The Jesus Puzzle
By Earl Doherty
By Earl Doherty
Many of the elements in the Gospel story have been rejected by modern critical scholarship as unhistorical...our purpose is to examine all of them, and to show that the Gospels are unreliable as an historical record, or as providing any basis for supporting the historicity of Jesus.
Jesus of Nazareth, and the Gospel story, cannot be found in Christian writings earlier than the Gospels, the first of which (Mark) was composed in the late first century.
There is no non-Christian record of Jesus before the second century. References in Flavius Josephus (end of the first century) can be dismissed as later Christian insertions.
The early epistles, such as Paul and Hebrews, speak of their Christ Jesus as a spiritual, heavenly being revealed by God through scriptures, and do not equate him with a historical man. Paul is part of a new "salvation" movement acting on revelation from the Spirit.
Paul and other early writers place the death and resurrection of their Christ in the supernatural-mythical world, and derive their information about these events, as well as other features o their heavenly Christ, from scripture.
The ancients viewed the universe as multi-layered: matter below, spirit above. The higher world was regarded as the superior, genuine reality, containing spiritual processes and heavenly counterparts to earthly things. Paul's Christ operates within this system.
The pagan "mystery cults" of the period worshiped savoir deities who had performed salvific acts which tool place in the supernatural-mythical world, not on earth or in history. Paul's Christ shares many features with these deities.
The genuine philosophical-religious concept of the age was the intermediary Son, a spiritual channel between the ultimate transcendent God and humanity. Such intermediary concepts as the Greek Logos and Jewish Wisdom were models for Paul's heavenly Christ.
All the Gospels derive their basic story of Jesus of Nazareth from one source: whoever wrote the Gospel of Mark. The Acts of the Apostles, as an account of the beginnings of the Christian apostolic movement, is a second century piece of myth-making.
The Gospels are not historical accounts, but were constructed through a process of "midrash," a Jewish process of reworking old biblical passages and tales to reflect new beliefs. The story of Jesus' trial and crucifixion is a pastiche of verses from scripture.
"Q" - a lost sayings collection extracted from Mark and Luke made no reference to a death and resurrection, and can be shown to have no Jesus at its roots, roots which were ultimately non-Jewish. The Q community preached the kingdom of God, and its traditions were eventually assigned to an invented founder who was linked to the heavenly Jesus of Paul in the Gospel of Mark.
The initial variety of sects and beliefs about a heavenly Christ shows that the movement began as a multiplicity of largely independent developments based on the religious trends and philosophies of the time, not as a response to a single individual.
Well into the second century, many Christian documents lack or reject the notion of a human man as an element of their faith. Only gradually did the Jesus of Nazareth portrayed in the Gospels came to be accepted as historical.
First Century Zeitgeist
Christianity and other Jewish apocalyptic sects, more mainstream Jewish proselytizing activities, various pagan salvation cults, all had their apostles tramping the byways of the empire, offering brands of redemption and future exaltation for the individual believer. By the middle decades of the first century, the world...was "a seething mass of sects and salvation cults."
Gospel Authorship Bogus
The assigning of the Gospels to legendary figures of the Christian movement was a product of the later second century, and critical scholarship regards such translations as inaccurate.
Most of the Gospel story has been relegated to fiction by recent critical scholarship.
Christian tradition, for the better part of two millennia, has regarded the four Gospels as independent accounts of the events of Jesus' life and death, by persons in the know, providing a fourfold witness to those events. Most Christians today still believe that. But New Testament scholars know better, and they've known it for almost two centuries.
...the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, rather than being independent corroborations, are direct copies of Mark. Matthew reproduces almost 90 percent of Mark in his own text, Luke over 50 percent.
Sages Don't Mention Jesus
Seneca (died 64 AD), the greatest Roman writer on ethics in his day, has nothing to say about Jesus or Christianity...Stoic philosopher Epictetus espoused a "brotherhood of man" doctrine, aiming his message at the poor and humble masses...But he apparently had not heard of his Jewish precursor. The historian Arrian preserved some of Epictetus' lectures but records no mention of Jesus.
Epictetus' reference to "Galileans," if this means Christians, tells us nothing about whether the object of their worship was mythical or historical, and the same is true for a famous reference from Pliny the Younger contained in a letter to Trajan around the year 112...Even subjecting them to torture, Pliny found "nothing but a degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant length."
In his witty epigrams, the satirist Martial (died 103 AD) depicts the most diverse characters of his contemporary Rome, but Christians who believe in the deity of a crucified Jewish preacher are not among them.
Martial's youngest colleague Juvenal (died 138 AD), a poet of broader and more bitter invective, also gives us a vivid picture of the foibles and fools of the empire's capital in his day, but he has no barbs for Christians either. The first of the satirists to pillory Christians is Lucian, who in the 160s wrote On the Death of Peregrinus in which he mocks them for their gullibility in accepting beliefs "without any sure proof."
Pliny's uncle, Pliny the Elder, was a Roman writer on natural history. As part of his voluminous writing career, he assiduously collected reports on all forms of phenomena in nature, such as eruptions, earthquakes and all manner of astronomical events...makes no mention of prodigies associated with the beliefs of Christians: no earthquakes or darkenings of the skies reputed to have occurred at the crucifixion of their founder, nor any star of Bethlehem that was supposed to have marked his birth. (Since Nero is reported to have had Christians executed in great numbers after the fire of 64, one might presume that Pliny would have been familiar with the sect.
If the silence on Jesus in the earlier works of both Tacitus and Josephus casts doubt on the authenticity of their later references, then we have truly lost every clear non-Christian reference to Jesus as a human being before the latter half of the second century.
Nowhere in all of his seven letters, written around the year 107 AD, while he was being brought to Rome for execution, does Ignatius quote a single teaching of Jesus, nor a miracle, nor any detail of the passion under Pilate which he so ardently defends.
...we are confronted with a situation in which four different Christian writers over a period of some 40 years, ranging from Alexandria to Antioch to Asia Minor to Rome, show no knowledge of written Gospels - and this up to a period some 60 years after the standard dating of Mark...Though the Fathers are beginning to draw on sayings and maxims which they attribute to Jesus, their abysmal ignorance of the basic content of the Gospels, especially in regards the passion, would suggest that such documents and their disseminations are a late phenomenon.
In the writings of the Apostolic Fathers prior to Justin Martyr, we have no clear witness to any of the written Gospels. Those who have studied this matter have concluded that the echoes of Gospel material occasionally found in the Fathers are derived from floating oral traditions or perhaps small collections of sayings, these elements would have found their own way into the written Gospels.
Religion of Paul (not Jesus)
Stepping onto that stage is the first witness to the Christian movement, one who left us with the earliest surviving record of belief in a new Savior and system of salvation: the wandering apostle Paul.
Paul is claiming that he is the medium of God's revelation; through him the world is learning about the Son, the newly-disclosed means of salvation for Jew and Gentile alike.
Paul Doesn't Mention Disciples
If an earthly Jesus had chosen personal followers - referred to in the Gospels and Acts as "disciples" - one would not know it from Paul and other early writers. The word disciples never appears in the New Testament documents outside the Gospels and Acts, even though many of these supposed followers would have still have been alive at the time of Paul, brimming with memories and stories of their experiences with the Master himself. On such things the disciples are silent.
Paul applies the term "apostle" to a wide range of Christian missionaries, from himself and Barnabas and assorted other colleagues, to rivals he viciously condemns...it is only with the Gospels, written half a century or more after Jesus' supposed death, that we ind the term narrowed to a select group of men personally chosen by Jesus.
Some scholars, such as Rudolf Bultmann (Theology of the New Testament), have rejected outright the historicity of the Twelve as an inner circle accompanying Jesus in his ministry.
...the only names of apostles from Jerusalem which he (Paul) records anywhere in his letters are Peter, John and James, the latter being the head of the Jerusalem church, not the James of the twelve in the Gospel tradition.
Gospels vs. Epistles
If we had to rely on the letters of the earliest Christians, such as Paul and those who wrote most of the other New Testament epistles, we would be hard pressed to find anything resembling the details of the Gospel story. If we did not read Gospel associations into what Paul and the others say about their Jesus Christ, we could not even tell that this figure, the object of their worship, was a man who had recently lived in Palestine and had been executed by the Roman authorities with the help of a hostile Jewish establishment. Could this be because they are not in fact speaking of any such figure?
Could it be that if we remove those Gospel-colored glasses when reading the early Christian writers, we would find that all of them, Paul especially, have been telling us in plain and unmistakably terms exactly what the earliest Christians did believe in, and what the Christ they all worship really was?
Jewish monotheism and ethics were embraced by great numbers of gentiles who joined Jewish synagogues and sects in varying degrees of conversion. One of the features of Christianity was the formation of gentile groups who adopted Jewish ideas and practices, eventually considering themselves the new inheritors of the Jewish God's promise. These mutual crossover influences gave rise to the new faith which was a hybrid of both cultures, and a product which would shape the future of the Western world.
...yet to use the word "Christianity" or a phrase like "the Christian movement" is fundamentally misleading.
...it also implies...that it was all set in motion by a specific historical figure, Jesus the Christ.
...In reality "Christianity" in its beginnings was much more diffuse. It was made up of several unrelated strands of activity within the religious philosophy and culture of the time, strands which lacked any common point or figure of origin. Only through a unique set of circumstances did all of those strands come together to produce the picture of Christian origins which the world has envisioned for so long.
The first parent was a Jewish preaching movement centered in Galilee, although it seems to have extended beyond that region. (Galilee is an area of Palestine located about 75 miles north of Jerusalem). The itinerant prophets of this new "counter-culture" announced the coming of the kingdom of God and anticipated the arrival of a heavenly figure called the Son of Man who would judge the world. They taught a new ethic and advocated a new society, they claimed the performance of miracles, and they aroused the hostility of the religious establishment.
The kingdom of God movement in Galilee produced all the traditions which ended up in the Gospels as part of the ministry of the fictional Jesus: about conflict with the establishment, healings and miracles, the new ethic for the kingdom, about the imminent end of the world and the arrival of the Son of Man.
Out of the Galilean Tradition grew the Gospel of Mark.
The second parent was not so localized....the "Jerusalem Tradition," and though Jerusalem was an important center for this half of the Christian picture, in reality it too was comprised of many strands. It came to life in numerous places across the eastern half of the Roman empire, expressing a great variety of ideas. It too was a preaching movement, built on a Jewish base but combining Jewish and pagan traditions. It was conducted by apostles who might roam far afield to deliver their message and establish communities of believers. That message was about a heavenly Son of God who was both an intermediary between God and the world, and a Savior figure. He was variously called Jesus, or Yeshua (meaning "Yahweh saves" in Hebrew), the Christ (Greek for the Hebrew "Maschiach," or "Messiah," meaning "Anointed One), and the Son. Some looked upon this new Son of God as a Revealer who bestowed saving knowledge of God, others as one who had undergone death and resurrection. All manner of apostles like Paul were going about preaching this divine being and often not agreeing among themselves about him; indeed, they could be at each others' throats, as certain passages in Paul's letter reveal.
The two traditions (Galilean and Jerusalem) had nothing to do with one another. They have nothing in common.
Mythmongering at Work
The epistles have been appended to the Four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles as though they all relate to the same Jesus figure, as though they follow on Gospels and Acts in some natural sequence. But this "New Testament" was put together only the latter part of the second century. The majority of the epistles, which came from all over the Christian world, were written earlier than the Gospels, and demonstrate no knowledge of those Gospels or their content. Nor do virtually all of those which were written later.
Jerusalem Tradition Accounts
Modern scholars have begun to recognize the great divide between the world of the Gospels and the world of the epistles.
The documents which supposedly record Jesus' preaching career in the towns and countryside of is home province (the Q document)...say nothing about him going to Jerusalem or abut anything that happened to him when he got there. There is no reference to his death and resurrection, nor is the Jesus figure found in the Q document given a role as a Savior.
On the other side...the message of apostles like Paul who went about the empire preaching a Son of God, has nothing to say about a ministry in Galilee. The epistles attribute no teachings, no miracles, no appointment of apostles, no biographical details to the Christ Jesus, they talk about. They focus entirely on the believer's relationship to the heavenly Son and on his redeeming sacrificial death and resurrection. The latter are never placed in an historical setting.
Peter & James (Jerusalem)
...are part of the same "Jerusalem Tradition" proclaiming salvation through belief in a dying and resurrected Christ, a divinity who is not identified with a recent historical man.
Spurious Biblical Documents
In that portion of the New Testament following the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, there are 52 documents. Most of them were not written by the authors whose names they bear. Among the 13 epistles assigned to Paul, scholarly study and computer analysis have judged only seven as genuine. Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon. (2 Corinthians is an editing together of at least two separate letters and Corinthians, Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians were likely written within a decade or two of St. Paul's death (presumably in the '60s) by followers or members of his congregation. Their authors used Paul's name in order to give their letters greater authority.
The epistles to the Hebrews is anonymous. Of those under the names of Peter, James, John and Jude, none today are judged to be authentic. That is they were not written by the legendary followers of Jesus.
Dating of these documents is notoriously difficult, and wide leeways are allowed.
Those 22 documents in the latter part of the New Testament contain roughly 80,000 words. They are the product of about a dozen different writers, Paul being the most prominent.
As astonishing as such a silence may seem, an equation such as "Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God and Messiah" is missing from all early Christian correspondence. The Jesus of the epistles is not spoken of as a man who had recently lived.
...we are left with an entire corpus of early Christian correspondence which gives us no indication that the divine Christ these writers look to for salvation is to the identified with the man Jesus of Nazareth whom the Gospels place in the early first century - or indeed, with any man in their recent past.
Real vs. Supernatural
It is important to realize that the many references in the epistles to the "death" or "rising" of Christ are not, in themselves, references to physical events on earth or in history. They, along with a handful of 'human' sounding terms, are part of the myth of the Son; they relate to the activities of this divinity in the supernatural realm...Like Paul's Christ, savior gods such as Attis and Osiris had been killed; like Paul's Christ Osiris had been buried like Christ on the third day, Adonis and Dionysus had been resurrected from death. All these things were not regarded as historical; they had taken place in the world of myth and higher reality.
The author of the epistle to the Hebrews also waxes dramatic about the Son...Though this author devotes a dozen chapters to detailing the Son's redeeming activities in a heavenly sanctuary, he never identifies him with the man Jesus of Nazareth or any other human being.
Paul has no sense of Jesus as a recent ethical teacher. Rather, Christ is a divine presence, a channel to God and to knowledge of spiritual truths.
The Jesus Seminar's Findings
What did Jesus teach? The Jesus Seminar has rejected as inauthentic some three quarters of the sayings attributed to him. Even the famous "love thy neighbor" commandment which Christian history has always regarded as the centerpiece of Jesus' teachings...has been judged "gray" (not too likely).
But if none of the sayings and deeds of Jesus found in the Gospels are attributed to him in the epistles and other early documents, this will indicate (a) the Gospels cannot be accepted as providing any reliable historical data, and thus (b) the fundamental basis for the historicity of Jesus - namely the Gospels, since he appears nowhere else in the surviving record - has been seriously undermined.
The Historicity of Mary
Non-Gospel Christian writings before Ignatius have nothing to say about Mary, her name is never mentioned. Nor does Joseph, Jesus' reputed father, ever appear.
As for the Nativity stories in Matthew and Luke...nowhere in the first century are such images discernible. Shepherds, angels, magi, mangers, or overlooked inns are never mentioned, nor is the city of Bethlehem or the great census under Augustus. No star lights up the night sky at Jesus' birth in either Christian or pagan writings. No association with a cruel Herod and his slaughter of innocent children, an event unrecorded by historians of the time, is ever made.
The Crucifixion & Cross
It would be strange indeed to find that the cross was not a universal motif in all Christian expression from the very birth of the faith. The cross and the resurrection: together they formed the twin pillars of Christian trust in salvation.
...Paul nowhere places the death and resurrection in an historical earthly setting. Nor do any of the other epistle writers.
Paul does not even tell us that Jesus was tried.
Within the New Testament itself, one of the underlying sources of many of the sayings in both Matthew and Luke, the Q document which forms the basis of the Galilean Tradition, can be shown to contain no concept of a Jesus who suffered and died, let alone one who was resurrected.
From Bethlehem to Calvary, there is a resounding void on the places and details of Jesus' life and death which resonates throughout the entire record of early Christian correspondence...Where are the holy places?
In all the Christian writers of the first century, in all the devotion they display about Christ and the new faith, not one of them expresses a desire to see the birthplace of Jesus, to visit Nazareth his home town. No one talks about having been to the sites of his preaching, the upper room where he held his Last Supper, the hill on which he was crucified, or the tomb where he was buried and rose from the dead. Not only is there no evidence that anyone showed an interest in visiting such places, they go completely unmentioned.
The words Bethlehem, Nazareth and Galilee never appear in the epistles, and the word Jerusalem is never used in connection with Jesus.
Jesus the Christ
For several centuries, Judaism had asked the question: How was God to save his people? Who would be the agents involved? In many people's minds, that agent would be an Anointed King, the Messiah, a descendant of David.
The Greek word for "Anointed One" is Christ. It is not a proper name, but a designation, a title.
Strictly speaking, the Christian icon should be referred to not as Jesus Christ, but as Jesus the Christ. Jews regarded the information about this anticipated Messiah as having been embodied in prophetic and other writings, and the number of passages taken to refer to him grew in proportion to the number of those who searched for such things.
Paul's Ear to the Ground
Paul and other early Christian writers are speaking of Christ in exactly the same language as we find in the broader philosophical world, both Greek and Jewish. Paul's idea of the spiritual Son has absorbed both the Logos and personified Wisdom. In reading scripture and imagining he is being inspired to view of God's Son, Paul is drawing on the prominent ideas of is day and the deeper heritage which lay behind them.
Paul and Grecian Influences
There is no question that Pauline Christianity contains important elements which are deeply rooted in the Jewish scriptures and cultural heritage. At the same time, the nature of the salvation it offers, the sacramentalism involved, the features of its saving deity, are heavily dependent on Hellenistic precedents.
Paul's Christ Jesus bears too close a resemblance to the savior gods of the Greco-Roman mystery religions to allow it to be claimed hat one has nothing to do with the other.
If Christianity as a more all-inclusive "religion" than the mysteries had a precursor in the pagan world, it was in the movement known as Orphism. The Orphic mysteries were based on ancient poems which, put into writing around the 7th century BC, were attributed to the legendary singer and poet Orpheus of pre-Trojan War days, who was regarded as the companion to the god Dionysus. At a more profound level than the other mysteries, Orphism sought to explain good and evil in human nature and to find ways of atoning for humanity's guilt...A virtuous, ascetic life liberated the soul and led to its eternal bliss on the far western Isles of the Blessed, while evil persons (and those uninitiated into the mysteries) faced a cruel punishment in the Underworld. Here was the Greek concept of Hell (Tartarus), probably predating even the Jewish one.
The Q Document
As we saw...in the early strata of the Q document it is difficult to detect any clear sign of an individual, much less a Jesus of Nazareth.
In the two earliest stages, no attribution of sayings to a Jesus can be uncovered.
Lord's Prayer Confusion
...arguably the most important and enduring thing Jesus ever recorded to have spoken. And yet not even this had come to Q attached to a specific setting in Jesus' career. Matthew includes it in the Sermon on the Mount, delivered to vast, attentive crowds. Luke offers it during the journey to Jerusalem, a private communication at the request of the disciples who as "Lord, tell us how to pray."
Casting out Money-Lenders
...Mark gives us the dramatic scene in the Temple where Jesus overturns the tables of the money-changers and pigeon-sellers, and bars passage through the Temple court. That such an event could have happened as Mark portrays it is virtually impossible.