A Christian is a man who feels Repentance on a Sunday For what he did on Saturday And is going to do on Monday

T R Ybarra

The Silent Jesus 2

Why Do the First Century Christians not Respect Jesus as an Original Teacher?
Gospels and Q
Justin
Other Apologists of the Second Century
Minucius Felix
…more

Abstract

Each Pagan saviour god had overcome death to assure the initiate immortality. Paul knew 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 Judaism and the mysteries. This leader had the title Jesus or saviour, and was thought by Hellenized Jews to have been the Jewish Messiah (christos, in Greek). So, Paul made Jesus Christ into Christianity’s saviour god, saying he had died and been resurrected as a redeeming act, promising resurrection and eternal life to the believer. But Paul could not account for all the Christian centres in the empire. Many existed before he got there. Rome had Jewish Christians by the 40s, and a churchman remarked that Romans believed in Christ without benefit of the apostles. Soon after the crucifixion, Christian communities existed all over the eastern Mediterranean, their founders unknown. They were Hellenized Jews of which Paul was one.

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.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.