Jesus Neither God Nor Man by Earl Doherty
Book Review
Robert Tulip

Deep beneath the surface of the earth, vast plates the size of continents imperceptibly grind against each other. Tension builds invisibly, while the surface shows little sign of the stresses steadily building below. Eventually, the growing tectonic pressure becomes too much, and the surface suddenly shifts to align to the causal reality. The vast destruction of a big earthquake produces a new stability, the apparent peace of the days before the quake is revealed as illusory, and those who had imagined their previous situation would continue are exposed as wrong.

The seismic shift of continental drift is seen in human culture in another form of tectonics. The carpenter Jesus, in Greek the tekton or master craftsman, sits at the center of Western civilization as the imagined redeemer of the faithful. And yet, as Earl Doherty proves beyond doubt in his masterful detailed analysis of Christian origins, Jesus Christ did not exist as a man, but was invented as a fictional character by the early church. This finding is a spiritual earthquake for our day.

Like a top barrister building his case for the jury, Doherty methodically examines early Christianity and its context to show there is no evidence whatsoever for the Christian faith in a historical Jesus, and abundant evidence for his invention. Like a new Galileo knocking away belief in heaven, or a new Darwin destroying belief in creation, Doherty eliminates the remaining pillar of conventional faith, the belief that Christianity was founded by Jesus Christ. It just did not happen.

This shocking finding has an equal seismic power as those earlier demolitions of orthodox belief by Galileo and Darwin, and is simply unimaginable for almost all Christians. And yet, if we put ourselves in the place of Christians at the time of Columbus, fearing a waterfall at the edge of the world ocean, or at the time of Darwin, secure in the ethical framework built upon the Genesis creation story, with Adam as the first man whose sin was redeemed by Christ on the cross, we can start to imagine how current religious delusions may also prove to be groundless, a house built on sand.

By questioning the traditional assumption of Jesus as founder, Doherty comprehensively and systematically shows how early Christian writings have been seen “through a glass darkly”, as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 13, through the distorted prism of the later fictional invention of Jesus. For generations after the supposed time of Jesus, we read nothing, precisely nothing, of the historical savior who is so familiar from the Gospels. Saint Paul and his contemporaries in the first century make no mention of Bethlehem, of Nazareth, of Galilee, of a ministry in Jerusalem, or a death on Calvary. These supposed events only appear later, in the brilliant inventive genius of Mark, and his successors Matthew and Luke, with their synthesis of the various strands of spiritual belief into a believable historical story in the early second century.

Paul’s Christ is an imaginary spiritual cosmic figure, whose manifestation on earth occurs in the proclamation of the apostles, not the teachings of the Savior, and contains no historical detail at all. By deceptively placing the Epistles after the Gospels in the New Testament, Christians have systematically distorted their reading of Paul, imagining that he speaks of a historical Christ when in fact he does no such thing.

Doherty provides a forensic analysis of this ‘reading back’ of Gospel preconceptions into the Epistles. He shows that all the supposed historical references to Jesus by Paul amount to nothing more than clutching at scanty straws by later dogmatists. Jesus is from David according to the flesh? This line from Romans 1 illustrates little more than Paul’s belief that the messianic idea emerges among the Jews. James is ‘brother of the Lord’? This ambiguous wording from Galatians 1:19 could have various other meanings other than the sibling of Christ that Christian apologists read. Christ celebrated the “Lord’s Supper”? Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 11 that he knows of this event only ‘through revelation’, more as supernatural ritual than historical event, and without any mention of details such as a trial the next day, or a location.

Apart from these dubious snippets, Paul presents an amazing and complete silence about a historical Jesus. Where Paul could naturally be expected to cite the teachings and life of Jesus in defense of his arguments, he never does. His arguments all come from the Old Testament, never from the supposed recent events in Palestine. Such a method of argument would be bizarre, if Jesus actually was the founder of the faith. Remember the advice of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount not to hide your light under a bushel? Paul seems so entirely embarrassed about the light of Christ that he never quotes him, or refers to any definite event in His supposed life. But that is because he had a big hand in inventing him.

Fast forward half a century from Paul to Mark, the first Gospel, and we find an inventive amalgam of Old Testament prophecy, set into a historical novel in Galilee and Jerusalem, rather as the tale of the Knights of the Round Table was later set in Camelot. Matthew and Luke then add a bunch of ethical sayings, known as Q, and finally John brings in the speculative visions of the Gnostics. It was all completely fictional, but so seductive that it spread like wildfire, once enough people were convinced. Not until 150 years after the passion events they describe were the four Gospels recognised as the canon, leaving abundant time to suppress, forget, amend and lose the real historical origins of Christian faith.

The Gospels and Epistles provide no evidence for any historical claims about Jesus. But Earl Doherty shows that so-called ‘independent evidence’ of Jesus is similarly farcical. Christians were so embarrassed to read Roman historical accounts which left Jesus out that they added him in, using the fraudulent practice of interpolation. Many Christians cite the main historian of the Jewish War, Josephus, as independent testimony. No Christians for more than two centuries noticed his mention of Jesus, even though it would have been a natural argument for them to cite, had he written it. The reference to Jesus in extant copies of the Antiquities of the Jews is a crude forgery. But Doherty observes that the fraudulent addition of Christ to the work of Josephus enabled the survival of the book. The hostile indifference of Christians through the dark ages to anything that did not agree with their dogma would have seen Josephus consigned to the flames had Eusebius not tampered with the text to add the line about the savior. Similarly, the supposed blaming of Christians for the fire at Rome in The Annals of Tacitus is nothing but a myth, not noticed by any historians or readers for hundreds of years, as believable as the fragments of the True Cross. Christianity is a Big Lie.

Jesus Neither God Nor Man is a magisterial work, utterly demolishing any credibility for literal historical faith in Jesus Christ. It presents a compelling logical foundation for theology that will completely wipe away the speculative visions based on historical fantasy.

Potential further research, building on Doherty’s findings, should, in my view, seek to solve the puzzle that he poses of how Christianity evolved despite a complete absence of evidence for its claims. Doherty sets the platform for real scholarly debate, rendering any views that rely on the assumption of a historical Jesus as obsolete. Why did people believe in Jesus? Two areas that merit further investigation are the cosmic framework of observation of the stars, and the continuity between Christianity and other mythical traditions, especially from Egypt. Doherty only mentions these issues in passing. However, the observation of precession of the equinox has a precise match to the timing of Christ, with the idea of ‘as above so below’ linked to the concept of the Age. As well, there are obvious major parallels between Christianity and Egyptian beliefs in their main gods Osiris, Isis and Horus. Doherty exercises scholarly caution regarding these more speculative areas of enquiry, restricting his analysis to the established Western framework of Greco-Judaean civilization. But as his findings are analyzed further, these themes deserve close scrutiny.

Rather than a ‘Big Bang’ founded by Jesus Christ, Doherty explains Christianity as an idea that was ‘in the air’ across the Roman Empire, with multiple diverse sources that gradually coalesced into the historical myth that has dominated Western culture for the last two millennia. As he says, it is absurd to imagine that the Christian communities who received Paul’s letters imagined that an obscure carpenter from Nazareth was the incarnation of the Logos, especially when Paul himself makes no such claim. In presenting a purely scientific causal evolutionary account of the cultural memes of faith, Doherty’s explanation of the rise of Christianity seems more like the Cambrian Explosion, the sudden change more than half a billion years ago when multi-cellular life first evolved across the earth, with myriad forms emerging, competing and mostly going extinct, with only the most adaptive surviving.

So does Doherty demolish Christianity? Surprisingly enough, I don’t think so. He reserves his withering scorn for the Christian apologists who turned the early myth into dogma, who distorted the historical record to support their political interests in the growth of the church. As for Paul himself, and the writers of the Gospels, Doherty appears to hold them in high esteem, as spiritual geniuses who articulated a new myth suited to the ethical needs of their day. Doherty speculates that Mark would have been aghast at what later churchmen made of his allegorical tale of Christ.

The failure of Christianity to understand its origins has ever since been a source of dominant delusion. By analysing what the original authors really intended, that Christ was mythical and eternal, not literal and temporal, we have opportunity to rebase Christianity in scientific understanding, so that reverence for the idea of Christ can once again be based in spiritual cosmic imagination, rather than in historical idolatry. Literal faith in Jesus Christ is the last major holdout of fundamentalist supernatural error, committing the sin that Paul condemned in Romans 1:25, “exchanging the truth of God for a lie, and worshipping and serving the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.”

Well, nice job, Robert. As Doherty says and as you wholeheartedly agree, there is little reason to have confidence in the foundational story that the Gospels present. Whether there was a Jesus or not, it seems very unlikely that he was the originator of a religion. That work was done by others, at a time later than the dates of the supposed Jesus. Where I disagree with you and others is that all this was done in a kind of wink, wink fashion. I think the belief in the real man at the core really did work itself into all the writings that we call Christian. I don't find in your summary of Paul's epistles the slam-dunk, metaphorical Jesus that you perceive Paul to be talking about. It's much simpler for me to believe that Paul thought the resurrected Jesus had appeared to him on the road to Damascus. Resurrected meaning he had once been alive. What Paul omits to say in his instructions to the various diaspora communities of Jews doesn't seem to me decisive. True enough, the details that later were used in the Gospel stories might not have been worked into the tradition about Jesus at the time Paul was writing.

I don't think, as a general rule, that anyone is likely to go to the mat for a metaphor, to the extent that Paul and others did. There would be flesh and blood behind the commitment, the power of certainty that belief in historical origin would confer.

I still need to read this book. I'd like to see how Doherty approaches the Pauline Epistles issue.

DWill wrote:Well, nice job, Robert. As Doherty says and as you wholeheartedly agree, there is little reason to have confidence in the foundational story that the Gospels present. Whether there was a Jesus or not, it seems very unlikely that he was the originator of a religion. That work was done by others, at a time later than the dates of the supposed Jesus.

Yes, this is a first key point, that Jesus Christ did not found Christianity. The complete absence of any specific reference to the teachings or life of a supposed founder for nearly a century after his claimed birth makes the conventional Christian belief utterly implausible. Doherty does a better job than any writer I have previously encountered of laying the details out of how the conventional story of Jesus as founder clashes with the actual record of the evolution of Christian faith.

Where I disagree with you and others is that all this was done in a kind of wink, wink fashion. I think the belief in the real man at the core really did work itself into all the writings that we call Christian.

Before I read Neither God Nor Man, I was more sympathetic to the argument you put here. However, Doherty shows that the comprehensive silence by Paul about any reliance on an actual Christ indicates that Paul was not aware of any such story. His talk of the 'manifestation' of Christ was purely spiritual and mythic, but constructed in such a way that the Gospel authors were later able to use similar ideas, notably the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, to invent the historical narrative. Doherty goes into all this in scrupulous detail.

For example, there is the addition of the Q ethical sayings (such as the Sermon on the Mount) to the Old Testament 'midrash' by Mark. Doherty shows that textual analysis of Matthew and Luke, such as how they present the same source material in different and contradictory ways, taking it from Mark or from Q, indicates that the "Jesus said" lines in the Gospel were a later addition to an older set of sayings that originally lacked such attribution.

I don't find in your summary of Paul's epistles the slam-dunk, metaphorical Jesus that you perceive Paul to be talking about. It's much simpler for me to believe that Paul thought the resurrected Jesus had appeared to him on the road to Damascus. Resurrected meaning he had once been alive.

Ha, the scales falling from Paul's eyes on the Damascus road at Acts 9:18 is a beautiful example of how myth has corrupted our outlook on history.

Doherty points out that Acts is in fact one of the latest works of the New Testament, dating to the latter part of the second century, when the carnalists needed to provide historical cover for their fantasies. Nothing of the sort appears in the Epistles. Doherty gives a compelling analysis of Acts as an Orwellian rewriting of events, presenting a vision of Paul that completely contradicts his own views in the Epistles. So it is historically quite invalid to cite Acts as a reliable source for anything about Paul.

What Paul omits to say in his instructions to the various diaspora communities of Jews doesn't seem to me decisive. True enough, the details that later were used in the Gospel stories might not have been worked into the tradition about Jesus at the time Paul was writing.

Doherty looks at this traditional apologetic argument quite carefully. Paul cites Moses extensively, but never cites Jesus. This is one of several factors that make it implausible that Paul's revelation of Jesus is based on a real man.

The arguments that the teachings of Jesus were too well known to need citing is a pathetic rationalization. No Christians seem to show any awareness of these teachings until they miraculously appear a century later in Mark, sprouting fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus. The only logical explanation is that the story of Jesus was invented well after the time of Paul. Your phrase "worked into the tradition about Jesus" is quite telling. If Paul's belief was based on a real Jesus, why do we find such an absence of engagement between Paul and a community holding this historical memory? The yawning abyss about a historical Jesus in the Epistles is why the church found itself compelled to manufacture claims about Paul in Acts, such as his encounters in Jerusalem.

I don't think, as a general rule, that anyone is likely to go to the mat for a metaphor, to the extent that Paul and others did. There would be flesh and blood behind the commitment, the power of certainty that belief in historical origin would confer.

This is a very interesting question for history and psychology. For a start, we don't know that Paul 'went to the mat', since the fable of his sea voyage to Rome only dates from Acts, long after his death. What we really see is a gradually evolving myth.

This is why I took the trouble to mention Hitchens' error in dating Tertullian's comment about martyrs in his Introduction to Arguably. Hitchens is similarly a victim of church propaganda, with his placement of martyrology in the first century, when in fact we have no such martyr evidence until the second century.

As people gradually came to believe in a historical Jesus, it fitted right in to their sense of moral outrage at the amorality of Rome, that a perfect innocent had been sacrificed to the maw of Empire. People actually are willing to die for a myth, if it can be presented in a sufficiently plausible way. Without such plausible presentation as we find in the Gospels, a historical Jesus would have been just another of the many thousands of casualties of Empire, rather than the mythical 'one for all'.

And anyway, it beggars belief that this 'flesh and blood' originator went completely under the radar of Josephus, who made it his business to record the reasons for the Jewish War in 70AD, which manifestly did not include any Jesus movement, and of Philo, who represented the Jews to Rome in the mid first century and was the main source for the Logos doctrine in John. The 'flesh and blood' of Christ was only a later invention, as the Gospel authors wove together the strands to create a unifying historical myth.

That is certainly a good defense of the mythical Jesus, but remember, what I am most concerned with saying is that the historical reality of Jesus is what the Gospels were primarily interested in selling to us. As I read them, this is inescapable for me. Whether the writers simply had come to accept legend and rumor as the facts, or whether, a bit bizarrely, they knew it wasn't true but wanted to use it all anyway, the narratives we have are clear in their intent to assert that the credibility of the faith relies on things that happened. Apparently, you can read, say, Mark, and not come away thinking that the writer believes in a literal Jesus, but I can't.

I've mentioned before the role that the Jews were cast into by the early Christians. To scapegoat an entire ethnic group as the killers of a savior makes some kind of twisted sense. To scapegoat them as killers of a metaphor, doesn't.

DWill wrote:That is certainly a good defense of the mythical Jesus, but remember, what I am most concerned with saying is that the historical reality of Jesus is what the Gospels were primarily interested in selling to us.

“Selling” is exactly the right word. In George Burns’ great line, ‘if you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made’. But the question here is why the Gospel authors would want to fake sincerity in order to get people to believe in a historical Jesus?

The Gnostic Paul by Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, explains how the New Testament continually speaks at two levels, a literal faith for the general public, and an allegorical message for the initiates. What happened was that the literal faith became so popular that the adherents of the allegory, of the actual hidden intent of the writers, got squeezed out and suppressed. So Mark wrote his Gospel as a popular introduction to a faith community, on the understanding that once people had been attracted they could be taught the real (spiritual) story.

Unfortunately the bait and switch proved a bit too clever, with the bait so attractive that people forgot about the switch. It is like a furniture store advertising tables for a dollar each, with the intent of running out of stock so they can get people in the door to sell them one hundred dollar tables, but then finding that the one dollar table actually becomes their main business.

Another comparison is with the Sorceror’s Apprentice. The spell to get the mop to come to life is like the literal Gospel story. Just as the apprentice did not know how to reverse the spell when the mop flooded the room, the early church did not know how to explain its allegorical intent once the Gospel story had become dominant.

As I read them, this is inescapable for me. Whether the writers simply had come to accept legend and rumor as the facts, or whether, a bit bizarrely, they knew it wasn't true but wanted to use it all anyway, the narratives we have are clear in their intent to assert that the credibility of the faith relies on things that happened.

The latter case, that they knew it wasn't true, is well argued by Doherty. He goes through the Gospels in detail looking for what is known as Midrash. This is the practice of taking a text from one context (eg Moses crossing the Red Sea), and using lines from it in a completely new context, such as Jesus walking on water or getting baptized in the Jordan River. Considered in this light, the events of Jesus’ life appear as a total midrash, deliberately using the Old Testament as a blueprint for the imagined life of the Messiah. Since the real background message was a spiritual savior, the fictional nature of the introductory texts did not matter.

I don’t think it is plausible that the Gospels were based on ‘legend and rumor’. If that was the case, there would be some trace of it outside the Christian communities, but there is none, until much later when the Gospels were accepted as a source. What happened was that the Gospel authors combined ideas from a range of sources, including the Old Testament, the Q ethical sayings and Egyptian myth, with the primary intent of producing a believable story. Matthew and John say their goal is to induce belief (ie not to provide accurate history).

Apparently, you can read, say, Mark, and not come away thinking that the writer believes in a literal Jesus, but I can't.

It all gets back to intent. If ‘Mark’ wrote his Gospel in order to attract converts, it becomes a bit like L. Ron Hubbard and his Thetans, something that is completely unbelievable but has nonetheless served to expand a cult.

The Feeding of the Five Thousand is a crucial text in this regard. This myth was not known as far as we can tell before Mark, and is the only miracle to appear in all four gospels (six times!). It is allegory for a cosmic message. So it makes no sense to suggest Mark based it on ‘legend and rumor’, and complete sense to say he based it on ‘bait and switch’.

I've mentioned before the role that the Jews were cast into by the early Christians. To scapegoat an entire ethnic group as the killers of a savior makes some kind of twisted sense. To scapegoat them as killers of a metaphor, doesn't.

The historical context is far more complex. The trauma of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and expulsion of the Jews from Israel in 70AD was so immense and intense that we can hardly imagine it. It seems very plausible that the psychological displacement of the trauma on to a ‘one for all’ with the Jesus story, and Matthew’s blaming of the Jews for their own fate, provide adequate explanation for the original scapegoating.

Robert Tulip wrote: “Selling” is exactly the right word. In George Burns’ great line, ‘if you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made’. But the question here is why the Gospel authors would want to fake sincerity in order to get people to believe in a historical Jesus?

Faking sincerity is only one of the possibilities I mentioned, and the less likely of the two. The other is that the Gospel writers believed the essentials of the story. What is so hard to accept in that? Were journalistic or historiographical standards of truth prevalent then? Looking at the the scriptures that they were so familiar with, do you suppose they discounted all of that, too, as impossible exaggeration, behaving like rationalist skeptics?

The Gnostic Paul by Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, explains how the New Testament continually speaks at two levels, a literal faith for the general public, and an allegorical message for the initiates. What happened was that the literal faith became so popular that the adherents of the allegory, of the actual hidden intent of the writers, got squeezed out and suppressed. So Mark wrote his Gospel as a popular introduction to a faith community, on the understanding that once people had been attracted they could be taught the real (spiritual) story.

Calling the Gospels sustained allegory is stretching things for me, but even if that were accepted, it's not as though the allegorical meaning cancels the narrative; it merely adds to it. Moby Dick is still a tale about whaling, for all its allegory. There is no basis to claim that the writer of Mark disavows the literal sense if he tucks other meanings into the work.

Unfortunately the bait and switch proved a bit too clever, with the bait so attractive that people forgot about the switch. It is like a furniture store advertising tables for a dollar each, with the intent of running out of stock so they can get people in the door to sell them one hundred dollar tables, but then finding that the one dollar table actually becomes their main business.

So speculative.

The latter case, that they knew it wasn't true, is well argued by Doherty. He goes through the Gospels in detail looking for what is known as Midrash. This is the practice of taking a text from one context (eg Moses crossing the Red Sea), and using lines from it in a completely new context, such as Jesus walking on water or getting baptized in the Jordan River. Considered in this light, the events of Jesus’ life appear as a total midrash, deliberately using the Old Testament as a blueprint for the imagined life of the Messiah. Since the real background message was a spiritual savior, the fictional nature of the introductory texts did not matter.

Interesting, to be sure.

I don’t think it is plausible that the Gospels were based on ‘legend and rumor’. If that was the case, there would be some trace of it outside the Christian communities, but there is none, until much later when the Gospels were accepted as a source. What happened was that the Gospel authors combined ideas from a range of sources, including the Old Testament, the Q ethical sayings and Egyptian myth, with the primary intent of producing a believable story. Matthew and John say their goal is to induce belief (ie not to provide accurate history).

Your idea that popular beliefs, folklore, a lot of oral transmission, play no part in the formation of the Gospels seems odd to me. For stories about a man, real or not, to be promulgated in this way is surely not unprecedented, and what "traces" would one expect to find?

The Feeding of the Five Thousand is a crucial text in this regard. This myth was not known as far as we can tell before Mark, and is the only miracle to appear in all four gospels (six times!). It is allegory for a cosmic message. So it makes no sense to suggest Mark based it on ‘legend and rumor’, and complete sense to say he based it on ‘bait and switch’.

But do you know that the miracle has no provenance, that it was invented by the Mark writer before the other Gospel writers copied it? And again, I don't see where 'bait and switch' needs to come in. Why isn't it just a symbolic, metaphorical element?

The historical context is far more complex. The trauma of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and expulsion of the Jews from Israel in 70AD was so immense and intense that we can hardly imagine it. It seems very plausible that the psychological displacement of the trauma on to a ‘one for all’ with the Jesus story, and Matthew’s blaming of the Jews for their own fate, provide adequate explanation for the original scapegoating.

I'd have to ask you to explain this more fully. I think that the scapegoating of the Jews for handing Jesus over to the Romans and then clamoring for his death, is rather hard to account for absent very real animosity that arose over facts accepted by Christians. The conscious use of fiction idea comes up short in relation to this.

Some good reviews I see there Robert:

“...A refreshing exception to this rule is the monumental work of Earl Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, a revised and expanded edition of The Jesus Puzzle on top of which a decade’s worth of new research has been added. This hefty tome presents an argument so bold it is no surprise it comes from outside the mainstream of New Testament scholarship, yet so compelling in its ability to explain contradictions in the existing theories that it may prove to be nothing less than a paradigm shift…The bombshell conclusion that there was no flesh and blood Jesus ever is nothing new: The concept of the mythical Jesus has been in and out of vogue for centuries. What makes Doherty’s theory a force to be reckoned with is its power to explain why the New Testament looks the way it does, and where all those puzzling inconsistencies came from. By unscrambling the two traditions and setting them in the right order, he has provided us with significant explanatory power…Read this book, even if it’s the only one you read on the subject. I did. And when I was done, I felt like a veil had been lifted from my eyes: the quest for truth had set me free.” Roberto Perez-Franco, Staff Writer, “The Tech,” Newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

DWill wrote:Faking sincerity is only one of the possibilities I mentioned, and the less likely of the two. The other is that the Gospel writers believed the essentials of the story. What is so hard to accept in that? Were journalistic or historiographical standards of truth prevalent then? Looking at the the scriptures that they were so familiar with, do you suppose they discounted all of that, too, as impossible exaggeration, behaving like rationalist skeptics?

"The scriptures they were familiar with" were contained in the Old Testament. The Christian agenda was to bring the scriptures up to date in a new covenant for a New Age.

Paul showed no awareness whatsoever of an incarnate Christ, but his myths of the cross provided fertile ground for the invention of a historical story. Doherty is extremely informative on the contradictions between the Gospels. They used the same Old Testament ideas in different order and different ways, in order to embroider their elaborate fable. If there was a historical Jesus, then Paul would have shown some actual knowledge of him, and this would have been reflected in his letters to the Christian communities who already existed across the empire.

The logic of growth of a belief accords, as I set out in the opening post, with a Cambrian Explosion, not a Big Bang. Multicellular life appeared across the earth in the Cambrian only after the oxygen level in the atmosphere reached a critical threshold after more than three billion years of microbial life. Similarly, the idea of a Christ figure was 'in the air' for Paul, as an imagined fulfillment of prophecy, a way to bring together all religions into unity in the common era, and a story of how the degraded conditions of earthly life could connect to a cosmic redeeming absolute truth.

All of these points touched strong emotional nerves, priming the pump for the invention of a historical Jesus of Nazareth. The alternative, the Big Bang theory of Jesus as founder, defies logic and evidence, as there is no sign of this story until the gospel of Mark, close to the turn of the second century. The complete absence of Jesus from contemporary historical accounts shows that the dramatic events of the gospel are invented, casting extreme doubt on the idea that these events were elaborated from a historical seed.

The real seed was the desire to combine Jewish tradition of the messiah with Greek philosophy and Egyptian myth. The Gospels are potboilers that were just as convincing to those who wanted to believe as Carlos Castaneda's Tales of Don Juan, the Yacqui Sorceror, are to those who want an indigenous American spirituality. And equally fraudulent.

Calling the Gospels sustained allegory is stretching things for me, but even if that were accepted, it's not as though the allegorical meaning cancels the narrative; it merely adds to it. Moby Dick is still a tale about whaling, for all its allegory. There is no basis to claim that the writer of Mark disavows the literal sense if he tucks other meanings into the work.

And Jesus is a tale about heroic salvation and sacrifice. These are themes that latch on to people's experience and dreams, the fantasy of a perfect Jew who stood up to Rome and defended the Davidic legacy as King of Israel, his resurrection proving that imperial power could not subdue the spirit of truth. Moby Dick cobbles a lot of real experience of the sea, but I doubt anyone believes there was a real great white whale that represented the hostile malevolence of the earth towards human depredation, although for many this myth is just as seductive as the myth of Christ.

Your idea that popular beliefs, folklore, a lot of oral transmission, play no part in the formation of the Gospels seems odd to me. For stories about a man, real or not, to be promulgated in this way is surely not unprecedented, and what "traces" would one expect to find?

The folklore was very much there, but as Old Testament anticipation of a Messiah. Daniel 9 can be read as predicting the exact time of Christ (as Isaac Newton showed). The Psalms, Isaiah, and all the prophets set the folkloric scene. But that is quite different from the folklore you are looking for, which tells of Christ after the event. For that we have nothing until Mark, whose Jesus is no more reliable than Mallory's Sir Galahad, written hundreds of years after the legend of Camelot, and only a late messianic addition to the folk stories.

But do you know that the miracle [Feeding of the Five Thousand] has no provenance, that it was invented by the Mark writer before the other Gospel writers copied it? And again, I don't see where 'bait and switch' needs to come in. Why isn't it just a symbolic, metaphorical element?

I don't know Mark invented it, and I suspect it had a significant oral provenance before Mark. My view is that this miracle, like Daniel's prophecy, describes the observation of the shift of stellar Ages from the Age of Aries to the Age of Pisces. Astrology was big in the Roman Empire, but Christianity condemned it. My view is that Christianity was grounded in an astrological vision of the cosmos, but the combination with Jewish transcendentalism led to this origin being denied and forgotten. The ladder was pulled up by those at the top, the orthodox apologists, and evidence of this ladder was systematically eradicated, except for archaeological hints such as the loaves and fishes as symbols of Virgo and Pisces. What this means is that the so-called miracle started as a cosmic allegory and was carnalized in the Gospels.

scapegoating of the Jews for handing Jesus over to the Romans and then clamoring for his death, is rather hard to account for absent very real animosity that arose over facts accepted by Christians. The conscious use of fiction idea comes up short in relation to this.

Again, if this was true, why did Josephus and Philo not notice, when they did notice things of far less moment? The whole scapegoat scenario involves a level of political prominence that just does not square with the complete absence of the story from the historical record. The silence is deafening. The refusal of the Jews to accept the story of Christ as fulfillment of their own scriptures was plenty of reason enough for Christians to instigate their baleful anti-Semitic attitudes.

It might be hard to keep in mind, Robert, that I'm not arguing for a historical Jesus. I don't see much point in that. A given for me is that the Jesus who performed the miracles, attracted huge crowds, and was resurrected, wasn't historical. So was there some germ of a man that got the whole ball rolling while fevered imaginations did the rest? Likely, I think, but again not essential. My argument is all about the intent of the Gospels and other NT writings. My unsurprising conclusion is that the NT is trying to say just what people have taken it to say over the centuries, which is that here we have events in history that prove we have been given the ultimate revelation. Whether we doubt that people could really believe this, and whether we see scant evidence of a Jesus founder, seems to me beside the point when all we need to do is read the books and have their intent come across loud and clear.

As for the scapegoating of the Jews, you're thinking I'm claiming a historical basis for that, that Jesus was crucified at the pleading of the Jews and that therefore the Christian writers made the Jews' guilt prominent in the Gospels and in Acts. I'm only looking at the texts and noting that the writers certainly accepted that, however they reached their conclusions. Judging just by the parallel content of the four books, we can safely assume that hating the Jews and all the rest (perhaps including, as you say, the loaves and fishes) were familiar to the audience, either in written or oral form. This I believe is widely accepted. There was no ploy used in the Gospels by clever fiction writers to get the simple common people hooked on a false, literal story, while beckoning to the educated to taste the finer fruit of allegory. How could they maneuver when they invented so little, and why would all four maneuver in the same basic way?

The importance for history, for later history, of what the Gospels say about the Jews is that the Bible's words were taken as solid proof that the Jews were guilty of deicide. That this destructive theme was invented by the writer of Mark, who didn't think Jesus was real in the first place, and then parroted by the other writers, is a poor chance indeed.