http://www.steamshovelpress.com/jesuspuzzle.html
Book Review:
The Jesus Puzzle:
Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ?
by Earl Doherty Saussy
Reviewed by Acharya S
On the cover of Earl Doherty's book, is a blurb from a reader of
Doherty's earlier online version: "You present nothing new here that your
master, Satan, has not previously used to deceive the simple." In reality,
neither does this zealous critic present anything new, as this sinister
sentiment has been slung since Day One at those who do not blindly believe
every priestly huckster who comes along. Such an acrimonious response, in
fact, ranks right up there with "Your [sic] gonna burn in hell," in
intelligence and efficacy in refuting scholarly challenges to ludicrous
biblical claims.
It is a constant source of amazement to "freethinkers," rationalists
and assorted (other) scholars and scientists that it is considered virtuous
to blindly believe in the words of a man or a group of men concerning the
matters of "faith" and "religion," when, if religion were to have any meaning
at all, it would be about reality, honesty and integrity. There is little
honest or righteous about blindly accepting and then promulgating beliefs one
has not thoroughly investigated. Such behavior - and subsequent name-calling
and threats when the sale of these sacrosanct shoddy goods falls through -
should be considered the realm of the con artist, rather than that of a
seeker of truth.
There is nothing reasonable about accepting a story on its face value -
particularly if it defies logic and the laws of nature. And from beginning to
end the gospel tale does just that. It is a cruel tale that reveals a
deranged god. And a tale not even original to Christianity but falsely
presented as such. In actuality, the gospel story has been demonstrated
repeatedly to be a mishmash of mythical and ritualistic motifs found in
older, "Pagan" and "Jewish" (Hebrew/Israelite) cultures. Knowing this fact,
many erudite and enlightened individuals have attempted to explain how Christ
and Christianity really came about. For their courageous and insightful
efforts, they have reaped the consequences of immense vitriol and, all too
frequently over the millennia, death.
It is with great relief to the dissenters, then, when another intrepid
voice is heard and an inspiring book makes it to print, as it indicates that
on the horizon still glows some glimmer of hope that humanity can be freed
from erroneous beliefs which have caused endless suffering, atrocity and
terror. As someone making the world safer, the dissident should be lauded and
defended in his or her endeavors.
In his endeavor at seeking truth - and risking the vituperation of
those unwilling or unable to investigate for themselves - Earl Doherty
smoothly solves another piece of the Jesus puzzle, which has been under
deconstruction for centuries. He throws his well-considered opinions and
research into the ring alongside those of thousands of dissidents over the
centuries. Fortunately, Doherty's work provides unique and complementary
aspects to a growing body of literature written by those derogatorily called
by Christian apologists, "Christ-mythers," an assembly sneered at and
vilified - but not adequately refuted by any means - by believers and vested
interests alike.
After years of painstaking research, classicist and humanist Doherty,
like his Christ-myth predecessors, concluded that there was no historical
Jesus. The same conclusion was reached by his colleague, the Jesus Seminar's
Robert Price, an ex-evangelist who became a mythicist after close examination
and the removal of mythical elements from the gospel story, after which
little was left of the gospel Jesus that could be considered "historical."
In dissecting the Christ myth, Doherty focuses on demonstrating the
lack of historicity found in the earliest of canonical Christian texts, the
epistles. Like so many others, he wonders why "Paul," considered by numerous
Christians to be the "greatest apostle" and the truest establisher of
Christian doctrine, makes nary a mention of Jesus's purported life, deeds and
sayings.
In fact, Doherty does an excellent job outlining that the Christ of the
epistles is non-historical and transcendental, and that Paul and the other
epistle writers had no awareness of the gospel tale and its "historical
Jesus." Says he:
"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 Christ Jesus, 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." (2)
After 50 pages of relentless demonstration of this fact, one must throw
up one's hands in surrender: Paul, the "truest apostle" of the Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ whose teachings are often placed above those of Christ
himself, had never heard of the "historical" Jesus of Nazareth portrayed in
the gospels. In establishing this fact, Doherty includes a witty (fictional)
"conversation between Paul and some new converts" that shows how absurd is
the apologist claim that Paul's silence regarding the sayings, deeds and life
of Jesus is because the apostle had "no interest in them."
But Paul and the other canonical epistle writers are not alone in their
ignorance of the "historical Jesus." As Doherty further remarks:
"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." (73)
There is simply no reflection in the earliest Christian texts of any
"life of Christ" as a human being, divine or otherwise. To the rational mind,
this fact would serve as real proof that Jesus Christ is a fictional
character imposed upon history, in reality representing the disincarnate
Savior of the ancient, pre-Christian salvation cults. Indeed, the epistle
writers and other early Christian authorities speak almost exclusively of a
phantom or gnostic Christ of the same type of dying and rising savior gods
found in the Pagan mysteries for centuries, if not millennia, prior to the
Christian era.
Doherty recognizes that, prior to the advent of Christianity, many of
the same religious concepts were found within these salvation cults located
ubiquitously around the "known world." The salvation cults were indeed the
wellspring of Christianity, which represents the conglomeration of most of
the cults, religions, sects, mystery schools and secret societies within the
Roman Empire and beyond. In fact, Christianity turned inside out the
salvation cult mysteries, which constituted a "mythos and ritual" passed down
orally for centuries, as well as added to, changed, and "improved upon" as
new "doctors of the faith" rose up through the ranks of the mystery schools
and secret societies. In reality, Christianity represents a divulgence of
these secrets, explaining the persecution of early Christians as initiates
who broke their blood oath not to reveal them. Indeed, these schools and
societies were infiltrated by those who felt no duty to such an oath, and who
then pretended that these ages-old mysteries were a "divine revelation" to
them.
Concerning the religious environment of the world at the time, Doherty
states:
"Christianity and other Jewish apocalyptic sects, more mainstream
Jewish proselytizing activities, various pagan salvation cults, all had their
apostles trampling 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,' operating amid a broader milieu of ethical and
philosophical schools only a little less emotionally conducted." (34)
In addition, Doherty states:
"A rich panoply of Son/Christ/Savior expression was rampant across the
eastern half of the Roman empire by the late first century. Considering that
Christian writers even in the early second century show no familiarity with
the Gospel story, it seems ill-advised to trace all these ideas to an
historical Jesus of Nazareth who died obscurely in Jerusalem and whose career
on earth is not even preserved by those who allegedly turned him into the Son
of God." (138)
Doherty also shows the precedents for "the Son" and "Logos" ("Word")
within Jewish tradition and literature, exposing a seamless transition
between those concepts and the Christ of the epistles. Building on centuries
of bible scholarship, Doherty outlines numerous gospel elements and passages
that have their origins in Old Testament scripture:
" . . . virtually every detail of the Gospel passion story can be shown
to have a parallel in scriptures, and . . . even the intermediate and
large-scale structures of the account are scripturally determined." (244)
After establishing that the earliest Christian view of Jesus was of a
mystical, non-historical Son of God, Doherty moves on to the purported
extrabiblical and non-Christian evidence of Christ's historicity. Regarding
the works of various historians of the era, he says:
"If among these we begin our quest for non-Christian witness to Jesus,
the pickings are extremely slim. The first century philosopher Seneca (died
65 CE), the greatest Roman writer on ethics in his day, has nothing to say
about Jesus or Christianity - even though Christians after Constantine made
Seneca a secret convert to the faith and invented correspondence between him
and Paul. A little later, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus (c55-c135) espoused
a 'brotherhood of man' doctrine, aiming his message at the poor and humble
masses (he was a former slave himself). But he had apparently not heard of
his Jewish precursor. The historian Arrian preserved some of Epictetus'
lectures but records no mention of Jesus." (200)
And on goes the list of first and second century historians who are
silent on the subject of Jesus and Christianity.
Chief among the slim pickings are the pitifully few "references" held
up by apologists, such as the widely trumpeted passages from Pliny, Suetonius
and Tacitus, all of which have been demonstrated by many scholars, including
Doherty, to have basically no value in establishing a historical Jesus.
Considering that, repeatedly over the centuries, the notorious passage
in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, the "Testimonium
Flavianum," basically has been proved to be a "rank forgery," it is a pity
that Doherty needs to spend so much effort debunking it once again, but he
does it well and thoroughly. Likewise he does away with the other "evidence"
found in Josephus, i.e., the passage about James, the "brother of the Lord,
called Christ."
Regarding the Testimonium Flavianum, or "TF," the constant
regurgitation by Christian apologists of this spurious passage, as
essentially the only non-biblical "evidence" of the existence of the great
wonderworker Jesus Christ, shows how desperate is their plight. In actuality,
it takes little time for the trained and critical eye to know that the
Testimonium Flavianum is a Christian interpolation, i.e., a forgery.
In dissecting the Josephus passage, Doherty writes:
" . . . the startling fact is that during the first two centuries when
such a passage is claimed to have existed in all manuscripts of the
Antiquities of the Jews, not a single Christian commentator refers to it in
any surviving work." (208)
The logical conclusion for this absence of reference to the TF in the
abundant writings of the Christian fathers of the second and third centuries
is that the TF was not originally in Josephus but was likely forged in the
fourth century by Church historian Eusebius, who is the first to mention it.
The apologist claim that the TF must be real because there are no extant
copies of Josephus without it is simplistic and specious. In the first place,
up to the 16th century there evidently was at least one copy of the
Antiquities that did not contain the TF, in the possession of one Vossius.
Secondly, the lack of extant copies without the TF can be explained easily by
the endless destruction of texts by Church authorities over hundreds of
years.
On pp. 220-221 of The Jesus Puzzle, Doherty springs a sublime trap.
First he leads the reader through a discussion regarding a purported "lost
reference" in Josephus, as alleged by Church fathers Origen and Eusebius,
supposedly reflecting that the historian "believed that the calamity of the
Jewish War (66-70) and the fall of Jerusalem was visited upon the Jews by God
because of their murder of James the Just." Next, Doherty states:
"Origen brings up the 'lost reference' to criticize Joseph for not
saying that it was because of the death of Jesus, rather than of James, that
God visited upon the Jews the destruction of Jerusalem. But more than half a
century earlier, the Christian Hegesippus had said the same thing. As
preserved in Eusebius, Hegesippus witnesses to a Christian view of his time
(mid-second century) that it was indeed the death of James the Just which had
prompted God's punishment of the Jews."
"But," Doherty continues, "there is a very telling corollary to this.
Why did those earlier Christians not impute the calamity to God's punishment
for the death of Jesus, since to the later Origen - as well as to us - this
seemed obvious?
"The explanation is simple. The need to interpret the destruction of
Jerusalem would likely have developed early, even before Hegesippus. At such
a time, an historical Jesus and historical crucifixion had not yet been
invented, or at least would not have been widely disseminated beyond a few
early Gospel communities."
Proceeding to the second century Christian apologists, Doherty also
reveals that the majority of them writing before the year 180, such as
Theophilus, Athenagoras and Tatian, do not speak of a historical Jesus. These
three writers, for example, refer to a disincarnate, non-historical "Son of
God" or "Logos." Says Doherty:
". . . Theophilus never mentions Christ, or Jesus, at all. He makes no
reference to a f
