Customer Reviews

Did Jesus Exist?

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New Testament scholars, quick to dismiss evangelical leanings toward belief that the Gospels are verbatim accounts by eyewitnesses, should think again if they think they have silenced their critics.

Wells has shown that questioning a few assumptions can lead to vastly different conclusions. The assumption he questions is that the general framework of the gospel accounts is based in fact. His different conclusion is that the Jesus that Christians know and love is mostly or all a legendary character.

Basically, taking Paul's earliest writings (which predate the gospels), Wells examines the growth of a tradition which added more and more on to the idea of Jesus, which is how myths work.

Scholars have turned their nose up to this theory, citing that Wells is not accepted in scholarly circles and that he is just a German professor, instead of providing some reasons that Wells's inference from the known data CAN'T work.

Read and enjoy. Crossan, eat your heart out.

Mr. Wells does a pretty simple thing here, but he does it well and he does it thoroughly. He takes the first four chapters of the New Testament (using the original Greek texts) and cross references it with other accounts of that time (Roman and Jewish sources). Nothing spectacular here, just good research and some decent historical work.

Because of his thoroughness, the reader is very early on faced with the obvious fact that there is completely no historicity at all for this fellow named Jesus in the New Testament. If you are into the whole faith thing, then of course this is no problem. Faith is faith is faith--that wonderful admission that pesky things like facts and logic and evidence and putting them all together to come to some sort of coherent conclusion is, well, not so important.

But, instead if you are into thinking stuff through, it is hard to walk away from this text and still admit that this guy ever existed, let alone did all those magic tricks: making some tasty wine from water, being born from someone who had never broken her hymen, busting out of his grave to make a short reunion tour before floating up, up and away on a fluffy, snow-white cloud.

The chapter on Pagan and Jewish Background was probably my favorite.

I should warn though that the text is a bit dry, but it makes for awesome reference. If I ever crack it open again it will be for that reason.

Fascinating book. The chapters on synoptic gospel-to-gospel inconsistencies, gospel editing from church fathers with an obvious agenda, and the similarities of the Jesus story to those of pagan gods were particularly compelling. This book convinced me that agnosticism is a very reasonable stance.

The author stresses the silence of Paul and first century documents about the earthly life of Jesus, which is a fact.
But when he studies the origin of the gospels he considers its sources to be oral tradition, even if it doesn't come from eye witnesses.
This is a contradiction.
If there was an oral tradition, how could there have been Paul's silence?
The book was written in 1975. Modern scholars forward more consistent explanations.
There was no oral tradition about Jesus. The gospels were written based on the Old Testament, on myths of ancient civilizations and Luke and Mathew on a gospel known as Q (source) collecting hellenizing sayings in circulation and then attributed to Jesus.
I did expect much more from this book.

Wells has made a cottage industry of questioning whether Jesus existed. In addition to this book he has written The Historical Evidence for Jesus [1988]and Who Was Jesus ?: A Critique of the New Testament Record [1989]. At one time he seemed willing to admit that Jesus actually existed around 200 BC (The Jesus Legend [1996]), but he apparently has reconsidered with The Jesus Myth [1998].

In this book he takes the position that Jesus was invented by Paul, embellished by the catholic and pastoral epistles, and placed in somewhat of a final form by the Gospels. The pagan mystery religions, with their dying and reborn divinities, served as a model for Paul's Jesus, and from there Jesus sort of morphed into a quasi-historical figure by the process of reading Biblical prophecies and making up details of his life to fit the prophecies.

Wells begins his argument by noting that the extra-Biblical testimony to Jesus is both sparse and late. Later on, however, he admits such a one as Jesus would likely have lived under the radar screen of widespread public awareness. He completely rejects both of Josephus' references to Jesus as Christian interpolations. Scholars generally agree that Josephus' longer notice of Jesus has been reworked by Christian copyists, but they use the second, less complimentary reference as evidence that the first was reworked by Christian revisionists. See
Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament.Wells then tries manfully to show that when Paul speaks of meeting the brothers of the Lord, he is using that term metaphorically and doesn't really mean that they were actual brothers (or half-brothers, or step-brothers) of Jesus. In so doing he manages to turn in as fine an example of straining at a gnat to swallow a camel as can be found in Biblical interpretation. He takes the fact that Paul voices opinions compatible with Jesus' teaching without attributing them to Jesus to mean that Paul knew nothing of the earthly Jesus. As I demonstrated in my reference to straining at gnats, it is quite possible to echo Jesus' words without attributing them to him. (See Mt. 23:24). As Wells grudgingly admits, absense of evidence is not evidence of absense. Although Wells argues strenuously, without citation of evidence, that the incidents in Jesus' life were invented to fulfill Bible prophecy. What is much more likely, and what we can find evidence for having happened in other circumstances, is that actual historical events get interpreted as having been prophesied by earlier writings. Nostradamus is a fine example of the phenomenon, where his ambiguous verse gets twisted to fit every major happening in current events. I distinctly remember a noted psychic claiming on television that the Watergate scandal was prophesied in Nehemiah, because it refers in chapter 8 to a water gate. It is much more likely that Biblical prophecy was interpreted in light of historical events than that quasi-historical events were made up to fulfill Biblical prophecy. Wells mentions Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna (70-156), in order to date the writing of Matthew and Mark, but never deals with the evidence that Polycarp was a student of one John, an apostle who knew Jesus. Again he mentions Papias (60-135), but never deals with Papias' personal acquaintance with an apostle named John nor with Papias' statement that he collected reminiscences of Jesus by eyewitnesses to his ministry. See Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony.

Wells tries manfully to prove Jesus did not exist, but there is much more evidence for Jesus' existence than for the Trojan War, which is accepted as having actually happened (The Trojan War: A New History) or King Arthur, who is agreed to have been an actual historical person (The Discovery of King Arthur).

To make this short, The best book on Jesus using historical facts