Category Archives: Christian origins

Jesus and the Leper

Posted on by
3

I thought we might share a couple of Bible studies these next couple of weeks. Some of you will remember these from your Christian days, when you’d gather with other eager believers so that a self-appointed expert could tell you what a particular story in the Bible really meant. I’m no expert, just someone who subjected myself to such indoctrination while all the time wondering if what I was being told was really what the passage was about. Doubts, however, were ‘of the devil’ so any such critical thinking needed to be suppressed. Since my eyes were opened to the allegorical nature of much of what is in the Bible and in the gospels in particular, I now see these same passages in a completely different light. I hope you’ll allow me to share my insights with you.

First off, it’s Mark 1:40-45, in which Jesus (seemingly) heals a leper:

 A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” Jesus was indignant. He reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” 

Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cleansed. Jesus sent him away at once with a strong warning: “See that you don’t tell this to anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.” 

Instead he went out and began to talk freely, spreading the news. As a result, Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed outside in lonely places. Yet the people still came to him from everywhere.

The giveaway phrase here is ‘make me clean’. The man does not ask Jesus to heal him which, suffering from a debilitating disease as he was, would have been the most obvious, most pressing request to make. Instead, he asks to be ‘cleansed’ with all its ritual connotations, the word used here, καθαρίζω (katharizo), also meaning ‘purify’. According to Leviticus 4: 11-12, leprosy was a condition that was spiritually unclean. Only by making the prescribed offerings – the usual doves, lambs and ‘crimson stuff’ – could a leper who was already healed become ritually pure.

Who, according to the New Testament, replaces all the sacrificial offerings of the old covenant? Why, it’s Jesus himself of course (1 Corinthians 11:25, Ephesians 5:25-26 etc). Jesus cleanses and purifies the leper in the story, just as he is able to cleanse and purify sinners. This is what the early cult believed: ‘Ask Jesus, the heavenly Christ, to cleanse you of your sins and, just like he does for the leper in this parable, he’ll do it for you. As a penitent believer, you are the leper. Not only are you cleansed of your sin, you are purified.’

This also explains why Jesus is ‘indignant’ when the leper first approaches him. On the surface it makes little sense for him to be indignant with the man, which is why some translations change this verse to say Jesus ‘felt compassion for him.’ Jesus’ metaphorical annoyance is for those who have allowed the man’s spiritual condition to have deteriorated to a state comparable with leprosy. The Jewish priestly system, symbolised anachronistically in Mark as the Scribes and Pharisees, the later arch-enemies of the new cult.

Jesus commands the leper to visit the Jewish priest to demonstrate that he, Jesus, is the new cleanser of sins, replacing the priesthood itself. Instead, the leper goes against Jesus’ and the early cult’s wishes. My God, how could the cult remain secret and exclusive if newly cleansed converts behaved like this!

So there you have it. The leper is a metaphor for the sinner in need of the heavenly Jesus’ cleansing. His leprosy is a metaphor for the sin itself. The healing is a metaphor for the penitent’s spiritual purification. The man’s by-passing of the Jewish law is a metaphor for Jesus replacing the law. The cleansed leper’s shouting about it is a metaphor for the early cult’s desire to keep its rituals and teaching secret. Its parables like this one were designed to enlighten cult members while obfuscating and confusing the unbeliever (Mark 4:11-12).

As a literary creation, an allegory replete with metaphor, this event need never have happened in reality. Given its literary nature, it’s highly unlikely it did.

God and the Domino Effect

Posted on by
6

Once free of belief in God, everything that follows collapses.

No God means –

   No divinely inspired scripture, no sin, no salvation, no need of salvation, no repentance or divine forgiveness (and no need of these things either), no grace.

   No supernatural, no heaven or hell, no Satan, angels or demons, no Holy Spirit, no effective prayer, no miracles, no judgement, no eternal life.

  No Son of God, no God Incarnate, no prophecy, no atonement, and, most significantly, no resurrection. 

According to the Bible, God resurrected Jesus (Romans 6:4; Galatians 1:1; Acts 2:22 etc). Therefore, no God = no resurrection.

So, where did all these ideas that, once God ceases to exist, fall like dominoes? Answer: the only place ideas ever come from: the human mind. Everything ever associated with gods, and with YHWH (Old and New versions) is entirely human invention. This is the only logical, rational conclusion.

  Paul’s vision of what he took to be the Risen Christ and his consequent theology: the product of a tortured imagination.

  The resurrection appearances supposedly experienced by Cephas and others: within their own heads (grief-induced hallucinations, dreams, trances, emotional agitation). Or: an emotional response to some natural phenomenon such as bright lights.

  The stories of Jesus that these visions inspired: invented by creative writers imaginatively applying ‘prophecy’ imagined by earlier writers.

  If he existed, Jesus’ Messiah complex: worked up entirely within his own religion-soaked brain.

  His conclusion that the end of the age was nigh and that he would be king of the new order (assuming he really did think this): the result of wishful thinking, all in his imagination.

Subsequent additions to the Christian experience: the Trinity, guesswork about the Messiah’s delayed return, the panoply of saints, heresy, blasphemy, ‘God’s standards’, the inerrancy of scripture, apologetics and, coming full circle, conversion experiences. All creations of the human imagination and emotions.

With no actual God, this is the only viable explanation of the phenomenon that is religion. Human beings did it.

 

Whatever Happened to Yeshua bar Yosef?

Posted on by
8

What happened to the real Jesus? The itinerant Jew who trudged around Palestine with a small group of followers, preaching who knows what. How to survive the imminent end of the world perhaps. His name wasn’t really Jesus. That’s a Hellenised version of the Jewish name Yeshua: Ἰησοῦς’ pronounced ‘Yay-soos’, which means (suspiciously) ‘YHWH is salvation’. The bar Yosef part means son of Joseph, not son of God. Whatever he was about, this Yeshua was crucified by the Romans and soon after his death, one or two of his friends convinced themselves they’d seen him alive again. Or so the story goes.

The earliest information we have about Yeshua includes very little of what we now think we know of him. The crucifixion/resurrection are the only parts of the story that interest Paul, and then only because he thinks he too has seen the risen Yeshua inside his own head. But this Yeshua, whom Paul does indeed call Jesus, is no itinerant preacher. Paul seems unaware of any of his story, his parables, aphorisms or miracles. Instead he consistently describes Jesus as a heavenly being who speaks to him through ‘revelation’, explaining in convoluted terms how his death leads to salvation. This Jesus, now with appended ‘Christ’, Greek for Messiah, is an amalgam of elements from mystery religions, resurrection myths and Paul’s own fanciful ideas. He is hard to reconcile with a real man who walked the Earth years earlier.

Verdict: Paul’s celestial Christ isn’t Yeshua bar Yosef. Paul’s Christ never existed.

The accounts of Jesus that appear decades later attempt to ground Paul’s imaginary being historically and geographically. In this, the gospels are superficially successful but even a cursory analysis reveals serious fault lines. The gospels rely heavily on myth, metaphor and the misapplication of ‘prophecy’, rather than historical fact. They are a form of midrash. The first, written anonymously round about 70CE and later attributed to someone called Mark, is, as today’s TV dramas often say, based on an idea by Paul. It is unlikely it reflects an historical Yeshua. Subsequent gospels, also anonymous but known later as Matthew and Luke, are themselves based on Mark’s, importing its flaws and introducing spurious material of their own. In neither is Jesus the son of Joseph; he’s the son of God, born of a virgin

Verdict: the Jesus of the synoptic gospels is not Yeshua bar Yosef. He’s a literary construct, a fantasy figure.

When the fourth gospel appears, sixty to seventy years after Yeshua is supposed to have lived, the Jesus character has evolved yet again. John’s supremely confident, egotistical creation equates himself fully with God: ‘I and the Father are one,’ as he puts it. This Jesus bears little relation to Mark’s central character who keeps his mission and identity secret (as well he might as a literary construct created primarily for cult members in the know.)

Verdict: the fourth gospel’s Jesus is not Yeshua bar Yosef. He’s constructed from the beliefs of later versions of the cult.

By the time of Revelation (95-96CE), Christ has become a Game of Thrones reject, overseeing the destruction of demons, dragons and other non-existent creatures. Any semblance of reality has been left far behind.

Verdict: Revelation’s Christ isn’t Yeshua bar Yosef. He’s as imaginary as Paul’s Christ, another fanatic’s ‘vision’.

Can Yeshua bar Yosef be rescued from all these accretions? Can a historical figure be detected beneath the layers of fantasy constructed around him (or the idea of him at least)? The attempts made in the last 150 years suggest not. He is lost for good underneath layers of myth and magic.

Does it matter? Not really. None of his followers today would be interested even if he could be unearthed and resurrected. They are content with the Jesus of imagination: Paul’s, the gospel writers’, the creators of creeds, ministers who interpret the stories about him and their own emotional need. Today’s Christ is an imaginary being, a heavenly superman as unreal as the sky gods who preceded him; a faith-created myth.

Verdict: the Jesus worshipped by today’s Christians isn’t Yeshua bar Yosef either. That character is lost to us. So early did cultists lose sight of him, he may as well have not existed.

Perhaps he didn’t. 

Whatever Happened to Mary Magdalene?

Posted on by
2

(The risen Jesus) appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve (1 Corinthians 15:12)

When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had driven seven demons. (Mark 16:9)

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb… Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshipped him. (Matthew 28: 1 & 9)

Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance… she turned around and saw Jesus standing there. (John 20: 1 & 14)

Whatever happened to Mary Magdalene? I mean, where did she go? She’s everywhere in the gospels: following Jesus and his entourage around the place, funding his layabout lifestyle (Luke 8:1-3) and being first to see him after he returned from the dead. After that, nothing. Luke doesn’t even bring her back for his sequel and no one else in the New Testament so much as mentions her. When, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul lists those who, like him, have had a vision of the risen Christ, she’s conspicuously absent. Mary is the first person to see Jesus resurrected according to three of the four gospels, yet in the far earlier tradition mentioned by Paul, she doesn’t get a look in. Her place is taken by Cephas.

The neglect of Mary Magdalene in early tradition could of course be because she was a woman, and a woman’s testimony, back in those less than enlightened times, was worth far less than a man’s. However, it’s far more likely that whoever created the creed had never heard of her. Why not? Because the gospels didn’t exist when they came up with it. They had no idea that a woman was supposedly the first to see Jesus alive again. As far as they were aware, it was ‘Cephas’ who’d had the first vision of the risen Lord. Yet Peter – assuming he and Cephas are the same person – isn’t the first to see the risen Jesus in any of the gospels.

Mary Magdalene is side-lined like this because when the creed was created, and later still when Paul quotes it in 1 Corinthians 15, the stories about her hadn’t yet been invented. It’s safe to say, she hadn’t been invented.

In fact, Mary Magdalene and most of the rest of the support cast from the (future) gospels aren’t referred to anywhere else in the New Testament. This includes at least eight of the disciples from the slightly differing lists in the gospels, the Virgin Mary, Joseph, the angel Gabriel, the Magi, Nicodemus, Lazarus, Martha & Mary, Judas (apart from Luke’s side-splitting story about him in Acts), Barabbas, Joseph of Arimathea and Doubting Thomas. Likewise, fictionalised versions of historical figures with key roles in the gospel stories aren’t referred to either: Herod, Pilate, Caiaphas and John the Baptist(?) are all absent, even from epistles written and forged after the appearance of the gospels’ ‘cunningly devised fables’ (2 Peter 1:16).

Decades after the early creed of 1 Corinthians 15 and Paul’s letters, Mark invented Mary Magdalene, as well as many other characters who appear in his gospel. His allegory then became the basis for the other three canonical gospels, whose authors added their own imaginary characters.

And just as they invented the earthly Jesus’ companions and adversaries, they created too his miracles, teaching, cryptic parables, bodily resurrection and ascension. Mary Magdalene was but one small aspect of their ingenuity.

 

The Great Resurrection Scam

Posted on by
2

Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.  For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 (circa AD 49-51)

Paul said that because Jesus died and rose from the dead others would too. How does this follow?

He also claimed that all a person had to do to be sure of a spiritual resurrection was to believe that Jesus had already risen (1 Corinthians 15:20, AD 53-54), How did he know this? Almost certainly it came to him in one of his visions and his subsequent ‘revelations’ (‘the Lord’s word’ as he puts it in the letter to the Thessalonian sect).

Possibly, though less likely, he learnt it from the Christians he persecuted prior to his conversion. If so, where did they get the idea from? That the cult members in Thessalonica had to ask Paul what would happen to those who had passed away suggests this wasn’t a significant concern prior to this point. Paul and other early believers thought the Messiah/Son of Man was going to appear within their lifetimes (‘we who are still alive’ etc). It was only when cultists started dying off in noticeable numbers, and the Lord remained a no-show, that it started to become an issue. Paul had to make something up. And make it up he did.

How the Bible tells us the Resurrection was nothing more than Visions

Posted on by
7

I’ve written about this before, but want to pull together some strands that demonstrate the risen Jesus was a vision or hallucination. He appeared only in the mind of others: the New Testament tells us as much.

Exhibit 1. Paul writes of the appearance of the risen Jesus, whom he sees as a ‘life-giving Spirit’, being ‘in’ him (Galatians 1.16). Paul has more than one such vision, including his trip to heaven recounted in 2 Corinthians 12.2, which he refers to as his ‘revelations’.

Exhibit 2. Paul implies in Corinthians 15.5-8 that others who have experienced the post-mortem Jesus ‘saw’ him in exactly the same way he did. For Paul, there was no difference between his inner-visions and those experienced by the so-called apostles.

Exhibit 3. The author of Acts creates a story out of Paul’s first vision, the famous account of his conversion on the road to Damascus. It’s a fabrication of course, told differently each time it’s referred to Even so, Luke retains the visionary nature of the experience: Jesus is a bright light and a disembodied voice.

Exhibit 4. The other sightings of the risen Jesus in Acts are visions. When, for example, Stephen is about to be stoned (Acts 7:54-56) he sees in his mind’s eye the heavens open and Jesus sitting at the right hand of god. Other New Testament encounters of the resurrected Jesus, such as John’s Revelation, are explicitly said to be visions.

Exhibit 5. Many of the sightings of the risen Jesus in Matthew and Luke are not of a real, physical human being. Those who experience him see him materialising in locked rooms, vanishing at will and floating up into the clouds. None of these events actually happened; they are the gospel writers’ literary realisations of visions experienced decades earlier, and they retain the hallucinatory qualities of those experiences.

Exhibit 6. Remaining with the gospels’ accounts of the risen Jesus, there is the strange phenomenon of those experiencing him failing to recognise him. Mary in the garden thinks he’s the gardener; the disciples on the road to Emmaus don’t know its him until he breaks bread; the disciples mistake him for someone else on the shore until he tells them how to fish properly. Most damning of all, some of the inner circle of disciples doubt it’s Jesus they’re seeing in their collective visions (Matt 28:17-18). Again, these stories preserve the tradition that the earlier visions weren’t always recognised as Jesus. And why wasn’t he? Because he was an hallucination

Exhibit 7. The risen Jesus has to prove who he is. According to Acts 1:1-3, he ‘presents himself’ his followers, some of whom have wandered around aimlessly with him for three years, and has to convince them he is who he appears to be. And, the text suggests, it takes him forty days to do it. This makes no sense. A far better explanation of this story (and it is a story) is that having experienced their visions of something-they-took-to-be-the-resurrected-Jesus (bright lights? Disembodied voices?), his followers set about convincing themselves that what they experienced really was their former Master. This they did by scouring the scriptures to find ‘proof’ that the Messiah would die and rise again. We know this is how their thinking worked. The same process was used to create the gospels and is evident throughout the New Testament.

Exhibit 8. Dead people stay dead. They do not resurrect.. This is not an a priori assumption. No corpse has ever revived after 36 hours or indeed any other period of time. We know this experientially, statistically and scientifically. Only in stories and religious myth do the dead return. This is what we are dealing with here: stories and myth that flesh out the visions and hallucinations of a few religious zealots.

Either All True Or None True

Posted on by
3

About 2,500 years ago, a man called Elijah went up to heaven while still alive. He was taken through a whirlwind in a chariot of fire, pulled by horses of fire. This amazing event was witnessed by several other people who were profoundly affected by it. The story of this ascension was possibly relayed orally for many years until finally being written down in what is now 2 Kings 2.

Did any of this really happen?

Of course not. It’s a myth.

Some time in the 4th century BCE, the first king of Rome, Romulus, was taken, while still alive, to the dwelling place of the gods. From that time on he was worshipped as a god – some said he was eternal to begin with – with a temple being built in the very place from where he had ascended. Later he appeared to one of his followers, Julius Proculus who said the resurrected Romulus was larger and more beautiful than ever, armed with weapons shining like fire. Julius Proculus attested to this appearance of the resurrected Romulus, swore an oath to its veracity and relayed it faithfully to others.

Did any of this really happen?

Of course not. It’s a myth.

https://mythologymatters.wordpress.com/2019/04/18/easter-mythology-the-resurrection-as-modeled-on-greco-roman-myths/

It is not known when Mithras was born, if indeed he was. He emerged from a rock in the spiritual realm as a child or youth, ritually slaughtering a bull and sharing a banquet with the god Sol. He guided souls to the after-life, propelled as they were by the bull’s blood and flames. He was worshipped primarily by soldiers who saw him as their salvation from the bitterness of earthly life. There were rituals to be followed to become a true initiate and for Mithraic mysteries to be revealed. How Mithras made himself known to his acolytes is unknown, but in the first three centuries CE, his cult rivalled that of the Christians in popularity.

Did all of this really happen?

Of course not. It’s a fabrication, a myth.

In the 8th century CE, the prophet Muhammad flew from Mecca to Jerusalem on a winged equine. Once in Jerusalem he climbed a ladder to heaven. Once there he travelled through the various levels, having conversations with other lesser prophets, before entering Allah’s domain. His journey was later revealed to two early prophets who had known Muhammed when they were boys. They conveyed the details accurately until they were recorded, briefly at first in the Qur’an and later in more detail in its supplement, the hadith.

Did any of this really happen?

Of course not. It’s a fabrication, a myth.

In the early 19th century, Joseph Smith was visited by Jesus and his Father in a vision. They told him that he should not join any existing church because they were all in error. Later, a hitherto unknown angel named Moroni appeared to Smith and indicated to him where some gold plates were buried. He instructed Smith to dig up and translate the plates. Obediently, Smith did so, using a pair of seer stones for the translation. The resulting Book of Mormon was a revelation of Christ’s activities in North America following his resurrection. Smith wisely had a number of his associates witness, in writing, the existence of the gold plates as well as their supernatural provenance.

Did any of this really happen?

Of course not. It’s a fabrication.

In 1916 the Virgin Mary appeared numerous times to three poor Portuguese children, giving them instruction and prophesying to them. She also promised that she would perform a miracle at Fatima. Accordingly, between 30,000 and 100,000 people, including reporters and photographers, gathered at Fatima where many saw multi-coloured lights before the sun itself ‘danced’. It came closer to the Earth before zig-zagging back to its usual place in the sky. While not all of the attendees testified to the phenomenon of the dancing sun (some saw only the lights, others nothing at all) many did and testified to the effect the miracle had had upon them.

Did all of this really happen?

Of course not. It’s a fabrication based on hallucinations.

Around 30CE, a rabbi known as Jesus, who had been born of a virgin, gathered together 12 followers and went around Galilee preaching absolution from sin and the imminence of the Kingdom of God. He announced he was the Messiah who would rule the Earth when the kingdom arrived. The Jewish authorities took exception to his claims and petitioned the Romans to have him executed. This they did, only for Jesus to come back to life three days later, appearing in visions to his followers. He ascended to heaven, promising that those who believed in him would enjoy eternal life. Some of his disciples spread his message faithfully until it was eventually written down, first by a former Pharisee called Paul and then by four authors who accurately recorded what Jesus had said and done.

Did all of this really happen?

What do you think?

After the Gospels

Posted on by
2

None of the New Testament documents written prior to AD70 – those by Paul – contain any of the sayings, miracles or activities attributed to the Earthly Jesus in the later gospels. They don’t reflect anything of the oral tradition, first proposed in the 18th century. Those same gospels don’t reflect much of it either; the only ‘good news’ passed on by word of mouth was of a transcendent celestial Godman seen in visions. There is no evidence of any other. The later gospels incorporate the visions experienced by Cephas and others in their resurrection stories.

What then of the letters and books written after the appearance of the gospels? Do they reference, quote or base their teaching on the pre-crucifixion aspects of the Earthly Jesus of the gospels? Or do they, like Paul, concentrate solely on demonstrating the heavenly Jesus is the Messiah on the basis of what can be found in Jewish scriptures? You’d think that, with the gospels in circulation by then, that It’d be the former. But you’d be wrong.

Let’s make a quick survey of New Testament books post AD70. I’m taking their composition to be those listed here.

Hebrews (composed anywhere between 60 and 115 by unknown author[s])

Hebrews describes the Messiah as a heavenly high priest. Everything the writers ascribe to him is taken not from the gospels, nor an oral tradition on which the gospels are supposedly based, but from ancient Jewish writing; what we know as the Old Testament. Every single reference is from this source. Read the book for yourself and take note of the footnotes. Like gospel Jesus, Jesus the High Priest is constructed from snippets lifted from the Old Testament.

Revelation (composed anywhere between 70-110)

In Revelation, warrior Jesus has a lot to say, most of it quotations from the Old Testament. None of it is derived from the gospels nor the oral tradition on which the gospels are supposedly based. John’s ‘revelation’ is a fantasy constructed around ancient ‘prophecy’. Again, read the book for yourself and take note of the footnotes. Like gospel-Jesus, Jesus the Great Warrior is constructed from snippets lifted from the Old Testament.

1 Peter (70-100) and 2 Peter (125-150)

You’d think the letters purportedly written by the disciple Peter (or Cephas), the man who, according to the gospels spent three years with Jesus, would be full of his teaching, the mysteries he explained only to his closest followers, reports of his miracles or any of his other activities. But no. The best he can do across the two letters (written by two different people, decades apart, neither of them Peter the disciple) is this:

For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. He received honour and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain (2 Peter 1: 16).

Remarkably, this fake Peter recalls an event which never happened: when Jesus glowed like a lightbulb as two long-dead prophets beamed down from Heaven. It is, however, finally a reference to a gospel story. But then, doesn’t the author disparage ‘cleverly devised stories’ in this same passage? What else could he be referring to if not the gospels? We find a similar warning in 1 Timothy (and again in Titus 3: 9):

…command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer or to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. Such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God’s work – which is by faith (1 Timothy 1: 4, written by a fraud pretending to be Paul).

These New Testament writers, even when they seem aware of gospel myths and their endless genealogies don’t approve of them. Perhaps that is why they prefer to ignore them, deriving proof of the Messiah from ancient Jewish scriptures instead. Every other reference to Jesus in the Peter epistles is from the Old Testament. How strange for someone pretending to know the man in the flesh.

We could go on to look at other books of the New Testament – for example, that written by ‘James’, supposedly Jesus’ brother – but this post is already too long. Rest assured if we did, we would see the same thing: none of the information about Jesus is derived from the gospels or the oral tradition on which the gospels are said by apologists to be based. There was no oral tradition, apart from stories of visions. The gospels are literary recreations – allegories – of those visions. They were not well received by the other writers of the New Testament who either ignore or disparage them. All that mattered to these early cultists were ‘revelations’ directly from the Lord and the Old Testament ‘prophecies’ that validated them.

An Anonymous Author Writes…

Posted on by
1

A little while ago I came across a group of enthusiasts who met locally to celebrate the chap who’d founded their group a few decades back. I paid them a few visits to see what they were about and when they learnt I was capable of stringing a few sentences together, asked if I would write a short biography of their Founder. Being an obliging sort, I said I would, not realising the challenges that lay ahead.

For a start, none of them had actually known the guy. He’d died soon after the group had started and none of the current membership had ever met him. Worse, they weren’t even sure what his real name was. Some said ‘Josh’, some ‘Jess’ and others ‘Manny’. They thought a guy who had known him was still alive, but couldn’t remember his name either. ‘Rocky’, they said, or maybe ‘Tiny’.

All the same, I’d said I’d have a go at the biography and didn’t want to disappoint them so I set about searching the Web. I soon discovered that both ‘Rocky’ and ‘Tiny’ had passed away, about the same time six or so years earlier. There was nothing online about any Rocky but there was quite a bit about Tiny. Or rather by him. He’d left a whole series of posts, mostly about he’d been contacted by the founder from beyond the grave. He said over and over that he could prove it really was the Founder he was channelling because, apparently, it said so in some old stories. He quoted these all over the place.

All weird stuff, but all I had to go on.

So I set to. I tried to make as much sense as I could of Tiny’s writing. I made stories out of his rambling, imagining what the Founder must’ve been like from the things Tiny claimed he’d told him. Like Tiny, I used old stories to fill out the narrative and included loads of metaphor. People love finding hidden meanings in things. I stopped short though at having the Founder come back from the dead at the end, not even metaphorically. Tiny insisted he had done but no-one in their right minds would believe it.

In the end, I thought I’d made a good job of it. The guys in the group thought so too. They were so pleased they suggested I publish it on Amazon, which I did. To my surprise, it started selling really well and got some very good reviews (and only a couple of poor ones.) To my annoyance, though, it wasn’t not long before a bunch of opportunists took to writing novellas about the Founder themselves, and (the nerve of it) lifting whole chunks of my story and ‘correcting the errors’! Errors? How could there be errors in something I’d made up? They even used my technique, lifted from Tiny, of borrowing bits from older books and making them fit their version. Their ‘Founder’ turned out to be different from mine, though not, I’m convinced, anywhere near as good.

I’ve decided I was going to retire from this writing lark. It’s too competitive and there are too many plagiarists around. Let them get on with their inferior sequels. Everybody will remember I was the first, and the best. Won’t they?

Mark and the Oral Tradition

Posted on by
26

Paul never refers to ‘the disciples’, the term used for Jesus’ inner circle in the later gospels. Instead, he refers to the founders of the cult as ‘apostles’ (literally ‘messengers’). Cephas is described as an apostle, as is Barnabas (Acts 14:14) and Paul himself. Paul defines the term more specifically as someone who has been commissioned directly by Jesus (1 Corinthians 9:1; Galatians 1:1-2). Evidently he himself was not: he encountered the risen Christ only in his head. He felt this was more than good enough. For Paul it was the only qualification anyone needed to be an apostle. He cites others who had encountered Jesus in the same way:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. (1 Corinthians 15: 3-8)

What he goes on to say is crucial in understanding the nature of ‘the gospel’ that was in circulation in the years before Mark’s gospel:

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them – yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed (1 Corinthians 15: 8-11; my emphasis.)

What they preached was their visions of a celestial Saviour. The witness of these visionaries of the risen Christ was the only gospel they knew and, Paul suggests here and elsewhere, the only one that was being transmitted orally when he was active. As we saw last time, he knew no other details of Jesus’ life, had none passed on to him and passed none on to others, except for these visions and the teaching he worked out from them – his ‘revelations’. Let me say that again: the visions of the risen Jesus were all he, Cephas and others knew. Paul says so categorically. There was no other ‘oral tradition’.

Paul builds his subsequent teaching on Jewish scripture, showing how his ‘revelations’ must be from the Christ because they comply with this scripture (even though he has to manipulate it to make it do so: in Romans 9, for example). Nowhere does he say he is referring to any history he has learnt, nor to anything passed on to him orally about Jesus’ teaching, ministry, life or miracles. Just the opposite in fact:

I want you to know… that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man nor was I taught it; rather I received it (directly) by revelation from Jesus Christ’ (Galatians 1: 11-12).

About seven years after Paul’s death, a literate member of the one of the cult communities – known to us as Mark – decided to set down Paul’s teaching about the Christ in allegorical form. He tells us this is what he is doing several times in his gospel, including Mark 4:11-12:

To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that “‘they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven’” (referencing and misquoting Isaiah 6:9)

Mark did not depend on any oral tradition for his information about Jesus’ life because apart from the ‘announcement’ built on Cephas’, Paul’s and others’ visions there was no oral tradition. Mark took Paul’s teaching and like him, used Jewish scripture as the basis for the story he developed from it. Thus, Paul’s ‘revelation’ of a bread and wine ritual (1 Corinthians 11:23-27) becomes the Last Supper (Mark 4:22-24); Paul’s teaching about forgiveness becomes Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness; Paul’s dispute with Cephas leads to a gospel Peter who is bungling and disloyal; Paul’s mention of The Twelve in 1 Corinthians becomes, with a miscalculation, the disciples; Paul’s instruction to obey the authorities (Roman’s 13:1) becomes Jesus’ (Mark 12:17); Paul’s, and Jewish scriptures’, promise of the spiritually blind (2 Corinthians 4:3-6) being helped to see becomes Jesus’ miracles of healing; Paul’s predictions about the end of the age (1 Thessalonians 4:15-17) become Jesus’ (Mark 13); Paul’s talk of the coming of the Christ in person (1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:11) becomes Jesus’ prophecies about the Son of Man appearing (Mark 14:61); Paul’s vision of the risen Christ becomes the resurrection. And on and on. There is nothing in Mark’s gospel that doesn’t derive from Paul’s teaching, and Jewish scripture in turn. it is, in short, made up.

All of this accounts for the absence of any resurrection appearances in Mark. His gospel ends with the discovery of the allegorical empty tomb and leaves off there because it is where his audience came in, as it were. They had been converted by hearing of the ‘appearances’ of the celestial Christ to Cephas and those Paul lists in 1 Corinthians. They already knew how the story ended or, more accurately, how it had begun: with those visions.

Later, Matthew, Luke and John would take Mark’s allegory and use it as the basis for their gospels, adding new, invented material of their own. The myth, in both the technical and popular sense, was born.