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Randel Helms

Gospel Fictions Paperback – September 1, 1989

by Randel Helms (Author)

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Are the four canonical Gospels actual historical accounts or are they imaginative literature produced by influential literary artists to serve a theological vision? In this study of the Gospels based upon a demonstrable literary theory, Randel Helms presents the work of the four evangelists as the "supreme fictions" of our culture, self-conscious works of art deliberately composed as the culmination of a long literary and oral tradition.Helms analyzes the best-known and the most powerful of these fictions: the stories of Christ's birth, his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, his betrayal by Judas, his crucifixion, death and resurrection. In Helms' exegesis of the Gospel miracle stories, he traces the greatest of these - the resurrection of Lazarus four days after his death - to the Egyptian myth of the resurrection of Osiris by the god Horus.Helms maintains that the Gospels are self-reflexive; they are not about Jesus so much as they are about the writers' attitudes concerning Jesus. Helms examines each of the narratives - the language, the sources, the similarities and differences - and shows that their purpose was not so much to describe the past as to affect the present.This scholarly yet readable work demonstrates how the Gospels surpassed the expectations of their authors, influencing countless generations by creating a life-enhancing understanding of the nature of Jesus of Nazareth.

Print length

154 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Prometheus
Publication date

September 1, 1989
Dimensions

6 x 0.46 x 8.95 inches
ISBN-10

0879755725
ISBN-13

978-0879755720
Lexile measure

1270L
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Randel Helms is a writer, professor, biblical scholar, and specialist in the works of William Blake and J.R.R. Tolkien. Helms was born in Alabama and was educated at the University of California Riverside. After leaving school, Helms began teaching at a number of universities around the United States. Many of his books are dedicated to debunking the Bible as fiction. He is the author of Gospel Fictions, Who Wrote the Gospels, and The Bible Against Itself.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Prometheus; Revised ed. edition (September 1, 1989)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 154 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0879755725
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0879755720
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1270L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.46 x 8.95 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #185,797 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #123 in Atheism (Books)
- #315 in New Testament Criticism & Interpretation
- #376 in Jesus, the Gospels & Acts (Books)

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79 ratings

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Chris Albert Wells

Party strategies in disguise

Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2011

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Helms is not the first to pinpoint textual inconsistencies. The merit of his book is to clearly show how the stories were borrowed from OT narratives, as well as how different OT references were used, sentence by sentence or word by word, to justify changes introduced by Matthew, Luke and John. His literary approach is very efficient in arguing that the gospels were a work of fiction guided by an evolving theological agenda, and that the evangelists were more concerned in the future of their rising Party than narrating a biography.

The gospels are history in disguise but here Helms has missed the point by crediting an historical Jesus that gives him the impression that Mark's account is misguided fiction. I wonder how Helms would reconsider his book with the following information?

The two gospel messiahs personified an intra-community split where Jesus was emblematic of the Essen avant-garde and John the Baptist, an allegory of Elijah, stood for a caricature of the Essen traditionalists. Jesus is always competing against Elijah and the many textual references borrowed from Elijah and his follower Elisha (both more famous than Jesus the beginner) serve to show that Jesus is just as great, and even greater. Elijah is always a big nuisance and permanently over-shadows the competing nascent messiah-mediated revival cult. Mark was writing contra the traditionalists, an angry and impulsive book, where his initial attack probably ended with the Transfiguration scene where both Moses, giver of an incomplete law so blind on eternal life as well as Elijah the competing Temple messiah are both dismissed. The Jerusalem book is a later development that introduces a priority claim: resurrection belongs to the Jesus partisans, an affirmation that owned them the "Messianic" sobriquet. This is the raw material Matthew had to work on to expand the newly expanding party. As Helms shows, Matthew built upon Mark's original extensively using OT references.

The gospels are not poetry and fiction but strategies, founding a new Party and publicising its particulars against already established religious groups.

With these reserves, I'll give back a star to Helm's book because it has so much insight and is very informative.

7 people found this helpful

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The Parentals

The God's Honest Truth

Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2016

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Typically, the first thing a negative reviewer does when complaining about a book like "Gospel Fictions" is attack the writer for being biblically illiterate and religiously incompetent. I don't really know what either of those statements mean, except that these reviewers are offended by anything that challenges established religious truth. The reviews are inundated with biblical scholars.

I am not biblically literate, neither am I religious. But in an attempt to understand the mindset of others, I read religious history and, occasionally, religious commentary and philosophy. Good examples of both are hard to find because they are too often tainted by prejudice and dogma. For example, the existence of Jesus Christ is taken a priori without historical proof and the rest follows in a predictable fashion.

Randel Helms is not predictable. "Gospel Fictions" is not biblical commentary in any usual sense. Neither can you conclude that the author is an atheist. Helms states several times that, in spite of his premise that the Gospels are fictions written to serve a religious purpose, the existence of Jesus is not disproved, nor is it part of any agenda. The irony is that Helms has performed the same exercise as the writers of the Gospels did nearly two thousand years ago in reverse. By this I mean Helm's meticulous illumination of contrivances between the New and Old Testaments, which appears to be nothing more than revisionist history. I leave it to you to decide who I am referring to. I find it interesting that believers will read the Testaments in the forward direction and non believers in the reverse direction. Helm's term for this is self-reflexive. It is what divides us.

I want to thank the man who calls himself "Odysseus at home" and lives in Santiago, Chile. I have been to Santiago and loved it. Did you know that they sell books in the subway in vending machines? You've got to love a city like that. Please read his five star review of the Gospel Fictions and his others which are thoughtful and intelligent. I have purchased several books based upon his reviews. Small world, isn't it?

11 people found this helpful

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Ben

Parallel after parallel

Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2013

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Gospel Fictions by Randel Helms is an interesting and somewhat eye opening book.

Helms suggests, as any reader can see by a reading of the Gospels, that the Gospel writers took stories from the Old Testament and reworked them in their own Gospel. I say "as any reader can see" because a reading of the Gospels does have explicit and direct referencing to the Old Testament - showing undeniably that the Gospel writers were using it as a reference (for example Mark 1:2 referencing the book of Isaiah, but Mark doesn't get it entirely right). The question is, how many of the Gospel stories were borrowed/fabricated from Old Testament stories?

Helms goes through dozens of stories in the Gospels and finds parallels for such stories in the Old Testament, and even stories from other religions that the Gospel writers could have known about. One such example is the miracle of Jesus feeding the multitudes, which parallels Elisha in 2 Kings 4:43-44. Helms also explains why Mathew and Luke changed stories when they were copying the story in Mark. I particularly liked the example with the cursing of the fig tree. In Mark, Jesus goes out of his way to see the tree, curses it, and it dies by the next day... Mathew, copying the story, has the tree placed more conveniently on the road side. Mathew's Jesus is all knowing, knowing that the tree didn't have figs anyways, so Jesus didn't have to use extra effort to travel to the tree. Jesus curses the tree and it withers away immediately, portraying Jesus as being more powerful.

Some parallels are more convincing than others. Helms shows translations when appropriate to show how the Gospel authors sometimes copied stories word for word, adding weight to the evidence.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. It was a quick read and straight to the point.

5 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Sphex

Have you given your heart to Apollonius?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 18, 2009

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Probably not, even if you knew he was "said to have worked miracles of goodness, casting out demons, healing the sick, raising the dead" and that he was thought to be a son of God. "Accused of sedition against Rome, he was arrested. After his death, his disciples claimed he had risen from the dead, appeared to them alive, and then ascended to heaven." Randel Helms begins this tremendous book with a startling demonstration of how these familiar biographical details belong not just to you-know-who. Even non-Christians tend to concede that there is a remarkable and unique historical figure at the centre of Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth, and few wonder why the teacher and wonder-worker Apollonius of Tyana did not inspire a world religion. This little-known parallel between Apollonius and Jesus is the aperitif before the tasting menu of typologies that follow.

The simplest view of the New Testament is that it is the oral tradition written down. Scholars argue over the details of the selection process and the scribal copying leading to our earliest surviving manuscripts. Believers may take an interest in such matters, but in the end can always beg the question by asserting that, because God was in charge, the end result is the Gospel truth. Helms reminds us of a more sophisticated view and the significance of that familiar phrase - "according to the Scripture" - which means that "typology, not history, is at work here." The early Christians did not "conduct the kind of historical research that might be done by a modern to find information about Jesus; they had a divinely certified source already in their possession - the Jewish Bible". In an important sense, they created the Old Testament as "a book about Jesus" and Helms shows that time and time again, when they wanted to know what Jesus must have said or done, they went back to Kings or to the Psalms or to Micah.

Consider, for example, the story of Jesus' agony in the garden of Gethsemane, "one of the most moving fictional creations in the New Testament." By now (if not before), many Christians will have tossed the book aside in disgust at the use of the "f" word. But even they must grant that this "account is obviously fictional, since there could have been no witnesses to Jesus' agony in the garden after he left his followers; they were all... asleep." Helms argues that "Jesus' emotional agony was part of the typological fiction" and traces the story back to "Elijah's fleeing from Ahab and Jezebel". Luke's version reveals "in its vocabulary a dependence on Septuagint III Kings and thus the origins of the story".

As for one of the most important events described in the canonical Gospels, not only do we not know when Jesus died - was it "the afternoon before Passover or the afternoon after"? - we cannot know what his dying words were. It is "not that we have too little information, but that we have too much." Helms cites three candidates from the four evangelists: "each narrative implicitly argues that the others are fictional." Luke, for example, "knew perfectly well what Mark had written as the dying words of Jesus" but "he created new ones more suitable to his understanding of what the death of Jesus meant".

At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus is said to have been baptized by John, but again the accounts vary in interesting ways. Mark simply presents Jesus as no different to any other repentant sinner seeking baptism. Matthew and Luke find this unsatisfactory and "set about rewriting and correcting" the first Gospel. By the time their Gospels were being composed, Mark's theology was already old-fashioned and even smacked of the adoptionist heresy. Developing theology drove the creative process. Matthew invents a dramatic scene not present in Mark: when Jesus "came to John to be baptized by him, John tried to dissuade him." Matthew also reads Mark "with a close critical eye" and drops the verse from Malachi that Mark wrongly attributes to Isaiah. Such editing was permitted since Mark "was not yet accepted as canonical Scripture and thus could be changed at need."

This excellent work deserves to be read by believers and non-believers alike. Common responses to its title - "Well, obviously!" and "Typical militant atheism!" - will unfortunately keep its appeal for either group limited. This is not about how we can all enjoy a well-turned phrase or an instructive parable even if we reject the supernatural claims of the Bible, and it's not dismissing the Bible as a pack of lies. By fiction Helms means "a narrative whose purpose is less to describe the past than to affect the present" and so, since literature can create meaning all the way from the frivolous to the profound, there is meaning in the Bible open to all. Where believers suffer for their faith is in mistakenly thinking that if their beliefs are not historically true then they can have no meaning.

Christians today - given the multiplicity of their sects - are well aware of the perils of interpretation and probably wish they could return to a pristine age before heterodoxy took hold. But there never was such an age, and the remarkable fact is that interpretation is at the core of their religion, not just one evangelist interpreting another but also interpreting scripture itself to write fiction. Call it revelation if you like, this is still the literary instinct at work. The difference between the postmortem careers of Jesus and Apollonius lies in the literary artists who wrote down the stories. Left as words in the air the stories about Jesus would have long since vanished from this earth. The crime of faith has always been to interpret such fiction as fact.

13 people found this helpful

Very enlightening if it is true

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 9, 2014

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The thesis of the book is an exploration of the sources used by the Gospel writers for the four Gospels, with explanation as to how and why these sources were used. It makes for a fascinating read and may change forever the way you think about Christianity and religion in general. For devout Christians, I predict this book will only enhance their belief in Christ rather than chip away at it. Why so? Because Abrahamic religions use circular reasoning to prove that their dogma is inerrant.
The author basically posits that the early christians accepted the old testament as simply an oracle for the coming of Christ, prolifically using verse scattered in the old testament (primarily Daniel and Kings) to detail his birth, life, passion, death and resurrection. Each phase of his life is plucked out of the OT and fleshed out to make the story of Christ's life flow from one OT prophesy to next.
You will also learn that the Gospel of Mark was written before the other Gospels (though after Acts) and was seen by Matthew and Luke as a first stab that needed correcting. Marks Gospel was not profound enough and lacked understanding of where the theology had to go in order for it to be more effective especially when evangelizing to non-Christians.
It is very interesting trying to figure out who knew, what when and why. It is a great who dunnit mystery that the author tries to untangle.
It is a small book but there is a lot of information to take in so I will have to read it again.

One person found this helpful

Ripping good book !

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 9, 2012

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Randel Helms is a professor of English par excellence. Read this and you will be able to laugh to yourself when you hear Christian English teachers waffling away about the gospel as if there were never any other interpretation than 100% literal, eye witnessed truth. Helms gives reasons to think that many parts of the gospel stories are rewritings / parallels of the Old Testament stories. The writers of the gospels thought that the O.T. contained prophetic messages about a saviour who would come in the future so they raked through the texts looking for anything that might tell them what Jesus might have been like or what sort of things he probably would have done. They didn't consider their writings to be deceitful or false but rather they thought they were finding great truths about the Christ from the Old Testament texts.
Randel Helms doesn't mock Christanity, just presents a different possibility.
I think higher criticism of the Bible makes it more interesting. Maybe Christianity is more about supporting each other in aiming to live a decent, caring, ethical, successful life and warning about the pitfalls of poor decisions. Maybe Christianity would be more popular if it freely admitted to a fallible Bible, though I suppose it has other more nuanced ways of disarming and forgetting troublesome bits of it.
For other great scholars on the same vine try Robert M. Price

H. A. Weedon

Brilliant interpretation.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 1, 2011

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This is a succinct, carefully researched work that hits home in every line. Entirely free from tedious, academically inspired waffle, it wastes no time in convincingly revealing the truth about how the four canonical gospels came to be written. This careful analysis clearly shows that there were deep divisions in Christianity right from its earliest beginnings. The multiplicity of divisions in modern Christianity are very much in keeping with its confused origins.

Randel Helms' brilliant interpretation is set before the reader in a kind hearted, non-judgemental fashion devoid of denigration. Interested only in revealing the truth, he sets it before the reader in a plethora of factual analysis. He sees the four gospels in the clear light of honest research, not least into their historical background. On pp 80 and 81 he makes the connection between earlier Buddhist stories and some of Jesus' teaching. Asoka, the great Buddhist Emperor of India during the Third Century BCE, sent Buddhist emmissaries to Athens, Damascus and Alexandria. Many of the stories about Jesus such as walking on water, calming the storm and feeding a multidude had all been told about the Buddha who lived nearly 600 years before the time of Jesus. Although Buddhist teaching has never required anyone to believe such tales, Christianity has always made a big thing of miracles, which Randel Helms clearly shows to have been mere fictions. Parables such as that of the Prodigal Son were circulating in India hundreds of years before the time of Jesus and were subsequently developed and used by Siddharta Gotama, known as Shakyamuni Buddha, who also composed his own original parables.

Randel Helms' expertise in expoisng the spurious relationship between fictitious Old Testament miracles and those alledgedly performed by Jesus is particulary convincing. Those of us who have been distressed by Jesus' apparent cruelty to animals when he cast demons into innocent pigs causing them to drown to death in the Sea of Galilee need be distressed no more. It's just another cock and bull, or should that be 'pig and water', story? He certainly wouldn't get away with it today. The RSPCA would be after him with a heavy fine or even a prison sentence as a result. Thank you Randel Helms for writing such a readable book with happy and liberating truths packed into every line of it.

2 people found this helpful

Barry Ryder

'The Gospel truth' doesn't exist - and never did!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 10, 2010

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This 1988 publication - from the pioneering stable of Prometheus Books - provides a very good 'primer' for readers who are serious about understanding the Bible and its true origins.

Helms is never savage or disdainful toward the faithful and this book isn't an attack on religion per sè. His task is to seek out and explain the deepest origins of the four Gospels.

In doing so, of course, he ably demonstrates that there is nothing 'divinely inspired' about them or the 'truths' that they supposedly contain.

His analysis is entirely convincing. Indeed, the great Bart Ehrman's books over a decade after this one cover much the same ground and reach the same, inevitable conclusions.

The Bible is just 'another' book. It contains fables, history, politics, law and, above all, myriad contradictions and mistakes. Add to this the human emotions, hopes and fears and it becomes patently clear that it was written by men for men.

Read Helms and you'll begin to see and understand.

Great book!

Barry

6 people found this helpful