Jesus Neither God Nor Man
Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2011 10:29 am
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.”
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.”