The Silent Jesus 1

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

Abstract

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?

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Jesus is a Myth | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History

Page Tags: Earl Doherty, Q, Quelle, Silent Jesus, Jesus Puzzle, Christianity, Christians, Jewish, Jews, Roman, Rome, First Century, Minucius Felix, Bible, New Testament, Christ, Christian, Christianity, Christians, Doherty, God, Gospels, Jesus, Kingdom, Paul, Resurrection

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