An eternal holiday is a definition of hell.

The Silent Jesus 3

Five “Fallacies” Answered
The Making of a Myth

Comment

From Earl Doherty

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.

Five “Fallacies” Answered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Making of a Myth

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus’s reputation seems to have been fancifully embellished:

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

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

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

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

Comment

From Earl Doherty

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

human.st/jesuspuzzle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.