The singular form of Adonai is Adoni (“my lord”). This was used by the Phœnicians for the pagan god Tammuz and is the origin of the Greek name Adonis.

Was Christ a Fiction? 2

Mythological Hero
Crucifixion
Mythological Language
Forty Years
Objective History?
A Broad View

Abstract

Robert M Price, a former evangelist turned battling skeptic, asks, “Was Christ a Fiction?”. Price declares he was in more ways than one. The worst way is that Jesus is really the fly used by evangelists, priests and other crooks to catch people to control them. Apologists’ say there was “too little time between the death of Jesus and the writing of the gospels for legends to develop”, but 40 years is quite sufficient. In any case, apologists cannot face the argument that Jesus never existed because their whole mentality presupposes a Jesus who died around 30 AD. That Christ is mythical means there was no Jesus alive in Pontius Pilate�s time to give rise to a legend but instead, Pilate�s time was later selected as the time when Jesus lived. Orally transmitted legends usually come from the generation before last.

Mythological Hero

The life of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels is that of the worldwide hero of mythology:

The divine hero’s birth is supernaturally predicted and conceived, the infant hero escapes attempts to kill him, demonstrates his precocious wisdom already as a child, receives a divine commission, defeats demons, wins acclaim, is hailed as king, then betrayed, losing popular favor, executed, often on a hilltop, and is vindicated and taken up to heaven.

If these features are found everywhere in heroic myths and epics, but never in real life, it is not safe to believe anyone who tells you that in one particular case it really happened. Yet that is what the born again punter does and that is what the scheming priests make children believe before thay have developed any critical faculty. Some believers glibly accept these other myths but declare them false, to which one has to accuse them of special pleading. They do not know that this one rather than any other is the “true” myth.

If we do not use the standard of current real-life experience to assess history, we would find ourselves accepting every myth and outlandish fairy tale there ever was, and would finish up drowning in a morass of make-belief. And why would God or Nature do things that do not happen now? As Price says: “Isn’t God supposed to be the same yesterday, today, and forever?”

So far so good, but here Price begins to get carried away because he says the whole of the Jesus saga is captured in the standard myth, “with nothing left over”. It is therefore:

arbitrary to assert that there must have been a historical figure lying back of the myth. There may have been, but it can no longer be considered particularly probable, and that’s all the historian can deal with—probabilities.

He says he is more and more attracted to the theory that Jesus never existed and so is simply a fiction.

This is where we have to part company with Mr Price because a great deal of Mark’s gospel, considered by many to have been the earliest one written, has quite specific details of an extended and peculiar campaign in Galilee and a march on Jerusalem. The interesting thing about this is that it is set in a particular and known historical period and involves historical characters and historically verifiable institutions. It was a period of deep discontent and of prolonged revolution ending in a four year bloody war. Now, the mythical Jesus turns out to have been crucified as a rebel against Rome, a most likely happening if a rebel is what he was and a most unlikely choice of death if the designers of a new religion wanted to choose a hero.

Price goes on to say that the passion stories of the gospels are too similar to contemporary myths of dying and rising saviour gods including Osiris, Tammuz, Baal, Attis, Adonis, Hercules and Asclepius to be real. Like Jesus, these figures were believed to have once lived a life upon the earth, been killed, and risen shortly thereafter. Their deaths and resurrections were in most cases ritually celebrated each spring to herald the return of the life to vegetation. In many myths, the saviour’s body is anointed for burial, searched out by holy women and then reappears alive a few days later.

Crucifixion

So this is where history and myth begin to merge. The popular hero in Palestine was caught and crucified. He was a holy man because those who fought for independence for Judaea in those days generally were holy men, the Jews considering themselves God’s Chosen People. Since they were expecting a miracle from God—though it never came—they persuaded themselves it had, and began to merge history and myth. At a time when news passed by word of mouth, the rumour machine was probably highly efficient and many of the rebel’s followers might have had the myth not long after it was invented.

Price adds that the details of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection accounts are similar to the events of several surviving popular novels from that period in which two lovers are separated when one seems to have died and is unwittingly entombed alive. Grave robbers discover her reviving and kidnap her. Her lover finds the tomb empty, graveclothes still in place, and first concludes she has been raised up from death and taken to heaven. Then, realizing what must have happened, he goes in search of her. During his adventures, he is sooner or later condemned to the cross or actually crucified, but manages to escape. When at length the couple is reunited, neither, having long imagined the other dead, can quite believe the lover is alive and not a ghost come to say farewell.

Apologists contend that all these myths are plagiarized from the gospels by Pagan imitators, pointing out that some of the evidence is post-Christian. Nevertheless much is pre-Christian. The early Christian apologists prove it by arguing that these parallels to the gospels were counterfeits in advance, by Satan, who knew the real thing would be coming along later and wanted to throw people off the track! They could not have argued this way had the Pagan myths of dead and resurrected gods been more recent than the Christian.

C S Lewis suggested that in Jesus’s case “myth became fact”, an argument that Price pooh-pooh’s, Lewis being a soft-headed apologist for Christianity. The others were myths, but this one actually happened. But though Lewis meant this as an apology for his belief, it is likely to be true—not by accident but by design, so to speak. The very point the earliest gentile bishops would have been making to the Roman housewives and slaves they recruited was that this dying God had “actually happened” recently, and witnesses could confirm it.

This latter is both the reason why an absurd religion got a foothold at all, and the reason why the gospels seem unhistorical. There were witnesses and after 70 AD, there were even more, the Jews having been dispersed from their homeland. These witnesses confirmed that there had indeed been a Jesus who was crucified, but he was not a god but a rebel against the Romans. They confirmed the fundamental fact, and for the first gentile Christians as for born again converts today, it was sufficient—they wanted to believe.

What of the details though? The Jewish witnesses could quote particular cases and did. How were they to be refuted? The bishops could not say they were false, because that would undermine their case. They wanted to accept they were true, then their god was proved to have lived in detail. So, they simply told their followers pious lies, just as they have done ever since—the Jewish witnesses had got the story a bit confused. If it is for the glory of God and his son, Jesus Christ, then any lie is the truth, so they confused the truth with their distortions but still retained enough of it to keep the essence of the story of the witness. All of these lies are set down in remarkably unadulterated form in Mark’s gospel and have been interpreted in The Hidden Jesus [†]

Click for AskWhy! Books In Print and order form

Mythological Language

Despite the bishops’ best efforts, besides gullible souls, there were plenty of skeptics then, just as there are gullible souls and skeptics today. Paul, the first evangelist to the gentiles, did not want to talk at all about the god except in mythical language. He never mentions Jesus performing healings because the healings were not physical healings at all but spiritual ones, persuading Jews to take courage and oppose the foreign rulers. Paul would not have wanted to mention this. Only twice does he speak of “words of the Lord”. He never speaks of Jesus as a teacher because Jesus was not particularly known as a teacher, and what he did teach was rebellion.

Paul attributes the death of Jesus not to Roman or Jewish governments, but rather to the designs of evil “archons”, angels who rule this fallen world, an obvious early attempt to put space between the historical Jesus who was murdered by the Romans he hoped to convert and the God Jesus, Paul set out to create.

Romans and 1 Peter both warn Christians to watch their step, reminding them that the Roman authorities never punish the righteous, but only the wicked. Price amazingly asks: “How could they have said this if they knew of the Pontius Pilate story?” The answer is that they were trying to deceive their flocks—who at that stage will not have known the story—as preachers have done ever since.

Two epistles, 1 Thessalonians and 2 Timothy, do blame Pilate or Jews for the death of Jesus, and can be shown on other grounds to be non-Pauline and later than the gospels. The story was by then out in the open, successfully smudged by the bishops as it has since remained, despite the attentions of hundreds of “scholars”.

Price claims that Jesus was eventually “historicized”, redrawn as a human being, much as Abraham, Joseph, David, Solomon, Moses, Samson, Enoch, Jabal, Gad, Joshua the son of Nun, and other ancient Israelite gods had already been. Different attempts to locate Jesus in recent history were made by laying the blame for his death on well known tyrants including Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate and even Alexander Jannaeus in the first century BC! Now, if the death of Jesus were an actual historical event well known to eyewitnesses of it, Price says there is simply no way such a variety of versions, differing on so fundamental a point, could ever have arisen!

We must take, Price’s word for it that there were these other attempts beside the familiar gospel ones to ameliorate the story of Jesus, but that they should have been made is not in the least surprising. First century bishops did not have the internet. Different versions of excuses were made and some of them now appear in the New Testament even though they are contradictory. Some bishops might have tried to make out that Jesus was punished by a Jewish king not a Roman governor, for obvious reasons.

Forty Years

Price himself, answering the apologists’ claim that there was “too little time between the death of Jesus and the writing of the gospels for legends to develop”, says 40 years is easily enough time for legends to arise. He also points out the apologists are not facing his argument that Jesus never existed for they presuppose a historical Jesus who died around 30 AD. The theory that Christ is mythical means there was no Jesus alive in Pontius Pilate’s time to give rise to a legend but instead, that later, Pilate’s time was selected as the time when Jesus lived. Just as somebody always knows somebody who had a miraculous experience, orally transmitted legends usually come from the generation before last.

Now, on the idea outlined in The Hidden Jesus, this is possible. The gospel clues suggest that Jesus began his campaign in 18 AD and died in 21 AD which precedes the governorship of Pilate. There is reason to believe that Christians, when they took state power in the fourth century, doctored the dates of Pilate in Josephus so that anyone who found or had kept a copy of the Roman archive pertaining to the crucifixion of Jesus could be discredited as a fraud. Only two easy alterations were needed to the letters which served as Greek numbers.

It just about remains possible that the dates of Pilate are correct and Jesus was crucified by an earlier governor. The legend that it happened in the reign of Pilate then arose because Mark and the first Christians, who had been waiting fifty years for the end of the world, decided that the bloody defeat and diaspora of the Jews and the destruction of the temple in 70 AD sufficed for it, and though they had forgotten exactly when the events had happened, simply extrapolated them back forty years—a Jewish generation, the maximum extent of the prophecy—from then into the reign of Pilate as Prefect of Judaea.

Price questions the historicity of the passion by asking why the earliest gospel crucifixion account in Mark spins out the terse narrative from quotes cribbed from Psalms 22? Well, the answer is plain. Whether Jesus in reality died a noble death or otherwise, the story had to be embellished. The legend of Jesus was now being made and the followers were not going to tell the truth about their god, so begin to take messianic references from the scriptures and apply them to Jesus—now Christ. He asks also why does 1 Peter have nothing more detailed than Isaiah 53 to flesh out his account of the sufferings of Jesus? The answer is the same. And the more recent gospels carry on mythologising, even finding a book of wisdom sayings and attributing them to Jesus.

Objective History?

Price also gets on dodgy ground when he disparages quests for the historical Jesus by turning to Albert Schweitzer, an admirable scholar but a Christian. He says the “historical Jesus” found by those bothered to look is “just” a reflexion of the individual who is looking. Price hints that Schweitzer was the “single” exception, but any exception invalidates the rule.

On the other hand, it is quite natural, and almost inescapable, that everyone is moulded by their own experiences and social situation. All investigators therefore paint themselves into their findings. The truth, inasmuch as it is possible to get it, is found by the continuation of this process until by trial and error and eliminating the excesses and the mistakes and bringing in new discoveries, eventually a reasonable approximation will be found.

Plainly once someone is dead and times have passed, the truth can never be resurrected. Even President Kennedy is now a myth, but we still have a reasonable picture of him. It is pure defeatism in history to say that the historian can never get the truth because he projects himself into his picture. Says Price:

Today’s Politically Correct “historical Jesuses” are no different, being mere clones of the scholars who design them.

So there is no point in doing history at all? Nonsense!

Price now finds comfort from C S Lewis: “Each ‘historical Jesus’ is unhistorical. The documents say what they say and cannot be added to”. Lewis took it for granted, as all Christians do, that the gospel picture is sufficient—it is true. All the questors are doing is saying, “Not necessarily, mate! What about this? And what about this too?” By assessing the “probabilities” in all these pictures, an approximation to the truth will be found. Why does Price object to this?

He explains that:

Even if there was a historical Jesus lying back of the gospel Christ, he can never be recovered. If there ever was a historical Jesus, there isn’t one any more. All attempts to recover him turn out to be just modern remythologizings of Jesus. Every “historical Jesus” is a Christ of faith, of somebody’s faith. So the “historical Jesus” of modern scholarship is no less a fiction.

The correct attitude is that they are all approximations to the truth. If all the facts about someone’s life are available, it is still impossible to know the historical person. Facts have to be selected to present an accessible portrait. If many of the facts are missing or have been deliberately altered, as in the case of Jesus, then it becomes harder still because it becomes a matter, not of selection, but of interpretation and we have to look for clues in the events and circumstances. None of this makes the task not worth undertaking for otherwise history—and indeed many other fields of inquiry—is pointless.

It seems that Price is being distracted by the fashion for postmodernism—a denial of scholarship in favour of empty verbosity. It is a sort of extension of Christian pious lies into every field of scholarship, and unsurprisingly Christians are at the forefront of it. All you have to do is make up anything you like by association of ideas, negation, astrology and fantasy—any means as long as it does not involve reason or facts—to discredit, preferably, a conventional piece of learning generated by someone else’s sincere efforts and that is scholarship. It’s baloney, but typical of the insanity of the world.

A Broad View

G B Shaw, in the preface to Androcles and the Lion, says that Jesus was insane. George Moore, in his Apostle says that the figure of Christ in Luke, of which the preachers are fond, is “a lifeless, waxen figure, daintily curled, with tinted cheeks, uttering pretty commonplaces gathered from The Treasury of the Lowly, as he goes by”. Renan, while denying Jesus’s divinity, thought that there was “something divine” about him. The more the liberal Christian feels compelled to sacrifice the miracles and divinity of Jesus, the more zealous he is to magnify the grandeur of his personality. Most Christians say Jesus is “the grandest figure in all literature”, or that, if the Jesus of the gospels did not exist, the creation of his personality by some obscure writers of the first century is itself a miracle:

The thesis is within thirty years there had evolved such a coherent and consistent complex of traditions about a non-existent figure such as we have in the sources of the Gospels is just too implausible. It involves too many complex and speculative hypotheses, in contrast to the much simpler explanation that there was a Jesus who said and did more or less what the first three Gospels attribute to him. The fact of Christianity’s beginnings and the character of its earliest tradition is such that we could only deny the existence of Jesus by hypothesizing the existence of some other figure who was a sufficient cause of Chrstianity’s beginnings—another figure who on careful reflection would probably come out very like Jesus!
James Dunn, The Evidence for Jesus

Dunn thinks he is preserving the gospel Jesus with this argument, but he is not. A figure “very like Jesus” is not Jesus! While Wells is probably wrong that Jesus never existed, he also draws a parallel with Faust who did exist but as a shadowy figure not that of legend. Jesus was likely to have been the same. He did exist and was “very like” the gospel Jesus but he was an historical person, free of the supernatural, but neverthless a remarkable Jewish leader. That is the thesis of these pages.

Jesus believed in eternal torment for people of weak will. He loved little children but advocated virginity as the higher ideal, cutting at the root of family life and blighting love. Though gentle to the adulterous woman, he bitterly and vulgarly abused the Pharisees, to which you will find no parallel in any Pagan moralist of the time.

In the gospels, Jesus recommends hardly a sentiment that he does not violate. He scorns synagogues and meeting-places, and then founds a Church. He has no word of guidance in the problems of social life because be believes that the world is about to end. He is the archetype of the Puritans, scornful of all that is enjoyable in life, bitter and unjust to those who differ from him, quite impracticable, even foolish, in many of his counsels. Not surprisingly, the modern world has no use for Christ.

One solution of all this tissue of contradictions is that a dozen different people’s excuses for Jesus have been mixed together in these composite writings, the gospels. One man did not write any gospel. One spirit did not dictate them. They embody the contradictory excuses of isolated and often hostile communities in different parts of the Greco-Roman world. It was not the same man who made up the excuse of Jesus loving children and scorning his mother. It was not the same man who made Jesus into a wine-bibber and yet tell us to live on bread and sleep on stones, who made Jesus the friend of whores and then deny human sexuality. We can assume Jesus, as an Essene prince, was consistent in his views.

Paul’s letters show how they began to change according to the audience. To one group he has to talk much about fornication and feasting, to another about correct ritual, to another about points of theology. He cites little from any knowledge of Jesus, but sets the lying agenda for Christianity by being all things to all men.

The phenomena of a Christianity in the first century implies an historical person. From a general knowledge of Hindu and Chinese sacred literature, we have less evidence of the personal existence of Kong-fu-tse or Buddha than of Jesus. The documents are even further removed from the events than the epistles and gospels are. Yet no historian doubts their historicity.

Probably Peter was never at Rome, but the other Roman bishops named, from about 70 AD onward, are not doubted. This group was a thousand miles from Judaea, and there were churches all the way between, with overseers (bishops), elders (priests), and servers (deacons). Lives of Jesus were circulating amongst them, and those lives or gospels do present Jesus as a man, living in Judaea. The Church combatted and defeated the Gnostics who held that Jesus was never contaminated by a body. Basilides, one of the ablest of the Gnostics, an Alexandrian, tried to teach in the first half of the second century that Jesus was never a man, and the whole Church promptly and emphatically repudiated him. He had to found a special half-Persian, half-Christian sect.

The epistles of Paul seem to take us back to about the middle of the first century. By 60 AD, groups of Christians existed in every large Roman city. Paul’s belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus is, he admits, not accepted by all. It was hard to accept but that Jesus was born, taught, and was executed in Judaea is at the basis of Paul’s teaching, and he never mentions any member of a church who doubts it. The Gnostics with their spiritual Jesus came later.

Paul speaks of Cephas and others who were actual companions of Jesus. The genuineness of all the epistles must be questioned to doubt this. In 2 Corinthians 4:10 Paul says that it is fourteen years since he first came to believe in Jesus, to believe that he was God, not that he was man. So he joined the Christian body, and mingled with them in Jerusalem, within less than ten years of the execution of Jesus. No Jew there seems to have told him that Jesus was a mere myth. In all the bitter strife of Jew and Christian the idea seems to have occurred to nobody.

Setting aside the gospels entirely, ignoring all that Latin writers are supposed to have said in the second century, a large and roughly organized body of Christians existed at a time when men were still alive who remembered events of the third decade of the century. Many of these people will have had quite different ideas about Jesus from the myths that the churches were building up, but none of them said that Jesus did not exist. They all knew he did, and told the truth about him as they understood it. They knew he was not a god!

To early Christians, Jesus is not primarily a teacher. A collection of wise teachings might in time get a mythical name attached to it and the myth might in further time become a real person. But from the earliest moment that we catch sight of Christians in history, the essence of their belief is that Jesus was an incarnation, in Judaea, of the great God of the universe. The supreme emphasis is on the fact that he assumed a human form and shed human blood on a cross. So it seems more reasonable, more scientific, more consonant with the facts of religious history, to conclude that Jesus existed, but for believers from the beginning he was seen as an incarnate god and given the divine attributes of “the great God of the universe”!