The Christ Myth Revisited

Book Review
by Frank R. Zindler

A review of The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity begin with a mythical Christ? By Earl Doherty (Ottawa Canada: Canadian Humanist Publications, 1999, viii + 380 pages. ISBN 0-9696014-0-5. USA $14.50) Available from American Atheist Press, Product #5599.

Madalyn Murray O’Hair would have loved this book for its scholarly and magisterial thoroughness, although the book doubtless would have caused her anguish as well. The anguish would have been due to the fact that Dr. O’Hair herself had worked for years on a book with the same import - a book which, in her inimitable, flamboyant style, she titled Jesus Christ Superfraud. Alas, computer disasters and a series of time-costly duties prevented her from completing the book before her death. Despite this, she would have been happy to learn that someone had done so definitive a job to demonstrate that there never was any historical Jesus.

I too approach this book with a mixture of delight and dismay. Like Dr. O’Hair, I have been working for nearly a decade on a book seeking to disprove the historicity of Jesus. (If it ever gets finished, it will be called Inventing Jesus: The Non-Life of Christ.) Earl Doherty’s The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity begin with a mythical Christ? has been my wake-up call - or rather the buzzer signaling that I have overslept. I too have been scooped.

Doherty begins his book by nailing twelve theses upon the door of the Cathedral of the Historical Jesus. Calling these theses “The Twelve Pieces of the Jesus Puzzle,” he enumerates twelve points which together only make sense if Jesus never existed. If the Jesus of Christian tradition once existed as an actual physical being, these twelve points constitute an inscrutable mystery and an insoluble problem. Since they are to some extent an epitome of the entire book, it is useful to quote them completely:

The Twelve Pieces Of The Jesus Puzzle

[1] Jesus of Nazareth and the Gospel story cannot be found in Christian writings earlier than the Gospels, the first of which (Mark) was composed only in the late first century.

[2] There is no non-Christian record of Jesus before the second century. References in Flavius Josephus (end of first century) can be dismissed as later Christian insertions.

[3] The early epistles, such as Paul and Hebrews, speak of their Christ Jesus as a spiritual, heavenly being revealed by God through scripture, and do not equate him with a recent historical man. Paul is part of a new “salvation” movement acting on revelation from the Spirit.

[4] Paul and other early writers place the death and resurrection of their Christ in the supernatural/mythical world, and derive their information about these events, as well as other features of their heavenly Christ, from scripture.

[5] The ancients viewed the universe as multi-layered: matter below, spirit above. The higher world was regarded as the superior, genuine reality, containing spiritual processes and heavenly counterparts to earthly things. Paul’s Christ operates within this system.

[6] The pagan “mystery cults” of the period worshiped savior deities who had performed salvific acts which took place in the supernatural/mythical world, not on earth or in history. Paul’s Christ shares many features with these deities.

[7] The prominent philosophical-religious concept of the age was the intermediary Son, a spiritual channel between the ultimate transcendent God and humanity. Such intermediary concepts as the Greek Logos and Jewish Wisdom were models for Paul’s heavenly Christ.

[8] All the Gospels derive their basic story of Jesus of Nazareth from one source: whoever wrote the Gospel of Mark. The Acts of the Apostles, as an account of the beginnings of the Christian apostolic movement, is a second century piece of myth-making.

[9] The Gospels are not historical accounts, but constructed through a process of “midrash,” a Jewish method of reworking old biblical passages and tales to reflect new beliefs. The story of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion is a pastiche of verses from scripture.

[10] “Q,” a lost sayings collection extracted from Matthew and Luke, made no reference to a death and resurrection and can be shown to have had no Jesus at its roots: roots which were ultimately non-Jewish. The Q community preached the kingdom of God, and its traditions were eventually assigned to an invented founder who was linked to the heavenly Jesus of Paul in the Gospel of Mark.

[11] The initial variety of sects and beliefs about a spiritual Christ shows that the movement began as a multiplicity of largely independent and spontaneous developments based on the religious trends and philosophy of the time, not as a response to a single individual.

[12] Well into the second century, many Christian documents lack or reject the notion of a human man as an element of their faith. Only gradually did the Jesus of Nazareth portrayed in the Gospels come to be accepted as historical.

A Backward Biography

As this book so ably demonstrates, the traditional scenario of Christian origins is upside-down and backwards. Jesus of Nazareth, a man, did not become a god; rather, a heavenly being, Christ, was transported to earth by story-tellers and became a man. As a man, he lived his life backwards. The earliest sources - whether biblical or extrabiblical - know nothing of his terrestrial life at all. The earliest of the canonical gospels (Mark) knows nothing of his childhood or middle years, but later gospels (Matthew and Luke) have lots of (contradictory) information about his childhood. Still later, “apocryphal” gospels “know” even more about his early years.

Perhaps the greatest false assumption inherent in the traditional view is the notion that Christianity had a beginning at all - that there existed some moment in time when the movement now called Christianity was set in motion. Rather, as Doherty compellingly shows, the cord of Christian history is actually a long braid composed of numerous separate fibers of tradition - fibers which join together at different times, split apart, recombine, and reassociate to form the tangled tapestry of Mediterranean religious history. Moreover, the braid is hopelessly frayed out in its oldest segment. Many of the loose threads that dangle from the bottom end of our cord of history are themselves not the true starting segments. Rather, they are the detached ends of fibers of religious fancy and speculation that could be traced - if only they still existed - to the remotest antiquity. Asking when Christianity began is as silly as asking when Hinduism began, say, or when the Egyptian religion began.

Doherty states the case succinctly [p. 127]:

[Traditional] theory extrapolates backwards. It starts from the Gospels and assumes that all the different strands found within them can be traced back to a common source. But no concrete evidence exists for this postulated break-up of Jesus into his component parts, for this initial divergence of responses to Jesus, followed decades later by a reverse convergence of those parts into the Gospels.

Rather, the separate strands which were later brought together to form the “Jesus tradition” of the Gospels are best seen as unrelated expressions within the broader social and religious milieu of the time, having nothing to do in their earliest stages with an historical Jesus, in some cases not even with a spiritual Jesus. Collections of wisdom teaching, aretalogies (lists of exploits and miracles attributed to famous men, or even to sectarian groups and their prophets), anonymous apocalypses, traditions of conflict with the establishment in the demand for reforms to social and religious practice: such things were the antecedents to the various Jesus strands and only at later stages did they become associated with such a figure, ultimately to end up in a composite Gospel. Some would have been linked to a Jesus only at the time of Gospel composition.

The fallacy of thinking Christianity began at some discrete moment in time is paralleled by the fallacy of thinking it began at one specific location in space - e.g., Jerusalem or Galilee. Here again Doherty goes to the heart of the matter [p. 139]:

The multiplicity of early Christian expression does not need an explanation in the context of a single point of origin and an initially pristine doctrine about Jesus. Rather, Christianity was born in a thousand places, in a host of different forms, growing out of the broad, fertile religious soil of the time. It sprang up in many independent circles and sects, both inside and outside Palestine, the product of many minds. All of it was the expression of the prevailing religious philosophy of divine intermediaries and the cravings of the age for “salvation.”

Asserting that the traditional view is upside-down is easy, although few scholars have ever achieved that plane of enlightenment. Demonstrating the fact, however, is much more difficult, and this is where The Jesus Puzzle is most significant as a contribution to scholarship. It proves beyond cavil, I think, that Jesus didn’t become a god, but rather that a heavenly Christ was dragged to earth to become a man. (Incidentally, it is more than likely that “Mark” was responsible for this lèse-divinité.)

Crucial in establishing the heaven-to-earth directionality preceding the creation of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ is Doherty’s discussion of turn-of-the-era philosophies and religions, such as Neoplatonism, Stoicism, and the mystery cults, wherein an action parallelism was created between the incorruptible (i.e., not capable of rotting) heavenly world and the terrestrial world in which things decay. Heavenly events had their earthly correlates, and vice-versa:

In describing the relationship between the upper and lower worlds, scholars… speak of a “parallelism of action” between heavenly and earthly counterparts, a “structural homologue”… Actions by divine beings in the spiritual realm have their consequences for those on earth who are joined to them. This idea is the key to understanding the concept of salvation which early Christianity shared with the Greek cults. The absorption of the spiritual power generated by the deity and his acts is accomplished through a pattern of “likeness.” … In other words, the spiritual force set up by the acts of the deity in the primordial past or higher reality impacts on the devotee in the present in a parallel process. …

All this fits into that most fundamental of ancient concepts outlined earlier: the idea that earth was the mirror image of heaven, the product proceeding from the archetype, the visible material counterpart to the genuine spiritual reality above. Heavenly events determined earthly realities. It follows that in such a philosophical system, the determining acts of divine forces which conferred salvation would of necessity be located, not on earth, but in that higher realm. Everything Paul says places him in that sort of thought world. [pp. 99-100]

Thus, the saving sacrifice of which the Pauline family of letters speak have nothing to do with an earthly Jesus of Nazareth, but rather, deal with a celestial event similar to the “acts” of other savior gods such as Attis and Mithra. Doherty’s classical scholarship provides compelling arguments to show that the Greek texts of these letters are more reasonably interpretable in such a frame of reference than within the traditional schema. It is a pity, then, that he does not provide much discussion of the astrological - or perhaps ‘astral’ is a better term - background of the same Pauline language he so ably examines, for at least some of the Greek terms used by “Paul” are known to have been astrological technical terms as well. There is a rich literature on the astrological underpinnings of Christian mythology going all the way back to Charles François Dupuis (1742-1809), whose thirteen-volume Origine De Tous Les Cultes traced out the astral components of religion in general and Christianity in particular. An astrological understanding of how the “upper world” affected the “lower world” was very common at the turn of the era - hints of astrological speculation can be found even in the scrolls from Qumran on the Dead Sea - and it would be most interesting to see to what extent it is reflected in the vocabulary of the Pauline texts. Perhaps this is a subject to be explored in the next edition of The Jesus Puzzle.

Arguably the most impressive thing about our author is his ability to read the oldest Christian literature - the Pauline corpus and Q, the so-called ‘Sayings Gospel’ reconstructed from the texts of Matthew and Luke - and read what is actually there, not what years of Christian brain-washing have made us think is there because tradition says it should be there. He argues eloquently for a new and more objective paradigm [p. 125]:

…the New Testament epistles present the Christian reader and scholar with difficulties and anomalies at every turn. These have traditionally been ignored, glossed over, or subjected to unnatural interpretations and questionable reasoning in order to force them into the mold determined by the Gospels.

What is needed is a new paradigm, a new set of assumptions by which to judge the epistles (as well as the other non-canonical documents we have looked at), one capable of resolving all those contradictions and uncertainties. That paradigm should be determined by what we can see in the epistles themselves and how we can relate their content to what we know of the spirit and conditions of the time. When the new paradigm and the interpretations based upon it are revolutionary, at least by the standards of the old one, incredulity is to be expected. But dramatic reversal, even on the order of something like the Copernican revolution in astronomy, is not at all rare in the field of science and historical research. Dogma and received wisdom are regularly overturned in many areas. The investigation of Christian origins as an historical phenomenon enjoys no privileged exemption from such a fate.

If the elements of early Christianity as reflected in the epistles point to a faith movement which is based on an entirely spiritual deity, and this picture fits very well into the known religious thought of the time, then that is the path of investigation to follow.

It is one thing to write a book showing that there is no creditable evidence of any historical Jesus, and quite another to write a book offering a convincing theory of how Christianity could have come about without him. Earl Doherty has achieved both. The Jesus Puzzle is a book no Atheist can afford to ignore. It should be on every skeptic’s book shelf - after being slowly read through twice. It is the most compelling argument against the historical Jesus published in my life-time. It will be interesting - and perhaps amusing - to see how evangelical apologists deal with this jack-hammer blow to the solar plexus of Jesus, the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, which was the son of Heli, which was the son of Matthat…

Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 by American Atheists.