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The Jesus story as we now know it was not created all at once, or by only one person. The "Jesus story" developed gradually, as different Gnostics added new motifs and refined old ones, fashioning a progressively more complex allegory as time went on. Later, as referenced repeatedly during prior articles, the Jesus story fell into the hands of those with a more political agenda and became distorted and confused, but the underlying initiation allegory which is its foundation remains:
The problem is that we don't see this "initiation allegory" any longer since Rome added much to the First New Testament to obscure the "allegorical" interpretation of "the Christ." With the later "literalization" of "the Christ" by Rome in their Second New Testament this earliest understanding of "the Christ" by the Gnostic Jewish and Gentile Christians has almost been lost today. Only since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library and the Coptic Gospels has this light again reached mankind. Rome's censorship and destruction of the Gnostics and their writings has succeeded over the centuries to such an effect that few, if any, know the truth about the earliest of Christians and followers of "the Christ."
The earliest Christian texts we possess are the genuine letters of Paul written in the first half of the first century. Paul quotes older hymns to Christ, which suggests that he is developing a Joshua/Jesus cult that may have already been in existence, perhaps for centuries. We have shown in earlier articles that this Godman myth has existed since Egypt and only the names of the entities have changed in successive centuries.
Unlike the New Testament gospels, written some 50-100 years later after the authentic Pauline writings, Paul does not teach a quasi-historical narrative about Jesus. Paul's Jesus is a clearly mythical figure who does not inhabit any particular time or place. Paul never quotes Jesus and does not portray him as a recently deceased Jewish master. Paul alludes to (but does not quote) several sayings that are later attributed to Jesus in the gospels. Stanton observes: "Paul fails to refer to a saying of Jesus at the very point where he might well have clinched his argument by doing so" (G. Stanton, Gospel Truth?, 1995, p. 130).
Truly, he doesn't treat him as someone who had actually lived at all. Paul's epistles, written c.50 CE, are the earliest Christian texts we possess and the earliest depiction of "the Christ" that we have from Christian hands.
Answer for yourself: Why is this important? First of all this gives us the earliest and truest picture of what "the Christ" was believed to be as well as being a strong influence upon later Gospel writers as they mould a biography around "the Christ."
Paul tells us very little that could relate to an historical Jesus, apart from that fact that he was born of a woman, baptized, died and resurrected - all of which Pagans could equally claim of Osiris-Dionysius, without intending to imply that he had been an historical figure. Paul:
Answer for yourself: Why?
G. A. Wells quotes the words of several New Testament scholars who refer to the "scantiness of Paul's Jesus tradition" as "surprising", "shocking" and a "matter of serious concern". Stanton remarks that"Paul's failure to refer more frequently and at greater length to the actions and teaching of Jesus is baffling" (op. cit., 131). As Wells also notes, Paul's complete silence on the historical Jesus "remains a problem only for those who insist that there was a historical Jesus to be silent about" (Did Jesus Exist?, p. 21). In fact, Paul tells us quite specifically that he never met an historical Jesus but a being of light whom appeared to him in a vision. In his Letter to the Colossians Paul describes himself as having been assigned by God the task of delivering his message "in full"; of announcing "the secret hidden for long ages and through many generations" which is now being disclosed to those chosen by God.
Answer for yourself: And what is this great secret? Is it, as we might expect from an orthodox apostle, the "good news" that Jesus had literally come and walked the Earth, worked miracles, died for our sins and returned from the dead? No. No. As much as I read the authentic Pauline epistles (seven) I cannot find such references to a historical Jesus.
Paul writes: "The secret is this: Christ in you."
Col 1:25-28 25 Whereof I am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God which is given to me for you, to fulfil the word of God; 26 Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints: 27 To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory: 28 Whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus: (KJV)
Answer for yourself: Have you ever noticed this before when reading the Book of Hebrews?
Heb 8:4 4 For if he were on earth, he should not be a priest, seeing that there are priests that offer gifts according to the law: (KJV)
Answer for yourself: What? "IF" he had been on earth?
You mean he wasn't?
Paul or a pro-Pauline writer writes: "If" Jesus had been on Earth, he wouldn't have been a priest," not, "When Jesus was on Earth, he wasn't a priest."
When Paul reveals to us "the secret" of Christianity, it has absolutely nothing to do with an historical Jesus. The secret he declares is the mystical revelation of "Christ in you" - the one Consciousness of God in all of us (the indwelling Logos...Chokmah...Sophia...Son of God...Holy Spirit...etc.).
Col 1:25-28 25 Whereof I am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God which is given to me for you, to fulfil the word of God; 26 Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints: 27 To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory: 28 Whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus: (KJV)
Paul's Jesus is a mythic figure whose story teaches initiates the path they must follow to realize the Christ within. The only narrative elements of the Jesus myth important to Paul are:
Answer for yourself: What do all of these three things above have in common? They are a "pattern" for initiation into Gnostic Christianity as taken from the Exodus allegory of Moses and Joshua which was used by Gnostic Christians to lead new converts to God.
All of these Paul understands "allegorically" and not "literally" as symbolizing the stages of initiation into the "Higher Mysteries" of Christianity (Gnostic Christianity). By identifying with Jesus' baptism initiates are washed clean of their past and begin the quest for Gnosis. By vicariously sharing in Jesus' death and resurrection, they symbolically die to their "old self" and resurrect "in Christ".
Rom 6:4 4 Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. (KJV)
Eph 4:22 22 That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; (KJV)
Col 3:9 9 Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; (KJV)
Later Christians will expand this simple allegorical foundation to create the complete Jesus story.
Christian gospels began to be written down at around the end of the first century and the beginning of the second century. These include The Sophia of Jesus Christ, The Dialogue of the Saviour, The Gospel of Thomas, The Shepherd of Hermas, The Exegesis of the Soul, The Hypostasis of the Archons, The Apocryphon of John, The Secret Gospel of Mark and Pistis Sophia.
Answer for yourself: What do all of these early gospels have in common? They are all now rejected as heretical by the Roman Church and they did not teach a "historical Jesus" but rather an "allegorical" understanding of the Exodus allegory and "the Christ - Sophia".
One thing is surely indisputable from all of this: the gospels are not, as some Christians claim, the divine words of God. The view of the Bible as the Word of God or Holy Scripture belongs to a past time. Today it hinders understanding. The Bible is the word of human beings. There is today a crisis in New Testament studies for the facts from serious study is the death blow for such traditions. For if they words of the New Testament are God's Word, then God is extremely confused. As, by his very nature, God is unlikely to be confused, it seems safe to conclude that we are dealing with the words of fallible men.
Answer for yourself: So, can the gospels be relied on to tell us anything about a historical Jesus? What light can scholarship shed on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?
Well, first of all, the gospels were not originally even known by these names. They were not attributed to any particular author, each gospel being regarded as "the gospel" of a particular Christian sect. Only later did they acquire the names of their supposed authors (I. Wilson, Jesus: The Evidence, 1984, p. 32). The gospels are actually anonymous works, in which everything, without exception, is written in capital letters, with no headings, chapter or verse divisions, and practically no punctuation or spaces between words. They were not even written in the Aramaic of the Jews but in Greek.
The gospels have also been added to and altered over time. The Pagan critic Celsus complains that Christians "altered the original text of the gospels three or four times, or even more, with the intention of thus being able to destroy the arguments of their critics" (G. Stanton, Gospel Truth?, 1995, p. 35). Modern scholars have found that he was right. A careful study of over 3,000 early manuscripts has shown how scribes made many changes (Ibid.). The Christian philosopher Origen, writing in the third century, acknowledges that manuscripts have been edited and interpolated to suit the needs of the changing theological climate:
It is an obvious fact today that there is much diversity among the manuscripts, due either to the carelessness of the scribes, or the perverse audacity of some people in correcting the text, or again to the fact that there are those who add or delete as they please, setting themselves up as correctors. (quoted Ibid.).
To convey the enormity of the problem, one scholar describes selecting a place in the gospels completely at random (in this case he chose Mark 10-11) and checking to see how many differences were recorded between various early manuscripts for these passages. He discovered "no fewer that 48 places where the manuscripts differ, sometimes there are only two possibilities, often there are three or more, and in one case there are six!" (Ibid.).
Scholars also know that whole sections of the gospels were added later. For example, originally Mark did not contain any words beyond Chapter 16 verse 8 - the fear of the women at their discovery of the empty tomb. The so-called "long ending," in which the risen Jesus appears to his disciples, is not found in any early manuscripts and yet now appears in nearly all New Testaments.
Despite all of this editing and amending, the gospels remain contradictory and inconsistent, as we have seen. For centuries, the Catholic Church prevented anyone other than priests reading the New Testament for themselves so few had the chance to discover just how confused the gospels are. That all changed with the Protestant Reformation Luther demanded that ordinary people be allowed to read the Bible for themselves, a challenge to the Vatican that helped spark the Reformation.
Eager to distance themselves from Rome, German Protestant scholars began to search the gospels for the real Jesus. Even up to the present day the majority of such scholars have themselves been Christians, since a theological career at a German university is closed to those who have not been baptized. Yet despite this, rather than giving Christianity a firm historical foundation, as they hoped, Protestant scholars' three centuries of intense scholarship have undermined the literal figure of Jesus completely. I Wilson in his book Jesus: The Evidence, on page 33 states that Protestant scholarly endeavors required great courage , for they were confronting a deeply entrenched belief in the accuracy, indeed the divinity, of the gospels. In the 18th century, Herman Reimarus, Professor of Oriental Languages at Hamburg University, was dismissed from his post when he repudiated the miracle stories as spurious and supernatural. It is of note that the term "gospel truth" dates back only to the 19th century, when these doubts about the gospels became widely known (G. Stanon, op. cit., p. 7).
From detailed research they concluded that the Gospel of John was written so late that it could not have been an eyewitness account (G. Stanon, op. cit., p. 37). In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus teaches in pithy parables, but John contains lengthy, apparently verbatim speeches in fluent Greek, which were clearly not the words of a Jewish carpenter's son. Irenaeus, who gave us the Second New Testament, maintains that the author of the Gospel of John is is Jesus' favorite disciple John. It is unlikely though that this simple fisherman from Galilee was trained in either philosophy or Greek, unlike the writer of John's Gospel. J Campbell in his Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, 1955, on page 170, notes that scholars are agreed that the Gospel of John and the first epistle are probably by the same author, but that this is not the disciple John. The second epistle is by another author and the third by still another. The Book of Revelation, also said to be by John, is a Christian recension of a late Jewish apocalypse written under a pseudonym. John also describes quite different incidents from the other gospels.
The work of the Berlin philologist Karl Lachmann and other eminent scholars also revealed that, despite their differences, Matthew, Mark, and Luke shared a great deal in common. These similarities are due to the fact that Matthew and Luke are actually reworkings of Mark (Wilson, op. cit., p. 36), which is the simplest and earliest gospel. If John is written too late and Matthew and Luke are based on Mark, this leaves us only the Gospel of Mark as a possible eyewitness account of the life of Jesus.
Scholars believe that Mark was written sometime between 70 CE and the early second century. G. Wells in his Did Jesus Exit? says that it is impossible to be more precise than this. For sightings of what will become the first Gospel we are dependent on the testimony of early Apostolic fathers, men like Polycarp, Papias, and Ignatius. As well as being used disingenuously by second-century writers such as Irenaeus and Tertullian, their letters were also interpolated and added to in the fourth and fifth centuries. Picking through this mess leaves us with the generally held view that sometime between 70-135 C.E. might be correct. If we accept the earliest possible date, it is just feasible that Mark was an eyewitness. Yet ironically, Mark does not claim to have known Jesus. Many in the early Church objected to his gospel being treated as canonical for this very reason. Stanton tells us that in the second century doubts were expressed about Mark, Luke, and John - Mark because he was simply a secretary of Peter, Luke because he was said to have been an assistant to Paul (who had himself not seen Jesus), and John because that gospel was widely known to be the work of the Gnostic Cerinthus. Only Matthew was above suspicion. Our Matthew, however, is not the one that was known to Papias of Hierapolis, who is said to have been active post 70 C.E. in Asia Minor. He collected information about the Messiah from refugees pouring out of Asia Minor, but refers to his Matthew as a book of "oracles". This suggests a book of proof texts on the Old Testament, used as prophecies or "oracles" to support the Jesus story. Papias was also defensive of criticism against Mark because he was not an eyewitness of the events he recounts. Mark is claimed to have been at best some sort of secretary or interpreter for Peter. Even this is impossible, however, since Mark's gospel exhibits what one modern scholar calls "a lamentable ignorance of Palestinian geography" (Wilson, op. cit., p. 36).
In the seventh chapter, for instance, Jesus is reported as going through Sidon on his way from Tyre to the Sea of Galilee. Not only is Sidon in the opposite direction, but there was in fact no road from Sidon to the Sea of Galilee in the first century CE, only one from Tyre.
Similarly the fifth chapter refers to the Sea of Galilee's eastern shore as the country of the Gerasenes, yet Gerasa, today Jerash, is more than thirty miles to the southeast, too far away for a story whose setting requires a nearby city with a steep slope down to the sea. Aside from geography, Mark represented Jesus as saying, "If a woman divorces her husband and marries another she is guilty of adultery" (Mark 10:12), a precept which would have been meaningless in the Jewish world, where women had no rights of divorce (Ibid.).
In the late nineteenth century, Wilhelm Wrede, Professor of New Testament Studies at Breslau University, argued that even the Gospel of Mark, the earliest and most primitive gospel, was more concerned with theological dogma than historical accuracy (Ibid., p. 33). In 1919 another German scholar, Karl Ludwig I Schmidt, published a careful study of the way in which Mark's gospel had been created. He was able to show that the author of Mark had created his gospel by linking together existing smaller stories. The Jesus story had been constructed from pre-existing fragments (Ibid.). An example of this is the miraculous feeding, which appears twice in Mark, once to 4,000 and once to 5.000. It seems unlikely that these were two separate incidents, particularly since in the second the disciples ask, "Where could anyone get bread to feed these people in a deserted place like this?", thus being apparently ignorant of the first occasion, which they are reported to have witnessed. The way that Matthew and Luke had added to Mark the nativity story and genealogies showed how the Jesus story had evolved over time. It could no longer be assumed by scholars that these narratives were in any way factual accounts (B. L. Mack, The Lost Gospel, 1993, p. 24. This effectively brought to an end any hope of finding a historical Jesus within the gospels.
German theologians began increasingly to date the origination of Mark, Matthew, and Luke to well into the second century CE (I. Wilson, op. cit., 1984, p. 37; G. A. Wells, op. cit., 1975, p. 72). Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), Professor of New Testament Studies at Marburg University, spent his life studying the gospels and was one of the greatest authorities on the New Testament. He pioneered the influential method of analyzing the gospels called "form-criticism." Eventually he concluded:
I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either and are, moreover, fragmentary and often legendary.
It is currently accepted amongst most scholars that also written at this time were the anonymous gospels that were later attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which turn Paul's timeless Christ myth into a pseudo-historical drama. These are represented by the Four Gospels in our current New Testament today!
The evidence for dating these gospels so early, however, is very flimsy as we have demonstrated. Once we have jettisoned the untenable idea of these texts being eye-witness reports, it seems likely that future scholarship will date them later and later into the second century - and even then with no certainty as to just how similar the gospels of that time were to the versions with which we are familiar today. Despite the widespread assertion that the gospels originated c. 70 CE-110 C.E., the only "evidence" to back this up are some vague allusions in Papias and Polycarp, whose testimony has in turn been through the "Holy Forgery Mill" of Irenaeus and Eusebius. The evidence supports the belief that the texts we now call the gospels are in fact late second-century creations. It is profoundly suspicious that Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second century in Rome, never mentions Matthew, Mark, Luke or John in his entire extant works and yet just a generation later in the same part of the world Irenaeus states that there are only four gospels and the canon is closed. Celsus, writing c. 170 CE, knows nothing about Matthew, Mark, Luke or John but refers to gospels of Helen, Mariamme, Salome and a host of other women, and the texts known to Plotinus in Rome at the beginning of the third century are Gnostic works, copies of which have now been found in Nag Hammadi.
Nor does "hard" archaeological evidence support a first-century date for the gospels. In 1992 Carsten Thiede's The Earliest Gospel Manuscript claimed that the three fragments stored for a long time in Magdalene College, Oxford, date from the middle of the first century. However, the eminent papyrologist Graham Stanton has clearly demonstrated that the fragments are written in the "Biblical Uncial" handwriting which only emerged in the late second century (Stanton, op. cit., 13). In addition, these tiny fragments can tell us nothing about the texts they came from and for whole texts we must wait until the fourth century - a suspicious fact in itself.
The Gospel of Mark is thought to be the earliest of the New Testament gospels, but scholars have shown it to have been created from pre-existing fragments which contain sayings and a non-time/place specific Jesus story to which someone has added a geographical and historical context.
According to Clement of Alexandria, there were originally three gospels attributed to Mark - the one in the New Testament, a second Secret Gospel of Mark, of which we have fragments, and a third oral gospel too profound to be written down, but passed on from master to master (The Secret Gospel of Mark) in W. Barnstone, The Other Bible, 1984, p. 341). Professor Wilhelm Wrede (1859-1906) of Breslau University was the first to show that the supposedly "primitive" Gospel of Mark had undergone extensive theological rewriting and editing. In 1919 Karl Ludwig Schmidt demonstrated that the gospel had been composed from previously existing fragments and that the connecting links between these were Mark's own invention.
Matthew and Luke based their versions of the Jesus myth on Mark, copying sections of it right down to the same Greek particles while The Gospel of John presents a significantly different version of the myth. G.A. Wells, G. A. (op. cit., p. 95) states that the realization that Matthew and Luke copied Mark led to the discovery that they both also used another text which scholars have identified as Q. S. L. Davies, in his The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom, 1983, demonstrates that both Q and Thomas are related works which depend heavily on Wisdom sayings. All of the New Testament gospels contradict each other in many important details (G.Stanton, Gospel Truth?; Freke and Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries, p. 139ff). This is because the Gnostics saw their scriptures as initiation allegories and so had no compunction about adapting them to suit their own particular requirements.
Not forgetting what we just read above which is the hard facts we find upon serious in-depth study, now as well that the Pagans had for centuries expressed their myths in the form of plays. The Jews had no dramatic tradition, but did write the first Greek historical novel - an allegorical story which portrays Judaism as a Mystery religion (Joseph and Aseneth, the story of the conversion of an Egyptian girl to Judaism written in the second or first century BCE, is considered by Momigliano to be the oldest Greek novel in existence). It should not surprise us, therefore, that some 200 years later the Jesus allegory, the central myth of the Christian Mystery cult, was likewise written in the form of a quasi-historical novel. The "Cruci-Fiction" in R. M. Price and his Deconstructing Jesus, 2000, p. 213ff, draws attention to the affinity of the gospel story to the genre of the ancient romance novel. Favorite themes common to both include lovers separated by tragic events (cf the Gnostic myth of Sophia and Jesus, their tragic separation and ultimate reunion), empty tombs and heroes surviving crucifixion. Bickerman writes about Hellenistic Jewish literature and its passion for "modernizing" biblical stories: ]Because pure fiction did not exist at this date, in order to express new ideas an author had to remodel an existing factual narrative.' (J. Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age, 1988), 206).
Historical myths were the Jews" speciality. The Exodus initiation allegory, which also appears to have no basis in actual history, is written in the form of a pseudo-historical narrative. Despite the best efforts of biblical archaeologists to prove that the Exodus took place during the reign of Rameses (Genesis 47:11), there is no evidence that this has any basis in historical fact (at least not at that time but does so when it is redated to a different time). The link between Rameses II and the Israelite bondage was an illusion without any real archaeological foundation. When Jewish Gnostics developed their new myth of Jesus the Jewish dying and resurrecting Godman, it was inevitable they would eventually also set this allegory in an historical context. As with the Exodus myth, the creators of the Jesus story mixed together mythical figures, such as Jesus and Mary, with a handful of historical figures which were also used to play symbolic roles in the initiation allegory. Unlike Exodus, the new Jesus myth could not be set in archaic times, because it was portrayed as a revelation of a new Messiah. It was set, therefore, in the recent past and incorporated figures who were important to Jewish Gnostics, such as the much revered John the Baptist and the much hated Pontius Pilate, the Roman ruler of Judaea.
At the end of the first century CE, when the original Christians were casting the Jesus myth in an historical setting, Israel was in deep crisis. Jews needed an explanation for the terrible events which were befalling them. In 70 CE the Jerusalem Temple, the very heart of Jewish Literalism, had been torn down by the Romans. By 135 CE the whole of Israel would be laid waste and cease to exist for 2,000 years. Jewish Gnostics deliberately set the Jesus story in the years in which the crisis began.
It was precisely at the time that Jesus was portrayed as being born that Rome imposed direct taxation on Judaea, forever ending its independence, and Pilate signalled the irrelevance of Jewish culture by desecrating the Temple in Jerusalem". Luke tells us that Jesus was born at the time of the census of Quirinius, which scholars date to 6 CE. Unfortunately for the supposed inerrancy of the gospels, Matthew 2:1 tells us that Jesus' birth was during the reign of King Herod, who died 10 years earlier in 4 BCE. According to Josephus and Philo, Pilate was particularly detested by the Jews Pilate was prefect for 10 years from 26 until 36, when he was sent back to Rome to answer for a massacre. He was so hated that he is the only prefect from the years 6 to 41 to be mentioned by name by Josephus and Philo. He violated Jewish religious taboos many times and was the first Roman to defile the Jerusalem Temple. Josephus writes, "Pilate, during the night, secretly and undercover, conveyed to Jerusalem the images of Caesar known as sigma. When day dawned this caused great excitement among the Jews: for those who were near were amazed at the sight, which meant that their laws had been trampled on - they do not permit any graven image to be set up in the city" (Josephus, The Jewish War, 1959, p. 126). It was a defining moment in Jewish history, which reached its terrible crescendo in the holocaust of 70 CE. In Israel and the Diaspora, the first century felt like the "end days", as indeed it was for the Jews as a sovereign nation. The original Christians therefore really had no choice about when they set their Jesus myth. If the Messiah didn't come at this time, when he was most needed, he just couldn't be the Messiah.
The original Christians (Gnostic Essenes-Therapeutae) portrayed their Gnostic hero Jesus-Joshua as a harbinger of these turbulent times who came to offer mystical liberation as an alternative to the futile attempts at political liberation which, in retrospect, the Jews could see had destroyed them completely. The Gnostic Messiah Jesus offered defeated and dejected Jews meaning and new hope.