So how did the story actually originate? How did a minor Jewish sect become, within a few decades, a separate and fairly significant religion? Was Jesus even a real person?
Aslan
Recently I read various articles (in Free Inquiry magazine) that help clarify the history. I also read Zealot, by Reza Aslan (an Iranian-born scholar who left Islam for Christianity), purportedly attempting to chronicle the “historical” Jesus as distinguished from the Biblical one.
Firstly, if Jesus did exist, he didn’t make much of a splash at the time, didn’t even make the “newspapers.” Of course there weren’t newspapers, but tons of stuff was being written, and nothing contemporaneous even mentions Jesus.
Believers point to a passage in historian Josephus’s writings, that does briefly recap the familiar Jesus story. Josephus wrote in the later decades of the First Century. However, the subject passage only appears in copies of Josephus’s work made centuries later. Not in early copies. It seems obvious it was inserted long after Josephus’s death, to give Jesus false historicity.
Even Aslan begins by conceding “there are only two hard historical facts about Jesus” — he was a Jew who led a popular movement in First Century Palestine; and he was crucified. Yet Aslan’s confidence in even these limited “facts” seems misplaced. He cites only a tangential reference to “Jesus, who they call Messiah” in Josephus, apparently a different passage from the one discussed above, which Aslan does not mention. Plausibly both suffer the same problem. Meanwhile, interestingly, Aslan does cite a whole long list of Jesus-like First Century Jewish rabble-rousers who did certifiably get into the historical record. How did one so initially obscure become so important later?
He does reject as implausible some of what’s in the Gospels — notably their blaming the Jews, rather than the Roman Pilate (who killed thousands), for Christ’s execution. But Aslan has some trouble with Christ’s supposed miracles.
Aslan does call the resurrection a matter of faith, not history, and notes that its concept was wholly alien to Judaism. Yet he is impressed that so many of Christ’s contemporary followers are said to have testified to their personal experience of the resurrection. But here again nobody wrote anything at the time; those purported testimonies are all hearsay in the Gospels written by others much later. Meantime, as Aslan himself suggests, the resurrection story was concocted to solve a very big problem: otherwise any idea of Jesus as messiah or divine would seem to be contradicted by an ignominious death. And, most strikingly, Aslan says not even the Gospels talk about resurrection until the nineties CE.
In Aslan’s telling it would appear the Jesus cult originated in his lifetime and was sustained among his followers in the decades after, led by his brother James. This comports with most Christian histories. But this too is based on no evidence save the Gospels. Yet wasn’t Nero blaming Christians and persecuting them for Rome’s great fire as early as 64 CE? Or was he? Upon examination, the actual historical documentation for that too is dubious. Maybe more Christian mythology.
So when and how Christianity became a thing remains a puzzle shrouded in mystery. But it’s impossible that events as public and dramatic as the Gospels story could have occurred without being recorded and commented upon by numerous other contemporary chroniclers. Most likely Christ was a later fictional creation modeled upon that gaggle of familiar Judaean troublemakers Aslan describes.
Meantime there’s “Gospel Q” from about the same time as Paul and thus also predating the New Testament Gospels. No actual copy of “Q” has survived, but scholars have reconstructed it from later writings that relied on it, mainly the Biblical Gospels. Q — unlike Paul — does talk about the life of a Galilean named Jesus, and his supposed preachings. But here’s the interesting thing: Q says nothing of Jesus’s death! He doesn’t seem to be the same guy Paul was writing about.
And now we come to the Gospel of Mark, still later, dating from around 70 CE. Mark was probably writing down a story that had started as a meme a little earlier. But here for the first time Paul’s “Christ” is melded with Q’s Galilean “Jesus” — by some religious genius (we don’t know the true author; the type recurs, think Mohammad or Joseph Smith).
To see why that story turned out to have such legs, Aslan does provide the historical context. In 66-70 CE there was a failed Jewish revolt against Rome. It was a national catastrophe. Jerusalem was destroyed, its inhabitants slaughtered, the survivors carried off in chains to slavery. That put paid to the cults of messianic Judaism that had been so rampant. Nobody wanted to be tarred with that stuff now; it was a dead end.