The Jesus Myth by G. A. Wells, Open Court, Chicago, 1999.
Christianity is patently untrue. Its basic premise—that an all-powerful god who had created the universe caused a virgin to have a son by him who became a religious preacher and miracle-worker in an obscure border area of the Roman empire, was killed and then rose from the dead and eventually ascended into the sky and disappeared—is not only ridiculous but also biologically and physically impossible. It just never happened.
But was there even ever a historical person called Jesus? Opinion, even amongst anti-Christians, has been divided. So what is the evidence? The only evidence that we have is the Christians’ holy book which they call the New Testament. This does have some value as a contemporary document. Part of it—Paul’s letters (those he wrote himself)—was written in the middle of the first century, i.e. shortly after Jesus was said to have lived. The other part—the accounts of his life and death known as the “gospels”—was written towards the end of the same century, i.e. about fifty or so years after he was said to have died. However, as Wells emphasises in his new book, there are two problems.
First, Paul, who wrote nearest to the alleged events, says nothing about the life of Jesus; he was only interested in his death or, rather, in his supposed resurrection. This in itself is suspicious. Paul was a Jew, not from the core Jewish area in Palestine but from Tarsus, a town now in southern Turkey, and his main language was Greek not the Aramaic which Jesus and his original followers would have spoken. As a Hellenistic Jew he was influenced by Greek religious ideas, in particular that of a saviour-god; a god who died to save his followers and then later rose from the dead, as for instance Dionysus was believed to do by his followers. In other words, Paul saw Christianity as a saviour-god religion in which a divine figure called Jesus (a name which in Hebrew is linked to the idea of being “saved”) died to save those prepared to follow him. Paul did retain some Jewish ideas: that of an Old Testament character called Wisdom (who he believed Jesus to have been before he was born) and the apocalyptic view that the end of the world was nigh.
Second, while the “gospels” do claim to tell us about the life of Jesus, the trouble is that nearly every event in his life is paralleled either in Greek mythology (virgin birth, resurrection) or, particularly, in the lives of Old Testament figures who also walked on water, fed thousands, raised the dead, rode on asses and ascended into heaven on a cloud (Jesus does, however, seem to have been unique in walking through walls). It is clear that the authors invented a life for Jesus which corresponded to Old Testament traditions and predictions. Even the account of his death is not trustworthy. As a saviour-god he had to die a particularly humiliating death, which at the time was crucifixion but, as only the Roman authorities could carry out this punishment, he had to be made to be condemned by them.
When all this crap has been cleared away, what’s left? Nothing, say those who claim that Jesus was an invented, mythological character who never had any historical existence. Not much, say the others. Only that there was somebody called Jesus who preached that the Jews should reform their ways as the end of the world was nigh and perhaps healed a few cases of people suffering from psychosomatic illnesses, in Galilee in the first part of the first century.
Wells, who in his earlier books such as Did Jesus Exist? (1975) and The Historical Evidence for Jesus (1982), had embraced the Jesus-is-pure-myth theory (see correspondence in April 1980 Socialist Standard) has now in this and his last previous book, The Jesus Legend (1996), come round to the view that the Jesus story “may derive ultimately from the life of a first century itinerant Galilean preacher; but to separate out such authentic material from the mass of unhistorical narratives is a well-nigh hopeless task”.
Adam Buick
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