Creating Jesus

The Problem

            The Christian Bible consists of two Books, the Old and the New Testaments, welded together with a metaphorical blowtorch. The New Testament, qua literature, is just bad literature; as ‘history’, it is nearly worthless.

            Most, if not all, of the ‘prophecies’, ‘predictions’, and ‘fulfillments’, which supposedly link the two books together, are spurious and secured with the monkey wrench of allegory and sophistry. The historical period in which the action of the New Testament takes place has been so tampered with as to border on the absurd. The ‘history’ is really an anti-Jewish pro-Roman screed meant to win over the gullible masses as the Empire struggled to subdue the Jew and Judaism. Unlike other tribes and nations and peoples within its Mediterranean orbit, the Jew refused to subordinate entirely his Law and customs to Roman governance. He refused to bow down to idols of Caesar and his nation finally refused to accept Gentile sacrifices in the Temple altogether. From Pompey, shortly before the end of the Republic, to Hadrian, for nearly two hundred years, the Jew had been a ferocious and serious thorn in the side of the Pax Romana.

None of the NT authors really know the geography, topography, or the toponomy of Palestine first hand. Mark, for example, refers to the coasts of Judea by the farther side of Jordan (Judea never included lands beyond the Jordan; the river itself hardly presents a ‘coast’!).

None seem to know the Mosaic Law very well either. In fact, most contributors to this ‘new’ testament were probably anti-Semitic Gentiles writing fifty to a hundred years after their Jesus had walked the earth. Inflecting and permeating the whole corpus is a venomous antipathy towards the Jew and Judaism.

             Basic elements of literary composition were unknown to them: setting, plot, characterization in depth are so consistently mangled that overall verisimilitude is practically non-existent. But the authors did employ deliberate and malevolent techniques such as inversion, i.e. take the real fact and turn it upside down, then use caricature, satire, and comedy to flesh out the fabrication in order to achieve their literary goals, which were really in the service, initially, of Imperial Roman propaganda.  

            Now enter Paul of Tarsus. Paul had never seen or met Jesus of Nazareth in the flesh. But he did claim to have seen and talked with the Lord after His resurrection and ascension into heaven. Paul’s many private visions and revelations, he asserted, gave him the authority to preach the ‘good news’ everywhere with apostle status, in synagogue after synagogue and, supposedly, in one fledgling church after another. The trouble was: no one else, either in Palestine or abroad, had ever seen or heard his Jesus in the flesh either.  For his Jesus, you see, was in fact, a pure figment of his very active and fevered brain; that figment, therefore, badly needed some kind of concretization or a biography to make him, Jesus, more believable. The four evangelists, a good forty to seventy years after Paul, ca. 100 to 130 CE, came to the rescue with their ‘biographies’ of the risen Christ. Unfortunately, their Jesus, in so many respects, bears an uncanny resemblance to Paul himself.  In addition, there are numerous personality traits that are common to both, like malice, ignorance, and disingenuousness. Paul-Jesus is the same entity.

But curiously, the author of the Pauline letters doesn’t seem to know about Jesus’ miracles or John the Baptist or Nazareth, etc. And the author of Acts ostensibly doesn’t seem to have read the Pauline letters very carefully; but we will see that in fact he did, and his main mission was to polish Paul’s image and bury the embarrassing stuff as best he could.