Jesus bar Joses the
Nazarene of Galilea and Arthur the Soldier of Britannia share a lack of direct
empirical historical evidence for their existence. Almost equally, a great number of people have
faith they once existed without knowing any empirical, or even anecdotal,
evidence. Both are alike covered over by
a great weight of myth, forgery, and fraud.
Nor can we forget that both lived within the Roman Empire.
I say "Jesus bar Joses
the Nasorean" because (1) Jesus bar Joses is the name by which he would
have been known in the language in which the gospels were written, and (2) in
that actual Greek he is called Jesus the Nasorean not Jesus of Nazareth.
There is no independent mention of a town of Nazareth by any source until
the 3rd century CE; the title "Nasorean" was given to the priesthood
of the Mandean religion, an offshoot of mainline Hebrew religions which now
reveres John the Baptist above all over figures.
I’ve been into the whole
Arthur thing since I can remember, and I am convinced, based purely on
anecdotal evidence, that there is a real person behind the stories. Arthur was not a king and there was no
Camelot. He was not a Sarmatian, and may
not have even been a Briton. He was not
the chief of a heroic age war band. He
was mostly likely a military leader because of his extraordinary charisma and
natural tactical skills, and may have been from among the Irish settlers on the
west coast of the island. The why of any
of these is unimportant because Arthur is not the subject of this piece.
Despite the fervent desire
of countless Christians throughout the past two millennia, no empirical
evidence has yet been unearthed that an actual person behind the story of Jesus
of Nazareth as we have it in the Gospels ever existed. There has been plenty of forgery,
fabrication, and “pious fraud”, but nothing that stands up to the test of
empiricism. For example, the direct references to Jesus bar Joses in
Flavius Josephus' The
Antiquities of the Jews have
long been known to be fraudulent interpolations.
Why the Gospels are
unreliable witnesses, empirically-speaking, is a subject for a different essay.
One could argue that
Christianity came out of nowhere and was unique, with doctrines of an
incarnation of the divine come to Earth to live as a human among humans,
salvation from sin, blood atonement, etc., etc., but you would be wrong. In fact, one of the chief arguments of several
Early Church Fathers in their debates with pagan apologists was that everything
they then believed about their Savior was mirrored in the cults of Osiris,
Adonis, Dionysus, Attis, Tammuz, Serapis, Mithras, and several others.
But that’s not the point
either, except that it is useful to point out that this identification of Jesus
bar Joses of Nazareth with the protagonists of the Mystery Cults. The Mystery Cults were a group of religions
which had developed out of traditional national religions of various cultures
in the Meidterranean and Near Eastern world and shared common features such as
a dying and rising deity who was a Savior of humanity from its sins
collectively and individually. These
flourished throughout the Mediterranean basin, North Africa, and Southwest Asia
from the 2nd century BCE through the 3rd century CE.
The worshippers in the
Mystery Cults other than Christianity knew that the deities to whom they paid
homage were archetypes that represented greater truths rather than being truths
in and of themselves. Jesus bar Joses’
identification as a Jewish protagonist of his own Mystery Cult is a large part
of what drove the historical person into obscurity.
I’m about to digress, but
there’s a point, so hang with me.
I’ve been an Episcopalian
all my life, even during the decade and a half I was Roman Catholic; the only
way out is excommunication and as far as I know, the Anglican Communion doesn’t
do that. Maybe some of the African
churches. Anyway, when my mother was
confirmed she was already pregnant with me, so I was Episcopalian even before I
was born, you could say. So, when I was
thirteen and starting to think for myself, one of the first things that occurred
to me was to change churches. Not to
another parish within the Episcopal Church, but to the independent Baptist church
down the street in our neighborhood.
The announcement of my
intention brought about a fair amount of family members pulling their hair,
weeping, gnashing of teeth, and wearing sackcloth & ashes. The new deacon at our church (the Episcopal
church) entered into the civil war our family had degenerated into. He offered to have a meeting with the pastor
of the afore-mentioned Baptist church to make sure the decision was all mine
and I wasn’t being unduly pressured.
According to the Episcopal
deacon (later priest and a very good family friend), his meeting with the
Baptist pastor proceeded quite smoothly and civilly, and he was convinced I was
making my own decision. So my parents
reluctantly conceded.
After I had been attending
a few months, the pastor in a fit of being “carried away by the Spirit” talked
about how he had confronted this Episcopal minister and forced him to back
down.
I left the Baptist Church
that Sunday and never went back voluntarily.
Several months ago, I heard
an evangelist speak, and besides running down Janis Joplin over her song
“Mercedes Benz” (which he clearly does not get), he talked about a
confrontation he had with a Middle Eastern-looking Muslim about to board a
plane. In his favor, I doubt the evangelist
was as confrontational as he made it sound and he probably just chatted with
the guy, who was there was his wife. But
the only point of such claims made in front of an audience, other than to
repent of bigotry if that had really happened, was to puff himself up by
claiming to stand tall in an imaginary confrontation.
Now we can get back to the
main point.
Paul’s Epistle to the
Galatians is one of the seven attributed to him that is of almost certain
authenticity (the others are Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians,
Philippians, and Philemon). Meaning it
is one he actually wrote as opposed to Hebrews, 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians,
Colossians, 1 & 2 Timothy, and Titus.
Hebrews was not written by Paul, but more probably by James the Just, who
wrote the epistle by that name (James); the other non-authentic epistles are
pseudepigraphal.
So, Galatians is a good
source for the real thoughts of Paul of Tarsus.
The reason I mentioned the exaggerations of the Baptist pastor and the
evangelist is because Paul sound just like them in his account of his alleged
confrontation with Peter in Antioch over what he claimed was the latter’s
refusal to eat with Gentile believers after speaking with representatives of
James the Just, brother of Jesus. In his
account, Paul sounds just as puffed up as that pastor and that evangelist did
when they had their own imaginary encounters.
I’m not saying there wasn’t a discussion, or even an argument, just that
he probably wasn’t as triumphal as he made it sound.
In the same chapter of Galatians
(the second), Paul also mentions that James, Cephas, and John were the pillars
of the Christian community in Jerusalem, James being the same brother of Jesus
not the James who was the brother of John.
Paul uses Petros and Cephas interchangeably for the same person,
Peter.
It’s interesting that, at
least in the Synoptic Gospels, the three disciples always in the center of
things are James, Peter, and John, only in this case, the James refers to James
the Great, the brother of John. In those
gospels, those three are the witnesses to the raising of Jairus’ daughter and
to the Transfiguration as well as being called to be with him as he prayed in
Gethsemane, all three incidents at best apocryphal.
All three Gospels are much
later than Paul’s epistle and it is not hard to imagine how someone not reading
carefully and/or wanting to obscure the prominence of Jesus’ very Jewish family
who formed the leadership of Jewish Christians or Judaizers in the Early Church
would replace James the Just with James the Great when featuring the three most
prominent apostles when composing tales about how they came into such
prominence, a prominence of which the spinners of tales probably learned from
Paul’s epistle.
There
are references in the time of Domitian to James and Zoker, grandsons of
Jesus bar Joses' brother Judas, and earlier to Simeon (supposedly successor to
James the Just) bar Cleopas, alleged to be a cousin of Jesus bar Joses and their
predecessor as leader of Jewish Christians in Palestine in the time of Trajan.
Furthermore, if Irish priest Martin Malachi is to be believed, a group of
the descendants of the family met with Sylvester I, Bishop of Rome, in 318.
None of these references, which are at least somewhat credible, provide
any evidence of the things attributed to a historical person in the gospels but
they are reasonable anecdotal evidence that an actual person did exist.
So, that’s why I believe in
an actual historical Jesus. Because of
the lies. Because those lies and the
exaggerations have the ring of truth lying underneath them, a truth to be lied
about and twisted in order to advance one’s own agenda.
Just like all the lies and
stories told about Arthur the Soldier, a 5th century warrior and
general fighting for the survival of Roman Britain against the invading Angles,
Saxons, Jutes, Geats, and Frisians who was twisted into a legendary Once and
Future King of All England.
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