Introduction
1. Skepticism, at least initially, regarding any new hypothesis about Christianity’s beginnings is the only responsible attitude. Wild theories based on little evidence have scared away many from seeking a more complete understanding of the New Testament’s origins—and understandably so.
For the sake of clarity and in order to anticipate at least some of the many questions such an analysis will inevitably provoke, we aver that our theory accepts nearly all of the “hard” conclusions of historical scholarship unless specifically otherwise indicated in our text, including: the dating of the Gospels, the authorship of the genuine Pauline letters, the insights that Mark was used as a source (along with a so-called “Q” source) in the composition of Matthew and Luke, the nature of and reasons for the images on both Hebrew and Roman coins, the differing perspectives of the various Gospels, the identification of dates, and the like. As readers will have seen, we also agree with those who see pagan elements, Platonic elements and Hellenized “Mystery” Cult elements in the New Testament. Even when our identifications of certain persons may be controversial, the identification itself is hardly unique to us. We do question some of the traditional understanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as many others have of late, as well, but we hasten to add that our theory is not reliant on this fact, and is based on both a new integration of the evidence as well as original evidence presented for the first time in this book.
Moreover, the theory articulated in this book takes no position on the existence of a historical Jesus, a fact which has never been and may never be possible to verify. If such a person did exist, we believe he was likely to have been quite different from the protagonist of the New Testament. There were a number of Messiahs in the 1st Century who claimed to be the fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy, and many messianic Jews of the 1st Century were crucified for their beliefs. Many messianic fanatics of the era were surely named “Jesus.” All of these things are certainly true.
While even most religious skeptics have been reluctant to deny the historical reality of a human moral idealist named Jesus, an altruist and a peace-lover, there is insufficient evidence to claim certainty here. Although most researchers believe there was a real person named “Jesus,” they admit this is only a logical inference and that no direct evidence of his existence has ever been confirmed. Some scholars, on the other hand, have gone so far as to argue that there was no historical Jesus at all and that he was entirely constructed from earlier sources. (See, e.g., the work of Wells, G.A., such as Did Jesus Exist?, 1975, London: Pemberton.) Indeed, there are earlier precedents for all of the attributes that are ascribed to Jesus, as we demonstrate more than ever before. Still others think that Jesus did exist but that he was nothing like the person described in the Gospels. Some of these have argued that he was a political revolutionary or an insurrectionist—a “Zealot.” However, the question of whether Jesus actually existed is not addressed by our thesis, and perhaps may never be answered.
For the last two or three centuries, during the period when free inquiry in this matter has been possible, scholars have trained a critical eye on the texts of the New Testament, and during this time their arguments weighing the historical reliability of what has been passed down have aroused passionate debate. Most academics today, including many Christians, accept that the Gospels and the Book of Acts are not historically reliable sources. (See, e.g., Ehrman, Bart D., Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them), 2009, New York: Harper One.) We concur and for basically the same reasons (including the contradictions between them), and we agree that the Gospels were written for theological reasons and not as historical records, and therefore they can only be understood as either articles of faith or as allegorical guides to a deeper meaning. None of the Gospels was written in the time of Jesus, for example, or by anyone who knew him personally. Indeed, no evidence of Jesus from his own time exists, at all. That Jesus’s very name means “salvation” complicates the question of his personal existence even further.
A group of scholars calling itself “the Jesus Seminar” has attempted to sort through the earliest Christian texts and answer these various questions by creating an annotated translation of the New Testament—one noting all of their suspicions and doubts about the veracity of each line, phrase and word—in an effort to achieve consensus about what can or cannot be categorized as original, changed or added at a later date. (Funk, Robert W., Hoover, Roy W., and the Jesus Seminar, The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus: The Five Gospels, 1993, New York: Polebridge Press.) Their consensus? The bulk of what the Gospels claim Jesus said was not actually said by the historical Jesus. What they claim he did is still less reliable in their view.
They have concluded that even most of the things directly quoted by the Gospels as teachings of Jesus Christ were written later by authors with their own theological motivations. These scholars recognize that most of what we read in the Gospels is not history at all, but is often material re-worked from the Old Testament and that it contains narratives later attached to the legend of Jesus. For example, the oldest and shortest Gospel, Mark, contains no “Nativity” stories at all. The two Gospels that are so reliant on Mark, Matthew and Luke each add their own stories about the birth of Jesus—with little overlap between the two even as they occasionally appear to contradict one another. And to a large extent, these Nativity stories are obvious re-workings of existing material from Hebrew scriptures, such as the slaughter of infants in the story of Moses found in Exodus that is repeated in Matthew’s account of Jesus’s birth.
Among the copious other evidence that the Gospels are unreliable includes Mark’s declaration that Jesus said, before he was ever crucified, “Take up [your] Cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34) If he did indeed say such a thing, no one could have understood his reference at the time. It is more likely that such words were placed into the mouth of Jesus later, after the symbolism of the Crucifixion had been established. From across a wide range of disciplines and methods, scholars, including many Christians, have accepted that the Gospels, as history, are fictional, and that their function was theological.
The reliability of the history contained in the Gospels has been questioned long before us.
To be sure, the scholars of the Jesus Seminar believe that the authentic words of Jesus can be discovered through a process of determining the sayings, or parts of sayings, that are most amenable to oral transmission. Thus, by their logic, the more a saying attributed to Jesus is pithy and memorable, the more likely it is to be authentic. They add other factors to their considerations, such as “multiple attestation,” i.e., the existence of the saying in multiple sources, and especially its presence in the Gospel of Thomas, which was discovered among the finds at Nag Hammadi, a Gnostic library discovered in Egypt with certain texts dating back to perhaps the 2nd Century. Scholars had long hypothesized that just as Matthew and Luke seem to have used the Gospel of Mark as a source, so the sayings of Jesus shared by Matthew and Luke were probably also once circulated independently. This hypothesized second source was named “Q.” The Gospel of Thomas, although itself written in the 2nd Century, looks like it was developed directly from such a “Q source.”
Unfortunately for the Jesus Seminar’s wider approach, many of the sayings that they find to be the most authentic are those which are also the most nakedly pro-Roman and Hellenized parts of his message. For example, Jesus’s proclamations concerning taxes (“Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”), his denunciations of Kosher diet (“It’s not what goes into a person from the outside that can defile”), his attack on traditional Jewish Sabbath observance (“The Sabbath day was made for Adam”), etc., are among their strongest candidates for authenticity. Indeed, a reversal of standard Jewish expectations is ironically one of their key indicators of authenticity! We submit that they are some of the strongest evidence that these were inventions of the Roman government.