set aside the time to read John through. Don’t do it in bits and pieces as if you were in Sunday school or church, but as a whole. Read it as you would any other book, remembering that the chapters and verses are artificial divisions introduced many centuries after the book first appeared. Read it allegorically as a parable about your own life’s journey, and feel it come alive as never before. The message of this book is that Christ’s journey is a metaphor for our own spiritual journey through life. Read as myth and allegory, the Gospels speak powerfully to that theme.
St. Paul
This book is concerned with the mythic meaning of the Gospels, but it must be kept in mind that the earliest writings of the New Testament are those of St. Paul, who was the major force in the establishment of Christianity as a universal faith. He wrote his epistles around 50–65 CE, about twenty years before the earliest Gospel. He knew only a mystical Jesus, and his approach is wholly mythical—that of the Christ within. Paul’s knowledge of Jesus comes from visions and revelations; from the Old Testament (Paul viewed the whole of it as prophetic and as elucidating facts about Jesus); and from what was being said about the Christos in the Christian communities already in existence.11
The silence of Paul over the putative historical Jesus is virtually ear-shattering. But, because he does speak of Jesus Christ some two hundred times, the true nature of the problem escapes the average reader. He calls Jesus Lord and Son of God, but such titles already existed within both Judaism and the surrounding Pagan religions, and of themselves prove nothing. Paul presupposes that Jesus existed as a supernatural being before “God sent him into the world to redeem it.” Such pre-existence on the part of the Logos and Sophia, or Wisdom, was part of Judaic thought at the time. It was also part of Gnostic thinking, and there is considerable evidence to support the view that Paul was a Gnostic. According to Paul, Jesus assumed flesh (mythically) sometime after the reign of David, from whom Paul says, following what the Old Testament prophesied, that Jesus, as a man, was supposed to have been descended.12 In the myth, he was “made of the seed of David according to the flesh.” This, of course, was part of the traditional view of what or who the Messiah had to be. In Romans too he terms him a Jew “according to the flesh” and, later, the scion of Jesse to govern the Gentiles.13 As Professor G.A. Wells points out in Did Jesus Exist?, however, there were many centuries intervening between David and Paul, and the latter gives absolutely no indication in which of them Jesus’ earthly life supposedly fell. It is all supremely vague and mystical. We remember that Osiris too in the myth had an earthly life but was wholly mythical himself. As the scholar G. Bornkamm has observed, it is “an astonishing fact” that Paul nowhere mentions Jesus of or from Nazareth, who was a prophet and miracle worker who ate with tax collectors and sinners. He never once calls him “Jesus of Nazareth.”
Among other things, Paul is silent about:
• The Sermon on the Mount, and all the rest of Jesus’ ethical teachings. He discusses ethical issues, even some doctrines familiar to us, such as “bless those who persecute you,” but he gives them on his own authority, with no sign that Jesus taught the very same truths.14 He appeals instead to passages from the Old Testament to support his teachings. The Gospel itself was already written in the pages of the Old Testament, according to Romans 1:2. He says there that the Gospel was “promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures.”
• The virgin birth. Paul simply says Jesus was “born of a woman,” but so too were the Pagan deities, for example Horus and his mother Isis. He never mentions the virgin birth.
• The Lord’s Prayer. This omission is all the more remarkable in that Paul discusses prayer at length in chapter 8 of Romans and says plainly that Christians don’t know exactly what to pray for and have to depend on the Spirit’s praying within us with “groanings that cannot be uttered.”15
• The temple cleansing—which is cited by all four Gospels.
• All the miracles that abound in the Gospels. In fact, he seems to deny that Jesus worked miracles, since he puts down that whole approach: “Jews demand signs [miracles] and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified . . .”16
• He knows nothing of Jesus’ command to go and baptize everyone, since he explicitly says: “Christ did not send me to baptize.”17
• He fails to support his lengthy plea for celibacy by any reference to Jesus’ reported praise for those who renounce marriage for the sake of the kingdom.18
• Even when writing about Jesus’ death, he never mentions any of the trials, Pontius Pilate, Herod or Jerusalem. In 1 Corinthians, 2:6–8, Paul writes about the crucifixion of Christ by “the rulers of this age,” but this is not a reference to any earthly powers. Rather, he is referring to the widespread view in the Judaism of his day that the world was in the grip of evil angels and other malignant forces.19 Kittel, in his Theological Wordbook of the New Testament, says that by “rulers” Paul is not here referring to any earthly governors but to heavenly or spiritual ones.
Critical scholars agree that Paul gives Jesus’ Crucifixion “no historical context” whatever, so that nothing is known from him as to where Jesus had lived, where he was killed, where he was buried or the story of his Resurrection. E. Kasemann, the distinguished New Testament scholar, has found that “the scantiness of Paul’s Jesus tradition overall is surprising,” to say the least, but adds that his silence over the circumstances of the Crucifixion, which is so central to his theology, is “positively shocking.” G.A. Wells in Did Jesus Exist? notes that scholar W. Schmithals is on record as saying that Paul’s silence about the entire substance of the Gospels is a “problem to which no satisfactory solution has been given during two hundred years of historical and critical research, and to the solution of which great theologians have sometimes not even attempted to contribute.” They simply refuse to tackle the issue at all.
In addition to the above, the following facts need to be known more widely:
Paul’s mention of James, the Lord’s brother, does not necessarily mean a blood brother of Jesus.20 The Jerusalem group of believers were called by Paul “the brethren of the Lord.” Paul frequently uses the term “brother” for a fellow believer. Jesus, in this tradition, spoke of his close followers as his brothers, just as certain religious groups still do today, for example the Brethren churches. I even get letters from people wholly unknown to me that begin: “Brother Tom.”
It is argued that 1 Thessalonians 1:6 says Christians received the Word in much “affliction” and so are imitators of Christ. This might seem to imply that Christ was known to have suffered, that is, on earth. But other gods had similarly been regarded as suffering—Osiris, Orpheus, Adonis, etc.
Paul speaks of the faithful as having “received Christ Jesus,” in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Wells notes this is “the purest mysticism” and that the knowledge of Christ comes from communion “with hidden powers or spirits.”21 In 1 Corinthians 4:1, Paul designates himself and his fellows as the “stewards of God’s mysteries,” which was exactly the technical name for the stewards at the temples of the popular Egypto-Greek deity Serapis.22
Finally, Paul uses the language of mysticism and of Mystery Religions over and over again. He speaks of being in Christ, through Christ, with Christ, unto Christ, as suggesting some indescribable relationship between himself (or the believer) and Christ. It’s a relationship, according to Wells, for example, that the context wholly fails to explain. The real explanation is that Paul knew only the mystical Christ, the “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”23
Finding Personal Meaning in the Myth
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