Jesus!

Q: What has no legs at all?
A: The Jesus Story

I went looking for Jesus recently; I didn't find him. There's no trace of him anywhere other than a brief mention by a Jewish historian who heard the name some 60 years after Jesus supposedly died.

The strange thing was that the harder I looked the less there was. The whole structure of the myth is like a rotten post of wood - it looks solid enough from a distance to be accepted as having some reality to it, but as you touch it, it literally crumbles in your hand.

The Gospels are all much later than they pretend to be and are at least second generation retellings or, much more likely, inventions. They don't agree with each other in detail nor in theme. They're all blatantly reliant on older myths (Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Assyrian, Zoroastrian, Jewish) for the bulk of their text and ideas. The central character of Jesus does and says literally nothing new. In short, Jesus in the Gospels is a composite character created as a figurehead for a religious movement with political motivations relevant mostly to the Jews.

But that's hardly even the start of it. As soon as we finish the Gospels (with their completely made up names - none of them actually say that they're written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John) we're into Acts which is such complete nonsense that it's hard to know what to say about it; hardly any part of it is even physically possible, let alone plausible.

Paul introduces a completely new "Jesus" who he claims has had a strange change of mind about a lot of things since dying. This marks an attempt to broaden the political value of the myth out into the wider Roman world. It initially seems as if the point is to make Paul a VIP but even Paul doesn't hold up to scrutiny. He, too, is a composite character created by later writers who hook into his reputation to back up their ideas of where the religion should be going, snowballing that reputation in the process until we end up with a huge snarl of made up bollocks all attributed to one bloke who never even heard of most of the actions attributed to him, and who says flat out that never met the founder of the cult he aspires to lead and who's words he is re-interpreting based on a vision. As previously, most of these actions and revisions are drawn from other mythologies or from the Old Testament myths.

Working backwards, Judaism itself falls apart under even less pressure. Although I already knew that the OT was a random bag of made up events and self-justifications that contradicted itself and made no sense even internally, I have been surprised to realise that being a "Jew" in the sense we normally understand it is a Babylonian concept dating from only about 600 BC. The wider Hebrew population was not monotheistic and didn't have any of the core myths we associate with Judeaism before that time - the creation, the Garden of Eden, Tower of Babel, Exodus from Egypt, and of course the great Mesopotamian story of the Flood were all picked up by a small group of rich families living outside of Judea (Israel having had a surprisingly short life which was snuffed out centuries before). All of these except Exodus are Babylonian stories and probably even Exodus was picked up in Babylonian. It was only when the exiles returned from Babylon (after a mere 50 years; some of the returnees would have lived through the whole period) that they imposed this new religion on the Hebrews who had not been decanted to the Great City.

I started off with the fairly common notion that, although not everything in the Bible is literally true - an impossibility when the second chapter contradicts the first! - that something as detailed and relatively recent as the Jesus story would have some kernel of historical truth, even if Jesus was not the son of a non-existent deity. The first blow to that idea was that there is no history to the Jesus story. Not a single event in the whole thing has any existing support from outside the story. Jesus is, historically speaking, no more a real person than Gandalf - in fact less so; at least we know who wrote about Gandalf and we can get some historical context for the character and his creation from that.

I guess that, hardbitten cynical atheist though I imagined myself to be, I just found it hard to accept that someone would simply sit down and compose a pack of lies from start to finish for their personal gain. Well, put me down as chagrined. Really, it happens all the time. Criminals make up stories that put other people in the frame, Afghani peasants finger people they just don't like as "Taliban" knowing that it will effectively end the life of a person who maybe just had an argument with them about a field boundary, and adults tell children stories to "teach them morals".

Oedipus?
It's complex, mum!

But it's not like the NT (or the OT) was actually written as a single piece of fiction. Clearly, for example, the authors of Genesis 1 and 2 were different people who weren't really talking to each other (Gen.1 is the Babylonian version of creation); "Luke" and "Mark" were written by people with a completely different view of the story they were transcribing and were probably 50 years apart.

Where things got out of hand was when the whole lot was put together as a collection. As would happen again with the Koran, there simply was no way for the much later church leaders to judge which load of cobblers was "real" and which not. Christian fakers had been writing self-serving versions of the Jesus story for hundreds of years, putting false names on them, putting false dates on them, and misquoting older scripture (itself the result of the same process) to make the "facts" fit the "predictions" no matter how anachronistic.

But that is a distraction which makes it seem as if there was some special truth in there to be found and to an extent justifies the "shotgun" approach of throwing in a sample of gospels (from the 120 or so available) and a selection of letters that might or might not be from some guy possibly called Paul as well as a rag-tag set of apparently completely random stuff like the Apocalypse of John. If you're sure the truth is in there but can't decide exactly where then at least you're giving future generations a chance to find it, right?

In fact, this chain of reasoning has one very weak link. Bizarrely, the Bible contains no actual first-hand history of Jesus nor does it claim to. This is skirted over when teaching people about Jesus but the reality is that not a single person who wrote any part of the Bible actually claims to have met or seen the living Jesus. None!

The whole story is written as a sequence of "I met a guy who knew someone who..." or "I banged my head and had a vision of..." bar-room tall tales.

There are many other flaws in the story presented but to me this is the big one - a classic example of what Hitler called "the big lie". If people are arguing about whether Jesus was born in a cave or a house then they're not arguing about whether Jesus was born at all. The big lie floats silently past in a fog of more minor discrepancies.

I believe that one reason for this is the stress on learning the text of the Bible (also seen in Islam with its "schools" of children rocking back and forth as they imprint the words on their brains). Huge chunks of the Bible are memorized without ever being read. The words become abstracted sounds in the head, to be pulled out and reheated whenever some keyword in conversation triggers that part of the believer's brain.

The meaning of the words is often left to professional priests to decide on, lifting the burden from the simple worshipper, but even for the priests the meaning is usually ascribed in a context-free way. The quotation of this parable, or that Psalm is wielded in its own terms, perhaps with a bit of cross-indexing to other parts that have a similar tenor. What is never done is to survey the whole work as a single work. When that is done, the joke is revealed in its awful glory.

Jesus is a pacifist, except when he wants to kill people.
God gives 10 commandments, then changes his mind and gives a different 10.
Eve is made with Adam, then from and after him.
God is all powerful, unless you have an iron chariot in which case he can't stop you doing what you want.
God is good, except when he's doing evil.
A virgin birth is really important, but not important enough for all four gospels to mention it, or any of the apostles or Paul to refer to it even once.
God promises never to allow the Jews to be conquered, except a few years later they're steamrollered by one empire after another.

For almost every well-known Bible story that illustrates some moral or historical point, there is another that contradicts it or simply disproves it. Taken individually, these stories seem to carry some weight; taken together they reveal each other to be nothing but the same sort of myth as we find in Greece, Rome, Babylon or Egypt; local "Just So" stories that are not the result of a central truth but of a dispersed myth-making process. Indeed, they are often the same specific myth that we find in those civilizations.

My recent diggings were prompted by a spate of reading ancient literature - Herodotus, Sophocles, Socrates (via Plato and Xenophon), Pliny the Younger, and various myths - and spending a lot of time in the British Museum's Greek collection.

I started to notice some "Christian" ideas cropping up in the centuries before Christ was supposedly born. Treating people as you want to be treated is pure Socrates; "the last shall be first" was orthodox Dionysian teachings for at least 500 years before Jesus; resurrection is a recurring theme but the Christian version seems very like later-period Dionysian and even Roman thinking; even the image of the empty tomb and a miraculous bodily acceptance into the afterlife is from the story of Oedipus circa 450 B.C.; throw in some Pythagorean mysticism and you've basically got the teachings of Jesus.

In the Museum I noticed strangely familiar forms and was particularly struck by the appearance of an angel on a column from the Temple of Artemis (one of the 7 wonders). Turned out to be Thanatos, so this was effectively the Angel of Death complete with sword, but from the 4th century B.C.

And the dates on a lot of the Roman material surprised me too. A great deal of it is hundreds of years after Jesus's supposed execution. I'd always been told that Christianity went from zero to hero very quickly. I now realize this is an attempt to cover up one of Jesus's big blunders.

Jesus tells us that the end of the world is coming, and it's coming soon. He says that it will end while the people he is speaking to are still alive. Even when this was being written down it was problematic; by the 3rd-4th century it was simply embarrassing. History had to be re-written to make Jesus's words come true.

In real life, by the time of the council of Nicea (A.D. 325), Jesus was one of many deities jostling for acceptance and his mythology was undergoing a transformation to make it more compatible with typical deities around it. This process is what leads to Paul's jet-set life style in Acts. He and his mate Luke travel hither and yon around the greater Roman Empire to have amazing (incredible, even) encounters with governors, priests and priestesses (sorry, "women priests" as they're now called). What we have here is a re-telling of the classic "New God" story, familiar from Apollo, Lugh, Balder, and a host of other gods where the new god beats a succession of old gods in competitions to win for themselves a place at the "top table". What's different here is that the contest is by proxy, with Paul competing with Artemis, Aphrodite, Hermes, and even Zeus, on behalf of Jesus.

By placing these contests in the past the problem of Jesus's failed End of the World prediction is side-stepped by semantics. The "old world" has ended; the old gods were defeated in the lifetime of someone (Paul) who was alive when Jesus was teaching. Quite clever, really. The only difficulty is that it requires the fictionalized version of Paul to travel great distances within very very tight time-frames and have astounding levels of access to very busy, very important people but as with so much of the Bible, this only becomes apparent when looked at as a whole.

Answer the damn question:
Do you believe that Jesus forgives you,
yes or no?

There's three layers to Paul: 1) the "real" Paul who wrote a core of the letters ascribed to him, although this may or may not have been a person called Paul. This person lived early on in the Christian period but there's no exact date other than "pre-A.D. 70". 2) The Paul who is a composite of the letters ascribed to Paul, who certainly never existed. This Paul includes the first but also accretes other third-party material from quite early on. 3) The Paul of Acts, a wholly fictional being based on the earlier epistles and is attempt to construct a bridge between two rival sects with divergent views on Jews and older rituals. This one dates from post-A.D. 100 and probably emerges from the same frenzy of consolidation that produced the Gospels.
(The thrust of that consolidation was essentially a power-grab by the normal sort of cynics that take over religious movements once there's enough converts to exert power. Thus, the main topic of the later epistles is that congregations must obey the church elders and not ever listen to anyone that says anything different. Oh, and they need to pay a tithe to support the clergy because they can't be expected to dirty their hands with actual work, can they? Burning people at the stake followed with remarkable swiftness.)

The Historical Jesus Chair

This is another pattern that appears over and over throughout the whole Bible - something happens, stories are produced to explain it (often to explain it away), and then later some stories are written based on the previous stories, usually to justify some political policy of some faction. The end result is like a circle of people all sitting on the lap of the person behind - there's no actual chair anywhere.

In the case of Jesus, the thing that had happened was Greek philosophy and culture. Judaism had struggled for the hearts and minds of the mass of Hebrew people for a long time and remained mostly a leaders' cult of Law and Condemnation centred on Jehovah, a straight-up god of war completely devoted to death and destruction for the slightest transgression of the most trivial of rules - a fascist deity, basically.

That's a great basis for a King or Priest-King, but for the people at the bottom it's a miserable experience and most importantly, it really cramps your sex-life. Again, not a problem for the powerful who always have prostitutes, concubines, harems, or just  old-fashioned mistresses no matter what the official rules are, but normal people are interested in and enjoy sex and the "Kill, don't fuck" message of Jehovah isn't a particularly rewarding one if you're not in the army.

So, when the Greek influence started to be felt, it wasn't long before it started to erode the power base of the hard-liners. People being people, this created a middle-ground of Jehovahites who wanted to stick with the old guy but introduce (leaven, if you like) some more civilized elements to their religion. They needed a "New Testament" that would allow them to have some fun and not go to Hell. Also: they needed a religion that wouldn't start wars every ten years or so. Wars are not fun, especially if, like the Jews, you keep losing. Every bloody time!

The Greeks weren't pacifists of course, but they didn't believe (or even really understand) religious war. Like most polytheistic cultures, other deities were accepted in principle although they might represent some enemy state or tribe but it was not the deity that made the other an enemy and assimilation was the norm rather than the monotheistic reaction of condemnation. Even the warrior-nation of Rome took the same line. Up to a point. That point being when the hardliners in Judea refused to accept Roman Emperor cults and their statues. Cue yet another punishing war and crushing defeat (or three) for the Jews.

So the soft-liners' message about a self-sacrificing Christ (a pre-existing title; Jesus probably didn't even have a settled name of his own at first) who espoused very Greek notions of what an ethical life was starting to get traction at the same time that the official Roman view of the Jews was turning towards a "War on Terror" stance. In fact, it started to take off in Jewish settlements across the Empire where being openly Jewish was starting to attract unwanted attention and social stigma; for many it must have been a sort of Jew-lite that allowed them to worship their old War God but with an earthly representative that Romans could distinguish from the trouble-makers in Judea.

The central character probably went through several versions before emerging as the man called Jesus and Christianity may well predate Jesus by some considerable margin. The fact that Jesus looked like a typical Greco-Roman deity - young, handsome, bare-chested or toga-wearing, his very face based on Phideas's masterpiece statue of Zeus (and maybe his Greek name - no Jewish mother ever actually called a baby "Jesus") - made it easy for pagans to accept this new, easier-going version of Judaism that no longer even required genital mutilation. What could go wrong?

Gods are bundles of human desires packaged up and given a persona to which believers can relate in  a way which is more or less the same as they do to real people. Like many successful gods before him - Zeus, Baal, Ra, Ishtar etc. - Jesus never existed but nevertheless found people not only willing to listen but actively looking for something new. The old collections of beliefs were struggling in the face of a growing rationality, creating a power vacuum in the religious world.

Like anything else, religions and gods obey Darwin's law of natural selection - the gods you see around you today are the ones that succeeded in getting through yesterday. At any one time many new gods and religious cults are springing up, gaining a small following and then dying back. The same goes for more

Also Rans

abstracted religious notions such as forms of meditation or types of diets. Sometimes they die off because they're simply too weird to get mainstream acceptance but often its simply that there's already a cult or god that covers mostly the same ground and people aren't in the market for a new one.

But with the waning of serious philosophical backing for the old gods, there was a mood for a deity with more mystical aspect to keep the intelligentsia interested combined with a human or, rather, Dionysian appearance that was non-threatening and familiar. If events had come together in the right way a hundred years years earlier or later then probably some other fictional new god would have appeared and we would never have heard of Jesus. As it was, the Romans rather than the Jews took up the new god and, unfortunately, his violent and intolerant OT aspects as well as his Greek NT side. Rome still wanted an Imperial god and Jesus's dual-nature made him useful for that role. Centuries of murder and killing for nothing other than what people thought would follow.

Zeus was worshipped for something like 1400 years with millions of people over that time sincerely believing in him and his many interventions in the world and their personal lives. The same can be said of Jesus. And, as with Zeus, none of that changes the fact that Jesus was not, and is not, real.