus’s life. Paul’s letters were all written well before the gospels but make no unequivocal reference to any of the material in them—not to Mary and Joseph, the virgin birth, John the Baptist, Judas, Jesus’s miracles and his teachings, nor to the circumstances of his death other than that he was crucified.

He simply speaks of a new Jewish sect which adored a leader called the Messiah who had died and been resurrected. He conveys to the faithful instructions that had been given to him by the Messiah in visions not in real life, though they later appear in the biographical works as if they were real. Nor do references to Jesus in these, the earliest Christian documents, imply that he lived in the immediate past.

The lack of references to Jesus embarrassed the later Christians and they were not above claiming they existed when they knew they did not, and forging them when necessary to give the authenticity they sought. One such was composed in Rome in the fourth century AD and purported to be a letter between Seneca and Paul but is now accepted by all to be a fraud.

Justin and Tertullian both claimed that Pilate wrote a report to Tiberius telling him the full story, miracles, resurrection and all and that it could be found in the archives. Tiberius was said to be so impressed that he proposed to make Jesus a god but the Senate demurred. However, though Christians after Tertullian repeat this tale often, no one had mentioned it before. Gibbon makes it clear that Pontius Pilate would not have written a report incriminating himself against a god, that Tiberius who despised religion would not have wanted to create a new god, that the senate would not have dared to contradict his wishes if he did, and that the record of all this in the archives at Rome would not have escaped the attention of historians.

Where and how did Christianity begin?

The early Christian record is diverse, yet is silent about the human Jesus. Why is the living Jesus ignored if he really lived? Some people deduce that Jesus never existed as a man but was always a purely spiritual redeemer, a divine Son of God, never an earth born son of God. The legend of the human Jesus was tacked on later. Such an argument appears in several interesting websites and notably in the books by G A Wells—a professor at Birkbeck college in London. Wells was interested in the idea that Jesus never existed but was not a biblical scholar, and so was ignored by biblical scholars and Christians, the former overwhelmingly a subset of the latter. Wells wrote detailed scholarly works to demonstrate that Jesus never existed as a man—but he was wrong! In 1999, Earl Doherty published his own long term researches into the mythical Jesus under the title of The Jesus Puzzle.

Earl Doherty has a large original website devoted to this idea that we use as the framework for this reply, because this hypothesis is almost correct but the wrong way round. It requires a human myth to be tacked on to the original cosmic myth whereas the usual idea is that cosmic mythology was tacked on to the Jesus of history. It is hard to understand why the new form of the old cosmic redeemer should have superseded the older forms merely because it was new—there must have been some novelty about it. But the great big problem with it is that nobody in the first or second centuries AD would have chosen a Jewish rebel crucified as a traitor to be the human form of their cosmic god. Yet it happened, and the sheer embarassment of it in the first two centuries is the reason why Jesus is such a shadowy figure.

Doherty tells us that the traditional view that Christianity began in Jerusalem among the Twelve Apostles in response to Jesus’s death and resurrection is untenable. Within only a few years of the crucifixion, Christian communities exist all over the eastern Mediterranean, their founders unknown. Rome had Jewish Christians no later than the 40s, and a later churchman remarked that Romans believed in Christ without benefit of the Apostles. Paul could not account for all the Christian centres across the Empire—many were in existence before he got there.

The sheer variety of Christian expression and competitiveness in the first century, as revealed in documents both inside the New Testament and out, is inexplicable if it all proceeded from a single missionary movement beginning from a single source. We find a profusion of radically different rituals, doctrines and interpretations of Jesus and his redeeming role. Some even have a Jesus who does not undergo death and resurrection!

Paul meets rivals at every turn who are interfering with his work, whose views he is trying to combat. The “false apostles” he rails against in 2 Corinthians 10 and 11 are “proclaiming another Jesus” and they are certainly not from Peter’s group. Where do they all come from and where do they get their ideas?

Christianity was born in a thousand places, in the broad fertile soil of Hellenistic Judaism. It sprang up in many independent communities and sects, expressing itself in a great variety of doctrines. We see this variety in everything from Paul to the writings of the so-called community of John, from the unique Epistle to the Hebrews to non-canonical documents like the Odes of Solomon and a profusion of Gnostic texts. It was all an expression of the new religious philosophy of the Son, and it generated an apostolic movement fuelled by visionary inspiration and a study of scripture, impelled by the conviction that God’s Kingdom was at hand.

“Jesus” is from a Hebrew name meaning saviour. At the beginning of Christianity, it refers not to the name of a human individual but, like the term logos, to a concept—a divine, spiritual figure who is the mediator of God’s salvation. “Christ”, the Greek translation of the Hebrew “messiah”, is also a concept, meaning the “Anointed One of God”, though enriched by much additional connotation. In Jewish sectarian circles across the Empire, which included many gentiles, these names would have enjoyed a broad range of usage. Belief in some form of spiritual Anointed Saviour—Christ Jesus—was in the air. Paul and the Jerusalem brotherhood were simply one strand of this widespread phenomenon, although an important and eventually very influential one. Later, in a myth-making process of its own, this group of missionaries would come to be regarded as the whole movement’s point of origin.

Reply Doherty makes important points but gets carried away. There is no reason why the Christian religion should not have started in or about Jerusalem according to tradition. The only questionable detail is “The Twelve”, an expression which is surely an invention of the author of Mark. If Jesus had twelve special disciples, which would be supported by Essene practice, they had no special role in the story, and no missionary role among gentiles.

What is so incredible about there being Christian communities in distant places like Rome in the 40s? Acts tells us that Hellenized Jews were run out of Jerusalem soon after the crucifixion. They did not disappear! They were Hellenized which meant that they had Greek customs and spoke Greek, so they could have lived anywhere in the Greek speaking world—all of he eastern Mediterranean and even in Rome where Greek was the lingua franca of the time. If Jesus actually died in 21 AD, there was even more time for these communities to have become stablished.

Does anyone really think that no one besides Paul carried Christianity into the Empire? Paul was converted about 32 AD and did not start his missionary activity until some years later. It is hardly surprising that there were well established churches in the Empire by then. Paul’s own epistles highlight disputes that arose between Christians about who had founded this church or that and who had baptised whom. The varieties of Christianity are inexplicable only if the plain fact related in Acts is ignored—unnamed Hellenized Jews first took proto-Christianity out of Jerusalem.

Paul was an opportunist himself and doubtless there were others who hoped to jump on the bandwagon of gulling the punters eager to sign up for salvation. But the main disputes with “false apostles” mentioned are indeed with envoys from the Jerusalem Church. Orthodox Jews did not appreciate his message and reported him to James. He got himself into trouble.

When Doherty says Christianity began in a thousand places, he is partially right. It was not spread into the Empire as a unified, centralised movement and so a variety of liturgical practices were adopted from Judaism and the mysteries. The nominal centre was the Church in Jerusalem but it was interested only in Jews, not gentiles, so the gentile churches were free to do what they wanted from the start. Bizarre forms by today’s way of thinking resulted.

Paul and the Jerusalem brotherhood were two strands! Paul used the Jerusalem Church’s authority but plainly never agreed with them on anything substantial. Finally, Jesus seems likely to have been an Essene title derived from Joshua the High Priest in Zechariah. It is quite likely however, that Doherty’s views and these in these pages converge at this point in the possibility that the Essenes preserved a cult of Joshua. Certainly the title Joshua must be related in the context of the entry into God’s kingdom with the Joshua who mythically led the Israelites into Canaan.

Why was the Earthly Life of Jesus ignored by First Century Christians?

Doherty poses what he calls “an unsolvable dilemma”. A Jesus so hugely impressive to his followers and later believers must have made a big impression at the time. Yet, no contemporary historian, philosopher or popular writer records him. For over half a century even Christian writers ignore his life and ministry. Not a saying is quoted. Not a miracle is marvelled at. No aspect of his human personality, anchored within any biographical setting, is ever referred to. The details of his life nor the places of his career raise any interest in his believers. It all suggests that Jesus was not impressive but was an ordinary man, an unoriginal Jewish preacher, who performed no miracles and who did not rise from the dead. That is why he was ignored. How then could he have started a new cosmic religion?

Reply Jesus was at neither of these extremes. He was a significant man in his own domain but insignificant on a world scale. He was an Essene leader sent out to persuade Jews that they should prepare for the coming kingdom of God. The arrival of the kingdom would be violent. It required a cosmic battle and repentant Jews would have to help bring it about by helping to get rid of the Roman occupiers of God’s land, Israel. Jesus achieved a minor notoriety by leading a rebellion to capture Jerusalem from its garrison one Passover. The Romans counter attacked a few days later and crucified the rebels. Nothing impressive in that, so far.

What began the myth is that the victory (nasach) over the Romans led Jesus’s followers the Nazarenes to believe, as Jesus did, that the kingdom of God had come. In three days, the righteous dead would arise in God’s kingdom and a new temple would be built without hands. Then Jesus was caught and crucified. But, on the third day his followers found his body gone. It had surely been taken by Essenes—Jesus was a respected and loyal Essene still and Essenes habitually wore white like the “angels” at the tomb—but Jesus’s followers took his disappearance to be proof that the resurrection of the dead into the kingdom had begun. Jesus would naturally be the first to rise up into God’s kingdom.

The bemused surviving Nazarenes had been elated at the victory, distraught at the defeat and now were elated at the proof that defeat was still really victory. They soon convinced themselves that Jesus’s teaching of the general resurrection on the third day meant his own resurrection as the first fruits of the dead, and began the rumour that God’s kingdom had begun. In Matthew’s gospel we even find that some other dead saints were resurrected, but that will have been to reassure the punters. In reality, of course, no one else was ever resurrected and again the Nazarenes would have been puzzled that the kingdom was not unfolding before them.

Their explanation was that the cosmic battle was to last forty years. Jesus probably thought that when the archangel Michael split the Mount of Olives and arrived with the heavenly hosts, as he expected, the cosmic battle was over, but who knows? The Nazarenes had taken it that the resurrection of Jesus was the start of the kingdom, but now there had to be a forty year interlude while the cosmic battle was fought. Nevertheless, they were certain that Jesus had arisen and that the door of the kingdom had opened a crack. In forty years they would be saved if they remained repentant. As Revelation repeatedly says, the saints had to be patient!

It is this forty year gap that began the apparent lack of evidence for anything that Jesus had taught. The kingdom had begun, so anything Jesus taught was now irrelevant. Jesus had entered heaven—the kingdom of God—and every righteous person would follow him within forty years. This is what Paul seemed to believe. The kingdom had arrived so the man Jesus was unimportant. He was no longer a man but a cosmic being.

The next disappointment was that, after forty years, God’s people were heavily defeated and scattered to the four winds and still no more saints arose from the dead. By then, however, the myth had spread to the gentiles who were even more gullible than simple Jews, and their bishops found new excuses which a new generation of faithful were happy to accept. Mark’s gospel might have been privately circulated amongst the remaining faithful in about 60 AD. But the Jews were now thoroughly unpopular for fighting a bloody war against Rome for four years. There could still be no public admission that Jesus had been crucified as a rebel—even if portrayed as innocent, many would not have believed it, and Christians would have themselves risked being seen as traitors.

When passions about the war had cooled, Mark’s gospel could be openly published, then, a few decades later, the more refined ones. The truth could never be told, of course, but the bishops could not simply ignore all the rumours about the truth that entered the Empire via the diaspora Jews after the Jewish War. They had to tell their curious flocks that the stories (pericopes) had been distorted in the telling. A Roman legion became a flock of pigs, conversions to the Jewish cause became healings and, when the disciples had beaten opponents of the Nazarenes, it was to drive out demons.

Eventually, a pious but typical Jew was deified and became a gentile god. See! The dilemma is not unsolvable!

First Century

If the rebel were the very basis of the religion then the bishops had no choice but to accept it, and keep it secret as long as possible while it was embarassing. This was not that difficult because Christianity presented itself at first as another mystery religion, and the revelation that God incarnated in the astonishing form of a Jewish bandit was the secret kept until the catechumen received it at the completion of initiation. Christians always claim that the first gentile converts were slaves and newly freed men. Crucifixion was a perpetual reality to them, as the punishment for errant slaves, so possibly they empathised with a crucified god. Others would not have.

That is why Christian writers, aiming to win converts in the first years of evangelism, do not call upon the words and deeds of the Master himself. None of Jesus’s miracles, his apocalyptic preaching, the places or details of his birth, his ministry and his death, his parents, his prosecutor, his herald, his betrayer are ever mentioned by the first century Christian letter writers, and ethical teachings which resemble his as recorded in the gospels are never attributed to him. All of it is too embarassing to reveal publicly but it all can be revealed to the inititiate.

No first century epistle discussing Christian baptism, ever mentions either Jesus’s own baptism or John the Baptist. 1 Clement 17:1 speaks of those who heralded the Messiah’s coming, but includes only Elijah, Elisha and Ezekiel without mentioning John. Why? The answer is that John the Baptist had a rival sect that no bishop wanted to highlight. Later, they were happy to demote John the Baptist to the position of herald to the true redeemer.

The betrayer, Judas, also never appears, even in a passage like Hebrews 12:15 where the author, in cautioning against the poisonous member in the community’s midst, offers the figure of Esau as an example, who “sold his inheritance for a single meal”. Surely selling the Son of God for thirty pieces of silver would have been a far more dramatic comparison. Quite so, but Judas is plainly a personification of Jew. He has no identifiable role in the story except to depict Jews in an even worse light than they otherwise were to patriotic Romans. The character was added during or after the Jewish wars to show Jews as opposed to the Christian saviour as they were to Rome.

Mysteries

By the first century AD, the Empire had several popular salvation cults known as the Mysteries, each with its own saviour god, such as Osiris, Adonis, Orpheus, Attis and Mithras. How much these cults influenced Christianity is a moot point, but it is impossible to pretend that they had no influence, and, if appearance means anything, it is clear that Christianity was Judaism pressed into the form of a Mystery.

Each saviour god had overcome death to assure the initiate a little bit of godliness after death—immortality. To judge by the New Testament itself, Paul was aware of the death of a righteous Jewish leader seeking to throw off the Roman yoke and saw the chance to start a syncretistic religion based on the melting together of Judaism and the Mysteries. This man, who had the title Jesus or saviour, was thought by some Jews to have been the Jewish Messiah (christos, in Greek). Paul made Jesus Christ into Christianity’s saviour god—he had undergone death and been resurrected as a redeeming act (1 Cor 15:3-4), promising resurrection and eternal life to the believer.

Jesus had sought to liberate the Jews from foreign occupation so that God could bring about a miracle and start the kingdom of heaven in earth. It meant in practice an independent Judaea, as Roman administrators understood, but sounded great as a just spiritual home to the vast underclass of displaced and dispossessed people in the Roman empire.

The Jews had received from the Persians, when Judaism was first established around 400 BC, the idea of angels as God’s lieutenants, and guardian angels or heavenly equals. The heavenly equal of Jesus was thought by the Essenes who were his followers to have been the angel Michael, God’s army commander, who would lead out the hosts of angels and saints to defeat evil in the world. The saints were the righteous of this earth and would enter God’s Kingdom when it was established.

Paul taught that the Christians were the righteous because they believed in the Christ who had suffered on their behalf. He had been the first fruits of the resurrection—the first to be resurrected into God’s kingdom. Paul persuaded his punters that they would follow as long as they believed hard enough (and they proved that belief by putting money in the collection, of course). As Romans 6:5 declares, “We shall be one with Christ in a resurrection like his”.

Rites of initiation in the mysteries, which included types of baptism, made initiates “born again” and brought them into communion with the god or goddess. The Jewish sect that Paul usurped believed in daily lustrations but waived these for repentant sinners when the kingdom was imminent and allowed them a simple single immersion to purify their bodies to match their repentant souls. In so doing they made themselves ritually and spiritually pure enough to enter God’s kingdom—to be resurrected into it—immersion being a ritualised death. In Paul’s baptism, the convert died to his present life and rose to a new one of which, Paul says, “We are in Christ and Christ is in us”, making it into a communion as in the mysteries.

Sacraments and Resurrection

The saviour gods of the Mysteries had other sacraments. Mithras dined with the sun god before completing his earthly visit with an ascension to heaven on the sun chariot. This myth justified the Mithraic cultic meal which was akin to the Christian Eucharist. Doherty claims 1 Corinthians 11:23f is Paul’s institution of a myth to justify the cultic meal of the Christians. So there was no historical Last Supper, and the words are Paul’s. This latter is true but the Christians already had a cultic meal and it had degenerated so soon into drunkenness. Where did it originate?

The answer is that it was the messianic meal of the sect that Paul got it all from—the Essenes. The first Christians were Jews, they were Essenes, or rather the converts of Essene missionaries, of which Jesus was one, and like their leaders they partook of the sacred meal of bread and wine. The cannibalistic—mystery religion, omphagia—interpretation was certainly Paul’s, though even that he will have taken from the Essenes who sprinkled wine as the symbolic blood of their holy covenant with God.

Doherty admits that the Greeks could not understand the idea of resurrection in the flesh, which to them was as horrific as the playlet, The Monkey’s Paw. They could not conceive of decayed flesh being anything other than decayed and so found the idea of resurrection repugnant. For them the soul was waiting to be freed at death from the body that imprisoned it. Why then would the designers of the religion based on the Judaeo-Greek principles that they wanted to sell to punters in the Greek world ever tack on to it a concept repulsive to them?

That the early Christians adopted the idea of resurrection proves it was rooted in Judaism, for the Jews expected to be resurrected into God’s kingdom in earth! Unlike the Greeks, they understood that the pure uncorrupted flesh would join the dust of their bones again and make them as they were in life—but even purer for the world was now part of heaven and was free of sin and therefore free of corruption.

Doherty says that earliest Christianity conceived of Jesus only as raised in the spirit, exalted to heaven immediately after death whereas Paul gives the whole theory in 1 Corinthians 15:30ff where Jesus is called “the first fruits of them that are asleep. For since by man came death, by man also came the resurrection of the dead”. Plainly Jesus was considered to have been the first man to have been resurrected.

Doherty says no Christian writer of the first century ever wants to see the birthplace of Jesus, to visit Nazareth, the sites of his preaching, the upper room where he held his Last Supper or the tomb where he was buried and rose from the dead. No one goes on pilgrimage to Calvary, the place of mankind’s salvation. The reason is simple and unavoidable given the nature of the Christian god.

Ending in 70 AD, there was a violent war in Palestine in which the Jews caused a lot of grief and expense to a lot of Romans. Even when the war ended the troubles did not, and they flared up again in 116 AD and in 132 AD when there was another full blooded war. Yet Jesus was crucified a few decades earlier as one of these Jewish freedom fighters. How could people head on pilgrimages to the Holy Land in such a climate? Pliny’s letter to Trajan written at this time wanted advice on whether the Christians in Asia Minor should be executed or treated more leniently if they were willing to recant. What emperor was going to tolerate a lot of admirers of a Jewish rebel tramping around Judaea, a country fraught with sedition?

Why do First Century Christians not Respect Jesus as an Original Teacher?

Doherty Pope Clement in his epistle, 1 Clement, written about the end of the first century, first speaks of Jesus as a teacher but Clement seems not to have known anything that Jesus taught. Earl Doherty points out that Christian letter writers in the first century tell us little of the wise teacher and reformer of Judaism—the author of their teachings—supposed to be the living Jesus. They write of a divine Christ not of a man latterly crucified in Palestine. The Christian excuse is the early church had no interest in the earthly life of Jesus and Paul had no need to refer to him because his theology went further. They claim absence of evidence is not evidence of absence—the fallacy of the argument of silence—but this silence is so profound it cannot easily be explained away.

Why did the early Christian writers not know or not acknowledge that Jesus had lived on earth but rather treated him as an eternal cosmic spirit. Doherty’s answer is that Jesus never lived on earth. The earthly life was an invention of the church. The main problem with this idea is that it is hard to see why the church should have invented their god’s death on earth as a crucifixion, the most degrading of deaths reserved for slaves, felons and traitors. Indeed, the most likely answer to the silence of first century Christian writers is that they cared not to allude to Jesus’s life on earth precisely because they knew he was a crucified rebel. They avoided it as a calumny, especially when anti-Jewish feeling was high in the decades of the troubles in Judaea.

Doherty adds that first century writers cite sayings of Jesus in the gospels without crediting him with their authorship. James, the Didache and Paul, quote “Love Your Neighbour”, from Leviticus without strengthening it by adding that Jesus taught it. Whenever authority is given for such commands, it is God’s not Jesus’s. Paul’s epistles offered a faith based on revelation by the God of the Hebrew scriptures not anyone else’s teachings. The epistle to the Hebrews also cites the scriptures not from the supposed teachings of Jesus.

Reply Jesus was not an original teacher—he was not teaching anything new. His teaching was that of the Essenes, who naturally as the most devout of Jews, attributed everything to God. Only when Jesus’s real earthly record—both as an Essene and as a rebel—was forgotten did it become possible to make out that he was an original teacher.

Some works, the Didache, for example, will have preceded Jesus as Essene manuals that later were clumsily Christianised, explaining why Jesus is not invoked within them when expected. The Epistle of James is probably a genuine epistle of James the Just, the leader of the Jerusalem Church. He was Jesus’s successor and of the same rank. He wrote as an Essene, not as a follower of Jesus, and, as the equal of Jesus, his own authority to quote God was sufficient. If the mentions in James’s epistle of Jesus are genuine not interpolations, it is because he understands that the recipients were Jesus’s converts and so particularly indebted to him, not because Jesus had unusual authority as a teacher. In fact, they are probably Christian interpolations.

Paul’s epistles in their moral teaching can be regarded in the same way. Paul, it seems from his three years absence in the desert, was initiated as an Essene, not as a follower of Jesus. Paul required no authority but his own and knew little about Jesus himself. The few “words of the Lord” that Paul offers to his Christian communities seem not to appear in the gospels. Paul had his own channels to God and His Holy Ghost—as did most other early Christian evangelists. It suited him to use Jesus as the earthly vehicle for his own gospel of the cosmic saviour.

The non-canonical epistle of Barnabas also does not cite Jesus for the same reasons. Names like Barnabas, though acceptable Jewish patronymics, look suspiciously like Barabbas, son of the Father, to judge from the gospels, possibly an Essene name or title. So, if Barnabas were really Barabbas, an Essene, he too would have taught God’s word not that of an earlier Essene leader, Jesus. Remember an essential Essene characteristic was humility and self-effacement. They were unlikely to have attributed God’s message to any of their own leadership however worthy. Only their Righteous Teacher, the founder of the monastic sect, was thus elevated. Righteous Teacher possible became a title of the sect’s leader but, after the first one, they would all have been treated as servants of God, not heroes.

Jewish sects, like the Essenes, and the first Christians believed that the end of the world and the kingdom of God were imminent. Paul also begins with this apocalyptic view: “the time we live in will not last long”, and “you know the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night”. Much confusion exists in early works because the title Lord, which belonged to God, was transferred to Jesus. The “Day of the Lord” is properly the “Day of the Vengeance of the Lord”. “Lord” here means God.

As an Essene, Jesus taught the same idea, but Jesus thought the time had already come when he waited at Gethsemane. It did not and he was crucified, so, Jesus was wrong. Paul having been taught by the Essenes knew of their apocalyptic ideas, but they had to be revised when Jesus was crucified. Paul also knew that some of Jesus’s followers believed that Jesus had risen from the dead. Within forty years therefore, God’s kingdom would begin after a cosmic battle. It is this that Paul alluded to.

The epistles do not call Jesus the Son of Man. This apocalyptic figure. in Daniel 7:13, will arrive at the End Time on the clouds of heaven to judge the world and establish God’s Kingdom. The reason is simply that Jesus did not imply that he was Daniel’s “one like unto the son of man” when he called himself “son of man”. It was simply a modest euphemism for “I”. Paul was also expecting the End Time (1 Thes 4) but was unaware Jesus had declared he was Daniel’s Son of Man because he never did make this declaration.

Doherty comments that Paul’s view of the period leading up to the end of the world, especially 2 Corinthians 6:2, has no reference to Jesus’s role in it. Nor does he ever answer the question which people must have asked, “Why did the kingdom of God not arrive when the messiah first came?”. In the epistles, Christ’s anticipated coming at the End Time is never spoken of as a “return” or second coming. The impression is that this will be his first appearance in person on earth.

The verse in 2 Corinthians is the answer. It is Essene:

For He saith, I have heard thee in an accepted time, and in the Day of Salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the Accepted Time; behold, now is the Day of Salvation.

Paul is quite aware that Jesus has died—crucified on earth—and makes out that he was the messiah, but is now in heaven. But he teaches what the Essenes believed, that the acceptable time of the Lord was still to come. The Essene sages had misread the signs of the times when Jesus was their leader and had returned to their arcane interpretations of scripture to check their calculations. They were no less sure that the Day of the Lord was coming, but they still had not successfully arrived at the date of it.

The Day of God’s Vengeance was introduced by the archangel Michael emerging from the Mount of Olives at the head of the angelic hosts of heaven. Michael, the angel was plainly another god within the “monotheism” of the Jews, and was identified by the Essenes with the messiah. Michael was a cosmic figure—the origin of Paul’s creation, perhaps. It is evident that Paul believed that Christ and this angel were the same:

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first.

1 Thessalonians 4:16

It is arguable whether Paul saw this as the first coming or the second coming. Despite Doherty’s arguments Paul speaks of Jesus Christ giving his life for our sins, so if the deceased Jesus were to come at the Day of Salvation he would plainly be coming again. And while the gospels and the epistles do not use the word “parousia” to mean the second coming of Christ, the Epistle to the Hebrews says clearly:

So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation.

Finally, there was surely no need to answer the question of why the kingdom of God had not already come because, the fundamental belief of the first Christians was that it had, or rather that the gate of the kingdom had started to open with the resurrection of Jesus. That is the very reason why people wanted to convert. Because Jesus has been resurrected as the first fruits of the Spirit, they expected to be saved soon—they still do! The reappearance of Jesus or Michael was to complete the job.

Doherty asks what the content of the good news was? Jesus’s teachings are not quoted, but scriptural references given. But the answer is plainly that the good news is that God’s kingdom was nigh. Who was interested in anything else. The prospect of the end of the known world focused the mind admirably on the one coming. Jesus in life was irrelevant. Doherty cannot seem to understand this simple truth. He lives, like all of us, with the prospect of a full life and a natural death, but these Christians were told repeatedly by Jesus then by Paul that the world would end at any moment—like a thief in the night it would be quite unexpected. Does Doherty think that the recipients of this message would be asking what else the messiah taught?

Doherty tells us that Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:45f and elsewhere can speak of Christ as “man” (anthropos), but he is the ideal, heavenly man—a widespread idea in the ancient world—whose spiritual “body” provides the image for the heavenly body Christians will receive at their resurrection. For minds like Paul’s, such higher world prototypes had as real an existence as the flesh and blood human beings around them on earth. But 1 Corinthians 15:45 is clear proof that Paul believed certainly that Christ had been a real man:

And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.

There can be no mistaking this well-balanced construction. At the beginning of time God made man, calling him Adam. At the end of time he made the last such man into a spirit. Paul’s point is that all humans can aspire to the same spiritual life, but he is relating what he considers to be the proof. God makes natural man first then from natural man He makes spiritual man. Someone had to be the man who was unequivocally made into a spirit as all could see. Plainly the reference is to the resurrection of Jesus as the first fruit of the Spirit.

Gospels and Q

In 107 AD, Ignatius, the Christian bishop of Antioch, in his letter to five churches was the first Christian to mention Pilate and Mary but he made no mention of Joseph, Jesus’s father. The Epistle of Barnabas first describes Jesus as a miracle worker.

If Mark is as early as 70 AD, and all four gospels had been written by 100 AD, Doherty asks why none of the early Fathers—Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, the author of the Epistle of Barnabas—writing between 90 AD and 130 AD, quote or refer to any of them? How could Ignatius, so eager to convince his readers that Jesus had indeed been born of Mary and died under Pilate, that he had truly been a human man who suffered, how could he have failed to appeal to some gospel account as verification of all this if he had known one?

How can we know? The likely answers are either that he did not know of the gospels or that they were considered sacred books to be revealed to the initiates. Making books was an expensive and time consuming business. The gospels might have been written but only the originating churches still had copies, and certainly not most Christians. Moreover, the original gospels might have been quite different from what we now have.

Eusebius reports that, in a now-lost work written around 130 AD, bishop Papias mentioned works by Matthew and Mark. Papias called the former Sayings of the Lord in Hebrew. This latter, the original Matthew will have been a book rather like the recently found Gospel of Thomas, a testimonium of wise sayings. Scholars have long tried to find it in the extant gospels and call it Q (from the German “quelle”, meaning “source”). So, originally only Mark had the sort of biographical detail that we now expect in a gospel, and Mark will have been kept under wraps because of the troubles in Judaea.

The sayings of the historical Jesus precede the gospels and was born in the community or circles which produced the document now called Q. No copy of Q has survived, but scholars have been able to reconstruct it as the source of the common material found in Matthew and Luke which they do not get from Mark. Q was not a narrative gospel, but an collection of sayings which included moral teachings, prophetic admonitions and controversy stories, plus a few miracles and anecdotes. It was the product of a Jewish sectarian movement which preached a coming kingdom of God. Q was put together over time and in distinct stages.

The formative stage of Q, Q1, is an instructional collection of “wisdom” literature like Proverbs, sayings on ethics and discipleship, containing notably unconventional ideas. Many are recast Wisdom sayings and are found in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount—the Beatitudes, turn the other cheek, love your enemies. Luke 7:35 calls Jesus a child of Wisdom, and Matthew in his use of Q reflects an evolving attitude toward Jesus as the very incarnation of Wisdom herself. So, these sayings were not necessarily Jesus’s but were Wisdom sayings attributed to him after his death.

The next stratum of Q, Q2, is apocalyptic and therefore likely to be Essene. In contrast to the mild, thoughtful tone of Q1, Q2 contains vitriolic railings against the Pharisees, a calling of heaven’s judgement down on whole towns. The figure of the Son of Man enters, one who will arrive at the End-time to judge the world in fire—the figure in Daniel 7. Here we first find John the Baptist, a kind of mentor or forerunner to the Q preachers. Dating Q is difficult but it all fits the situation pertaining in Judaea from the time of Judas the Galilaean to the Jewish War.

There is good reason to conclude that the wisdom and apocalyptic stages contained no mention of a Jesus as speaker or source. They were traditional teachings of the Essenes probably attributed to the Righteous Teacher, which became a position named after the original. Jesus could have been justly assigned these sayings because he quoted them as a Righteous Teacher, though they were actually composed by a much earlier Righteous Teacher.

While Matthew and Luke often show a common wording or idea in a given saying core, when they surround this with contexts involving Jesus, each evangelist offers something very different, because the sayings have little or no context and the evangelists are simply inventing a suitable context for the sayings. Compare Luke 17:5-6 with Matthew 17:19-20.

Nor are sayings about the apocalyptic son of man’s future coming identified with Jesus, so, when they were later placed in his mouth, Jesus sounds as though he is talking about someone else. This is because originally the son of man, in Daniel, was the angel Michael who was later associated with Jesus as his heavenly counterpart, and became Jesus when he ascended to the balmy place.

The saying now found in Luke 16:16 is thought to be especially revealing by those who deny an historic Jesus:

Until John [the Baptist] there was the law and the prophets; since then, there is the good news of the kingdom of God.

No mention of Jesus. What Christians and skeptics of Christianity always fail to understand is that the great prospect for the Essenes, Nazarenes and first Christians, not to mention lots of other Jewish sects, was that of the kingdom of God. If Jesus or the angel Michael or one like unto the son of man or whoever else arrived to bring it in, he would be hailed as a saviour but only because he brought with him the reality of the kingdom of God. It is when the kingdom of God did not immediately follow that the wolves separated from the sheep, gave plausible reasons for the delay and turned attention to return of the saviour as well as the salvation.

No one, whether John the Baptist or anyone else prophesied any particular saviour. There would be a saviour. Christians made the messiah into Jesus. Some Jews already thought it was the king, Hezekiah, or the king of kings, Cyrus of Persia. Some came to think it was John the Baptist. John certainly was not heralding Jesus. He was heralding the kingdom of God, just as Jesus was, because Jesus inherited his position from John when the latter was arrested and jailed, probably for the last twenty years of his life before he was beheaded.

Doherty is also puzzled that there could ever have been a question in anyone’s mind as to who was the greater, Jesus or John, a point addressed in Q3 (Lk 7:18-35). Yet this merely shows the rivalry there was in the first century between the two sects, the Christians and the sect that became the Mandaeans. Both of these Jewish Essene leaders died doing the same job—trying to persuade apostate and backsliding Jews to give themselves to be saved and enter God’s kingdom. There is nothing surprising in their loyal followers later claiming each was the greater.

Q never uses the term “messiah” for its leader because no one in the sect could claim to be the Messiah. Q contains no concept of a suffering Jesus, a divinity who has undergone death and resurrection as a redeeming act. Q can make the killing of the prophets a central theme (Lk 11:49-51) and yet never refer to Jesus’sown crucifixion. Its parables contain no hint of the murder of the Son of God. Q, like the Gospel of Thomas, says nothing about the death and resurrection. Jesus makes no prophecies of his own death and rising, as he does in other parts of the gospels. In a Q passage in Luke 17:25, the evangelist inserts a prophecy of Jesus’s suffering and rejection. Matthew did not see it in his version of Q (Mt 24:23f). Q has no obvious soteriology in the sense of an atoning death for sin. Yet there is nothing surprising in any of this unless you accept the Christian myth that Jesus was a god. All or most of Q is pre-Christian. The death of Jesus was a surprise to people who expected him to introduce a host of angels from heaven to secure the wicked world for good. The idea that he was a redeeming sacrifice then arose, not before.

The passion, death and resurrection emerged from tales throughout Jewish literature. They reflect the way the Jews saw themselves at the time most of the Jewish scriptures were written or revised, following the Maccabaean revolt—the pious persecuted by the powerful, the people of God subjugated by the godless, but God always preserved a remnant. It is the theme of Joseph, of the suffering servant in Isaiah, of Tobit, of Esther, of Daniel, of 2 and 3 Maccabees, of Susanna, of the story of Ahiqar and the Wisdom of Solomon. A righteous man or woman is falsely accused but then is vindicated and exalted. Christians transferred the same image to Jesus.

Justin

Except for Justin, the Christian Apologists of the second century are also mainly silent about Jesus of Nazareth just as the first century letter writers are. Only in the middle of the second century do the gospels and Acts begin to be quoted. Justin Martyr, writing in the 150s, cites the first identifiable quotations from some of the gospels, though he calls them simply “memoirs of the Apostles”, with no names.

Could the earliest account of Jesus’s life and death have been written as early as 70 AD, and yet the Christian world took almost a century to receive copies of it? Christian historians, like Chadwick, have struggled to find explanations. They say the apologists were debunking the Greek myths with their comical gods—though few educated Greeks believed in the literal truth of the myths and the gods.

The Christianity defended by the apologists was an amalgam of Platonic philosophy and Hellenistic Judaism, which preached the monotheistic Jewish God as superior to Pagan gods. The Jewish scriptures, apparently not the gospels, provided their information about Yehouah, and Jewish ethics were seen as superior to Pagan ethics. The faith of the apologists is Platonism wedded to Jewish theology and ethics, but they spoke of a son of God as the Logos—an intermediary between God and humanity—a more subtle concept than the gods of Olympus and one that Greeks knew of, having invented it, but not of a son of God as a Christ. The idea of the Logos was so popular it had even spread to Hellenistic Judaism. Because this religion was not concerned with the Messiah or eschatology, it has little relationship with Paul.

If the Apologists were making a case for ignorant and superstitious Greeks, why did they not give them the Christian equivalent of the Olympian gods, the central myth of Christianity—the human sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ—for them to chew over?

Of the main apologists up to the year 180 AD when Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria and Origen nestle contentedly into the gospel tradition, none except Justin spoke of an historical Jesus in their polemics with Pagans. Justin came from Ephesus to Rome in the fifth decade of the second century as a Christian, having tried all the main philosophies of the day. Writing a decade later in defence of his philosophy, he said the “Logos took shape, became man, and was called Jesus Christ”. He set up his own school, teaching Christian philosophy in the manner of the Pagan philosophers, apparently independent of a church.

His Dialogue with the Jew Trypho was written in the 150s of the second century but it is set twenty years earlier when Bar Kosiba was in revolt, and seems to include an account of Justin’s conversion. An old Christian philosopher told Justin of the Jewish prophets, who spoke by the Holy Ghost to proclaim the glory of God the Father and his Son, the Christ. Those who accepted the proclamation had true wisdom so this Christ was saviour through imparting wisdom. Continuing to speak like a Gnostic, Justin said that a flame had been kindled in his soul. Addressing the Jew in the book, he concludes:

If you are eagerly looking for salvation, and if you believe in God, you may become acquainted with the Christ of God and, after being initiated, live a happy life.

Where is Jesus of Nazareth? The old Christian mentioned neither Jesus nor any incarnation. Later, Justin spoke of Christ’s death and resurrection, but here the Son saves by revealing God. Justin relates a conversion that did not involve any knowledge of the Jesus of history.

Trypho, a literary device to represent sceptics rather than a real person, states that Christians were mad to make a crucified man second only to God and adds what must have been a common argument:

Christ—if he has indeed been born, and exists anywhere—is unknown.

Some Other Apologists of the Second Century

According to Eusebius, another apologist, Theophilus, became bishop of Antioch in 168 AD. In his treatise To Autolycus, written about 180 AD, he reveals he was born a Pagan and became a Christian after reading the Jewish scriptures, not any gospel.

Autolycus asks what “Christian” signified. Theophilus explained they were called Christian because they were “anointed with the oil of God”—christos in Greek means one who is anointed. Theophilus never mentions anyone entitled Christ, or Jesus! Christians have their doctrines and knowledge of God through the Holy Spirit. For Theophilus, the Son of God was the Word through whom God created the world, who was begat by him—along with Wisdom.

He mentions “gospels” but they are the word of God, not a history of a man called Jesus. Jesus is not quoted as the author of the gospel sayings—they are simply the teaching of the gospels. Theophilus seems not to know of any incarnation into flesh, or the works of Jesus. Everyone obedient to the commandments of God would have eternal life—no atonement on the cross. When Autolycus demanded an example of one who had been raised from the dead, Theophilus apparently cannot think of Jesus as an example.

Athenagoras of Athens, possibly writing slightly earlier in Alexandria, had embraced Christianity, but shows no involvement in any church, or interest in rituals and sacraments. In A Plea For the Christians addressed to the emperor, he says that they accepted one god who made the universe through his Logos, the idea and power of everything, and the first product of the Father and therefore his son. But in a lengthy discourse he does not mention that the Logos was incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth.

Christian doctrine is the word of God, and does not come from human beings. He cites sayings similar to the Sermon on the Mount such as “Love your enemies” and “bless those that curse you” but attributes them to “scripture” with no specific gospels mentioned. He speaks of the “witness to God and the things of God” and “our teaching” but seems not to know any teaching that he is willing to attribute to Jesus.

Since there is no incarnation, there is no death and resurrection of Jesus, and no Atonement in the Athenogoras version of second century Christianity. Eternal life is gained “by this one thing alone: that we know God and his Logos”. The names Jesus and Christ never appear in Athenagoras.

The anonymous Epistle to Diognetus is often included with the Apostolic Fathers because it is a defence of Christianity addressed to Hadrian. The supreme God sent the Logos, his Son, down to earth, but no time, place, or identity for this incarnation are provided. The name Jesus never appears, but Atonement does appear—God “took our sins upon himself and gave his own Son as a ransom for us”, but no gospel details are given, no explanation is offered of the way in which the Son was “given”, and no resurrection is mentioned.

Tatian, a pupil of Justin, converted to Christianity by reading the Jewish scriptures. Later in Syria he composed the Diatessaron, the first harmony of the four gospels. Earlier, about 160 AD, in Rome,he wrote an Apology to the Greeks, urging Pagan readers to turn to the truth but omitting the words “Jesus”, “Christ”, and “Christian”. Though the concept of the Logos, which must have been well known to any Greek of a philosophic bent, he mentions nothing about the incarnation of the Logos. Eternal life is gained through knowledge of God, not by the atoning sacrifice of a Christ, and the resurrection of Jesus is not mentioned even when resurrection is the subject. The sayings Tatian cites are not attributed to an historical Jesus—knowledge comes only from God.

Yet, in his only allusion to the incarnation, he tells the men of Greece that Christians were not fools when they declared that God had been born in the form of man, and asks them to compare their own stories with the Christian ones. He cites Greek myths about incarnate gods undergoing suffering and even death to assist humanity. “We too tell stories”, he declares. Plainly the Greeks must have known that the Christian god had appeared on earth, but still there is no unequivocal mention of the manner of this and we have to assume he is alluding to the gospels perhaps just when they were beginning to emerge openly. Note that by comparing the Christian narratives with the Greek myths, Tatian implies that they are equally mythical, apparently a last ditch to retreat into to avoid any flack that came his way regarding Jesus as a Jewish insurrectionist. By implying the gospel story and Jesus were mythical like the myths of the Greeks, he could deny it as history.

Minucius Felix

Minucius Felix probably before Tertullian, who seems to have used him as a model, wrote in Latin, Octavius, a dialogue between a Christian and a heathen. Again Christianity seems not to have an historical Jesus. Henry Chadwick, the Christian historian, claims that Minucius used Tertullian’s much longer Apology, written around the year 200, thus pushing Octavius into the mid third century.

Chadwick says Minucius hardly mentioned Christ and said nothing whatever about the bible or sacraments out of “tact and restraint”, because his work was addressed to a “fastidious literary public”. If Minucius Felix wrote second, besides omitting Jesus, he missed out many important arguments in the longer work. The nature of the two works shows that Minucius wrote first at a time when “tact” was necessary and Tertullian wrote much more openly and harshly when it was not.

The truth is that Minucius was writing at a time when the Bar Kosiba revolt and Jewish riots were still in people’s minds and to mention Jesus as a similar Jewish rebel, and had been crucified for it, would not have been tactful. Nearly 100 years later we know from Tertullian and others that such tact was no longer needed, as Chadwick knows, forcing him to claim the intended audience was so refined they could not bear to hear the word “Jesus” mentioned.

The words, Christ and Jesus, do not appear in Octavius though the word, Christian, does. Octavius’s Christianity depends solely on God, the rejection of Pagan gods, the resurrection of the body and its future reward or punishment but has no place for the Son or even the Logos. No appeal is made to Jesus’s own resurrection as proof that the dead will be resurrected, even when asked directly:

What single individual has returned from the dead, that we might believe it for an example?

Caecilius lists the Pagan accusations against Christians and Octavius refutes them, as you would expect. Caecilius declares that the Christians are an ambominable congregation that should be rooted out. They were debauched, indulging in shameless copulation at their love feasts, and dismembering infants and drinking their blood during initiation. They worshipped the head of an ass.

And some say that the objects of their worship include a man who suffered death as a criminal, as well as the wretched wood of his cross… such depraved people worship what they deserve.

The person and crucifixion of Jesus appear clearly, but alongside accusations that are grotesque to the modern ear, with no suggestion that they are different in nature from the falsehoods that have to be refuted. Naturally, Octavius refutes these slanders, apparently including the accusation that Jesus was a criminal. He says men who had died could not become gods, because a god could not die, nor could men who are born. He ridicules the gods procreating themselves, thus denying that God could beget himself as a son. He also rejects miracles. Minucius is denying almost all that Christians hold dear.

And how does Minucius Felix deal with the accusation that Christians worship a crucified man and his cross? He says that it is a disgrace that Christians have to answer such charges as those put, especially as they lead chaste and virtuous lives, unlike Pagans. The charge of worshipping a crucified criminal he refutes by denying that the man was a mortal man.

When you attribute to our religion the worship of a criminal and his cross, you wander far from the truth in thinking that a criminal deserved, or that a mortal man could be able, to be believed in as God. Miserable indeed is that man whose whole hope is dependent on a mortal, for such hope ceases with his death.

The implication is that the criminal was really a god, but Minucius does not spell it out, and seems to deny the incarnation. As for the cross, he flatly states that Christians did not worship them or even want them, but Pagans did! Refuting the charges of debauchery and eating infants, Minucius gives no alternative explanation of the sacred rite of the Eucharist, or that Jesus was supposed to have instituted it.

These omissions—indeed, these suppressions—of Jesus were deliberate. The suppression of the story of the historical Jesus and the bowdlerized explanations of the name “Christian” and the source of Christian ethics, is an opportunistic denial of the gospels. The historical Jesus of Nazareth was a liability until the Jews were subdued, because Jesus was crucified as a Jewish anti-Roman bandit.

The history of Jesus was not told for the first forty or so years because Christians were expecting Jesus to return and purify the world. Accounts of his life appeared beginning in about 70 AD when Mark’s gospel was written, but the ill-favour caused by the bloody Jewish war of 70 AD meant it and its successors had to be kept secret, and so they were, but the Jews kept revolting and even fought another war ending in 135 AD. So the books which clearly stated that Jesus was crucified as a Jewish rival to Caesar still had to be kept under wraps.

Christian preachers and priests tell us that Christians were willing to die for their faith but they were not evidently ready to admit that Jesus was an anti-Roman rebel. The truth is that some of the earliest Christians died because they were seen as anti-Roman rebels or as supporters of such rebels, and some later Christians died because they refused to do their duty in the military, a legal requirement punishable by death that Romans saw as equally unpatriotic. As long as Jewish nationalists kept fomenting seditions, the Christians who wanted to keep alive—not surprisingly, most of them—were obliged to omit or gloss over the career of their incarnated god.

Only when the Jews were finally dispersed and Jerusalem was made into a non-Jewish city did Jewish rebellion get finally suppressed. So by about 160 AD, the story of Jesus as a crucified bandit began to come out into the open, but only the boldest Christian apologists, like Justin, were willing to argue the toss for a long time. Justin, the most famous of the apologists, openly put Jesus at the center of his explanations, but Pagan philosophers ridiculed the idea of a crucified god. After about 180 AD the pressure to suppress Jesus had disappeared and the gospels were openly circulated and spoken about.

The apologists claimed the superiority of Christian ethics and the view of God as the supreme good. That being the case, it was awkward for them to then claim and defend the fact that this god had incarnated as a Jewish seditioner. How is it possible to raise the stature of your religious view when, for most people, your god or sacred teacher seemed anything but good? Once the bad feeling caused in the Roman empire by the rebellions of the Jews evaporated, Jesus himself could be redeemed as a teacher and as an atoning sacrifice in Pagan eyes, but the immediate Roman propaganda and political dislike for things Jewish had too be overcome first.

Christian scholars like to claim a shift in emphasis from the Palestinian Christianity of the gospels to a Greek philosophical Christianity drawing on Plato and Hellenistic Judaism—a necessary step to appeal to the Greeks on their own level of understanding. It was indeed necessary because Jesus could not be openly admitted. All four gospels existed shortly after the turn of the first century and since the Jewish War was forty years in the past, the early bishops were perhaps allowing the gospels into the open. But then there was another uprising in 116 AD and before they could get over that one, there was the second Jewish war in 132-135 AD. The point is that gospels were in circulation, though there would not have been many of them not in the hands of the bishops while the Jews were rebelling.

The short apology of Aristides to the emperor Antoninus Pius, the earliest known apology, written in Syriac about 140, plainly knows of a gospel tradition if it is not based on a written gospel. God is born of a virgin, had twelve disciples, was pierced, died and was buried, to rise after three days. Syrians might have been a more sympathetic audience than Greeks and Romans, and it does not appeal to Greek ideas even the Logos, though Greek ideas were widespread. Because of its regional nature, it might have been the earliest apology to dare to state the truth openly—the Christian god died as a Jewish enemy of Rome.

Christian polemicists therefore did not want to publicise the contents of the gospels in their speeches or written polemics, but they will have known that their erudite Pagan opponents knew what they hoped to keep from the ordinary punters.

One might argue that if someone like Minucius Felix was being silent for political reasons, he would not have raised the taboo subject through his token Pagan accuser. Surely, the reason is plain in his answers. He wants to imply that they are not true while leaving the possibility that they are. He is trying to be like Paul—all things to all men. His treatment of these items of Christian belief is tantamount to a denial of them—but he does not exactly deny them!

The Pagan eventually converts to Christianity and arrives the next day for his first lesson as a catechumen. Here is another reason why all of this looks mysterious and writers are cagey about it. The apologists say themselves that the Christians had an initiation, and at a time when the popular religions were mysteries. Christianity too was offered as a mystery, so that not too much could be said about Jesus the criminal. That was to be revealed to the initiate.

The agent of the conversion, Octavius in this little drama, might be accused of lying, but Christianity has got where it has on nothing else, so it plainly never harmed its growth to success. The point is that, once someone has got as far as taking the step to initiation, all that has been said before is “fully” explained, with every wrinkle smoothed out by every lying ploy that can be brought to bear. Commitment carries it through, once people have decided for themselves that it is God’s truth.

Tertullian in about 200 AD makes no attempt to conceal the myth of Jesus. Not that hostility to Christianity was any less but hostility to Jews as enemies of Romans was less, and so the Christian god seemed less obnoxious. By the beginning of the third century, the last Jewish war was a whole lifetime past and the claim that the Christian God had died as a rebel against the Romans was no longer such a bitter pill. Tertullian unequivocally declares Christ, through his incarnation, his death and his resurrection, the Son of God who appeared among us:

Let no one think it is otherwise than we have represented, for none may give a false account of his religion… . We say, and before all men we say, and torn and bleeding under your tortures we cry out, “We worhip God through Christ!”

He is happy to admit what Minucius Felix omitted—the events in Judaea at the time of Pilate. It was past history and was not being revived every long hot summer by Jewish Zealots.

Five “Fallacies” Answered

Earl Doherty on his website tells us there are five fallacies of New Testament research. Now, the biblical scholars can defend themselves, but since these fallacies are simply problems that Doherty has with standard Christian theory, they can be answered in terms of a proper hypothesis—the hypothesis that Jesus was an Essene leader who led a brief war against the Romans and became and object of wonder.

Doherty: Fallacy 1. Jews, both in Palestine and the Empire, could believe that a human man was the Son of God. Within a handful of years of Jesus’s supposed death we know of Christian communities all over the eastern Mediterranean, most if not all within predominantly Jewish circles. Such Christians were numerous and troublesome enough in Rome to be expelled by Claudius in the 40s! The traditional Christian view is that these communities were founded by missionary apostles like Paul. They are supposed by Christian myth to have persuaded Jews that a humble preacher, executed in Jerusalem as a subversive, had risen from the dead, redeemed the world and was in fact God’s pre-existent Son who had helped him create the universe. For Doherty, this is a ludicrous proposition.

He explains that Judaism’s fundamental theological tenet was, God is one, but he accepts that the first Jewish Christians, such as Paul, were flirting with a compromise to monotheism in postulating a divine son in heaven. But he was a part of God and well founded in scripture. The popular view of God at the time, developed by the Gnostics, was that God gave off “emanations” that themselves appeared as distinct entities—Wisdom, the Logos, the Son. But Doherty says these spiritual beings were not ordinary men! Gentiles were more ready to accept the idea, and it produced the “parting of the ways” between the Christian movement and its Jewish roots. Any Jew would have reacted with apoplexy to the unprecedented message that a man was God. The Jewish God could not even be represented by a human form, and thousands bared their necks for Pilate’s swordsmen to protest against the human images on Roman standards raised upon the fortress wall overlooking the Temple. To believe that ordinary Jews were willing to bestow on any human man, no matter how impressive, all the titles of divinity and full identification with the ancient God of Abraham is simply inconceivable.

Paul is not only assumed to have done this, but he did so without ever telling us that anyone challenged him on it, that he had to defend such a blasphemous proposition. His comment in 1 Corinthians 1:23 that the cross of Christ is a “scandal” refers to the idea that the divine spiritual Messiah had been crucified (in a mythical setting), not that a recent man was God.

Fallacy 1: Reply. Most of what Doherty writes is true of pious Jews. But the Jews who became the first Christians were not devout. They were sinners and backsliders as the gospels say. What is really meant is that they were Hellenized Jews, Jews who had adopted Greek ways and manners. In the gospels, the Roman occupiers employed many of them—they were called Publicans—but pious Jews would have nothing to do with them. Jesus aimed to win over these lost sheep to the cause of the kingdom—Jewish nationalism—and that is why “The Jews” are depicted as hating him. In the Acts of the Apostles, the Jewish Jews are called Hebrews.

After the Crucifixion, the Hellenized Jews were hounded by Saul and were dispersed but the Hebrews, among whom were the apostles, were not troubled. Saul’s conversion was from orthodoxy, which he tried to follow at first but which he was uneasy with despite his zeal in pursuing Christians, to Hellenisation. Hellenized Jews had accepted much of the Eastern mystery religions popular at the time and were ready to accept a hybrid of Judaism and the mysteries they had grown used to. Indeed, it seems that was the attraction to Paul, who might have started the synthesis proper. He was from Tarsus in Cilicia, a centre of mystery worship.

When Paul went converting in the wider Empire, it was to these Hellenized Jews that he turned. Many had fled Paul’s own persecutions in Judaea and had already set up churches elsewhere. Now that he was one of them, and apparently came with the authority of the Jerusalem Church, they offered him support and lodgings while he went about converting other Hellenized Jews and gentiles. The troubles he had in his adventures were from orthodox Jews in the Diaspora, who certainly did object to his blasphemies and eventually shopped him to James in Jerusalem, and gentile men who did not like his preaching of chastity to their women. So, the only fallacy here, Earl, is your own.

Doherty: Fallacy 2. Burton Mack suggests that this cultic deification of Jesus took place under the influence of gentiles in Hellenistic cities like Antioch. But this hardly explains Paul, a Jew born and bred, who was converted within 2 to 5 years of Jesus’ssupposed death. Did a whole Hellenistic mythology develop around Jesus overnight, in the heart of Jerusalem—and Paul swallowed it? Or did he believe in Jesus as the Son of God right from the start? Such scenarios fail to provide any convincing explanation for why such an immediate fragmentation would have taken place, why the Christian movement began as “fluid and amorphous” (James Robinson).

Mack admits that “much of the evidence is secondhand, and all of it is later”. Precisely. Out of a record of multiplicity, Christian scholars have deduced a single founder and point of origin which is based on a later stage: the gospel story, formed by the so-called reconvergence of the original diverging strands. But no document records this postulated initial phenomenon of differing “responses” to the historical man, this break-up of Jesus into his component parts. Given a record whose earliest manifestation is nothing but diversity, common sense requires us to assume the likelihood that this was in fact the incipient state, and that the new faith arose in many different places with many different expressions.

Fallacy 2: Reply This is less useful than discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a needle. The whole thing is hypothetical from beginning to end. The evidence is second hand and late. Isn’t all of the Christian evidence second hand and late? Someone says the movement immediately fragmented and someone else says it was fluid and amorphous, it diverged then converged, but all of this is meaningless speculation. What record testifies to the earliest manifestation of Christianity as being nothing but diversity? Gnosticism is meant, no doubt.

Christianity as we see it today was first started by Hellenized Jews who were persecuted into leaving Jerusalem. They went to different parts of the Empire and started churches knowing little more than that God’s messiah had been and the kingdom of God had begun. They had only the religious forms that they were familiar with, a varying mixture of badly remembered Essenism and not very well known mystery cultism.

Plainly, there was diversity here, but the unity was that all expected the door of the kingdom to swing open and admit them within forty years. Probably all of them celebrated a messianic meal of bread and water or wine that was to become the Eucharist, and new converts would have been admitted with baptism. These sacraments had been taught by Jesus and the apostles and were not hard to remember.

Mystery religions had similar cultic meals and initiation ceremonies including lustrations in some cases. Beyond this, each church might have had a different image of the elevated state of Jesus and perhaps these were all later attributed to him, but the central tenets of the religion were likely to have been uniform.

What is perhaps confusing is the Jewish presence in the Empire. There were a lot of sects in Palestine and most would have had equivalents elsewhere. Some might have been inclined to broadly support the new movement.

Evidently, Paul was one of the innovators of the embryonic religion. He had been brought up in a Pagan atmosphere in Tarsus and, as a boy impressed by religion, he must have taken a lot in. Whether his parents were Jewish or godfearers, he evidently went with them to Jerusalem and hoped for big things in Judaism. Paul was a self-confessed liar, and it is questionable that he was in the school of Gamaliel, quite an exclusive establishment and requiring a precocious knowledge of the law of Moses it is unlikely Paul had.

He tried to prove his earnestness by joining the temple guard and persecuting dissident rebellious sects, particularly the Hellenized Christians, doubtless hoping to be accepted as the Hebrew of Hebrews he later claimed he was. Then he allegedly converted to Christianity on the road to Damascus but the telling three years in the desert strongly suggests he tried to become an Essene. He failed and was expelled. He now knew a lot about the mysteries, a lot about Judaism and a lot about the particular sect called the Essenes with its apocalyptic outlook.

Paul was plainly a rogue and an opportunist, if not a double agent. It is likely he could no longer remain in Palestine and he moved off, eventually to become the apostle to the gentiles. He was always on good terms with the Romans despite the whippings he said he’d had and was saved by a Roman soldier from Jews who wanted to stone him for blasphemy. He had a privileged position in his journey back to Rome where he disappears, supposed by Christians to have been martyred. It is unlikely. He was probably pensioned off to Spain where he was unknown.

Doherty: Fallacy 3. Scholars have long asked questions like that of Elizabeth Schlüsser-Fiorenza: “Why do the (Christological) hymns use the language of myth to speak of Jesus of Nazareth who was not a mythic figure but a concrete historical person?” John Knox points to Ephesians 1:3–10 as a kind of mythological drama created to explain Jesus, entirely in supernatural terms. He says that the myth has been created based on memories of the Lord, but where are those memories? We cannot accept Knox’s claim that the myth in Ephesians is built upon “historical data” when that data is never pointed at or even alluded to. A better explanation would be that the historical data has been added to the myth later.

Fallacy 3: Reply The reasons are given above but there is a valid point here. It is illustrated by Ephesians 1:3-10 which is a prayer to God of Essene origin as is proved by its belief that those offering it were chosen before the foundation of the world. The Essenes considered themselves as God’s Elect for this reason. Paul has Christianised it crudely by adding four reference to Christ: “of our Lord Jesus Christ”; “in Christ”, “through Jesus Christ” and again “in Christ”. Simple! Paul and others did this often which is why the Christ of prayer and hymn often seems mythical. The first Christians believed Jesus was already at the right hand of God and soon they too would be able to look upon God’s face, providing they remained repentant.

Doherty: Fallacy 4. They rationalize that Paul “had no interest” in Jesus’s earthly incarnation, that his theology did not require it. This is difficult to fathom. Paul’s faith is centred on the crucifixion. What bizarre mental processes could possibly have led him to disembody it, to detach it from its historical time and place, from the life that culminated on Calvary? Why would he transplant the great redeeming act to some mythological realm of demonic powers who were responsible for “crucifying the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:8)? Why would he give Christ “significance only as a transcendent divine being” (Herman Ridderbos)?

Could Pilate not have served Paul as an example of the “wisdom of the world” which could not understand the “wisdom of God”? For Paul, baptism is the prime sacrament of Christian ritual. Through it, believers were adopted as sons of God. Paul in Romans 6 makes no mention of Jesus’s baptism by John and the myths surrounding it. In all the bitter debates he engaged in through his letters, such as on the validity of the Jewish dietary laws, Paul never mentioned his Lord’s own actions and teachings concerning the subjects under dispute.

Are we to accept, too, that Jesus’s earthly signs and wonders would not have been an incalculable selling point to gentiles, immersed as they were in popular Pagan traditions of the wonder-working “divine man”, a concept which fitted the earthly career of Jesus to a “T”? Even if Paul had expunged Christ’s human life from his own head, his audiences and converts likewise felt no interest and did not press him for details of Jesus’s earthly sayings and deeds—something of which he shows no sign in his letters? In any event, explanations for Paul’s silence and lack of interest would have to apply to all the other early epistle writers, who are equally silent—a situation so extraordinary as to defy rationalization. Amid such considerations, the argument from silence becomes legitimate and compelling.

Fallacy 4: Reply The answer has already been given. Christians were awaiting the kingdom. It might take forty years but it might come like a thief in the night, unexpectedly. They were no longer concerned with his life on earth because they saw him already glorified in heaven as all Christians have since. The difference today is that people are interested in his earthly life too because the kingdom of God has receded to some distant time in the future or simply happens when we die, if we have been good enough. So, we have time to think about Jesus’s career on earth.

If Paul was trying to convert people or keep his converts on the strait and narrow he gave them an image of the future, the glory of heaven, not the past. Paul himself plainly was not interested in Jesus’s past and that is not a rationalisation. The only relevance of Jesus’s life was that he had given his life as the perfect sin offering. Everyone who believed could be saved. What is difficult to fathom about this. Why is it a bizarre mental process or a cynical rationalisation? We have to take care not to project backwards our own highly rational culture. This world was largely irrational by our standards.

Regarding particular points. No early evangelist had any desire to remind unconverted gentiles of the way Jesus died. This will have been one of the mysteries revealed to them when they converted—Christianity was a mystery as Paul often says—and certainly not something to be put in open letters. Paul saw Christ as divine but baptism was a ritual purification. Even if he knew about the details of the baptism of Jesus he will not have wanted to imply that a god was impure.

On the dietary laws, Paul could not have cited Jesus because Jesus was a Jew who accepted the law of Moses as God’s law. Paul, not Jesus, abrogated them to allow gentiles to become honorary Jews.

Jesus was a man. He was not supernatural. How could he do supernatural things? All of these wonders were misunderstandings of Essene language or Jesus’s parables and speeches. Paul knew nothing of miracles because these mundane facts were not interpreted as miracles until later.

The audience of the evangelists did not ask about the life of Jesus because the emphasis was on the coming kingdom not on the career of the man who opened the door. They would be able to meet him in person soon enough.

Regarding other epistle writers, they had the same attitude as Paul in the early days. Later they were probably just ignorant, nobody having ever shown any interest in anything but the risen Christ. When the forty years of cosmic struggle passed, there arose a need for a life of Jesus and it was supplied, according to tradition, from the reminiscences of Peter, the evangelist, through Mark, supposedly Peter’s companion and interpreter, Peter being an Aramaic speaker. However it is unlikely to have been circulated except in restricted circles until the memory of the Jewish Wars had faded.

Doherty: Fallacy 5. Finally, many today find increasingly acceptable the direction which most recent liberal scholarship seems to be following: that Jesus was only a man, a Jewish preacher who was somehow divinized after his death, a death which did not result in resurrection. But here it seems to me that they face an insurmountable dilemma. Such a divinization on the scale that Jesus underwent would have been absolutely unprecedented, and there is no more unlikely milieu for this to have happened in than a Jewish one.

Nor is this divinization gradual, a graph line which ascends as his reputation grows, as the things he did in his life take on magnified stature and interpretation. Rather, at the earliest we can see any evidence for it, Jesus is already at the highest possible point, cast in an entirely mythological picture: fully divine, pre-existent before the creation of the world, moving in the celestial spheres and grappling with the demonic forces. Those deeds of his life which should have contributed to such an elevation are nowhere in evidence.

Fallacy 5: Reply There is really no need to write any more. The answer is above. Jesus was the prophet and agent of the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom. Many Jews, both Hebrews and Greeks, flocked to be baptised as repentant to be admitted into it. The righteous were to be resurrected into the kingdom after three days according to scripture. Jesus was crucified and on the third day his dead body had disappeared. The gullible followers interpreted the disappearance as the resurrection of Jesus and began to see him all over the place, just as people today see Elvis Presley. They deduced that the kingdom had indeed begun and Jesus was the first of the resurrected, the first fruits. In elation, they sought people to tell and convert.

No one else saw anything of the kingdom and they deduced then that it could be up to forty years coming. The heavenly host and the host of demons were to fight for forty years, paralleled by disasters and warfare on earth. The latter seemed to be happening. The times were troubled, the faithful waited, repentant. Jesus in this time was already a god, sitting at the right hand of God in heaven waiting for the end of the cosmic battle.

Plainly, Jesus became a god—an angel, the archangel Michael—as soon as his followers thought he had been resurrected, and this is reflected in the physical ascension into heaven written into the gospels. Arguably, the Hebrew followers of Jesus might have been more suspicious, though they accepted the lesser gods called angels and demons and had the tradition of God’s messiah, perhaps an angelic figure, but the Hebraic Jews do not count in the creation of Christianity. The apostate Hellenized Jews believed it, and they were the ones to spread it first into the Empire at large, thus forming the basis for a universal religion.

Doherty seems not to understand, even though the Christians themselves have been saying it for 2000 years—it was not the events of Jesus’s life which led to his deification but his death and apparent resurrection.

The Making of a Myth

When later reports attribute some spectacular act to a person that on-the-spot accounts had not mentioned, we should doubt that the alleged event had occurred, for why otherwise would the earlier reports have omitted it? If some other famous person is known to have performed such acts we may begin to suspect a deliberate falsification, an exaggeration or an invention; a desire to put our hero on a par with some other. If we find that motives existed for stories to be made up to create or enhance a reputation, our suspicions should certainly be aroused.

Christian documents fit this sort of pattern. The later Christian works are, the more details of the life of the god they contain—his life seems to grow with time. For the gospel writers, the motive to exaggerate was that they wanted people to join the Christian movement rather than some other.

G A Wells compares it with the growth of the legend of Faust. Faust lived in the sixteenth century and gained a modest notoriety in his lifetime. He was an educated man, a doctor, who travelled widely, performed magical feats and then died mysteriously. His contemporaries wrote about him and related something of his unusual behaviour. But in the 50 years after his death, his life was hugely exaggerated, his accounts and deeds multiplied. Reality became so overlaid with layers of fancy it could not be distinguished from legend… Why?

To serve as a guide to Christian believers—a warning not to bargain with the devil!

To serve as a guide for Christian believers biographies of Jesus were written about 50 years after his supposed death but, unlike Faust, there is no unequivocal contemporary evidence of his life. Later Faust stories served the aims of their authors just as later versions of the gospels served the interests of their editors—those of the growing Church. Most of what we know of the life of Jesus has accreted like the legend of Faust. Like Faust there seems to have been a real person at the core of it but, unlike Faust, we know little about that person.

Jesus’s reputation seems to have been fancifully embellished:

• incidents in his life parallelled incidents in the lives of previous gods and heroes
• there was a motive for inventing the stories
• contemporary documents were altered
• once the historicity of Jesus was accepted, the references to him multiplied
• later documents give more details than earlier ones
• careful research to get at the truth is ignored or vilified by those committed to the myth.

Even the crucifixion was not original. Thousands died on the cross at that time. And even before! Jewish history records an uncannily similar event from the previous century. The Talmud tells of a Jesus ben Pandira who was slain and hanged from a tree on the eve of Passover about 100 BC when Alexander Jannaeus crucified 800 Pharisees. Furthermore ancient religions are replete with incarnate gods who suffered for mankind, died, were buried, descended into Hell and rose from the dead to save the faithful. Many incidents in Jesus’s life have already happened to earlier gods or in earlier Jewish history.

In the first century AD people thought in terms of the miraculous and accepted the most unlikely assertions as being fact. The gods of Olympus manipulated nature for their own purposes and so too the divine Christ of the first century Christians had to show his supernatural power. He raises the dead, walks on water, turns water into wine, stills tempests and feeds multitudes with a few loaves and fishes. Angels sang at his birth and the dead walked at his death.

All of this is consistent with the story of Jesus being essentially mythical. It does not prove that it is, but the development of the gospel stories in the first century can be explained by unhistoric embellishment of an otherwise shadowy figure originally of little historical importance, a minor rebel who became a fantasy, a figment of Paul’s obsession with the god who dies.

Comment

From Earl Doherty

Someone pointed me to your page. I don’t have time today, but will try to find some in the next little while to go through it. But I did notice that your link to my site has been long dead. The old “magi” account has been replaced by another:

human.st/jesuspuzzle

There is also another JP site, but containing less material:

pages.ca.inter.net/oblio~/jesus.html

Why did someone have to point you to the page? We once exchanged emails and even books, and agreed to exchange links. I seem to recollect that you intended to publish a criticism of my book, but I never heard more about it. Anyway, I note that the link has changed and will change it on the page. Perhaps you would link to me as a matter of courtesy.

I receive many books and many requests to make links, including from those who have chosen to make links to me. If you’re familiar with my site, you will know that I review only books that are by mainstream NT scholars (in order to refute them), or else by those who share my views on there having been no historical Jesus, or at least question it. Your book does not do that. I also make very few links to others, and again this is only to those who share my mythical Jesus view, at least in part. Peter Kirby is the one exception, but he has a site which is a good general resource to those working in the field. Your book looked interesting, but it doesn’t fall into the above category. I also found it a bit of a difficult read physically (I read through a couple of chapters), as it has a rather small print. An eye condition of mine makes it uncomfortable to read that small, no matter who has written the book. Hope you understand.

I am reasonably good at understanding words, and sometimes arguments. Are you? You imply that I am begging you for a link. It is not just your eyes that are bad. I did not chose to link to you. You sent me your book. It is still on my desk and is dated 1999, which will be when you sent it. I did not ask for it, or pay for it, but I sent mine in exchange, and you said you would review it. You claim now that you only review mainstream NT scholars, as if you were in the mainstream yourself. You moved the goalposts, but I did what I said I would, linked to you, and gave you some commentary. The internet works by reciprocity. You asked for a link. You give a link in return. That is called courtesy, or in modern spiel, netiquette.

You did not reciprocate. That is your own choice, but do not ask me to understand shabbiness, or even conveniently bad memory. I do not accept it of Christians and do not see that I should treat critics of Christianity any differently. It was manifestly plain a long time ago that you were not going to do what you said. And despite our earlier correspondence you contacted me again, pretending you have only just become aware of my site—apparently not “a good general resource”. OK! That is your view, but the weakness of your eyes seems a desperate excuse for acting unworthily.

I leave it to you to do whatever you think is right.

I have no recollection of what led us to exchange books. It is almost five years now. (I can’t look up old emails because they were all lost in a computer crash last year.) I could be wrong, but I find it unlikely that I approached you first, as I was never a great websurfer and have rarely “asked” people to make links to me. It’s generally the other way around. Be that as it may, I can only act according to present circumstances. The reading “problem” is not an excuse. And I have limited time to do work for the site, including reviews, as I have a steady job (the money-earning kind). Thus, the limits I have set on the work I do. Nor did I “pretend” just to discover your site. I was responding to a recommendation from someone, and my memory of a book exchange as well as any “agreement” we might have made 4 or 5 years ago, wasn’t operative at the time.

You sound like a Christian. Your liberal use of quizzical marks might help you feel comfortable with your bad memory, but this present set of correspondence was also initiated by you. Long ago, I had abandoned any thought that you would honour what you said, and had seen no point in approaching you again—you approached me again, however “unlikely” it happens or “rarely” it happens or “generally” it is the other way round. I did say it is not just your eyes that are bad, but not only is your memory defective, you cannot even think of a reason why you would send me, and perhaps many others, your book when it was first published. Let me suggest that you were trying to publicise it by sending it to sources that might give it a plug. I responded but, quite apart from the promise of a review of my book, I expected a reciprocal link out of courtesy. I am plainly too old fashioned.

Anyway, if you cannot dredge it from either your computer or your own brain, there is nothing I can do to help, having tried reminding you, and since you are not willing to be reminded, there is nothing further to be said. You might however note that I have repaired the faulty link to your page, as you requested.

I think you have issues which need addressing. Your tone and remarks are a vast overreaction. This will end my exchange with you.

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