The Last Mythic God

13th Century Buddhist reformer Nichiren put forward the idea that all human troubles have their origin in incorrect philosophy or belief. The premise is simple to understand yet profound in its implications. As we think, so we do. If we follow irrational beliefs, we will act irrationally.

Modern atheists have raised their voices against the acceptance of religious beliefs that defy rationality, stories obviously fantastic in nature but accepted as truth. This belief occurs mostly in fundamentalist Christians, who adhere to the absolute inerrancy of the New Testament. The Gospels, which recount tales of virgin birth, raising the dead, commanding bodies from graves, as found in Matthew, which become walking zombies, water to wine, scant bread and fish multiplied to feed 5000, sending the schizophrenic demoniac’s many internal devils (“we are legion”) into 2000 conveniently nearby pigs, who then run off a cliff to drown in the sea. Walking on water, calming the storms, healing the blind and afflicted. A constantly menstruating woman who touches the bottom of his robe is immediately cured. Jesus himself resurrecting from the tomb to ascend physically to heaven.

All of these events, looked at in any view except that of faith, present themselves as mythic in composition, literary stories obviously designed to astonish, to establish the divinity of the hero of the story, to show the power of this new figure, Jesus, as on par with the Greek and Roman gods, as well as Moses and others from the Hebrew Bible. Jesus presented as merely one more in an unbroken parade of literary, mythic characters populating the religions and belief systems of the West for the last 3000 years.

Yet somehow, in one of the most peculiar turns history has ever taken, Jesus is still considered en mass to have been an actual person. The reason is most likely because of the wisdom sayings attributed to him, though none are original, all of them have sources in Jewish or Hellenistic teachings.

It’s a very strange anomaly in our world, belief in an ancient god who performs outrageous miracles, with the story still holding sway over a large percentage of the human population. This in jarring contrast to modern advancements of science, mathematics, medicine, computing, quantum physics, and our growing understanding of the cosmos.

He is surely a man out of time. And the same could be said for the religion called Christianity that has been built around him.

Biblical Scholars since the turn of the century have been questioning the historicity and mythic nature of the figure of Jesus. They’ve dug in deep and investigated, and what the detective story reveals is startling. There’s no person to be found, no man where one should be.

The first oddity is that no one from around the time of his ministry in the 30’s makes any mention of him. It’s been said that he was merely one of a number of itinerant preachers of the time, so there isn’t any reason he would be distinguished, but we do know of others, such as Theudas, and The Egyptian, and of course John the Baptizer. But Jesus, if claims of his widespread fame as recounted in the Gospels have any kernel of truth to them, would have surely been recorded by history.

Marcion of Sinope, considered the first heretic, was written about extensively by his detractors in the mid-second century. Jesus would have been in a similar position, held in contempt by the Torah observant priesthood class, because of his lax positions when it came to strict Torah adherence. If Jesus was as significant as the Gospels say, and if his relations with the priests and Pharisees were as prickly as they are shown to be in the Gospels, it would have been noted by Jewish scribes of the time.

The second major ‘proof’, until now regarded as uncontestable, are the letters of Paul. Though Paul never met him, doesn’t cite his teachings, and refers to him mainly as a celestial god, the letters establish a close enough relationship between a Jesus living in the 30’s and Paul’s letters, thought to be from the 50’s. But with Paul, we have the same problem as we do with Jesus. No one of his time seems to know anything about him. Acts of the Apostles, where Paul figures prominently, is dated to the early 2nd century. Before that, nothing. Nothing of the burgeoning churches in Rome or Corinth, nothing from any independent source, and most tellingly, no actual knowledge of the letters themselves anywhere, by anyone, until the 2nd century. The most solidly recognized appearance and knowledge of the epistles is their publication in 144 A.D. by Marcion. This puts independently verified recognition of the Pauline epistles between fifty and one hundred years after they were supposedly written. The earliest citation is found in 1st Clement, a text dated to around the turn of the 1st century, probably later. Paul was dead at this point, so it’s a name and a letter 1st Clement refers to, not a historical person. 1st Clement doesn’t cite any verifiable source establishing Paul as an actual man, and at best attests to proto-Pauline letters.

Recent scholarship by Nina Livesey, in her recent paradigm shifting work, “The Letters of Paul in their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship,” argues convincingly for the fictive nature of the epistles, written to promote a new celestial Christ theology. The first real record of the letters appearing anywhere occurs in the 2nd century, in 144 A.D., as part of Marcion’s New Testament collection. No singular letter of Paul’s appeared before that. This, she argues, points to a compiled collection composed prior to publication.

Robert M. Price explored this in his wonderfully titled “The Amazing Colossal Apostle,” where the historical cipher and incongruous figure named Paul also reads like a character out of mythic fiction.

Robyn Faith Walsh, in the groundbreaking “The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture,” presents the likelihood of the composition of the Gospels by writers schooled in Greco-Roman literature, writing not as part of early Christian communities, but rather for popular consumption as familiarly mythic tales.

There is a short mention of Jesus in Josephus’ “Antiquities of the Jews,” but most scholars interpret it as interlineation - added centuries later to make up for the glaring omission of Jesus within the book.

Without getting further into the investigative weeds, there’s very little else left, and whatever’s there can be contested on the grounds of scholarly argument and also with regard to later dating of the sources. Despite protests from some prominent scholars like Bart Ehrman, the historical evidence concerning Jesus is astonishingly absent from the record, especially for a figure who has been a dominant force in shaping the whole of Western Civilization for the last 1500 years.

It has often been called The Greatest Story Ever Told. And what if it is just that? A belief that rose out of what was originally designed to be a great story, nothing else.

The Tales of The Last Mythic God.