The Fiction of the Christ

By Heather Campbell

The back cover of The Jesus Puzzle (Earl Doherty, Canadian Humanist Publications) asks 4 questions:

• Why are the events of the Gospel story, and its central character Jesus of Nazareth, not found in the New Testament epistles?

• Why does Paul's divine Christ seem to have no connection to the Gospel Jesus, but closely resembles the many pagan savior gods of the time who lived only in myth?

• Why, given the spread of Christianity across the Roman Empire in the first century, did only one Christian community compose a story of Jesus' life and death -- the Gospel of Mark -- while every other Gospel simply copied and reworked the first one?

• Why is every detail in the Gospel story of Jesus' trial and crucifixion drawn from passages in the Old Testament?

These questions roughly frame the structure of the book, and Doherty has a thesis which account for the problems they raise: Jesus Christ was a literary creation, entirely without a historical human as a basis. Even among atheists this assertion comes as a surprise; we modern people unconsciously assume that gods and myths started out as legends of actual human exploits, gaining divinity in the retelling. However, the theory here is that Christ started out as a spiritual symbol that was gradually taken to be a historical fact.

Doherty takes us back to the social context and mythic worldview of the Mediterranean region of the time to show how the concept of Christ could have been synthesized without reference to a historical person. To Doherty, this idea of a literary creation explains why the non-Gospel part of the New Testament do not refer to Jesus' own (presumably fairly recent) life and ministry.

That the writers of the New Testament epistles appear to be unaware of the details of the savior that they preach is handled quite thoroughly in the first part of the book. The apostle Paul does not quote Jesus, even when it would have reinforced his argument to do so. Even in "apologetics" (defenses of the Christian doctrine) written as late as 100 C.E. there is scarce mention of a human Jesus. Doherty is aware of the logical difficulty of the argument from silence -- that is, the problem of proving non-existence -- and that this line of reasoning requires collecting every single situation where a mention of the historical Jesus would be expected, yet is not found. Even at a logical disadvantage, he builds his case well.

Doherty goes on to propose how such a literary creation could come to be. From about 200 B.C., the influence of Greek culture was felt throughout a wide area; one rather Platonic worldview held that the earth, the material world, was but one of several planes of existence. This plane was a dim, imperfect reflection of the highest heavenly plane. Between earth and heaven, one or more atmospheric planes were the dominion of angels and demons, who had the power to influence events in the material world. Several other religious groups had myths of divinities descending from the highest realm to perform salvific actions in the atmospheric realms (such as Mithra's slaying of the bull), and then ascending back to Heaven. Jesus as described by Apostle Paul seems to have acted entirely in higher spheres.

As the Greeks gave way to the Romans in dominance around the Mediterranean, there was great social upheaval and many sects arose. Jews looked forward to the Messiah predicted in their scripture; wandering preachers announced the kingdom of God soon to come. "Pagans" and Jews influenced each other; one's Savior came to be associated with the other's Messiah. Paul believed that Jesus was revealed to mankind through the Jewish scripture, if one were inspired and knew how to interpret the message.

Against this backdrop, the specifically Christian story of Jesus probably was written as a "midrashic" exercise. "Midrash" was a reworking of quotes and themes of the Hebrew scripture for contemporary education. Jews of the time would have been so familiar with midrash that they would have recognized the Jesus narrative as allegory.

Doherty traces the scriptural origins of each detail of the narrative. For example, Jesus' cry of lament, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" quotes the first verse of Psalm 22. Later in that psalm the line "They divided my garments among them and for my raiments they cast lots" became part of the story, and so on. With an identifiable "midrashic" source for every aspect of the trial and execution, these section of The Jesus Puzzle is to me the most logically compelling of the book.

However, much of the argument for the additional material that Matthew and Luke bring to Mark's basic gospel rests upon the existence of a hypothetical document. Called "Q" for "Quelle" (German for "source"), this text is speculated to contain only quotations, with no plotline. Matthew and Luke would have both used Q, albeit somewhat differently, to expand upon and rewrite Mark. Q has never been found as such, although the Gospel of Thomas, part of the Nag Hammadi discovery in Egypt in 1945, offers intriguing corroboration. Thomas is entirely a collection of sayings of Jesus, having basically no narrative element.

At some point, likely when Christianity drifted from its Jewish roots and all new converts came from Hellenistic backgrounds, the Gospels were interpreted as history rather than allegory.

The Jesus Puzzle sets forth a bold theory with a solid enough argument to open up new lines of inquiry. I have only a few problems with it: the endnotes contain too much discussion which should be found in the main section of the book; also, the writing may be too dense for a lay readership and not dense enough for a scholarly readership. Having said that, however, I believe this book is a very good start to an analysis of Christianity's founding figure.