The Gospels have combined various elements (Mack would call them 'responses to Jesus') into a composite picture.
This picture created the Jesus known since by orthodox Christianity.

• But what were those individual elements, the components of the Gospel amalgamation, based upon ?

For scholars in the field, its driving force, its chief innovative wellspring, was Jesus of Nazareth.
For them, not only did each of the various social groups form out of an initial response to the historical man Jesus,
each of them further evolved its own response into a distinctive myth about this figure.

However, it is essential that scholars demonstrate that each of these ingredients goes back to a common human figure—indeed, to any human figure. One cannot just assume that a given ingredient found in the later evidence can simply be extrapolated backwards and identified as a certain 'response' to an original Jesus.

• No documents record the genesis or early phases of these postulated responses, how they arose and why, while at the same time exhibiting a clear link to an historical man. As in the case of Q, for example, such things are instead read into the later evidence. As Mack said: 'Much of the evidence is secondhand, all of it is later.'
• Another requirement is that the scenario of this initial breakup of Jesus into his component parts must hang together, without fallacies and contraditions. And it must be shown to be at least theoretically supportable by the earlier evidence.

If there was an historical Jesus, then the earliest layer of the texts under consideration would logically be closest to that figure, and if this coincides with the established context, then there is a high likelihood that we would indeed have uncovered the "authentic" Jesus.

But if there was in fact no Jesus of Nazareth, and it is possible to view the earliest layers of those texts in a different light
—a ground zero which is empty of such a figure and precedes the development of an artificial historical Jesus—
then these bedrock layers of text could still coincide with the context Crossan has laid out if they can be seen as residing in Galilee.

Thus what we would arrive at is not an historical Jesus, but a broad movement which did not owe its source and wellspring to the force of one man—(or there may have been some influential individuals involved whose names have not survived)—
a movement for which an artificial Jesus figure was later developed to represent or symbolize.

• A saying or anecdote attributed to Jesus may fit Crossan's context, but it may equally well be a saying or anecdote which belonged to the teachings or experiences of a community, a reform/resistance movement, a sect in conflict with the establishment, only later to be placed in the mouth or at the feet of an invented Jesus.
• The name 'Jesus' appears only once in Q1 !!! in a saying that exhibits signs of having been artificially constructed since the corresponding one in Thomas shown below is much simpler:
  (#86) Jesus said "The foxes have their holes and the birds have their nests,
  but the son of man has no place to lay his head and rest.".
• As for Thomas, the slender "Jesus said" tacked on at the beginning of most sayings units could well be later appendages, since the document is from the 4th century and based on a Greek original made in the first half of the second century, likely somewhere in Syria. Many elements show indeed a second century gnostic redaction which has, at that time, flooded the litterature about Jesus. See the Gospel of Thomas
• So, how can we tell whether "Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find," was spoken by a Jesus or simply by a Kingdom group's spokespersons?
• And are there in fact indications within the evidence itself, backed up by deductive reasoning we can bring to that evidence, which point in the latter direction?

NT scholars are guilty of having a biased methodology based on the assumption that the 'Kingdom of God' movement has been founded by Jesus.

Earl Doherty (slightly adapted)

Additionally, I would suggest that the very nature of Q1 as a sayings collection would imply that the name to which the maxims are attributed is a fictive figurehead, like King Solomon in the Book of Proverbs, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes (to say nothing of the Odes of Solomon, the Psalms of Solomon, the Song of Solomon, the Testament of Solomon, or the Key of Solomon!).

Indeed, the attribution of a collection of maxims to an authoritative name betrays a long subsequent stage of "canonical" anxiety when scribes or theologians have forgotten just what a maxim, a proverb, is. To ascribe the saying to a "big name" implicitly assumes that the credibility of the saying depends upon the authority from whom it stems. You are to take Jesus' or Solomon's or Abe Lincoln's word for it. This mode of thinking I call "canonical," because it presupposes a mindset characteristic of theologians working with a sacred canon of writings which have been theologically homogenized at the expense of finer genre distinctions. "Big name" attributions originated with prophecies and revelations, assertions that could not be empirically verified and so rested upon the prior credibility of the revealer. This is, of course, why the apocalyptic writers all wrote under the names of ancient authorities like Enoch or Moses.

But such attributions are in the nature of the case foreign and irrelevant to the maxim genre. Proverbs enshrine wisdom, not revelation. They crystallize insights about life that immediately ring true to experience once we hear them, though chances are we ourselves would never have thought of them. If their truth resonates deep inside us, they have, as it were, their own empirical verification and do not rely upon the authority of a great name.

It is only later, once scribes seek extraneous theological legitimation for a collection of sayings, in a theological context, that the sayings collection comes to be judged and legitimated by analogy to revelations and prophecies. It might take the authority of Jesus to make one believe that one's own generation would live to see the Last judgment, but it would not require anyone's say-so to convince one that "he who hesitates is lost." Thus, again, the Q1 material originally must not have had the name "Jesus," or any other name, on it.

Think of the rabbis whose sayings are preserved in the Pirke Aboth. Most of these great figures are credited with one or two memorable sayings apiece. The blithe complacence with which Christian scholars have credited Jesus with such a huge store of wise sayings only reveals anew the implicit theological bias of supposedly critical scholars. They have just assumed that Jesus was Wisdom incarnate, and that therefore an infinite number of wise and pithy sayings might be attributed to him, while only one or two came from mere mortals like the rabbis or the Greek philosophers.

Robert Price Deconstructing Jesus

Do we receive from the Q1 sayings and anecdotes a striking and consistent picture of a historical individual?
There is a sly sense of humor coupled with common sense and prophetic anger.
There is a definite outlook on life.
And thus, one might think, a definite personality, a real character!

But no. The problem is that once we discern the pronounced Cynic character of the sayings, we have an alternate explanation for the salty, striking, and controversial "personality" of the material. It conveys not the personality of an individual but that of a movement, the sharp and humorous Cynic outlook on life. What we detect so strongly in the texts is their Cynicism. The fact that so many Q1 sayings so strongly parallel so many Cynic maxims and anecdotes proves the point for the simple reason that the Cynic materials used for comparison stein from many different Cynic philosophers over several centuries!
If they do not need to have come from a single person, neither do those now attributed to Jesus which parallel them.

Let me illustrate my point by supplying here many parallels gleaned from F.G. Downing's Christ and the Cynics. Robert Price Deconstructing Jesus

According to John Dillon, the first century is characterized by a "seething mass of sects and salvation cults".
These sects focused on "a desired transformation of the world" as Mack puts it. He and others cast this sectarian picture as primarily one of striving to create a reformed and better society (the proclaimed aim of all counterculture movements), accompanied by the rejection or softening of traditional bases of identity, such as ethnic background or social rank, substituting one based on the group’s beliefs, a new social 'vision'.

In addition, Crossan sees a Galilee in the 20s pervaded by a peasant resistance movement brought about by the deleterious effects of increasing rural commercialization and fed by traditional streams of religious idealism for social justice. This lower class resistance to Roman rule and its compromised Jewish aristocracy is witnessed by the many recorded disturbances in the supposed time of Jesus: prophets leading groups into the desert, to the banks of the Jordan, "usually unarmed, always slaughtered". This social unrest eventually led to an explosion of banditry, political instability, finally to outright revolt culminating in the disastrous Jewish War of 66-70.

Within Jewish circles in Galilee of the 20s and 30s, all these elements created the so-called 'Kingdom of God' movement;
new social groupings were being formed, centered on the anticipation of the coming of God.

This type of popular counter-culture movements is not specific to the Palestine of the 1st century.
In Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition, James C. Scott gives a picture of a universal type of radical symbolism found in folk cultures everywhere (slightly paraphrased):
the vision of a society of brotherhood in which there will be no rich and poor, no distinctions of rank and status, the elimination of religious hierarchy, with property typically held in common and shared, all unjust claims to taxes, rents and tributes to be nullified. Greed, envy and hatred will disappear in an Eden-like Utopia.
and concludes his book with:
In this analysis of the little tradition and popular religion in Europe and Southeast Asia, my point has been to demonstrate that, among the peasantry in most complex agrarian societies, one can find a pattern of profanations-symbolic reversals of the existing social order. The idiom in which they are expressed is, almost universally, religious. Much as the official religious doctrine is selected, reworked, and profaned in little tradition cults, so is the existing political order symbolically negated in popular millenial traditions.
For the most part, as we have stressed, these symbolic reversals are an undertone, a counterpoint, to dominant religious and political ideas. When outside forces or natural disasters appear to overwhelm the peasantry and play havoc with the normal categories of experience, however, this alternative world may chart a new course of action and open up new possibilities. This alternative symbolic world is constructed, we must not forget, largely in reaction to what might be described as the historic process of modernization-the creation of a bureaucratic state, the penetration of a market economy, the replacement of custom by law-a process experienced by much of the world's peasantry.
It is out of the turmoil and pain of this transformation that the need for a redemptive community grows. How else are we to comprehend a religious symbolism of liberation that displays so many similarities across time, space, culture, and religion? James C. Scott

These are universal sectarian expressions, of course, as is the focus on eventual personal salvation to some kind of higher existence. All such groups go on to create myths of origin which serve to explain themselves, glorify and sanctify their past and their beginnings, and justify their present faith and practices.

• As a universal phenomenon, it lives little place for a founder
  and implies that an historical Jesus is unneeded at the origins of Q and Thomas
  (was there a founder for our closer 1960s counter-culture movement?).
  
• If the primary impulse to such social formation was the anticipation of God’s Kingdom,
  is an historical Jesus required to explain such groups?
• Was it not possible that the whole idea of a human Jesus was part of the myth which was later developed to explain the onset of the movement (one of the purposes which myth serves), perhaps a later evolution of an earlier kind of belief?

Earl Doherty (slightly adapted)

I follow Stevan L.Davies in thinking that no settled communities could possibly have organized themselves on the principles of Q insofar as these required the renunciation of family, home, and property. Such sayings are fine for lone wolves and loose cannons like the Cynics.
R. Price Deconstructing Jesus p.49-50

So, since the ethical radicalism of some Jesus' sayings like the renunciation of home, family and possessions are
"absolutely impractical for everyday behavior", excepted "radical itinerants",

• Who would have preserved and passed them on through oral tradition over a period of decades?

• Why no context or story about Jesus would have been part of this Oral Tradition?

Plus, if Jesus preached in Aramaic and did not speak Greek,

• Why were his words consistently translated and transmitted in Greek?
• How did Jesus' original language not come to be preserved?
  Should not some trace of an Arameic dimension surface somewhere?

Earl Doherty

If such a wide-ranging movement and radical philosophy were the product of one man (and is such an achievement even conceivable?) rather than of a more amorphous group, that man would have had a spotlight shined upon him by everyone around him.

There is no way he could have escaped notice by the writers of the time, including Jews (Justus of Tiberias, Philo of Alexandria...) or Romans (Suetonius, Pliny, Martial or Juvenal...).

There is certainly no way Josephus would have restricted reference to him to that "authentic" residue of the Christian Testimonium Flavianum in Antiquities 18. "Wise man" wouldn't have begun to cover it. In any case, such a radical message which involved resistance, divine retribution and the overturning of classes and fortunes—not to mention of the world itself—would hardly have sat well with the Josephus who had no sympathy for revolution and was a favored client of the Flavian establishment. (emperors Vespasian, Titus and Domitian from 69 CE to 96 CE). Even that "neutral" residue could not have proceeded from Josephus' pen.
(See Josephus Unbound: Reopening the Josephus Question.)

• How such a man with such an influence would have escaped the notice of contemporary writers and subsequent historians?
  Some of this picture admittedly derives from the Gospels; perhaps critical scholars would claim that the authentic Jesus kept a 'lower profile,' but then one faces a greater difficulty in understanding how he generated and shaped the movement.

Earl Doherty

B.Mack A Myth of Innocence, 247

The sayings speak solely of the words themselves, of the new lifestyle and outlook they advocate, and nothing of their source. In Q, the anecdotes which surround a few of the sayings, which start to provide contexts and characters, come only at a later stage, and in Thomas they lie entirely in those little prefaces which bear all the signs of later appendages.

If an historical Jesus was the driving, innovative force behind the movement, the originator of its sayings, the hero and leader of the Q community and presumably regarded as such by the Thomas community,

• Why is his impact not stronger on the original stratum of material?
• Why are there no contexts preserved—or invented—for any of the sayings?
• Why wouldn't a certain degree of understandable hero-worship translate into incorporating his name, his personality and background, the circumstances of his ministry—anything!—into the preserved and transmitted traditions of the community, if only at the stage of writing it down?
• Why is it that commentators like Crossan must remark that the emphasis in all the early Christian tradition is solely on Jesus' words and not on his person, his experiences?
• Does it make sense that there would be no focus at all on accepting Jesus' words because they were his, of having faith in him as their originator, of giving him some kind of—I hesitate to use the word 'redemptive'—let's say 'emancipative' role?

The void in the Common Sayings Tradition points to the absence of a focusing figure. It points to a message and lifestyle not tied to any originating charismatic individual. If Jesus was responsible for all this, it would have led to a hero-fixation which could not fail to have found its way immediately into the sayings and anecdotes of a preserved and transmitted tradition.

Earl Doherty

Nothing in the entire document spoke of Jesus' death and resurrection,
nothing suggested a sacrificial or redemptive role for him.

• Why would the Q community have ignored the central message of Christianity?
• Why would they have shown no interest in Jesus' acts of salvation?

Surely they would not have been ignorant of what had happened to him when he made his fateful sojourn to Jerusalem.

We could enlarge on that mystery a little further.

• Did no sayings like those that were part of the passion story, the establishment of the Eucharist at a Last Supper, words from the cross: did none reach the community back in Galilee, to be added to the collection?

Jesus' defiant Son of Man proclamation before the High Priest is not to be found in Q, nor anything from the "little apocalypse" delivered to Jesus' disciples in the Temple (as in Mark 13) about the coming misfortunes and the "abomination of desolation," nothing about the arrival of the Son of Man in glory. These and other sayings like them would have provided the prophetic stratum of the Q collection with a fitting climax. For it is a cold, hard fact that none of the elements of the Jerusalem phase of the Gospels appear in Q.

Another puzzling absence is that of the term "Christ"- the Messiah.
There is no suggestion that Jesus is the Christ, no reference to the concept itself, ever surfaces in Q.

James the Just, the head of the Jerusalem church (to whom Paul witnesses), is supposed to be Jesus' own blood brother,
so we can assume he would have maintained connections with the family and circle back home in Galilee.
If a group of Jesus' followers and family members in Galilee had established a community there to preserve and propagate the Galilean teachings of Jesus,

• How could could they have remained ignorant about what subsequently happened to him in Jerusalem?
• Would they have remained impervious to the input from those in Jerusalem who responded to his death and perceived resurrection by establishing a whole other "tradition" about Jesus, one that regarded him not only as Messiah but as Son of God and Savior of the world?
• When the 'Son of God' movement spread outward from Jerusalem, did it bypass Galilee?
• Did it leave that earlier response in some isolated, uncontaminated enclave, interested solely in Jesus' Galilean preaching?
• Would they not have brought home the new message, the new Son and Savior response?

Not to mention details about the trial and crucifixion, or sayings of Jesus associated with those events.

• How could such things not have found their way back to Galilee and into the Q collection?

In Q2 the community is very much interested in the idea of an establishment which kills those sent from God.
Jesus could not fail to have been seen as just such a messenger, and Jesus had presumably been killed by the establishment.
The death of Jesus, the killing of their own founder and the fountainhead of their teachings, would have been seen as the ultimate example of the alleged ancient phenomenon of the killing of the prophets sent from God.
Yet this concept never appears in Q, and certainly not in passage like 11:49-51 where Jesus is not even included in the reference to those whom the Wisdom of God has sent.
"This is why the Wisdom of God said,
`I will send them prophets and messengers; and some of these they will persecute and kill;'
so that this generation will have to answer for the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world;
from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah who perished between the altar and the sanctuary." Q 11:49-51

Earl Doherty

Another major problem lies in the question of ethnic character within the 37 sayings common to both Q and Thomas.

This is supposedly the preaching of a long-awaited (in one form or another), biblically-based, Kingdom of God, within the context of a Jewish tradition about a God of justice and righteousness. Moreover, it is a preaching led by an ethnic Jew.
N. T. Wright wrote in The New Testament and the People of God:
"Far more important to the first-century Jew than questions of space, time and literal cosmology were the key issues of Temple, Land, and Torah, of race, economy and justice. When Israel's God acted, Jews would be restored to their ancestral rights and would practice their ancestral religion, with the rest of the world looking on in awe, and/or making pilgrimages to Zion, and/or being ground to powder under Jewish feet."

Thus, most of the reputed scholars (E.P. Sanders, R. Brown, P. Fredriksen, J.P. Meier, G. Vermes, G. Theissen, B. Ehrman...)
who don't agree with the view of Jesus as a simple 'cynic sage' naturally see him as an apocalyptic prophet, a proto-rabbi who announced the Kingdom of Heaven, before anything else.
Supporters of any other theory also largely agree on the important 'jewishness' of Jesus.

And YET:

• Where is the Jewish character of this bedrock layer?
• Where is the divine mandate, the will of the covenantal God of Judaism, the fate or role of the gentile,
  the restoration of Zion in a new Jerusalem?
• Where are all these Jewish preoccupations?
  There is not a murmur of them in Q1 or the parallel layer of Thomas.

The Kingdom is referred to 17 times out of 132 sayings in Thomas, 10 times out of 101 sayings in Q, and 4 times out of the 37 sayings of the Common Sayings Tradition— always simply in terms of "God" or "the Father" or "the heavens". Since Jews were not the only race to speak of a Kingdom of God, not the only ones to call the highest God "Father", and certainly not the only ones to envision some 'new world' in a heavenly setting, none of these things can be said to have a clear Jewish fingerprint. The specifically Jewish elements enumerated above by Wright don't appear in these sayings.

The prospect of divine intervention hovers in the background of all this counter-cultural expression, but there is nothing to exclusively identify it as proceeding from the Jewish Deity. And despite the emphasis in the prophets, Jews were not the only people in the ancient world to have a concept of social equality and justice. The Roman philosopher Epictetus in the late first century was a figure very like the Gospel Jesus in many ways, with a very similar program.

If the CST is to be rooted in a Jewish rabbi, whether a landless laborer or not,

• Would we expect to find this complete void (beyond a reference to Solomon) on all things specifically Jewish?
• Would this Jesus never have expressed himself in Jewish terms, never given voice to the tradition of Yahwehan justice and righteousness, to the prophets as biblical precedent?
• Would he never give a hint of the traditional question (again going back into the prophets) of whether
  the people's sins and the need for repentance had anything to do with the present state of affairs,
  something we see reflected in the preaching of John the Baptist?
• Would he never have allowed any flavor of prophetic or apocalyptic fervor to pass his lips?
  Why is it left to the Q2 generation to introduce such elements?
• Could it be that the bedrock layer of Q is not Jewish at all, but arises from a more cosmopolitan source, adopted, and to some extent adapted, by a Jewish (or at least Jewish-sounding) community whose real character emerges in Q2?

Earl Doherty

In Q, in an expanded form, a saying is placed in Jesus' mouth where it relates to seeing John the prophet. It leads into a description of John as "more than a prophet" and Jesus' own preparatory messenger. One would think that this is a dead giveaway that the Q construction is later, and a total invention, necessitated by having to relate the John of older Q tradition to the newly-introduced Jesus because:

• Reference to Jesus is missing in such places as Luke/Q 11:49 which speaks of those whom Wisdom has sent, Therefore also .. Wisdom said: I will send them prophets and sages, and «some» of them they will kill and persecute,
  and in the Son of Man sayings which are not identified with Jesus.
  How fortunate you are when they reproach you as good-for-nothings because of the son of man. Luke 6:22
  The son of man has come eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look at him, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.' Luke 7:34
  "Foxes have dens, and birds of the sky have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head." Luke 11:30
  "For as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so will the son of man be to this generation."
• The Q2 community looks back (Lk./Q 16:16) and sees only John the Baptist as marking the turning point to the preaching of the Kingdom, failing to include Jesus himself.
• John in the Q2 layer (3:16-17) prophecies an End-time judge (the Son of Man), not a teacher-founder Jesus.
• Overall, the strongly sapiential nature of the sayings in the early layer of Q suggests that Wisdom herself may have been regarded as the source of the teachings, something borne out by 11:49's "the Wisdom of God said:" (which Matthew caught and changed to a quote from Jesus' mouth)
• Moreover, comparison of Q and Thomas indicates the highly redacted nature of the Q document before it reached Matthew and Luke. In the very first Q unit (from Q2: Lk./Q 3:7-9/16-17), John makes no reference to Jesus; his "one to come" is obviously the apocalyptic Son of Man. But once an historical 'Jesus' is introduced into Q, he has to be aligned with John, and to do this the Q3 redactor constructed the elaborate 'dialogue' of Luke/Q 7:18-35. He put together a number of earlier discrete pieces, scripture quotes, sayings and parables. One of these, in a more primitive form, appears in the Gospel of Thomas as No. 78.

Earl Doherty

Any individual who had such charismatic power and influence to create this kind of radical, widespread movement,
especially among the unsettled lower classes, would soon have come to the attention of the authorities.
Whether his preaching actually led to insurrection or not, the fear would have been there.

• Long before he made his way to Jerusalem, such an individual would have been seized and likely executed as a subversive.
• He would hardly have been allowed to function unimpeded.
• He would hardly have managed to preach to large crowds in public places, to fire up elements of the lower classes with reputed miracles of feeding, healing or tampering with nature.
• At least while he was in Galilee, how explain Jesus evident immunity from prosecution?

Earl Doherty

...

The very earliest expression about Jesus we find in the Christian record presents him solely as a cosmic figure:

• the pre-existent creator and sustainer of the universe (Paul and his school),
• a heavenly High Priest and Platonic Logos-type entity (Epistle to the Hebrews),
• a descending redeemer in the spiritual realm (the pre-Pauline hymns)...

If Jesus of Nazareth was not a mythic figure but a concrete historical person,

• Why do the hymns use the language of myth to speak of Jesus ?

The Christ cult already existed at the time of Paul conversion (maybe around 32 CE)
and there is no suggestion that his beliefs differed critically from the others.

• Who, then, in the very heart of Israel, had turned Jesus into a cosmic deity
  and attached Hellenistic mythologies to him almost as soon as he was laid in his grave?
• Where are the 25 years of evolution needed for the earlier Jesus Movement to transform into the Christ cult?

Scholars argue that these myths have been created based on memories and "interpretation" of the Lord,

• But where are those memories ?
• How are we to understand an "interpretation" when the thing supposedly being interpreted is never mentioned ?

We cannot accept scholars' claim that the myths are built upon "historical data" when that data is never pointed at or even alluded to. A better explanation would be that the historical data has been added to the myth at a later time.

Earl Doherty

If the Christ didn't work any miracles nor said anything in the Epistles, what did he do ?
Compare to the other Jewish stories (Book of Daniel, Martyrdom of Isaiah, Book of Enoch, Apocalypse of Zephaniah, Apocalypse of Elijah, Assumption of Moses, Testament of Isaac, Apocalypse of Adam ... ) [to which we could also add pagan ones like Osiris, Isis, Mithra, Attis, Dionysus, Adonis...], the only things new and different in the writings of Paul is:

• the name Jesus (=Yeshua=Yahweh Saves)
• the claim of crucifixion, as opposed to being sawn in half or hung or tortured by various other means, as took place in the many other stories that preceded the story of Jesus.

• I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. Galatians 2:20
• Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. Galatians 3:1
  (Galatians were living in the middle of the actual Turkey !!!)
• Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Galatians 5:24
• May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
  through whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Galatians 6:14
• For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with Romans 6:6
• But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; 1 Corinthians 1:23
• since you are demanding proof that Christ is speaking through me. He is not weak in dealing with you, but is powerful among you. For to be sure, he was crucified in weakness, yet he lives by God's power. Likewise, we are weak in him, yet by God's power we will live with him to serve you. Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test? 2 Corinthians 13:3-5
• We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of God's secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him" — but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's spirit within him?
  1 Corinthians 2:6
  Like in Ephesians 2:2 or 3:10, many scholars think Paul uses 'Rulers' from the Greek 'archon' to mean 'spiritual power' or 'heavenly demon'.

There is not a hint of the passion in Jerusalem in the 80,000 words of the Epistles;
Paul is using only mystical and metaphoric words to preach the only event he knows about his deity.
The Epistles just don't make sense, if they relate to a faith movement based on a recent historical death & resurrection of a Galilean preacher.

All that I and others such as Earl Doherty propose, indeed demand, is that the writings of Paul and other early Christians be interpreted according to their own culture, which is exactly how all works by any author should be interpreted for historical understanding. In the middle of an era of salvation cults and apocalyptic literature and beliefs, Paul's "Jesus" is his "Enoch", "Isaiah" ...

R.G. Price Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

If we had no other documentary record than the New Testament epistles, we would probably regard the Son of God preached by apostles like Paul as a divine being like all the other gods of the day, or indeed of any day: confined to the supernatural dimension and communicating with believers and spokespersons through inspiration, visions and other spiritual manifestations. This is the way gods have been perceived to interact with the world from time immemorial. Paul's Christ would have been no different, and no more difficult to comprehend.

But if, on the basis of the later Gospel record, it is claimed that Paul and his colleagues are speaking of a human man who was recently on earth and set the new faith in motion,

• How is one to account for their silence on such a man and his career?

No Wise Teachings
The earliest reference to Jesus as any kind of a teacher comes in 1 Clement, just before Ignatius, who himself seems curiously unaware of any of Jesus' teachings.
Yet, the first century epistles regularly give moral maxims, sayings, admonitions, which in the Gospels are spoken by Jesus, without ever attributing them to him. The well-known "Love Your Neighbor," originally from Leviticus, is quoted in James, the Didache, and three times in Paul, yet none of them points out that Jesus had made this a centerpiece of his own teaching. Both Paul (1 Thessalonians 4:9) and the writer of 1 John even attribute such love commands to God, not Jesus!

• When Hebrews talks of the "voice" of Christ today (1:2f, 2:11, 3:7, 10:5), why is it all from the Old Testament?
• When Paul, in Romans 8:26, says that "we do not know how we are to pray,"
  does this mean he is unaware that Jesus taught the Lord's Prayer to his disciples?
• When the writer of 1 Peter urges, "do not repay wrong with wrong, but retaliate with blessing,"
  has he forgotten Jesus' "turn the other cheek"?

Romans 12 and 13 is a litany of Christian ethics, as is the Epistle of James and parts of the "Two Ways" instruction in the Didache and Epistle of Barnabas; but though many of these precepts correspond to Jesus' Gospel teachings, not a single glance is made in his direction. Such examples could be multiplied by the dozen.

No Apocalyptic Prophecy
Nor is there any reference in the epistles to Jesus as the Son of Man, despite the fact that the Gospels are full of this favorite self-designation of Jesus. This apocalyptic figure, taken from the Book of Daniel (7:13), appears in a cluster of Christian and Jewish sectarian documents in the latter first century, including the Gospels, where Jesus declares himself to be the one who will arrive at the End-time on the clouds of heaven to judge the world and establish the Kingdom. It seems inconceivable that Paul, with all his preoccupation about the imminent End (see 1 Thessalonians 4:15-18, for example) would either be unaware of Jesus' declared role as the Son of Man, or choose to ignore it.

Paul's view of the present period leading up to the end of the world seems to take no account of the recent activity of Jesus on earth. He gives us no "interregnum," no period between Christ's death and resurrection, and his future Coming.
Passages in Romans 8 (18-25) and 13 (11-12), and especially 2 Corinthians 6:2 ("Now [referring to his own work] has the day of deliverance dawned"), envision no impingement of Jesus' recent career on the progression from the old age to the new;
rather, it is Paul's own present activity which is an integral part of this process.
Nor does he ever address the question which would have reflected popular expectation:

• Why did the actual coming of the Messiah not in itself produce the arrival of the Kingdom?

In the epistles, Christ's anticipated Coming at the End-time is never spoken of as a "return" or second Coming;
the impression conveyed is that this will be his first appearance in person on earth.

No Words on the Cross
No one quotes any words of Jesus at the crucifixion.
Ephesians 4:32 urges that Christians "forgive one another as God in Christ forgave you."
The writer is apparently unaware of the moving words which Luke gives us (23:34), spoken by Jesus as he hung on the cross, words which would have provided a noble example to follow: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
The writer of 1 Clement (53:4), after a long dissertation on forgiveness, searches for words to sum up his point.
They are not the words of Jesus on the cross, but the plea of Moses to God that he forgive the disobedient Israelites.

No Ministry
But the silence extends beyond individual pronouncements to Jesus' ministry as a whole.
If Jesus had conducted a ministry within living memory, within Paul's own lifetime, remembrance of that ministry would surely have loomed large in Christian awareness. In the rough and tumble world of religious proselytizing, the appeal to Jesus' own words and actions, the urge to claim a direct link back to Jesus himself in order to confer authority and reliability on each apostle's preaching of the Christ, would have been an inevitable mark of the early missionary movement.
In Romans 10, Paul is anxious to show that the Jews have no excuse for failing to believe in Christ and gaining salvation, for they have heard the good news about him from appointed messengers like Paul himself. And he contrasts the unresponsive Jews with the gentiles who welcomed it. But surely Paul has left out the glaringly obvious. For the Jews—or at least some of them—had supposedly rejected that message from the very lips of Jesus himself, whereas the gentiles had believed second-hand. In verse 18 Paul asks dramatically: "But can it be they never heard it (i.e., the message)?"

• How could he fail to highlight his countrymen's spurning of Jesus' very own person?

Yet all he refers to are apostles like himself who have "preached to the ends of the earth."

This is a recurring feature of Paul's letters: he totally ignores Jesus' recent career and places the focus of revelation and salvation entirely upon the missionary movement of which he is the prominent member (as he sees it). The pseudo-Pauline letters do this, too. Read passages like Romans 16:25-27, Colossians 1:25-27, Ephesians 3:5-10 and ask yourself

• Where is Jesus' role in disclosing God's long-hidden secret and plan for salvation?
• Why, in 2 Corinthians 5:18, is it Paul who has been given the ministry of reconciliation between man and God, and not Jesus in his ministry?

The agency of all recent activity seems to be God, not Jesus.
Paul speaks of "the gospel of God," "God's message". It is God appealing and calling to the Christian believer.
2 Corinthians 5:18 tells us that "from first to last this has been the work of God" (New English Bible translation).
In Romans 1:19 the void is startling. Paul declares: "All that may be known of God by men...God himself has disclosed to them."

• Did Jesus not disclose God, were God's attributes not visible in Jesus?
• How could any Christian—as so many do—express himself in this fashion?

WHAT Message
Any Teaching or Sermon Bread of Life sermon Jn 6 Sermon on the Mount Mt 5-7...
Any Parable Parables of Kingdom Mk 4 Seven parables Lk 13-18...
Any Prophecy
Any reference to the Son of Man or the soon coming End
Any opposition from Pharisees
Any instruction to conform or not with the Mosaic Law...

Earl Doherty The Jesus Puzzle

No Joseph & Mary
Non-Gospel Christian writings before Ignatius have nothing to say about Mary; her name is never mentioned. Nor does Joseph, Jesus' reputed father, ever appear. The author of 1 Peter fails to offer Mary as a model in 3:1-6 where he is advising women to be chaste, submissive in their behavior, and reverent like those "who fixed their hopes on (God)". Instead, he offers the Old Testament figure of Sarah.

No 12 Disciples
If Jesus had conducted a ministry within living memory, there would also have been an appeal to the apostles who had been chosen by Jesus and heard the words he spoke. If too much time had passed, that appeal would have been to chose whom such followers had themselves appointed and given the proper doctrine.
In several letters Paul deals with accusations by certain unnamed rivals that he is not a legitimate apostle.
Even Peter and James dispute his authority to do certain things.

• Can we believe that in such situations no one would ever have used the argument that Paul had not been an actual follower of Jesus, whereas others had?

Paul never discusses the point.
In fact, he claims (1 Cor. 9:1 and 15:8) that he has "seen" the Lord, just as Peter and everyone else have.
This is an obvious reference to visions, one of the standard modes of religious revelation in this period.
And as Paul's "seeing" of the Lord is acknowledged to have been a visionary one, his comparison of himself with the other apostles suggests that their contact with Jesus was of the same nature: through visions.

And how could Paul, in Galatians 2:6, dismiss with such disdain those who had been the very followers of Jesus himself on earth? But in granting them no special status he is not alone.
The word "disciple(s)" does not appear in the epistles, and concept of "apostle" in early Christian writings is a broad one, meaning simply a preacher of the message (i.e., the "gospel") about the Christ. It never applies to a select group of Twelve who supposedly possessed special authority arising from their apostleship to Jesus while he was on earth. (It is far from clear what "the Twelve" in 1 Corinthians 15:5 refers to, since Paul lists Peter and "the apostles" separately. The term appears nowhere else in the epistles.)

No Apostolic Tradition
Nor is there any concept of apostolic tradition in the first century writers, no idea of teachings or authority passed on in a chain going back to the original Apostles and Jesus himself. Instead, everything is from the Spirit, meaning direct revelation from God, with each group claiming that the Spirit they have received is the genuine one and reflects the true gospel.
This is the basis of Paul's claim against his rivals in 2 Corinthians 11:4.
The writer of 1 John, in his declaration (4:1f) that the Son of God has come in the flesh, draws on no apostolic tradition, on no historical record, but must claim validity for his own Spirit, as opposed to the Satan-inspired false spirit of the dissidents.
In chapter 5, he declares that it is God's testimony through the Spirit which produces faith in the Son, not several decades of Christian preaching going back to Jesus himself.

• How could this writer in the community of John, which later produced the Fourth Gospel, say (5:11) that it is God who has revealed eternal life, and ignore all those memorable sayings of Jesus like "I am the resurrection and the life" which that Gospel so richly records?

As for Jesus' great appointment of Peter as the "rock" upon which his church is to be built, no one in the first century (including the writers of 1 and 2 Peter) ever quotes it or uses it in the frequent debates over authority.

No John the Baptist
In Christian mythology there is hardly a more commanding figure short of Jesus himself.
Until the Gospels appear, John is truly lost in the wilderness, for no Christian writer refers to him.
Even as late as the end of the first century, the writer of 1 Clement is silent on John when he says (17:1):
"Let us take pattern by those who went about in sheepskins and goatskins heralding the Messiah's coming;
that is to say, Elijah, Elisha and Ezekiel among the prophets, and other famous names besides."
Those other famous names he goes on to enumerate are all from the Old Testament.
The only surviving writer of the first century (outside the Gospels) who does refer to John the Baptist is a non-Christian: the Jewish historian Josephus. However, he fails to make any link between John and Jesus or the Christian movement.

No Herod, Sanhedrin or Jews
For almost 2000 years the Jews have endured vilification, hatred and outright slaughter as "killers of Christ."
Would the Jews take any consolation in realizing that no one before the Gospels shows any conception that they had been involved in Christ's death? (as 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16, is judged to be a later insertion).
In Romans 11 Paul is discussing the guilt of the Jews in regard to their lack of faith.
He refers to Elijah's words in 1 Kings: "Lord, they have killed thy prophets."
This guilt apparently does not include the killing of the Son of God himself, for Paul makes no mention of such an event.

No Pilate, Soldiers or Romans
If Paul and his contemporaries attribute no guilt to the Jews in the death of Jesus, how do they view the Romans?
In Mark's Gospel tale, Pilate was the figurehead of imperial justice who carried out the execution.

• Can we imagine that this man, had he enjoyed any role in the death of Jesus, would immediately sink from Christian consciousness for some three-quarters of a century?
• What of Pilate's struggle to free a man he believed was innocent, his dramatic gesture when he washed his hands of Jesus' blood?
• What of his offer to release Jesus, only to be refused by a crowd who demanded Barabbas instead?
• Could these dramatic elements have proven of no interest to the first three generations of Christians who based their faith on the event of Jesus' execution?

Romans 13:3-4 says "Rulers hold no terrors for them who do right ...(the ruler) is the minister of God for your own good."

• Can Paul have any knowledge of Jesus' historical trial and crucifixion and still express such sentiments?

Pilate, whether he believed in Jesus' innocence or not, delivered this righteous man to scourging and unjust execution.
If the story of such a fate suffered by Jesus of Nazareth were present in every Christian's mind, Paul's praise of the authorities as God's agents for the good of all, and from whom the innocent have nothing to fear, would ring hollow indeed.

WHO
Joseph and Mary
The 12 Disciples
John the Baptist Lazarus, Jairus, Mary Magdalene, Zacchaeus, Nicodemus, Simeon and Anna...
Pilate, Herod, the Sanhedrin, Joseph of Arimathea
The Pharisees
Any Crowd
Any Jew or Roman...

Earl Doherty The Jesus Puzzle

If the voice of Jesus in the early Christian correspondence is silent on everything from ethical teachings to apocalyptic predictions, if his calling of apostles during an earthly ministry is nowhere in evidence in the early apostolic movement,

• What about the physical details of his birth, ministry and passion?
• Is the life portrayed in the Gospels that is supposed to have been lived in the time of two Herods and Pontius Pilate anywhere in evidence in the New Testament epistles?

The occurence of miracles and wondrous events was an indispensable sign of the imminence of the Kingdom.
Anyone who claimed that the Day of the Lord was at hand had to produce signs and wonders to prove it.
All awaited the events spoken of in prophets like Isaiah:
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
And the ears of the deaf unstopped;
Then shall the lame man leap like a hart,
And the tongue of the dumb sing for joy. (35.5f)

But thy dead live, their bodies shall rise again.
They that sleep in the earth will awake and shout for joy. (26:19)

It seems strange that Paul, in urging his readers to be confident that the advent of Jesus and the kingdom lay just around the corner (eg Romans 8:19, 13:12), would never point to traditions about miracles by Jesus as the very fulfilment of the wonders that were expected at such time.
In 1 Corinthians 1:22 he scoffs at the Jews who always call for miracles to prove Christian claims, but here he should have the perfect answer for such calls: the signs which Jesus himself had provided.

In passages like 1 Corinthians 15:12f, Paul addresses those in Corinth who question wether human beings can be resurrected from death: How can some of you say there is no resurrection from the dead ?
Yet would Paul not have had the perfect rejoinder, proof that humans can come back from the dead?
He could point to traditions about the revival of Jairus' daughter (Mk 5:21-43), about the astounding emergence of Lazarus from his tomb (John 11:1-44). It is impossible to think that Paul would not have appealed to them in his argument.

To find the first indication of Jesus as a miracle worker, we must move beyond Ignatius to the Epistle of Barnabas.
No first century epistle mentions that Jesus performed miracles. In some cases the silence is striking.
Both Colossians and Ephesians view Jesus as the Savior whose death has rescued mankind from the demonic powers who were believed to pervade the world, causing sin, disease and misfortune.
But not even in these letters is there any mention of the healing miracles that the Gospels are full of, those exorcisms which would have shown that Jesus had conquered such demons even while he was on earth.

WHAT Miracle
Feeding of 5000 Jn 6
Heals blind man Mk 8
Heals Gadarene demoniac Mt 8
Stills storm Mk 4
Walks on water Mk 6
Feeding of 4000 Mk 8
Syrophoenician girl healed Mk 7
Heals centurion's servant Mt 8
Raises Jairus' daughter Mk 5
Turns water to wine Jn 2
Heal's official's son Jn 4
Raises window's son Lk 7
Ten lepers healed Lk 17
Raises Lazarus Lk 17
Blind Bartimaeus healed Lk 18
Heals cripple at pool Jn 5
Heals blind man Jn 9...

Earl Doherty The Jesus Puzzle

No Birth Story
As for the Nativity stories in Matthew and Luke, images of the birth of Jesus bombard us at every Christmas, but nowhere in the first century are such images discernible. Shepherds, angels, magi, mangers or overbooked inns are never mentioned; nor is the city of Bethlehem or the great census under Augustus. No star lights up the night sky at Jesus' birth in either Christian or pagan writings. No association with the cruel Herod and his slaughter of innocent children, an event unrecorded by historians of the time, is ever made.

No Baptism
For Paul, baptismn is the prime sacrement of Christian ritual, through which the convert dies to his old, sinful life and rises to a new one. In Romans 6:1-11 he breaks down the baptism ritual into its mystical component parts. Yet never do any of those parts relate to the scene of Jesus' own baptism. The descent of the dove into Jesus would have provided the perfect parallel to Paul's belief that at baptism the Holy Spirit descended into the believer. The voice of God welcoming Jesus as his Beloved Son could have served to symbolize Paul's contention (as in Roman 8:14-17) that believers have been adopted as sons of God.
Yet from the first century writers like Paul we would never even know that Jesus had been baptized.

No Betrayal and Denial
Juda is notably missing from Hebrews 12:15-17, where the selling of the Lord himself for 30 pieces of silver by a man embittered, jealous and deceitful, would have been a far more apt symbol of the bitter, poisonous weed that arises unchecked within the community of the holy.
Nor would a reference to Judas have been out of place in Paul's own presentation of his "Lord's Supper." Here he is criticizing the Corinthians for their behavior at the communal meal. He speaks of rivalry and "divided groups," of those who "eat the bread and drink the cup of the Lord unworthily." If anyone had been guilty of such things, it was surely Judas at the very first Supper.
The writer of 1 Clement also deals with the theme of jealousy, but to his list of Old Testament figures who suffered at the hands of jealous men, he fails to add Jesus himself, betrayed by the perfidious apostle in his own company.

The great triple denial of his Master by Peter himself, with the bitter remorse which followed as the cock crew, is nowhere referred to in the epistles. Paul can show outbursts of anger and disdain toward Peter and others of the Jerusalem group (as in Galatians 2), but never does he bring up a denial of the Lord by Peter to twist the knife.

No Eucharist
Hebrews also contains (9:20f) a stunning silence on Jesus' establishment of the Christian Eucharist. The writer is comparing the old covenant with the new, but not even the quoted words of Moses at the former's inauguration: "this is the blood of the covenant which God has enjoined upon you," can entice him to mention that Jesus had established the new covenant at a Last Supper, using almost identical words, as Mark 14:24 and parallels record. He goes further in chapter 13 when he adamantly declares that Christians do not eat a sacrificial meal.
The Didache 9 presents a eucharist which is solely a thanksgiving meal to God, with no sacramental significance and no establishment by Jesus.
(It leaves us 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 which is a revelation from God similar to the sacred meal established by Mithra, Isis or Dionysus, more on this matter later...)

No Trial and Crucifixion
The Gospel details of Jesus' trial and crucifixion are imbedded in our cultural heritage, from Pilate to the crown of thorns, from the raising up of the cross between two thieves to the gambling of the soldiers for Jesus' clothes, from the darkness over the land at his death to Josephus of Arimathea laying Jesus in his own tomb.
Yet none of these details surface in the wider Christian picture before the second century.
"We preach Christ crucified," says Paul. But he does not tell us where or when, or that Roman or Jew was involved.
None of the great cast of characters which passes through the various stages of the Gospel trial and crucifixion are ever mentioned in his letters.

All the early writers lack the essential atmosphere of the Gospel presentation of Jesus' death:
that this was the unjust execution of an innocent man, beset by betrayal and false accusations and a pitiless establishment.
Instead, Paul in Romans 8:32 extols the magnanimity of God who "did not spare his own Son but surrendered him for us all." And for the writer of Ephesians (5:2) it is Christ himself who in love "gave himself up on your behalf as an offering and a sacrifice whose fragrance is pleasing to God." Wherever Paul and others in the first century envisioned this sacrifice as having taken place, it seems light-years from the dread hill of Golgotha, from the scourges and the plaited thorns, the jeering soldiers and taunting crowds, where God expresses his dark wrath in earthquake, blackened heavens and a rending of the veil to his own holy sanctuary. Paul does not even tell us that Jesus was tried!

No Bodily Apparition
Most early Christian thinking seems to have envisioned Jesus as ascending to heaven immediately after his death.
The epistle writers show no concept of a bodily resurrection after three days, or of a period during which the risen Christ made appearances to human beings on earth. Such a blind spot would be hard to conceive, if we accepted the orthodox picture of a Christian movement which began in response to a perceived return of Jesus from the grave.
I Peter (3:20-22): "through the resurrection of Jesus Christ who entered heaven after receiving the submission of angelic authorities and powers, and is now at the right hand of God"
Ephesians 1:20: ". ..which (God) exerted in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, when he enthroned him at his right hand in the heavenly realms."
Hebrews 10:12: "Christ offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, and took his seat at the right hand of God." In 13:20, the writer has God "lead up" Jesus from the dead. Both verses illustrate Hebrews' lack of any concept of bodily resurrection.

WHAT Deeds
Any Birth Story
Any Baptism
Any 40 Days in the Wild and Temptation Story
Any Great Confession or Transfiguration
Any Miracle
Any Triumphal Arrival in Jerusalem
Any Betrayal & Denial
Any Trial
Any Information about the Crucifixion
Any Apparition in Flesh and Doubting Thomas...

Earl Doherty The Jesus Puzzle

In all the Christian writers of the first century, in all the devotion they display about Christ and the new faith, not one of them expresses a desire to see the birthplace of Jesus, to visit Nazareth his home town. No one talks about having been to the sites of his preaching, the upper room where he held his Last Supper, the hill on which he was crucified, or the tomb where he was buried and rose from the dead. Not only is there no evidence that anyone showed an interest in visiting such places, they go completely unmentioned. The words Bethlehem, Nazareth and Galilee never appear in the epistles, and the word Jerusalem is never used in connection with Jesus.
Most astonishing, there is not a hint of pilgrimage to Calvary itself, where humanity's salvation was presumably consummated.

• How could such a place not have become the center of Christian devotion?
• How could it not have been turned into a shrine?

Each year at Passover we would expect to find Christians observing their own celebration on the hill outside Jerusalem, performing a rite every Easter Sunday at the site of the nearby tomb. Christian sermonizing and theological meditation could hardly fail to be built around the places of salvation, not just the abstract events.

Do Christians avoid frequenting such places out of fear?
Acts, possibly preserving a kernel of historical reality, portrays the apostles as preaching fearlessly in the Temple in the earliest days, despite arrest and persecution, and the persecution has in any case been much exaggerated for the early decades. Even such a threat, however, should not and would not have prevented clandestine visits by Christians, and there should have been many other places of Jesus' career where visitation would have involved no danger. In any case, there would have been no danger in mentioning them in their own correspondence.

• How could Paul have been immune to the lure of such places?

Philippians 3:I0 says: "All I care for is to know Christ, to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings ..."
And yet,

• Does he care enough to visit the hill of Calvary upon his conversion, to experience those sufferings the more vividly, to feel beneath his feet the sacred ground that bore the blood of his slain Lord?
• Does he stand before the empty tomb, the better to bring home to himself the power of Jesus' resurrection, to feel the conviction that his own resurrection is guaranteed?

This is a man whose letters reveal someone full of insecurities and self-doubts, possessed by his own demons, highly emotional, a man driven to preach else he would go mad, as he tells us in 1 Corinthians 9:16.

• Would he not have derived great consolation from visiting the Gethsemane garden, where Jesus was reported to have passed through similar horrors and self-doubts?
• Would his sacramental convictions about the Lord's Supper, which he is anxious to impart to the Corinthians (11:23f), not have been heightened by a visit to the upper room in Jerusalem, to absorb the ambience of that hallowed place and occasion?

This type of consideration supplies yet another reason to regard as unacceptable the standard rationalization that Paul was uninterested in the earthly life of Jesus. (Even if that life was not the Gospel life, it is difficult to imagine an early Christian movement following a human teacher and yet knowing no biographical details of his career, real or invented.)

Moreover, when Paul undertook to carry his mission to the gentiles, surely he would have wanted and needed-to go armed with the data of that life, with memories of the places Jesus had frequented, ready to answer the inevitable questions his new audiences would ask in their eagerness to hear all the details about the man who was the Son of God and Savior of the world.
Instead, what did he do?
By his own account in Galatians, he waited three years following his conversion before making a short visit to Jerusalem,
"...to get to know Cephas. I stayed with him for fifteen days, without seeing any of the other apostles except James, the brother of the Lord." Nor was he to return there for another fourteen years.

• Did Paul learn all the data of Jesus' life on that one occasion? Did he visit the holy places?

Not having felt the urge to do so for three years, his silence on such things may not be surprising.

• But if he did make his own pilgrimage to Calvary and the empty tomb, can we believe he would not have shared those experiences-and they would have been intensely emotional ones-with his readers?
• If not here, then at least at some point in his many letters?

WHERE
Bethlehem, Nazareth
Anywhere in Galilee Capernaum, Bethsaida, Chorazin, Tyre, Cana, Dalmanutha, Nain, Gennesaret, Sychar, Ephraim, Bethany, Tiberias, Jericho, Caesarea Philippi, the Jordan river or Sea of Galilee...
Jerusalem
Any Temple, Gethsemane Garden, Hill of Calvary, Empty Tomb...

No Relics
Nor do they breathe a word about relics associated with Jesus.

• Where are his clothes, the things he used in everyday life, the things he touched?
• Can we believe that items associated with him in his life on earth would not have been preserved, valued, clamored for among believers, just as things like this were produced and prized all through the Middle Ages?
• Why is it only in the fourth century that pieces of the "true cross" begin to surface?

No Time
Nor do they give any possible clue to pinpoint Jesus historically.
The Christ of the Epistles is timeless.
Galatians 4:4: "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son"

The Argument From Silence
New Testament scholars are quick to maintain that the "argument from silence" is an invalid one,
but it surely becomes powerful when the silence is so pervasive, so perplexing.

• Why would writer after writer fail consistently to mention the very man who was the founder of their faith, the teacher of their ethics, the incarnation of the divine Christ they worshiped and looked to for salvation?
• Why would every Christian writer, in the highly polemical atmosphere during those early decades of the spread of the faith, fail to avail himself of the support for his position offered by the very words and deeds of the Son of God himself while he was on earth?
• What could possibly explain this puzzling, maddening, universal silence?

Earl Doherty The Jesus Puzzle

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It is the sacred writings which have created the picture of the spiritual Christ and determined many of his features.
Through the Scriptures and the agency of the Holy Spirit, God has revealed to apostle like Paul the existence of his Son and the role he has played in the divine plan for salvation. Old Testament texts became stories about Jesus.

These early writers talk of long-hidden secrets being disclosed for the first time, with no mention of an historical Jesus who played any part in revealing himself, thus leaving no room for a human man at the beginning of the Christian movement.
For example, in Romans 16:25, Paul proclaims his gospel
"about Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery kept in silence for long ages but now revealed,
and made known through prophetic writings at the command of God. . . ."
Here the words plainly say that Christ is a mystery that has been hidden for a long time, but is now revealed by God through scripture.

In a few passages, Paul tells us quite clearly that he has derived his information and gospel about the Christ from the scriptures. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, the fact that "Christ died for our sins," that "he was raised on the third day," is "according to the scriptures." The latter phrase can have the meaning of 'as we learn from the scriptures.'

1 Corinthians 15:3 Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures,
can come from Isaiah 53 in the Septuagint
He bears our sins, and is pained for us But he was wounded on account of our sins, bruised because of our iniquities. ...
All we as sheep have gone astray, everyone has gone astray in his way,
and the Lord [delivered him up] for our sins because his soul was delivered up to death ...
and he bore the sins of many and was delivered because of their iniquities.

1 Corinthians 15:4 and that he has been raised on the third day according to the scriptures
can be interpreted from Hosea 6:2
After two days he will heal us, on the third day he will restore us.
The story of Jonah also speaks of a rescue from the fish's belly after three days and three nights.

The manner of Christ's death:

Isaiah 53:5	The "wounded" of above is sometimes translated "pierced."
Psalm 119:120 (Septuagint)	contains the phrase "penetrate my flesh with thy fear." The verb in some contexts means "fasten with nails."
Psalm 22:16	"they have pierced my hands and my feet."
Zechariah 12:10	(speaking of a person in his own time) links the piercing with a "son": "They shall look on ... him whom they have pierced... and shall wail over him as over an only child, and shall grieve for him bitterly as for a first-born son." [NEB]

The Gospel of John 19:37 calls attention to this verse of Zechariah as a text in scripture which Christ has fulfilled.
What lies behind John's statement, however, is that verses like Zechariah 12:10 are the source for the `fact' that Jesus had been crucified.

One of the features of scriptural study in this period was the practice of taking individual passages and verses, bits and pieces from here and there, and weaving them into a larger whole. Such a sum was much greater than its parts. This is one of the key procedures of "midrash," a Jewish method of interpreting the sacred writings. This bringing together of widely separate scriptural references and deriving meanings and scenarios from their combination was the secret to creating the early Christian message. Scripture did not contain any full-blown crucified Messiah, but it did contain all the necessary ingredients. Jewish midrash was the process by which the Christian recipe was put together and baked into the doctrine of the divine Son who had been sacrificed for salvation.

Earl Doherty Jesus Puzzle

For most Jews, the Messiah would be a human figure, though one destined to be exalted by God. For others, however, the agent of salvation became more spiritual. The "one like a son of man" in Daniel 7 offered itself as a divine, or semi-divine savior figure. In the latter first century, such an End-time agent of God surfaces in Q and the Book of Revelation, and eventually in all the canonical Gospels. Among Jewish sects he puts in an appearance in the documents 4 Ezra and 1 Enoch, showing that even purely Jewish groups had begun to envision a Messiah figure who was more than human, someone waiting in heaven for the great day to arrive when he would bring about God's salvation of the righteous.

Shortly prior to the story of "Jesus Christ" we already have Jewish stories outside of the "Old Testament" that include the following:

• The titles or designations Son of God, Son of Man, Prince of Peace, Anointed One, King of Kings, etc.
• The Elect (many people and/or angels who will be justified)
• Heavenly powers who fight among themselves in heaven and through the manipulation of events on earth
• Heroes who predict their own death
• Passion narratives
• Promises of immortality
• Descriptions of resurrections
• The coming end of the world
• The coming creation of a new righteous world
• Angels interacting with people on earth
• People having visions (or claiming to have had them) and testifying to their truth
• People claiming to have witnessed amazing events on earth and testifying to their truth

It is only a small step further to regard Christianity, in its earliest form, not as a response to a human man, but as a religious and philosophical expression of the same nature. These varied circles of belief encompassed an unknown number of uncoordinated Jewish and gentile groups in Palestine and throughout the empire. They offered a spiritual Savior, a fully divine Son of God. Some of the same scriptural passages which more `mainstream' Jews were interpreting as referring to a future human Messiah were seen as pointing to a spiritual Christ, a Son of God waiting in heaven for the End-time when he would appear on earth.

Earl Doherty The Jesus Puzzle and R.G. Price Jesus Myth Part II - Follow-up, Commentary, and Expansion

beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries aloud:
"To you, O men, I call, and my cry is to the sons of men.
Hear, for I will speak noble things, and from my lips will come what is right;
for my mouth will utter truth; wickedness is an abomination to my lips.
All the words of my mouth are righteous;...
Take my instruction instead of silver, and knowledge rather than choice gold;...
I, wisdom, dwell in prudence, and I find knowledge and discretion...
Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate.
I have counsel and sound wisdom, I have insight, I have strength...
I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently find me...
I walk in the way of righteousness, in the paths of justice,
endowing with wealth those who love me, and filling their treasuries.
The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old.
Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,...
Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth;...
...then I was beside him, like a master workman;
and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the sons of men.
And now, my sons, listen to me: happy are those who keep my ways.
Hear instruction and be wise, and do not neglect it.
Happy is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors.
For he who finds me finds life and obtains favor from the LORD;
but he who misses me injures himself; all who hate me love death.
Book of Proverbs 8:1-36 (Old Testament)

"In wisdom the Lord founded the earth
and by understanding he set the heavens in their place."
Book of Proverbs 3:19

There are two important aspects of Wisdom here similar to the Christ..
First, she is "preexistent," that is, she was with God in heaven before the creation of the world.
And she is associated with God in that work, serving as an instrument in the process of creation.
These are two of the primary attributes given to the spiritual Christ in the thought of Paul, pre-existence and a role in creation.

Notice the vocabulary in all these extracts that could be misinterpreted for a real person.
"Thereupon wisdom appeared on earth and lived among men."
Baruch 3:37 (Old Testament)

In the Wisdom of Solomon, perhaps the most important surviving piece of Hellenistic Jewish writing,
we can see a clear and exotic blending of Wisdom with the Logos.
This document was almost certainly written in Alexandria, probably in the early first century CE.
Like the Logos, Wisdom is now the divine power active in the world, the spirit that pervades and governs all things.
She, too, is pre-existent and an agent of creation.
She is God's 'throne-partner', a step away from Christ sitting at the right hand of God.
". . . she rises from the power of God,
a pure effluence of the glory of the Almighty . . .
She is the brightness that streams from everlasting light,
the flawless mirror of the active power of God and the image of his goodness ...
She spans the world in power from end to end, and orders all things benignly.
Wisdom of Solomon 7:22-30

Earl Doherty

From the beginning, Christianity has understood itself as the religion of the Logos...
we Christians must be very careful to remain faithful to this fundamental line:
to live a faith that comes from the Logos, from creative reason and that, because of this, is also open to all that is truly rational.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) April 1 2005.

Mysticism is a doctrine that maintains that one can gain knowledge of reality
that is not accessible to sense perception or to reason.

Philo of Alexandria 20 BCE - 50 CE
He was an Hellenized Jew who spans two cultures: the Greek and the Hebrew.
When Hebrew mythical thought met Greek philosophical thought in the first century BCE. it was only natural that someone would try to develop speculative and philosophical justification for Judaism in terms of Greek philosophy.
Clement of Alexandria even called Philo "the Pythagorean."

Like Paul, Philo

• is a Greekspeaking Jew from the diaspora
• has a universal theology that doesn't exclude Gentile from Judaism.
• fuses Greek philosophical concepts with Hebrew religious thought and provides the foundation for Christianity
• uses what he calls "the method of the mysteries" to reveal Jewish scriptures as allegories encoding secret spiritual teachings. Inge op cit 355
• speaks figuratively about body & soul "Now, when we are alive, we are so though our soul is dead and buried in our body, as if in a tomb. But if it were to die, then our soul would live according to its proper life being released from the evil and dead body to which it is bound" (De Opificio Mundi 67-69; Legum Allegoriarum 1.108).
• contrasts the spirit with the body and regards the physical nature of man as something defective and an obstacle to his development that can never be fully surmounted. But higher and more important is the spiritual nature of man.
• believes in the heavenly body "We recognize, it is true, the traces of the cosmic origin of the Divine intermediaries; the angels are material intermediaries as well as spiritual, and Philo accepts the belief in the power of the heavenly bodies as an inferior degree of wisdom." Catholic Encyclopedia Online
  "There are two kinds of men. The one is Heavenly Man, the other earthly. The Heavenly Man being in the image of God has no part in corruptible substance, or in any earthly substance whatever; but the earthly man was made of germinal matter which the writer [of Genesis] calls 'dust'."
  leg. 1.31. See also Paul in 1 Corinthian 15:44-49 where he uses the term 'man' for Jesus.
• believes that man's final goal and ultimate bliss is in the "knowledge of the true and living God" (De Decalogo 81; De Abrahamo 58; Praem. 14); "such knowledge is the boundary of happiness and blessedness" (Quod Deterius Potiori Insidiari Soleat 86).
  Philo divides human dispositions into three groups:
  • the best is given the vision of God,
  • the next has a vision on the right i.e., the Beneficent or Creative Power whose name is God,
  • the third has a vision on the left, i.e., the Ruling Power called Lord (De Abrahamo 119-130).

The pivotal and the most developed doctrine in Philo's writings on which hinges his entire philosophical system, is his doctrine of the Logos. He made a synthesis of the two worlds he knew and attempted to explain Hebrew thought in terms of Greek philosophy by introducing the Stoic concept of the Logos into Judaism. In the process the Logos became transformed from a metaphysical entity into an extension of a divine and transcendental anthropomorphic being and mediator between God and men. Philo offered various descriptions of the Logos.

Comme le Christ de Paul, le Logos de Philon

• resides in Scriptures
  The Scripture Symbolizes the Logos as the revealer of God (Genesis 31:13; 16:8; etc) by an angel of the Lord (De Somniis 1.228-239; De Cherubim 1-3) and the utterance of God since God's words do not differ from his actions (De Sacrificiis Abelis et Caini 8; De Somniis 1.182; De Opificio Mundi 13).
  When the scripture uses the Greek term for God ho theos, it refers to the true God, but when it uses the term theos, without the article ho, it refers not to the God, but to his most ancient Logos (De Somniis 1.229-230).
  For Philo, the tabernacle of the Old Testament was "a thing made after the model and in imitation of Wisdom",
  and he finds in the Bible indications of the operation of the Logos, e.g., the biblical cherubim are the symbols of the two powers of God but the flaming sword (Genesis 3.24) is the symbol of the Logos conceived before all things and before all manifest (De Cherubim 1.27-28; De Sacrificiis Abelis et Caini 59; De Abrahamo 124-125; Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit 166; Quaestiones et Solutiones in Exodum 2.68).
  "God therefore sows and implants terrestrial virtue in the human race,
  being an imitation and representation of the heavenly virtue" (LA 1.45).
• est une Puissance Intermediaire, Messager et Médiateur entre Dieu et l'humanité
  The Logos as "interpreter" announces God's designs to man, acting in this respect as prophet and priest.
  According to Philo, man's highest union with God is limited to God's manifestation as the Logos.
  "And the father who created the universe has given to his archangel and most ancient Logos a pre-eminent gift, to stand on the confines of both, and separate that which had been created from the Creator. And this same Logos is continually a suppliant to the immortal God on behalf of the mortal race, which is exposed to affliction and misery; and is also the ambassador, sent by the Ruler of all, to the subject race.
  And the Logos rejoices.... saying "And I stood in the midst, between the Lord and you"(Numbers 16:48);
  neither being uncreated as God, nor yet created as you, but being in the midst between these two extremities, like a hostage, as it were, to both parties (Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit 205-206)
• is the image and revealer of God
  Though God is hidden, his reality is made manifest by the Logos that is God's image (De Somniis 1.239; De Confusione Linguarum 147-148)
  and by the sensible universe, which in turn is the image of the Logos.
  Through the Logos of God men learn all kinds of instruction and everlasting wisdom (De Fuga et Inventione 127-120).
  The Logos is the "cupbearer of God ... being itself in an unmixed state,
  the pure delight and sweetness, and pouring forth and joy,
  and ambrosial medicine of pleasure and happiness" (De Somniis 2.249).
• is the First-born Son of God
  "But the most universal of all things is God; and in the second place is the Logos of God"(Legum Allegoriarum 2.86).
  Philo transforms the Stoic impersonal and immanent Logos into a being who was neither eternal like God nor created like creatures, but begotten from eternity. The Logos is the the first-begotten Son of the Uncreated Father and the eldest and chief of the angels. It exists as such before everything else all of which are secondary products of God's thought and therefore it is called the "first-born."
  For the Father of the universe has caused him to spring up as the eldest son,
  whom, in another passage, he [Moses] calls the first-born;
  and he who is thus born, imitating the ways of his father,
  has formed such and such species, looking to his archetypal patterns" (De Confusione Linguarum 63).
  
• helped God in the creation of the universe
  Philo believes that the Logos is "the man of God" (De Confusione Linguarum 41)
  or the shadow of God that was used as an instrument and a pattern of all creation (Legum Allegoriarum 3.96)
  "Now it is an especial attribute of God to create, and this faculty it is impious to ascribe to any created being" (De Cherubim 77).
  The expression of this act of God, which is at the same time his thinking, is his Logos (De Providentia 1.7; De Sacrificiis Abelis et Caini 65; De Vita Mosis 1.283).
  The Logos has a special relation to man. It is the type; man is the copy. The similarity is found in the mind of man. For the shaping of his nous, man (earthly man) has the Logos (the "heavenly man") for a pattern. Jewish Encyclopedia
• sustains the universe
  The Logos is the bond holding together all the parts of the world.
  And as a part of the human soul it holds the body together and permits its operation.
  "And the Logos, which connects together and fastens every thing,
  is peculiarly full itself of itself, having no need whatever of any thing beyond" (Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit 188).
• is mystically revealed through spiritual vision
  For Philo, mystic vision allows our soul to see the Divine Logos (De Ebrietate 152) and achieve a union with God (Deut. 30:19-20; De Posteritate Caini 12). According to Philo these powers of the Logos can be grasped at various levels (De Fuga et Inventione 94-95; De Abrahamo 124-125)
  • At the summit level, an indivisible unity.
  • As the Creative Power
  • As the Regent Power
  while the lowest level correspond to those limited to the sensible world, unable to perceive the intelligible realities (De Gigantibus 20). At each successively lower level of divine knowledge (Gnosis ?) the image of God's essence is increasingly more obscured. Steps in mystic experience involve a realization of human nothingness, a realization that the one who acts is God alone, and abandonment of our sense of perception (Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit 69-71; De Plantatione 64; De Confusione Linguarum 95; De Ebrietate 152). A mystic state will produce a sensation of tranquility, and stability; it appears suddenly and is described as a sober intoxication (De Gigantibus 49; De Sacrificiis Abelis et Caini 78; De Somniis 1.71; De Opificio Mundi 70-71).
• is the expiator of sins and procures forgiveness and blessings
  When acting as the high priest, he softens punishments by making the merciful power stronger than the punitive.
  "For it was indispensable that the man who was consecrated to the Father of the world [the high priest]
  should have as a paraclete, his son, the being most perfect in all virtue,
  to procure forgiveness of sins, and a supply of unlimited blessings" (De Vita Mosis 2.134).
• is sent Down to earth to vivify and purify our soul
  "God sends forth upon it the stream of his own accurate wisdom, and causes the changed soul to drink of unchangeable health; ... and of it he gives drink to the souls that love God; and they, when they have drunk, are also filled with the most universal manna; for manna is called something which is the primary genus of every thing." Legum Allegoriarum 2.86
  The Logos has a special mystic influence upon the human soul, illuminating it and nourishing it with a higher spiritual food, like the manna, of which the smallest piece has the same vitality as the whole.
  And "in the midst of our impurity in order that we may have something whereby we may be purified,
  washing off and cleansing all those things which dirty and defile our miserable life,
  full of all evil reputation as it is" (Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit 112-113).
• prefigures Christian's trinity inside God's unicity
  The Logos is an agent that unites two powers of the transcendent God : ...that in the one living and true God there were two supreme and primary powers, Goodness [or Creative Power] and Authority [or Regent Power]; and that by his Goodness he had created every thing; and that by his Authority he governed all that he had created; and that the third thing which was between the two, and had the effect of bringing them together was the Logos, for it was owing to the Logos that God was both a ruler and good (De Cherubim 1.27-28).
  These powers are inherent in transcendental God, and that God himself may be thought of as multiplicity in unity.
  The Beneficent (Creative) and Regent (Authoritative) Powers are called God and Lord, respectively.
  Goodness is Boundless Power, Creative, and God. The Regent Power is also Punitive Power and Lord (Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit 166). Creative Power, moreover, permeates the world, the power by which God made and ordered all things.
  According to Philo, the two powers of God are separated by God himself who is standing above in the midst of them (Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit 166). Referring to Genesis 18:2 Philo claims that God and his two Powers are in reality one. To the human mind they appear as a Triad, with God above the powers that belong to him. (Quaestiones et Solutiones in Genesim 4.2). In addition to these two main powers, there are other powers of the Father and his Logos, including merciful and legislative (De Fuga et Inventione 94-95).

Philo on the 'The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'

It is a matter of debate whether Philo considered the Logos as a reality, as a distinct identity having real existence, or as no more than an abstraction.
Martin McNamara Intertestamental Literature, pp. 232-233

Il existait au premier siècle dans la diaspora un milieu commun juif-hellénique dans lequel Philon et les auteurs des Epîtres et de l'Evangile de Jean se déplaçaient, chacun de sa propre manière.
Les idées des apologistes du second siècle (dont Justin Martyr semble être le seul à connaitre un Jésus historique) sera basée sur la philosophie platonique et le judïsme hellénique: Epistle to Diognetus (130) Justin Martyr (100-165) Minucius Felix (?) Athenagoras of Athens (133-190) Theophilus of Antioch (117-181) C'est au troisième siècle que les idées Philon verront le plus de partisan chez les chrétiens Clement of Alexandria (150-215) Origen of Alexandria (185-254) Eusebius 'baptisa' Philon chrétien et nous légua la première liste de ces écrits Les pères de La Cappadoce (en Turquie) comme Grégoire de Nysse (335-400 ?) Ambroise de Milan (338-397) Mais le concile de Nicée (325 CE) ou il fut établit que le père était 'de la même substance que le père' marqua un frein au 'Logos' philonique qui était subordonné à Dieu.

A strong monotheist and Jewish mind like Philo stopped short of making his Son and Logos a personal divine being.
But other Jews didn't feel the same rigid restrictions toward God,
and could envision their Son as a personal divinity beside God in heaven.
From the Logos of Greek and Philonic philosophy to Paul's Christ Jesus is scarcely a stone's throw.
Earl Doherty The Jesus Puzzle

Shepherd of Hermas

Odes of Solomon

Ascension of Isaiah

Book of Revelation

Like a Gnostic, Paul

• claims to have ascended as far as the third level:
  I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. 2 Corinthians 12:2
• writes of a Gnosis which can be taught only to the "fully initiated":
  we speak of Sophia among the initiated. 1 Corinthians 2:6
• defends the secrecy of the Inner Mysteries by asserting that he has heard:
  ineffable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter. 2 Corinthians 12:4
• claims his gospel not from historical events or human teachings but from God's revelation :
  Galatians 1:16, 1 Corinthians 1:1, 2 Corinthians 1:1, 3:6, 10:13, 1 Thessalonians 2:4, Romans 1:1, Colossians 1:25, Ephesians 1:1, Titus 1:3
• offers a prayer that your love may more and more be bursting with knowledge (or Gnosis). Philippians 1:9
• writes of to have all the riches of assured understanding and the knowledge (or Gnosis) of God's mystery,
  that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom (or Sophia) and knowledge (or Gnosis).
  Colossians 2:2-3
• claims mystical knowledge by revelation of the Mystery was made known to me. Ephesians 3:3
• puts the emphasis on understanding, not on dogma: The letter kills, while the spirit gives life. 2 Corinthians 3:6
• preaches a message that is clearly mystical and allegorical
  -he writes of being raised up to heaven and enthroned with Jesus not as some hoped-for afterlife reward,
  but as something, which he and other Christian initiates have already experienced. Ephesians 2:4-7
• describes stories in the scriptures as allegories, Galatians 4:24
  and writes of events as symbolic. 1 Corinthians 10:6
• doesn't believe in the resurection of the dead or of the flesh
  Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. 1 Corinthians 15:50
  but in a spiritual experience that can happen right now:
  Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation. 2 Corinthians 6:2
• writes of participating in his suffering and sharing in the form of his death,
  and so being resurrected from the dead. Philippians 3:10-11
• preaches that Jesus' death is not an event in the past, but a perennial mystical reality.
  Through sharing in Jesus' death and resurrection each christian initiate can themselves die to their lower self
  and be resurrected as the Christ or Logos:
  We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead
  by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. Romans 6:4
  If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead
  will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you. Romans 8:11
• writes I have been crucified with Christ: from now on I live no more, instead Christ lives in me. Galatians 2:20

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share for the sake of his body,
which is the church, [the body of Christ is the church!] in filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions.
Of this church I became a minister according to the stewardship [term common for priest in the Mysteries of Serapis] from God
which was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known,
the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the saints.
To them God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles,
which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
We proclaim him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom,
so that we may present every man complete in Christ.
For this end I labor, striving with all his energy, which so mightily works within me.

Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy Was the original Jesus A Pagan God?

those who speak of the mystery cults in the past (Plato, Pindar, and even Virgil) all make it clear that the cults consisted of rituals and initiations preparing one for the journey in the afterlife


The Eleusian Mysteries of Demeter and Kore

The Andanian Mysteries of Messenia

The Greek Mysteries of Dionysos

The Anatolian Mysteries of Cybele and Her Lover Attis

The Egyptian Mysteries of Isis and Osiris

The Roman Mysteries of Mithras

The category life-death-rebirth deity also known as a "dying-and-rising" or "Resurrection" god is a convenient means of classifying the many divinities in world mythology or religion who are born, suffer death or an eclipse or other death-like experience, pass a phase in the underworld among the dead, and are subsequently reborn, in either a literal or symbolic sense. Such figures might include Osiris, Adonis, Tammuz, phoenix, Jesus, Baldur, and Odin. Female deities who passed into the kingdom of death and returned include Inanna and Persephone, the central figure of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Aboriginal mythology Julunggul Wawalag Akkadian mythology Tammuz Ishtar Arabian mythology Phoenix Aztec mythology Quetzalcoatl Xipe Totec Celtic mythology Cernunnos Christian mythology Jesus

Dacian mythology Zalmoxis Egyptian mythology Isis Osiris Etruscan mythology Atunis Greek mythology Adonis Cronus Cybele Dionysus Orpheus Persephone

Hindu mythology Trimurti Brahma Vishnu Siva Khoikhoi mythology Heitsi Native American mythology Kaknu Norse mythology Odin Balder Gullveig Phrygian mythology Attis

Roman mythology Aeneas Bacchus Proserpina Slavic mythology Veles Jarilo Sumerian mythology Damuzi Inanna

From Wikipedia Life-death-rebirth deity

Not only both traditions ignore the figure of Jesus of Nazareth but without any visible common ground between them,
this explanation fails to answer the most basic questions.

A displaced peasant, a landless laborer, who couldn't read, couldn't write, couldn't speak Greek, makes his way to the capital city of Judaism with its sophisticated ruling elite, its Temple, the center of religious and imperial authority, promptly gets himself executed in the most ignominious fashion, and is then elevated by souls unknown to the highest level of divinity just about any human has ever reached.

And the one thing which might conceivably have made some impression on those who engineered this fantastic response, a set of radical and visionary social reforms (even if they couldn't possibly be put into practice), is not even allowed to enter the picture, whose echo never puts in an appearance in the new "tradition".

• What scenario could possibly explain how such a thing came to pass?
• How did one man, operating in two centers separated by 75 miles,
  have given rise to two such divergent and incompatible responses?
• How did they flourish for so long in isolation from one another?
• How can the records show no trace of any 'gradual' elevation ?

Jerusalem Response
If Jesus was involved in a counter-culture movement to bring hope and new meaning to the lives of dispossessed farmers, directing homeless followers to carry his 'new-society-now' message to the towns and villages of Galilee and perhaps beyond,

• Why did he go to Jerusalem at all?
  What did he expect to accomplish there, with his brand of itinerant lifestyle aimed at a rural peasantry?

Presumably there would have been no natural audience for his preaching.
Or, perhaps he wanted to bring his message to the disadvantaged of the urban ghetto.

• If so, why was he not successful?
  Why could he not spread a similar kind of radical ethic to the downtrodden of the city?

For he quite clearly failed, since the Jerusalem response ended up having nothing to do with sayings or miracles or any other aspect of his life and work. Instead, it consisted of a bizarre and cosmic interpretation of his death, to which was added a perceived rising from the grave.

• If those involved in this response spurned his teaching, what other reason did it have to turn him into the Son of God?

Did the new group in Jerusalem hold up their hands and say:
"No, no, we're not interested!
Don't tell us about his sayings, don't tell us about his views of a new society, about his miracles.
We reject them all as having nothing of value to add to what we want to do to him:
turn him into the Son of God and Savior of the world,
translate his death into a cosmic event which gives salvation to humanity. We've decided that he rose from the dead.
We want to make him a part of God, give him all the divine titles,
and bring the wrath of every traditional Jew in the empire down on our heads.
We'll make him the Messiah and scour the scriptures for prophecies about him.
But what he accomplished on earth has nothing to do with our desire to do all this, thank-you very much."

• Who made up the Jerusalem community and what relationship, if any, it had to followers of Jesus from Galilee?
• If some of them came from the land of Jesus' principal ministry, having travelled with this illiterate peasant for who knows how many years, how did they make the quantum leap to cosmic Christ and the kerygma of death and resurrection?
• Jerusalem pillars, Peter & James, have apparently emigrated from Galilee and taken up residence in the capital,
  presumably following Jesus’ own migration there. But if Jesus, for whatever reason, was executed there as a subversive,
  why did his followers remain there—with impunity, to boot?
• How could Jesus own disciples, Peter & James, not be part of the Christ cult or not able to leave any mark on the new movement?
• Why at the same time did they abandon all concern for his former teachings and miracles, for the resistance movement which had been his raison d'etre and their own reason for following him?

And yet if they were on the scene for the great event of the death and resurrection, responding to it by joining in a new group of "brothers" and apostles to proclaim the new cosmic Jesus,

• Why were not the two Traditions automatically linked from the beginning?

Presuming that those followers from Galilee did not sever all connection with others back home,

• Why did the Q community not learn of the death and resurrection?
• Why was it not drawn to absorb that new response to their own native son Jesus, now elevated to the rank of divine Son and Savior?

Earl Doherty

Within a handful of years of Jesus' supposed death, the idea that Jews, both in Palestine and across the empire, could have come to believe —or been converted to the idea by others— that, a human man was the Son of God, is more than unlikely.

Judaism's fundamental theological tenet was: God is one.
It is true that the first Jewish Christians, such as Paul, were flirting with a compromise to monotheism in postulating a divine Son in heaven, even though he was entirely spiritual in nature and was conceived of as a part of God; this Son was derived from scripture and was an expression of the prominent philosophical idea of the age that the ultimate Deity gave off emanations of himself which served as intermediaries with the world.

But this is a far cry from turning a recent man who had walked the sands of Palestine into part of the Godhead.
(It was essentially gentiles who were later to create such an idea, and it produced the "parting of the ways" between the Christian movement and its Jewish roots.) In a society in which the utter separation of the divine from the human was an obsession, the Jewish God could not be represented by even the suggestion of a human form, and thousands bared their necks before the swords of Pilate simply to protest against the human images on Roman standards being brought into the city to overlook the Temple.
Almost any Jew would have reacted with apoplexy to the unprecedented message that a man was God.
To believe that ordinary Jews were willing to bestow on any human man, no matter how impressive, all the titles of divinity and full identification with the ancient God of Abraham is simply inconceivable.

• Did Paul, a Jew born and bred as he tells us, simply swallow the whole thing without a murmur of indigestion?
• And how can this elevation been unchallenged?

Since not only Paul is assumed to have done this, but he did so without ever telling us that anyone challenged him on it, that he had to defend such a blasphemous proposition. His comment in 1 Corinthians 1:23 that the cross of Christ is a "scandal" refers to his idea that the divine Messiah had been crucified (a spiritual figure in a mythical setting), not that a recent man was God.

Earl Doherty

Scholars are faced with a bewildering variety of expression in earliest Christianity.
Many circles of belief lacked fundamental Christian doctrines, and different aspects of Jesus are said to have been preserved by separate groups. Modern critical scholarship has put forward a curious scenario to explain all this. Various groups who came in contact with Jesus or the missionary movement about him are supposed to have focused on different aspects of him:

• Some exclusively on the teachings,
• Others on the miracles,
• Others on the message about his death and perceived resurrection as a redeeming act.
• Some came up with unique interpretations of him.
• Some of these groups saw him in entirely human terms,
• While others, like Paul, turned him into God and abandoned all interest in his pre-resurrection earthly life and identity.

Within the Christ cult itself, there existed a widely diverse set of expressions, varied interpretations of a divine Son and what he had done, what he represented, what he offered. If the Christ cult began at Jerusalem as a response to the events of Jesus' death and perceived resurrection, giving rise to a missionary movement which spread outward from that place,

• How did such dramatic diversity develop, some of it very quickly?
• Why would the writer of Hebrews (maybe in Egypt) have deviated so radically to portray its Son as the heavenly High Priest whose blood sacrifice, offered in the heavenly sanctuary, is the higher world counterpart of the Day of Atonement sacrifice performed by the high priest in the sanctuary on earth?
• How and why the Johannine Community developped such a different and unique christology?
• Why does the Odes of Solomon never speak the name Jesus nor make any reference to either the crucifixion or resurrection?
• In the Shepherd of Hermas, why is the name Jesus and Christ never used?
  Why is there no sign of death or resurrection?
  Why are the list of moral rules never assigned to Jesus?
• The Gnostic Savior is derived in part from a philosophical concept current in the early centuries of our era, which spoke of a 'Primal Man' or 'Heavenly Man'. This being descended the heavens to effect salvation. But again, no historical Jesus of Nazareth lies in the background.

Burton Mack (in A Myth of Innocence, p.98f) suggests that this cultic deification of Jesus took place under the influence of gentiles in Hellenistic circles like Antioch. But this hardly explains Paul, allegedly a Jew born and bred, who was converted within two to five years of Jesus' supposed death.

• Did a whole Hellenistic mythology develop around Jesus almost overnight and Paul accepted it?
• Or did he not believe in Jesus as the Son of God right from the start?
• Can we view the theology of Paul's letters, our earliest record written two decades later, as a result of the insidious influence of gentiles at Antioch?

Such scenarios fail to provide any convincing explanation for why such an immediate fragmentation would have taken place, why the Christian movement began as "fluid and amorphous" (James Robinson in Trajectories Through Early Christianity).
Mack admits that "much of the evidence is secondhand, and all of it is later."
Out of a record of multiplicity, Christian scholars have deduced a single founder and point of origin which is based on a later stage: the Gospel story, formed by the postulated reconvergence of the original diverging strands.

But no document records this initial phenomenon of differing "responses" to the historical man, this break-up of Jesus into his component parts. Given a record whose earliest manifestation is nothing but diversity, common sense requires us to assume the likelihood that this was in fact the incipient state, and that the new faith arose in many different places with many different expressions. Some elements, such as the teachings, would have had no connection to a Jesus in their early stages. Most of this diversity was later to be drawn together and recast under a composite new figure, courtesy of the evangelists.

Earl Doherty

• Could the career of such a mover and shaker, after he went off to Jerusalem to get himself executed and give rise to a whole other Tradition, could it have had so little impact as to disappear without a trace among those who responded to that death and perceived resurrection?
• Could Paul, who devoted his life to carrying the message to the gentile, have been so little impressed by Jesus' achievement in Galilee that he shows not the slightest interest in mentioning it to his audiences and converts—indeed, not the slightest knowledge of it?

Scholars, in seeking an explanation for Paul's blanket silence on the historical Jesus rationalize that Paul "had no interest" in Jesus' earthly incarnation, that his theology did not require it.
This is difficult to fathom as Paul's faith is centered on the crucifixion.

• What bizarre mental processes could have led him to disembody it, to completely detach it from its historical time and place, from the life which culminated on Calvary?
• Why would he transplant the great redeeming act to some mythological realm of demonic powers who were responsible for "crucifying the Lord of glory"(1 Corinthians 2:8)?
• Why would he give Christ "significance only as a transcendent divine being" (Herman Ridderbos, Paul and Jesus, p.3)?
• How can you turn a man into God and attach every mythological concept of the day to him
  and ignore the human antecedent as though he never existed?
• How can the Christ apostles never gave a clue that their theology grew out of
  previous views of Jesus as a human man and teacher?
  How can they say nothing about a life and ministry on earth?
• How likely is it that such a total excision of the cult’s previous interests in Jesus would have taken place,
  even in the process of a dramatic elevation to divinity?

More than 200 times, Paul had the opportunity in his writings to found or strengthen his theological preach with the sayings and deeds of Jesus on earth or the events of his life.

• Could Pilate not have served Paul as an example of the "wisdom of the world"
  which could not understand the "wisdom of God" ?
• For Paul, baptism is the prime sacrament of Christian ritual; through it believers receive the Spirit and are adopted as sons of God. Yet we are to assume that Paul, in presenting his baptismal rite (such as in Romans 6), cared nothing about Jesus' own baptism by John, about such traditions that he had received the Spirit in the form of a dove, that he had been adopted as Son by the Father in the voice from heaven.
• How can we assume that in all the bitter debates he engaged in through his letters, such as on the validity of the Jewish dietary laws, Paul never felt a need to introduce the Lord's own actions and teachings concerning the subjects under dispute?
• Are we to accept, too, that Jesus' earthly signs and wonders would not have been an incalculable selling point to gentiles, immersed as they were in popular pagan traditions of the wonder-working "divine man," a concept which fitted the earthly career of Jesus to a "T"?
• And are we to believe that, even if Paul had expunged Christ's human life from his own mind, his audiences and converts likewise felt no interest and did not press him for details of Jesus' earthly sayings and deeds—something of which he shows no sign in his letters?

In any event, explanations for Paul's silence and lack of interest would have to apply to all the other early epistle writers, who are equally silent—a situation so extraordinary as to defy rationalization. Amid such considerations, the argument from silence becomes legitimate and compelling.
The total silence about a recent historical man and the movement he would have founded in Galilee is a problem scholars are unable to solved.

Earl Doherty

The apostles of the Christ cult would have carried the message declaring Jesus Son of God and Savior of the world, to half the empire in an amazingly short time. Within a handful of years of Jesus' supposed death we know of Christian communities all over the eastern Mediterranean: Rome, Alexandria, Antioch (the three largest cities in the Roman Empire), Corinth, Ephesus...
Many of them involving at least some Jewish adherents.

Such Christians may have been numerous and troublesome enough in Rome to be expelled by Claudius as early as the 40s.
At the very least, Paul in Romans speaks of a congregation of the Christ that has been established in the capital of the empire "for many years" (15:23).
After noting that this gigantic leap by the Jerusalem Tradition Crossan remarks that:
"if you move from Jesus in the tiny hamlets of Jewish Lower Galilee to Paul in the great metropolises of the pagan Roman Empire, the leap seems unimaginably great and miraculously inexplicable." The Birth of Christianity [p.416]

Traditional Christian views have maintained that such communities were the product of dusty disciples from Judea who went off to centers big and small and almost overnight managed to convince great numbers of Jews (as well as gentiles) that a humble preacher they had never seen or heard of, executed in Jerusalem as a subversive, had risen from the dead, redeemed the world, and was in fact God's pre-existent Son who had helped him create the universe.
This is an incredible proposition.

Earl Doherty

Finally, many today find increasingly acceptable the direction which most recent liberal scholarship seems to be following: that Jesus was only a man, a Jewish preacher who was somehow divinized after his death, a death which did not result in resurrection. But here it seems that they face an insurmountable dilemma.

Such a divinization on the scale that Jesus underwent would have been unprecedented,
and there is no more unlikely milieu for this to have happened in than a Jewish one.
Nor is this divinization gradual, a graph line which ascends as his reputation grows,
as the things he did in his life took on magnified stature and interpretation.
Rather, at the earliest we can see any evidence for it, Jesus is already at the highest point,

• cast in an entirely mythological picture, fully divine
• pre-existent before the creation of the world
• moving in the celestial spheres and grappling with the demonic forces

Those deeds of his life which should have contributed to such an elevation are nowhere in evidence.
Let's put the dilemma this way: If this man Jesus had had the explosive effect on his followers that is said of him, and on the thousands of believers who responded so readily to the message about him, such a man would have had to blaze in the firmament of his time. That impact would have been based on the force of his personality, on the unique things he said and did. There is no other way.

And yet the picture we see immediately after Jesus' death, and for the next two generations in every extant document, flatly contradicts this. The blazing star immediately drops out of sight.

• No contemporary historian, philosopher or popular writer records him.
• There is no sign of any tradition or phenomenon associated with him.
• For over half a century Christian writers themselves totally ignore his life and ministry.
  • Not a saying is quoted and attributed to him.
  • Not a miracle is marveled at.
  • No aspect of his human personality, anchored within any biographical setting, is ever referred to.

The details of his life, the places of his career: they raise no interest in any of his believers.
This is an eclipse that does not even grant us a trace of a corona!

If, on the other hand, Jesus was simply an ordinary human man, a humble (if somewhat charismatic) Jewish preacher

• who really said little of what has been imputed to him,
• who performed no real miracles,
• and who of course did not rise from the dead.

All of which might explain why he attracted no great attention and could have his life ignored as unimportant by his later followers.

WHAT, then, is the explanation for how such a life and personality could have given rise This is an unsolvable dilemma.

How such a cosmic, unprecedented deification of an unknown and ignorant man who would have done and said barely anything could have taken place?
B.Mack called it 'one of the most difficult challenges confronting the historian.'

Earl Doherty