Biblical historians are evenly divided on the question of whether Jesus the Nazirite was a posthumously deified real person or a creation of fantasy literature. G. A. Wells and Robert Price argue that Jesus did not exist (although Price’s latest book is ambivalent on the question), Michael Arnheim and Martin Larson believe he did, and John Crossan insists that there really was a Jesus while simultaneously presenting a reconstruction of Christian origins that would be logical and coherent only if there was not a real Jesus. At the extreme of the “no such person” thesis, John Allegro, in a mushroom fantasy that Robert Graves described as “an elaborate literary hoax,” concluded that Jesus began as a personified mushroom. Equally extreme are theologians whose refusal to question the dogma that Jesus was a god incarnate, was virgin-born, and rose from the dead, makes it impossible for them to be taken seriously by scholars who do not start from predetermined conclusions and force the evidence to fit.

Arguments for Jesus’ nonexistence, based on the pre-existence of resurrected savior god myths millennia before Jesus’ birth, parallel the argument, “George Washington allegedly flourished in the 18th century. The fable of the honest little boy and the cherry tree has been traced back as far as the 17th century. Therefore it did not happen. Therefore George Washington did not exist.”

Such reasoning would not be without merit if, as Price (2000, p. 250) claims, “the gospel story of Jesus matches the pattern of the Mythic Hero Archetype in every detail, with nothing left over.” But even after the fantasy elements are deleted from Jesus’ official biographies, there is plenty left over, most of it of such a negative nature that no mythmaker in his right mind would have invented such stories about a person he was trying to portray as the ultimate hero.

The Christian gospels are fiction. No person capable of rational human thought disputes that reality. But the claim that a work of fiction cannot be a source of history ignores obvious precedents. Homer’s Iliad comes to mind. Iliad was a composition of the unbridled imagination. Yet Heinrich Schliemann used information in Iliad to help him locate the vanished cities of Troy and Mycenae—and succeeded. It is precisely because the gospels are fiction, and their authors’ purpose in writing is clearly discernable, that historians are able to identify anecdotes that no fan of Jesus would have intentionally invented. Does that mean that such stories were concocted by Jesus’ detractors, and gullibly copied by a gospel author or one of his sources? Not impossible, perhaps, but unlikely. The Occam’s razor explanation is that one of Mark’s sources wrote an unflattering anecdote that he had heard from a source whose reliability he did not doubt, perhaps even an eyewitness, and Mark dutifully repeated it because he failed to recognize how thoroughly it discredited his propaganda that Jesus was admirable.

For example, at the beginning of Jesus’ career, when an unfortunate sermon almost got him lynched, the anonymous author of the earliest gospel writes (Mark 3:21), “But when his family heard, they came to take him into custody, for they declared, ‘He’s gone mad.’” The only reason Mark would have included such a negative anecdote, omitted by both of Mark’s copyists, is that he got it from one of his more reliable sources who believed it was true. Certainly no sycophant would have invented such a tale. Jesus’ immediate repudiation of all family ties (Mark 3:31-35) could be explained away as a standard Essene procedure toward family members who remained outside of the sect. But the only believable explanation for an apologist acknowledging that the people who knew Jesus best considered him a madman, is that Mark was stuck with the reality that they really did. And what mythmaker trying to portray Jesus as a good guy would have invented accusations that he was “a drunkard, a glutton, and a lover of tax collectors and sinners [i.e., hookers]”? (Matthew 11:19)

The gospels describe Jesus vandalizing the moneychangers’ booths in the temple courtyard, but offer no explanation for such incomprehensible behavior. Why would Jesus do that? Probably Mark’s source answered that question, and the gospel author deleted it because it would have portrayed Jesus as the leader of an anti-Roman revolution—the very person “Mark” was trying to prove he was not. Martin Larson’s explanation (The Essene-Christian Faith) makes complete sense, and can be accepted as a given for the simple reason that no other logical explanation has ever been offered. In Larson’s analysis of the scene, Jesus vandalized the daily sacrifice on behalf of the emperor Tiberias, thereby repudiating the emperor’s authority and announcing that the war of independence had begun—a ten-minute war that neither Josephus nor any other contemporary historian considered important enough to be worth mentioning.

The author of Mark (15:7) also revealed that Jesus was arrested with “the imprisoned revolutionaries who had committed homicide in the uprising.” In other words, Jesus’ arrest coincided with an abortive revolution against the Roman occupation, a revolution Jesus began by disrupting the temple sacrifice for Tiberias that symbolized Judea’s subservience to the emperor and the empire. Jesus was a man who started a war of independence—and lost. Real people do such things (e.g., Spartacus, Bar Kokhba). Mythical heroes do not.

The gospels mention a person called Bar Abbas, “son of father, ” a title born by the son of the only Jew legitimately addressed as “Father,” the president of the Sanhedrin. Barabbas, real name Yahuwshuakh bar Gamaliel, himself became high priest in 63 CE. What the gospel author failed to realize was that, in acknowledging that Jesus was arrested at the same time as one of “the imprisoned revolutionaries who had committed homicide in the uprising,” he was drawing attention to the fact that Jesus’ arrest coincided with an anti-Roman uprising. Mark tried to play down the connection by inventing a “blasphemy” charge as the reason for Jesus’ arrest. But with a rebellion on their hands, would the Romans have bothered with a person accused of a Jewish crime that had nothing to do with that rebellion? Coincidence is not the explanation. As for Barabbas’s arrest, Robert Eisler theorized that he was attempting to dissuade Jesus from his ill-conceived plot, was arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and released in time to celebrate Passover when Gamaliel and Kaiafa explained why he had been there. (pp. 472-476)

Mark did not dispute that Jesus’ lieutenants included members of the Zealot sect that had instigated the war in progress at the time of writing (July/Aug 70 CE), including a member of the sect’s ultra-terrorist wing, the sicarii/iskariots, who were still holding out at Masada after the fall of Jerusalem. The gospels identify as Jesus’ lieutenants: Judas the sicarius, “daggerman,” a member of the Zealot sect’s most militant wing; Simon the Zealot; and Nathaniel the Kananaya, meaning Zealot. In a book written to convince Vespasian that the Christians were not a branch of the religion with which the emperor was at war, Mark could not deny that Jesus was supported by anti-Roman rebels, since that reality was too widely known. So he tried to neutralize it by pretending that Judas was “really” Jesus’ enemy and had ultimately betrayed him.

But perhaps the strongest evidence for Jesus’ historicity is the surviving testimony that Jesus was grossly deformed. While the author of Luke stopped short of portraying Jesus as a cross between Quasimodo and Rumpelstiltskin, as later Christian apologists did, he did record (Luke 4:23) that Jesus told his home town synagogue audience, “You’re sure to recite this proverb to me: ‘Doctor, heal yourself.’” Why would Jesus expect his hearers to react in such a manner? What was there about him that needed healing? One possible answer can be found in the same author’s Acts (8:32-33), and also in John (12:38).

The authors of Luke-Acts and John both equated Jesus with the suffering slave of Isaiah 53:1-12. Deutero-Isaiah had written of his hero, “Having neither proper shape nor beauty, lacking good looks that would have attracted him to us.... We regarded him as someone plagued and afflicted by the gods.”

Even allowing that John used Luke as a source, why would either author have equated Jesus with such an unfortunate creature? The answer that springs to mind is that they were putting the best possible spin on the reality that the physical description of Isaiah’s suffering slave matched the physical description of Jesus.

By c 178 CE, the pagan writer Celsus was able to say of Jesus, “Surely a god would never have such a body as yours, that is so contemptible, being subject to such numerous and considerable imperfections.” A generation later, in his Contra Celsum, the Christian apologist Origen did not dispute the accuracy of Celsus’s description. Rather, he argued that Celsus “cannot deny that if our liberator was born as we say he was, that then his body had in some sense a stamp of divinity on it.” (ch. 59) Since Origen offered rationalizations of all of Celsus’s other anti-Christian arguments, his failure to dispute that Jesus’ body was so stricken with “imperfections” as to be “contemptible” is most reasonably interpreted as an admission that the description was accurate.

Tertullian in 207 CE similarly conceded that Jesus was misshapen: “His body was not even of honest human shape.” Clement of Alexandria described him as having “a very ugly face.” Cyril of Alexandria echoed that description, while Andrew of Crete declared that he had “eyebrows which meet.”

Those descriptions prove only that, from about eighty years after his alleged death, Jesus was believed by Christians and non-Christians alike to have existed and to have been deformed and ugly. But did such a description exist early enough for it to have had a factual basis? There is good reason to believe that it did.

The earliest hint of Jesus’ physical imperfections was written within twenty years of his death by Paul of Tarsus. Jesus, according to Paul (Philippians 2:6-7), “did not exhibit the shape of a god because he considered it larceny to be equal to a god. Rather, he degraded himself by taking the shape of a slave.” Note that Paul did not say that Jesus adopted the “status” of a slave. He wrote that Jesus had the shape/form/morphe of a slave, in other words a body more appropriate for a slave than a king.

It is not credible that second-century Christian apologists invented the deformed Jesus that remained undisputed until the sixth century. More likely, they were quoting from an older source, and there is reason to believe that the source was Josephus. As quoted by Robert Eisler (p. 467) Josephus’s Halosis described Jesus as follows:

“a man of simple appearance, mature age, small stature, three cubits high [4 ft 6 in; 137 cm], hunchbacked, with a long face, long nose, and meeting eyebrows, so that they who see him might be affrighted, with scanty hair (but) with a parting in the middle of his head, after the manner of the Nazirites, and with an undeveloped beard.”

While it is not impossible that the Josephus passage is a forgery, in order for Christian theologians to accept the description as accurate someone of comparable reputation must have written it. Such a description could only have been written down and accepted at a time when dispute would have been impossible because people were still alive who had seen Jesus preach and knew that he was as ugly as the writer claimed. Josephus wrote at a time that fits that specification. Had the description of a deformed Jesus originated as late as the time of Celsus, Origen could simply have painted an alternative Jesus, more like the Adonis that he became after Josephus was expurgated and the Mandylion of Edessa, on which all future depictions of the Christian junior god were based, was painted. Origen did not dispute Celsus’s description, because the unexpurgated Josephus still existed, and any contradictory description would not have been believed.

The Jesus of history was deformed. A fictitious Jesus would from the start have been the Greek god of post-Mandylion iconography. The Jesus of history marched into Jerusalem on a Sunday morning, proclaimed independence, and was arrested and executed five days later without accomplishing his purpose. A fictitious Jesus would not have started a war he could not win. Jesus was posthumously transformed into a latter-day Osiris, Dionysos, Atthis, Tammuz, Adonis and Mithra. But he must have existed, because what a remains after the savior-god myths and hero-miracles are deleted is a misshapen, rationally challenged religious fanatic whom no mythologian would ever have invented—at least not as a hero.

Bibliography of recent books that discuss the question of Jesus’ historicity:

John Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, NY, 1970 (a ridiculous book).

Michael Arnheim, Is Christianity True?, Amherst, 1984.

Steuart Campbell, The Rise and Fall of Jesus, Edinburgh, 1996.

John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? San Francisco, 1995.

Don Cupitt, Who Was Jesus?, London, 1977.

Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle, Ottawa, 2000.

Robert Eisler, Jesus and John the Baptist, NY, 1931.

Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries, NY, 2000.

Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ, Toronto, 2004.

William Harwood, Mythology’s Last Gods, Amherst, 1992.

The Judaeo-Christian Bible Fully Translated, Booksurge.com, 2002, 2003, 2004. Uncle Yeshu, Messiah (a novel), Xlibris.com, 2001.

Randell Helms, Gospel Fictions, Amherst, 1989.

Who Wrote the Gospels? Altadena CA, 1997.

R. J. Hoffman and Gerald Larue, Jesus in Myth and History, Amherst, 1985.

Ian Jones, Joshua, The Man They Called Jesus, Port Melbourne, 1999.

Martin Larson, The Essene-Christian Faith, New York, 1980.

Gerd Lüdemann, The Great Deception, Amherst, 1999.

A. J. Mattill Jr., Sweet Jesus, Gordo AL, 2002.

Robert Price, Deconstructing Jesus, Amherst, 2000.

The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, Amherst, 2003.

Hugh Schonfield, The Passover Plot, NY, 1966 (wild speculation).

G. A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus, Amherst, 1982


Copyright ©2006 William Harwood and Ulster Humanist, Dec/Jan, 2004/5.