Some Controversial Reflections on the Historical Jesus Problem
Following our recent exchange discussing religion/Christianity (him) and a more general spirituality (me), Medium writer Matthew has invited me to have a similar conversation with him on the theme of the historical Jesus. This time each of us will be posting an article here, and then await a response, the process continuing until we reach a natural conclusion. This is my opening salvo.
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Several years ago I had an exchange with Benjamin Cain on the same theme. He was outlining, seemingly advocating, the case for Mythicism (the suggestion that no historical Jesus existed) here. I responded here, outlining the evidence for the existence of a historical figure. There were then further articles.
One of Cain’s arguments, still relevant here, is that he believes that the Mythicist argument is probably correct, but thinks that the issue is ultimately unimportant, because it is the theological, supernatural Christ that is crucial to Christian faith. Since he thinks that this can be disposed of by scientific, historical considerations, the question of whether a historical Jesus really lived or not becomes merely an academic puzzle to solve. That is a position that I disagree with; it is much more important than that. We have to understand the meaning of the theological, supernatural Christ, and what, if any, connection that has with the historical Jesus.
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In our previous exchange Matthew said that he is “advocating for a Christianity rooted in historical facts about the first century”. If these are not facts, then “we must essentially assume the texts of the new testament to be not just wrong but misleading”. I replied that we have to be prepared to contemplate that possibility. Let’s see how factual these Christian beliefs actually are.
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In my first contribution to our previous discussion, I said that I personally believe that the origins of what became Christianity are an impenetrable mystery. I went on to note the conclusions of various scholars/writers. I’ll now supply the background evidence which supports those arguments.
1. No Historical Jesus existed
The two main arguments in favour of this suggestion are that the dying-and-resurrected saviour god is a recurrent theme in the mythologies of the world (Jesus would therefore be but one more example), and that there is almost no historical evidence for the existence of Jesus, apart from the New Testament itself. Two books among others which explore these themes are:
- The Jesus Mysteries: Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God? by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy
- The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light, by Tom Harpur.
At the beginning of his book Harpur refers to the work of three scholars (Godfrey Higgins, Gerald Massey, and Alvin Boyd Kuhn) who “challenge present Christianity to the core… (They) have made it clear in voluminous, eminently learned works that the Jewish and Christian religions do indeed owe most of their origins to Egyptian roots”. In particular, Massey wrote “six monumental volumes that dealt at length with the mythology and religion of ancient Egypt”.
Following in their footsteps Harpur says: “I will clearly document that there is nothing the Jesus of the Gospels either said or did — from the Sermon on the Mount to the miracles, from his flight as an infant from Herod to the Resurrection itself — that cannot be shown to have originated thousands of years before, in Egyptian Mystery rites and other sacred liturgies such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead”. The star in the east, walking on water, slaughter of the innocents, temptation in the wilderness, changing water into wine, all “already existed in the Egyptian sources”.
He concludes that “there is irrefutable proof that not one single doctrine, rite, tenet, or usage in Christianity was in reality a fresh contribution to the world of religion”, therefore that Christianity is “simply a revamped and mutilated Egyptianism”.
Needless to say, this “seismic research by a few specifically neutral scholars… has been deliberately ignored by churchly authorities for many decades”, and Massey’s “controversial work was considered taboo in what were regarded in his day as respectable literary and religious circles. He was nevertheless light-years ahead of his time”.
If this is true then it is clear that Jesus cannot have been a one-off incarnation of God, as Christianity claims.
Approaching this theme from a slightly different angle, there is the work of the late Dorothy Murdock, who wrote under the name of Acharya S. Two relevant books are: The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, and Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled (note the spelling of ‘Suns’). She also claimed that Jesus never existed as a historical person, but was rather a mingling of various pre-Christian myths, sun deities and dying-and-rising deities. This is a theory known as astro-theology, which believes that Jesus is actually a representation of the Sun-God. She argued that the Christian canon, as well as its important figures, were based on Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and other cultures’ myths.
What she doesn’t seem to realise or know is that the journey of the sun through the zodiac is associated with the spiritual tasks of an esoteric initiate (spiritual seeker), as explained for example by Alice Bailey in The Labours of Hercules, where there are indeed 12 labours (symbolically representing the stages of the spiritual quest) corresponding to the zodiac signs. (Note that the early Christian father Clement of Alexandria wrote: “The path of souls to ascension lies through the twelve signs of the Zodiac… the descending path is the same”.
Another book on that theme is The Gospel and the Zodiac: the Secret Truth about Jesus by Bill Darlison. He was actually a Unitarian minister, so obviously had no axe to grind with Christianity. He focussed on the Gospel of Mark, and claims to demonstrate that it is deliberately structured around the signs of the zodiac, and that it was originally an esoteric text.
If we follow that train of thought, we can ask whether the story of Jesus is that of God who became a man, as the Church claims, or a man who became God? Are the gospels the story of an esoteric initiate? In which case, is it an actual man or a fictional character? Is all this an esoteric allegory along the lines of the labours of Hercules?
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Just because a vast amount of mythological material has been added to a possibly historical figure does not mean that no such figure existed; it merely means that we need to extract the history from the myth. (That is in fact the meaning of the phrase ‘the Quest of the Historical Jesus’, as in the title of Albert Schweitzer’s book, which implies that the New Testament story has added much to the historical figure.) That is what I’ll attempt to do in the following sections.
2. Jesus Was Not Crucified
The main source for this idea is the work of Edmond Bordeaux Szekely. He was brought up in Catholicism, and was a brilliant scholar. He was guided by two mentors who obviously didn’t want to take on the responsibility for blowing the whistle themselves, and who therefore guided him to find some documents hidden in the Vatican library and elsewhere.
His main discovery was that there were two ‘Christs’. One was the leader of a Jewish Messianic movement, a pretender to the throne of Judea, named Ioannes. He was the one condemned to crucifixion by Pontius Pilate. The other was an Essene preacher/spiritual leader, who was captured on the same day, and presented to Pilate, who released him. (I have written about this on Medium in more detail here. My article was written after listening to this Zoom talk currently on Youtube. See also this Amazon page.)
This suggestion is obviously controversial, but is supported by the Qu’ran: “they neither killed nor crucified him — it was only made to appear so”. (Alternative translations, “…but they thought they did”, “…though it so appeared to them”, “…but [another] was made to resemble him to them”. The last of these translations goes on to say “and they did not kill him for certain”.)
Szekely went on to found a community based on his understanding of the Essenes. He also wrote three books (which I own): The Gospel of the Essenes, The Essene Code of Life, and The Teachings of the Essenes from Enoch to the Dead Sea Scrolls. All this might lead one to believe that he was completely sincere, and therefore that his story is true.
3. If Jesus was crucified he survived this and therefore did not die
This suggestion obviously contradicts number 2, which means that if 2 is true, then what follows is to some extent fiction.
The story begins with Hugh Schonfield’s book The Passover Plot. Based upon his reading of John’s gospel, he concluded that Jesus had a secret plan with only the closest of his followers to ensure that he would survive the crucifixion and be brought back to full health. However, this plan failed because of a soldier’s actions with a spear. (For full details, see the section ‘Planning’ in this wikipedia article.)
I’m now going to explore the possibility that this secret plan did not fail, as concluded by Schonfield, rather succeeded. I have discussed this at length in this article, and summarised it in this article. The account in John’s Gospel is the most relevant. Here are the main points to note:
- the short length of time on the cross
- the possibility that the ‘sour wine’ given to Jesus was in fact a soporific drug, thus an anaesthetic which would give the appearance of death, or perhaps even some form of poison, which created the same effect.
- the failure to break the legs of Jesus, which would have accelerated his death; this did not happen because he was believed (incorrectly) to be dead already.
- the spear which pierced Jesus’s side, following which “at once blood and water came out”. From a medical point of view, this indicates that he was alive, even though the text states that he was dead.
- the role of Pilate. It was apparently a flagrant breach of procedure to hand over the body to Joseph of Arimathea — according to Roman custom, it should have remained on the cross. Furthermore, in the original Greek version of Mark’s Gospel, when Joseph asks for Jesus’s body, he uses the word soma — a word applied only to a living body, instead of ptoma which means corpse.
- the arrival of “a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about an hundred pounds”. Myrrh is claimed to be a form of sedative, and is also used for its restorative properties and as an analgesic. Aloes is a strong and fast-acting purgative, which would therefore have been useful to help expel the poison from Jesus’s body. One wonders therefore why on earth this was being brought to the tomb of a person believed to be dead, and in such vast quantities! (Was this a clue that we are meant to pick up on?)
In the light of all the above, resuscitation might be a more appropriate word than resurrection. We know, in modern times, that someone can be pronounced clinically dead, yet somehow return to life, having had a so-called near-death experience. Something like this would seem to be more likely in the case of Jesus, according to this account, than the Christian version.
Further clues can be found in Mark’s gospel. The editors have entitled the concluding passage ‘The Resurrection of Jesus’, which may well be a mistaken assumption. What does the text actually say?
When the women arrived at the tomb, they discovered that the stone had been rolled away. “As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, ‘Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you’ ”.
It’s very hard to approach this with a completely blank mind, but if one had absolutely no knowledge of Christianity and its teachings, then there is no obvious reason here to conclude that a dead Jesus has been resurrected. He was ‘crucified’, which means nailed to a cross, not that he is dead. However, “he has been raised”, i.e. saved or brought back to life. He had predicted that he would survive the crucifixion, and this has now come to pass; it was all part of the plan.
A young man dressed in a white robe might well be an Essene.
The text finishes abruptly soon after that in the oldest versions of the text, and other endings have been added, presumably by later writers, not the original author known as Mark, because they considered the original version unsatisfactory.
If either theory 2 or 3 is true, then Jesus did not die on a cross. On that theme Holger Kersten’s book Jesus Lived in India is relevant. The author believes that he also died there.
4. Jesus must have been far more militant than he appears in the gospels
I’ve discussed this in detail in this article. Here is a brief summary.
All four gospels have references, even if indirect, to Jesus’s coronation as king. In the eyes of the authors, therefore, Jesus was the long awaited Jewish Messiah, whom no Jew considered to be divine. He was expected rather to be a human descendant of King David, hence the two genealogies in Matthew and Luke.
In Mark, as Jesus rides into Jerusalem, the cry is “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!” This is echoed in John, and Luke throughout is even more insistent: “we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us”, which can only mean the Romans.
It would seem therefore that Jesus completely failed in the mission prophesied for him even by an angel of God! He never became King of the Jews, was apparently crucified for making that claim, and later the Romans actually won the war (66–74 CE) and completely destroyed Jerusalem. Yet that prediction remains in the texts.
However, in the gospels in their current form Jesus understood his mission completely differently (he believed that it was his mission and destiny to die on the cross), and that is apparently according to the same four authors who wrote the above. How can this be?
A reasonable hypothesis is therefore that the historical Jesus was nothing like how he is portrayed in the gospels. He would have had to have been something along the lines of a military leader. At the very least, even if he did not intend to bear arms himself, he must have been closely associated with some rebels, military figures — as King the leader of a group capable of entering into a potentially winnable conflict with the Romans. The only alternative, more in keeping with the gospel portrayal, is that Jesus was a peaceful, spiritual figure, who entered Jerusalem to claim his throne, expecting divine intervention to come to his aid. After all, in Matthew’s gospel he had said: “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (16.28). He might be referring to his own successful military mission but, in the light of other passages, he might also be referring to some supernatural figure. If that is what he believed, then, given what followed, he was completely deluded. The first option is therefore by far the more likely.
Recent books which have examined this hypothesis in detail are:
- Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln
- Bloodline of the Holy Grail by Laurence Gardner.
- Jesus and the Zealots by scholar S.G.F. Brandon
- Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan
The most relevant point is that crucifixion was a Roman punishment for insurrection, whereas the punishment for blasphemy, what Jesus was actually accused of, was stoning, which could be authorised by the Jews, without reference to the Romans. The gospels agree that Jesus was the victim of a Roman administration, a Roman court, a Roman sentence, Roman soldiery and a Roman execution. An inscription “King of the Jews” is affixed to the cross, a detail which appears in all four gospels.
Baigent/Leigh/Lincoln conclude that “there is no question but that (Jesus) was crucified as a Zealot”, thus someone guilty of insurrection. “The two men allegedly crucified with him are explicitly described as lestoi — the appellation by which the Zealots were known to the Romans”. This leads us to the Barabbas episode. The free-a-prisoner policy never existed, according to modern scholars. Even if it did, there are some other bizarre factors that have to be taken into account (see the original article). One interesting point is that Mark (15.7) says that “a man called Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection”. What insurrection? There has been no mention of one. Why the insurrection, not an insurrection, as in Luke? Baigent/Leigh/Lincoln conclude: “Since Mark and Luke agree that Barabbas is guilty of insurrection, and since Matthew does not contradict this assertion, it is safe to conclude that Barabbas was a Zealot”.
There are various (apparently) militaristic references in the gospels, although their meaning is not clear cut (see the original article).
Laurence Gardner’s most significant extra contribution is to disclose the true (he claims) identity of the twelve apostles most of whom, it has to be admitted, are little more than vague names in the four gospels. He reveals them to be significant figures in Jewish religious society, including several Zealots, therefore militant opponents of Rome. He thus confirms what Baigent/Leigh/Lincoln had suspected when they said: “James, John and Simon Peter all have appellations which may hint obliquely at Zealot sympathies, if not Zealot involvement. They also note there that “Judas Iscariot derives from ‘Judas the Sicarii’ — and ‘Sicarii’ was yet another term for Zealot… The Sicarii seem to have been an elite within the Zealot ranks, a crack cadre of professional assassins”. (Everyone knows, of course, that Judas ‘Iscariot’ was one of Jesus’s twelve apostles.) Gardner talks of “an influential Council of Twelve under their supreme leader Jesus the Christ” (which means Messiah in the Jewish sense), and notes that “the Qumrân* Manual of Discipline details the importance of a Council of Twelve to preserve the faith of the land”. (*i.e. from the Dead Sea Scrolls)
5. the New Testament was written by the Romans, therefore Christianity was essentially a fraudulent fiction
As I said originally, this is a disturbing and controversial theory, almost too shocking to mention to Christians. It is nevertheless the claim of at least three apparently independent sources:
- The most serious would seem to be a book by James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy called Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity, (which I don’t own and haven’t read). Their website says that for over 30 years they have “painstakingly researched Christianity’s mysterious origins. In the process, they formed a startling conclusion that was met at every turn by more and more compelling evidence”, and that they have found “irrefutable proof” supporting it. This ‘proof’ comes from ancient texts, the New Testament itself, and “astonishing new archeological and iconographic evidence”.
- Also noteworthy is Joseph Atwill’s Caesar’s Messiah (which I have read). This “argues that the New Testament Gospels were written by a group of individuals connected to the Flavian family of Roman emperors: Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. The authors were mainly Flavius Josephus, Berenice, and Tiberius Julius Alexander, with contributions from Pliny the Elder” (source wikipedia).
- The True Authorship of the New Testament by Abelard Reuchlin (which I own and have partially read). The introduction refers to a GREAT SECRET, that the Calpurnius family of ancient Rome created the fictional Jesus, the New Testament, the Church, and Christianity. The text goes on to claim that all the main characters in the New Testament story are fictional, although they were connected with “some peripheral actual people”, e.g. Herod.
The latter was first published in 1979, therefore predates the other two by many years. At first I could not take it seriously; it is more an extended pamphlet rather than a book. It also issued a rather ridiculous challenge by offering a reward “if you can disprove the booklet’s thesis that the Calpurnius Piso family wrote the New Testament”. It continued: “The Abelard Reuchlin Foundation shall be the sole judge as to whether you have satisfied the required burden of proof”. This seemed somewhat unfair; how about some objective, independent, judges? In the light of the later publication of the other two books, however, I’ve had to take the claim more seriously.
By coincidence, as I was preparing this article, Garymazeffa responded to a recent one of mine thus: “It was the Flavians who orchestrated the writing of the era into the four gospels in usage today. It was not as haphazard or by a strike/stroke of God or MEN as people think”. I replied to him that the truth might be even worse.
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Most Christians, so it would seem, remain blissfully unaware of all the above literature. This is probably because their faith takes them nowhere apart from their local church and Christian community, where the message they have been taught is reinforced. If they do become aware of it, they tend to dismiss it out of hand.
Conclusion
Please note that what follows is hypothetical, speculative, and entering the realms of fantasy. I’m going to imagine a scenario in which all the above five theories are true, and try to synthesize them into a coherent and meaningful whole. This in no way means that I am advocating this position, or arguing that it is true.
There was a historical figure whom we now call Jesus. He was a spiritual teacher, perhaps even a prophet, from the Essene tradition. He was never crucified but was released by Pontius Pilate on the same day that the leader of a Jewish Messianic movement was arrested and subsequently crucified.
At some point later, an extremely clever Roman writer (or team of writers) combined the stories of these two men into one integrated whole. This would explain why the spiritual teacher who preached love and peace appears also to be a messianic militant, and was executed by the Romans for that reason. Does it also explain why some tantalising clues were left, indicating that the spiritual teacher Jesus did not actually die on the cross (myrrh/aloes, and the ending of Mark’s gospel)?
In the light of all the above, we have to conclude that the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection as found in the gospels is essentially a fiction created by the Romans. During this process a vast amount of mythological and extraneous material was added to this figure, so much so that some people have come to the conclusion that no such person ever existed. (Apart from the motif of the dying-and-resurrecting saviour god, there is also the addition of the virgin birth narrative in Matthew and Luke, something which Mark, John and Paul know nothing about.)
This team of writers would have to have been extremely clever. They would have needed extensive and deep knowledge of Hebrew tradition and literature, Egyptian history and mythology and other esoteric traditions. From what we understand, they would also have been able to write in Greek (even though they were Romans), and were capable of distinguishing between and writing in both colloquial Greek (which is what modern scholars say is the case with Mark), and the more formal Greek of the other gospels.
How credible is this scenario? I currently find this last paragraph the hardest to accept. The end result (i.e. the New Testament) seems far too complex to me to be merely a calculated, devious plot, but what do I know?
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Other topics which will probably need to be addressed in this ongoing exchange with Matthew are the role of Paul, whether the historical Jesus was more Israelite/Samaritan than Jewish, and the reported miracles — are these really evidence that Jesus was the Son of God? This article is already long enough, so I’ll leave all that for the future, and see what Matthew’s response is to all this.
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I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, and politics. All of those articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here). My most recent articles, however, are only on Medium; for those please check out my lists.
