The Jewish historian, Josephus (A. D. E. 37-100), supposedly mentioned Jesus in a couple of passages, but only one of these seems valid and free of interpolations by Christian scribes at a later time. This one exception may be quoted in its entirety:

A second and longer passage attributed to Josephus has been rejected by many Biblical scholars since the Renaissance as an obvious interpolation. However, its authenticity has recently been defended on the basis that it contained genuine praise by Josephus that was unfortunately supplemented by later interpolations. This controversial passage, identified as the Testimonium, may likewise be quoted in its entirety:

Here Josephus seems to have been a good deal more respectful of Christ than before, but again it is to be emphasized that there is a strong likelihood of forgery, certainly in the three portions that express an obvious Christian viewpoint: "if indeed one ought to call him a man," "He was the Messiah," and the entire "he appeared to them" construction. Eliminate all of this, and not much is left worth defending for its authenticity, certainly not the laudatory initial reference to Christ as a "wise man," "one who wrought surprising feats," and a "teacher" of "the truth" that should be "gladly" accepted [italics added for emphasis]. Moreover, the entire panegyric seems awkward in its context bracketed between two complex action-packed narratives by Josephus to illustrate worsening relations between Jews and Romans. The transition from the first to the second of these vivid historic episodes would be better and more believable without the Testimonium. The final sentence of the preceding narrative, "Thus ended the uprising," seems to call for the first sentence of the narrative that follows, "About this same time another outrage threw the Jews into an uproar . . . "Eliminate the Testimonium in its entirety, and the sequence between these passages becomes effortless. [vii]On the other hand, the insertion itself seems hasty and ill-considered.   

It seems that forgeries were a favorite pastime of early Christian scribes. Their proper task was to copy manuscripts, but too often they embellished these texts with additional details favorable to their own interpretation of Christianity. Altogether new texts were also written with the same purpose, including a large apocryphal literature rejected by the church by the end of the fourth century, only a small portion of which has survived. The most famous forgery was the Donation of Constantine, supposedly granting the papacy temporal power over Italy and other portions of Europe. This was exposed by Lorenzo Valla in 1439, but there were many other suspected forgeries that are still debatable. Even the date of Mark's Gospel can be estimated by Christ's prediction, "Not one stone will be left upon another" (Mark, 13. 2), supposedly foretelling the future annihilation of the Jerusalem temple in A. D. E. 70. If Christ did in fact make this prophecy during his lifetime, we have no idea when Mark's Gospel was written; but if Mark or later scribes took editorial liberties in hindsight to give Christ prophetic powers sufficient to predict the temple's destruction, as many suppose, we can date Mark's Gospel subsequent to A. D. E. 70-perhaps as early as from 71 to 73. [viii]Comparable liberties were likewise taken in other portions of the Old and New Testaments, most notably in Deuteronomy, which was very likely drafted by the priest (or priests) who claimed to have found it. Likewise, the Book of Daniel supposedly chronicled events in the second century, B. C. , as if predicted three hundred years earlier. Unlike Greek philosophy, Christianity resorted to such editorial liberties to vindicate its supernatural message. So, yes, Josephus's Testimonium might be valid, but there is ample room for doubt.

A major Roman historian, Tacitus (c. A. D. E. 55-117), does seem to have referred to Christ when he spoke of "Christus" as the founder of a religious sect blamed by Nero for having set the fire that destroyed much of Rome during his reign. Proponents of Christ's mythical status try to dismiss this passage as a forgery by later scribes, but its obvious bias against Christians lends it authenticity. The passage, from the Annals, written about A. D. E. 107, can and ought to be quoted in its entirety, since it is the primary non-Christian reference to Christ's identity within the first century after his death:

One doubts any forged interpolation by Christian scribes could have described Christianity with such obvious loathing as, "a class hated for their abominations," "a most mischievous superstition," something "hideous and shameful" brought to Rome, and an "evil" that originated in Judaea. Here the level of hostility in the depiction of Christians would suggest a historically valid response to Christianity, whatever the validity of its assessment.

Pliny the Younger (c. A. D. E. 62-113), the poet Martial (A. D. E. 43-100), and the stoic philosophers Epictetus (c. A. D. E. 50-138), and Marcus Aurelius (A. D. 121-180) also wrote of Christians without mentioning Jesus in particular. Perhaps more useful was Plutarch's essay, "Superstition," in which Christianity seems to have been included among contemporary religious sects that could be described with uncompromising hostility. Plutarch did not identify either Christ or the Christian sect by name, but who else might Plutarch have had in mind when he spoke of superstition "making fear to endure longer than life" with a concept of hell that stretched the imagination to its limit?

This was Dante's Inferno well over a thousand years before Dante-as hideous in its depiction of Hades as the Book or Revelation or any other text at the time of Christ! However, as already indicated, one cannot be certain Plutarch had Christianity in mind, much less Christ himself.

Obviously, any determination of the New Testament's textual authenticity depends on a clarification of the sequence among the Epistles and Gospels. Nobody denies, for example, that Paul's Epistles were followed by the four Gospels, and there is general consensus that Mark's Gospel came first, followed by Matthew and Luke's Gospels, and somewhat later by John's Gospel in its final version. Portions of John, however, seem to have preceded Mark, so any investigation of the earliest sources relevant to Christ's life must depend on a collation of information from Paul's Epistles, Mark's Gospel as confirmed by Matthew and Luke, and whatever can be extrapolated from John's Gospel derivative of its earliest version. Perhaps the most important contribution of Matthew and Luke's Gospels was their incorporation of the actual teachings of Christ acquired from the lost Q text (or Logia) in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, chaps. 5-7; also 10, 13, 18, 24-25) and Sermon on the Plain (Luke, 6. 20-49). Significantly, Christ's miracles were ignored by Paul, but added by Mark and the rest of the gospels; then Christ's immaculate conception was ignored by Paul, Mark, and John, but later added by Matthew and Luke. One can only speculate to what extent these major details in the story of Christ were retroactive interpolations with the purpose of inflating his role as a prophet to supernatural proportions.

Also of significance is the time span that occurred between Christ's crucifixion and its account in the gospels. The first of the Gospels, by Mark, came at least forty years later, and the others came later yet. The Gospels by Matthew and Luke were probably drafted within the following decade, and the final version of John's Gospel came at least a decade or two after that. The traditional explanation seems probable that the Apostle Peter had told Mark of Christ's life, providing the needed information for the first of the Gospels, but it seems likely that Mark also acquired some of his knowledge in an oral tradition often as much as the fourth degree removed from Christ. [xii]

Significantly, Mark himself was ignorant of the Palestinian geography he referred to in his narrative account, and he fully expected Judgment Day within the next year or two. Matthew and Luke tried to rectify his mistakes, but introduced problems of their own in their effort to link Christ's life with Old Testament predictions. Stories from Christ's childhood can only be found in apocryphal sources rejected by the church for being obvious forgeries, and we lack any clear indication how much time elapsed between Christ's baptism by John the Baptist and his crucifixion. It might have been within a year, it might have been as many as four or five years.

As to be expected, the Gospels frequently contradict each other. Homer W. Smith says 150,000 discrepancies have been found, H. L. Mencken says 175,000. [xiii]Even Matthew and Luke's stories of the Annunciation bear substantial differences. In Matthew, for example, the angel of the Lord advises Joseph of Christ's miraculous conception, but in Luke it is the angel Gabriel who advises Mary. Similar problems occur in the five accounts of Christ's resurrection. When, for example, did women visit Christ's tomb, when it was dark (John 20. 1) or during the sunrise (Mark 16. 2)?Who exactly were in the party that came?Was it Mary Magdalene alone (John 20. 1); Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (Matthew 28. 1); Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome (Mark 16. 1); or Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women (Luke 24. 10)?And so on. There are so many factual variations in describing the three days between Christ's crucifixion and his ascent to heaven that the entire testimony would be open to challenge in a modern court of law. [xiv]This confusion suggests a word-of-mouth report that got well out of hand as the story was enlarged to evoke greater wonderment from one telling to the next. Paul offered the first and simplest version, followed by the four Gospels, each of which provided its own embellishments.

And finally, Robert Funk gets to the root of Biblical propaganda by asking to what extent these Gospels might have been conscious fabrications to convert non-Christians:

Obviously these four modern theologians engage in shop talk among themselves without pandering to the Christian laity with obligatory assurances of love, eternal bliss, and all the rest of the verities emphasized by religion's traditional catechism. Aside from their many disagreements, what these theologians share is the assumption that the Gospels-hence inevitably the role and identity of Christ himself-cannot be taken at their face value as understood by the great majority of those willing to identify themselves as Christians.

Even the Apostle John conceded in his Gospel that accuracy was less important to him than convincing disciples:

John thus admitted he felt free to delete information, limiting his text to stories most likely to reinforce belief. Certainly the avoidance of irrelevant information and undue repetition would seem justified, but one cannot help asking what information he might have deleted to minimize disbelief.   

The first and most obvious possibility would have been Jewish gossip cited in the Talmud and summarized by Celsus late in the second century in his diatribe against Christianity, On the True Doctrine, the first such critique most of which survives today. An estimated seventy percent of this text is available to us only because it was quoted by the third-century Christian metaphysician, Origen, in order to refute Celsus's arguments. [xx]According to Celsus, Jesus was the illegitimate son of Panthera (or Pandira, or even Pandera), a Roman soldier and possibly a tax collector in a Calabrian legion that occupied the region. Celsus' story of Christ's birth has been dismissed as a "clumsy fabrication," but its possibility cannot be entirely discounted. Rhetorically addressing himself to Christ, Celsus made the argument plain:

How totally different from the official story of Christ's birth that we celebrate on Christmas!Celsus went on to say that Christ grew to maturity as a laborer in Egypt, then gained the reputation of a magician before returning to Palestine. If any portion of this account is true, Christ's remarkable empathy with the victims of poverty and discrimination takes on altogether new significance, for example in the Beatitudes that begin his Sermon on the Mount with extravagant praise for the very poor. For Christ himself could only have had a miserable childhood if he were the son of an adultress who was divorced by her husband, then prosecuted in a court of law for having given birth to a child by a soldier linked with an occupation army reviled by most of the Jewish community. One can only guess how and by whom Mary bore additional children (James, Joseph, Simon, Judas, and at least two sisters), to what extent the family was stigmatized, how it survived without Joseph's support, and how it might have migrated to Egypt and back again to Israel by the time Christ reached his maturity.

Clement conceded in so many words that the Secret Mark did in fact tell of Christ having engaged in nocturnal baptisms in which nakedness could have been featured, but he insisted the text said nothing of sexual interplay between Christ and the young men he baptized. The single example Clement used to illustrate his point summarized how Christ resurrected a nameless youth (identified as Lazarus in John 11-12), then initiated him as a Christian in a nocturnal ceremony wherein Lazarus "wore a linen cloth over his naked body" in presenting himself to Christ. Clement said nothing of Lazarus having removed this cloth, but chances are excellent he did, since this practice seems to have flourished in the early history of Christianity, presumably to evoke the experience of Edenic innocence as well as the baptismal symbolism of gaining a new identity through unclothing, then reclothing. [xxiii]However, as quoted by Clement, Mark also spoke of Lazarus's intense attraction to Christ once brought back to life, and later described Lazarus as "the youth whom Jesus loved. "All of this would suggest that Christ reciprocated Lazarus's feelings and that spiritual love (agape) might also have been erotic. At this point it seems best to let the passage speak for itself:

The question that remains is whether Christ's possible homosexual relationship with Lazarus was a "truth which merely seems true according to human opinions. "Or whether such a truth rooted in opinion might better describe an alternative version of events devoid of sexual implications and thus more acceptable to the great majority of Christian worshippers.

Matthew and Luke's Gospels exclude this portion of the narrative pertaining to Christ's arrest, just as Mark's Gospel excludes the Lazarus story. So why would Mark have eliminated one of these but not the other?Again, any reconstruction of the Gospels in this matter is necessarily hypothetical, but it seems likely that Mark thought the baptismal significance of the youth's escape at Gesthemane would be overlooked, but Matthew and Luke decided otherwise and deleted the passage from their adoptions of Mark, thus putting it in the same category for suppression as the Lazarus story. For, indeed, any confirmation of such nocturnal baptisms by Christ would have reflected upon Christ's relationship with all his disciples and many of his followers, as would be suggested by Paul's remark, "As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ" (Galatians 3. 27). In this more inclusive context, "Unclothed, then clothed, with Christ" might be suggested as a literalist elaboration of Paul's meaning, but of course it could only have raised difficult questions among the great majority of later Christians.

There is no reference otherwise in the four Gospels to Christ having performed baptisms. This omission can be interpreted in one of two ways: (1) that Christ performed no baptisms, just as John's Gospel specifically argued, ". . . it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized" (John 4. 2); or (2) that such baptisms were in fact performed by Christ despite their having later been ignored except in the one passage in which they were denied. This latter possibility would seem confirmed by John the Baptist's confident early prediction that Christ would perform better baptisms than he himself did--with fire instead of water (Mark 1. 7-8). Why, one asks, would Mark have reported John the Baptist's prediction if Christ did not go on to perform baptisms on his own? Moreover, one cannot overlook the awkwardness of the argument in John 4. 2, suggesting it might have been a later interpolation specifically inserted to make the necessary denial for the benefit of later Christians. Here it seems useful to quote the entire passage to justify this possibility:

The same line of argument may also be used regarding Celsus's lack of reference to nocturnal baptisms in his diatribe against Christianity. As illustrated by his explanation of Christ's birth and childhood, Celsus did not pull any punches in his critique of Christianity, yet there is nothing in his text regarding either Christ's baptisms or his sexual orientation. This could be explained by Christ's total innocence in the matter or by the completely successful effort to suppress the issue of nocturnal baptisms before Celsus and his contemporaries in Rome could learn of them. However, a third possibility cannot be discounted, that Celsus did in fact mention these baptisms, but that Origen excluded them from portions of the text he quoted to refute. If Origen retained only about seventy percent of Celsus's text, there is every reason to suppose that Origen chose to eliminate from consideration those portions of it that dealt with nocturnal baptisms. Origen had studied theology under Clement of Alexandria, who had already recommended in his Secret Mark letter an uncompromising evasiveness regarding these baptisms, and Origen himself was sufficiently fearful of sexual temptation that he actually resorted to self-castration. The prudent neglect of Celsus's remarks upon Christ's nocturnal baptisms would therefore seem likely to have been at the very top of his priorities in devising his refutation of Celsus. The very importance of the issue would be indicated by his willingness to take into account Celsus's remarks about Christ's birth as the son of a Roman soldier, but not about Christ's homosexual baptismal practices. This would have been too much.

2. PAGAN CHRIST

There remains, however, one major difficulty in accepting the historical truth of Christianity--its uncanny resemblance to myths of central importance to ancient pagan religions. The depiction of Christ himself is certainly life-like in the Gospels, yet his birth, death, and certain details of his biography duplicated stories of pagan gods worshipped many centuries earlier. These others were obviously imaginary, even literary, though at least a few of them might once have lived as mortal heroes. In contrast, the Gospels offered the concrete ritual sacrifice of a contemporary and truly human Son of God. Christ was a flesh-and-blood Messiah who spoke the wisdom of Judaic prophets, then died and was resurrected like Dionysus and Osiris. This amazing verisimilitude perhaps helps to explain the rapid growth of Christianity after Christ's martyrdom, but the question remains whether its factual validity can be accepted today.

Borrowings of this sort were very possible at the time, since the story of Jesus was almost exclusively within an oral tradition for the first forty years after his crucifixion, after which oral stories fed into what now seems an inextricable jumble of texts, lost texts, and forgeries over the next century or two. It is also important to remember that numerous pagan religions were then in competition throughout the Roman empire, all of which borrowed rites and stories from each other through both "syncretism" and "theocrasia. "Syncretism involved acquisitions from other religions in the most general sense, while theocrasia was limited to the merged identities of various gods, for example when the Ptolemies invented Serapis as a fusion of Dionysus and Osiris, and when such Roman deities as Saturn, Neptune, and Venus were modeled after the Greek deities Zeus, Poseidon, and Aphrodite. Arguably, theocrasia also occurred when Christ's identity absorbed the identities of Serapis and Mithra, among others, through the integration of their legends into the story of his life. For how could Christianity not have joined all the rest of these religions in this practice?And why was Christianity different from the rest except in having bridged the gap between Judaism and paganism, and in having done this relatively late in the history of ancient religion and therefore with greater effectiveness?[xxviii]In fact, the timing was almost perfect, bringing Christianity to the fore toward the end of the fourth century, when Mithraism, the dominant competitive pagan religion, was beginning to lose its appeal. It must be conceded that Christianity was by far the least tolerant of its competitors among the near-eastern religions that penetrated Rome (which just might have contributed to its final success), but its hostility did not inhibit it from drawing upon their ideas in order to enhance its appeal.

But there was more to Christianity than its success in fleshing out pagan myth as if the miraculous were real. I want to argue that Christianity also brought into play an effective synthesis of Judaism and pagan religious practices with much broader appeal among gentiles throughout the region. It did not simply revise and amplify these practices, but fused them into a more inclusive whole through unprecedented syncretistic ingenuity. Christ himself was convinced of his role as a Messiah in the Judaic tradition, Paul recognized that his crucifixion could be promoted in competition with pagan spring rebirth rituals, and the synthesis between these seemingly discordant religious observances, one Judaic and the other pagan, could be sealed and delivered by Christ's use of Zoroastrian eschatology to emphasize the grand struggle between good and evil as well as a Judgment Day when all of humanity is finally divided between heaven and hell. Everything fit. Christ could be worshipped as a Judaic Messiah prophesied by Isaiah (7. 14, 11, and 53), Micah (5. 2), and Zechariah (9. 9-17), but also as a sacred deity who endured death and resurrection like Dionysus, Osiris, and other eastern Mediterranean gods, and who thereupon ascended to heaven to preside with God, his father, on Judgment Day as predicted by Zoroaster (or Zarathustra as identified by Persians). A viable syncretistic triangulation was accordingly brought into play among three essentially complementary belief systems: (a) messianic Judaic prophecies, b) pagan fertility sacrifice, and (c) Persian eschatology. And it worked--except that it isn't necessarily true.

One is therefore tempted to bring to bear upon theology the principle of Eidetic Reductionism proposed by the twentieth century phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. In the field of philosophy this principle more or less involves isolating the essence of a phenomenon by eliminating all its accidental qualities. For Christianity, it would oblige discarding the pagan rites and myths shared by Christianity when it engaged in wholesale syncretistic acquisitions in order to recruit pagan worshippers. Now that Christianity is an established religion, these pagan elements can be discounted in order to salvage the ethical portion of Christian doctrine that presumably remains valid even today. This was Tolstoy's effort in his 1909 narrative compilation, "The Teachings of Jesus," in which he ended his story:

Here there is no return to life, no epiphany, no resurrection--just an account of what probably happened when Christ was crucified. Of course Tolstoy's simplified version of events stands an excellent chance of being factually incorrect in many of its particulars, but it is not riddled with mythical reconstruction contrived to seem miraculous, and this in itself can be treated as a blessing. So why not benefit from Tolstoy's example?The question is no longer whether Christ was a myth, but how and to what extent, and what can be salvaged once myth is discounted. The problem, however, is that not much, if anything, remains that is unique to Christianity. The eidetic core of Christianity dissipates, perhaps altogether disappears, once deprived of its pagan borrowings.

In The Mystery Religions and Christianity, Samuel Ellis explores other parallels with contemporary mystery religions, including confession, baptism, fasts, pilgrimmages, asceticism, sin, original sin, salvation, sacramentalism, redemption, and the pursuit of purity and holiness. [xxxvi]All these customs and religious practices were important to near-Eastern mystery religions that preceded Christianity. Christianity may be said to have benefitted from their example--it did not invent them.

Resemblances between Christianity and Mithraism are especially important and should be explored with greater specificity, since Mithraism was Christianity's most formidable competitor for popular Roman support from the second through the fourth centuries. But Mithraism was also older and more venerable, having been practiced in Persia as early as the fifteenth century, B. C. , when the god Mithra was also worshipped under the name of Mitra in India. The Emperor Nero (A. D. E, 54-68) considered becoming a Mithraist, and both the Emperors Commodus (180-92) and Diocletian (284-305) took up the cause of Mithraism, the latter having declared Mithra to be the protector of the Roman empire as late as 307, after his abdication from power. However, Christianity suddenly gained ascendancy upon the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 310, and in 321 it was established as Rome's state religion. The Emperor Julian the Apostate (361-63) tried but failed in his effort to resurrect Mithraism, after which the Emperor Theodosius consolidated Christian dominance once and for all during his long and oppressive reign (379-95). Nevertheless, competition between the two religions had been intense over almost two centuries, so their resemblances deserve careful examination. Mithraist beliefs were more obviously mythical than those of Christianity, but in their most important particulars they bore many striking similarities that may be listed here:

Christianity's ultimate victory over Mithraism primarily derived from its more democratic appeal, its better and more flexible sacerdotal organization, its unique possession of the Bible as an inspired sacred text, and its acceptance of female worshippers, Mithraism having encouraged the segregation of women to the worship of Isis or Cybele. Also, Mithraism was primarily associated with aristocrats and soldiers, whereas Christianity had a more broad-based constituency that granted equal status to beggars and criminals as well as women. Perhaps Christianity's primary advantage was its emphasis upon the individual's salvation as opposed to Mithraism's patriotic support of the Roman empire. Not surprisingly, Christianity thrived at the expense of Mithraism when Rome's decline started to accelerate with the Emperor Aurelian's withdrawal of Roman troops (c. 275) from the province of Dacia (now Romania), which was heavily populated by Mithraists. Christianity's pivotal victory followed upon the failure of both Diocletian's reforms and his effort to suppress Christianity at the turn of the fourth century. [xxxvii]

Other resemblances between these two eschatologies may be listed as follows:

then, is left of Christianity cleansed of all these pagan sources and analogues? Much less than one might expect, and in fact, some have argued, almost nothing at all. Even its Judaic content, they claim, was almost entirely borrowed. In his book, The Sources of the Morality of the Gospels, Joseph McCabe tried to document his conviction that, "Not one of the religious sentiments they [the Gospels] attribute to Jesus is novel or original. "[xxxix]

Homer Smith has likewise argued that the Sermon on the Mount, probably based on the now-lost Logia (or Q-text) of Christ's sayings, was rehashed from Psalms, Isaiah, Ecclesiasticus, the Secrets of Enoch, the Shemone Lesreh (a book of Hebrew prayers), and other Hebraic sources. [xl]More recently, a group of Bible scholars identified as "The Jesus Seminar," sponsored by the Westar Institute in Sonoma, California, has established after six years of analysis that at least eighty percent of the Logia, generally considered to be Christ's original sayings, can be documented to have come from other sources. [xli]The remaining twenty percent presumably remains under investigation. It seems there is very little in the life and teachings of Christ that can be exclusively attributed to Christ.

3. NEUROTIC CHRIST     

Without suggesting any application to Christianity, Lord Raglan has listed twenty-two narrative segments in the typical stories of mythic heroes, seventeen of which can be linked with the story of Christ:

Still, I would argue that Christ did in fact exist, and, beyond that, that he offered a unique and compelling articulation of the principles he found important, whatever their source might have been. His genuine identity seems to have been almost completely subsumed to his mythic role, but there was a real person behind his mythopoeic facade, so it seems valid and worthwhile to extrapolate his genuine identity from his extraordinary status as mankind's savior. The issues pertaining to which Christ's individual opinions seem to diverge the most radically from the catechism of other gods and prophets--include his personal insistence on his unique Messianic role as the Son of God, his repeated admonitions that one must reject even one's family in the pursuit of individual salvation, and his absolute confidence in the paradox that his message of love and passivity was enforced by a remorseless God prepared to consign malefactors to eternal hellfire. Relevant to all three of these issues, Christ stretched normal consciousness beyond itself to the utmost limit, but in such a fashion as to appeal all the more effectively to devout worshippers. This was a remarkable accomplishment, finally the product of individual authorship that could not have been invented by a committee or patched together by a clever fabricator. So Christ would seem to have been real, but the portrait that emerges can only discomfort Christians able and willing to judge his teachings on a dispassionate literalist basis. [xliii]

    Not that Christ limited the prospect of eternal hellfire to disbelievers. He also lapsed into bizarre passive-aggressive extravagance by promising to reward pure innocence with eternal bliss, while consigning sinners who fall short of this unattainable ideal to eternal destruction. Doomed, for example, are those who harbor resentment against others (and who doesn't?) or who resort to harmless insults--"Thou fool," for example, though Christ himself used such an epithet twice against Pharisees and Saducees (see Matthew 23. 17 and Luke 11. 40). Amazingly, one cannot even look upon another with lust (which most of us do now and again),Better to cut off our members, Christ argued-eyeballs, arms, whatever--than to risk eternal hellfire:

This extreme rejection of erotic attraction necessarily consigns most of mankind to eternal hellfire. Devout Christians pride themselves on their precise knowledge of scriptures, but suddenly become vague or symbolic when confronted with the Draconian implications of this passage. However, the text of Christ's remarks says what it says, just as legal documents and good poetry do, and its explicit meaning cannot be wished away as allegory or rhetorical exaggeration. [xlv]  

The hermeneutic ingenuity of sympathetic Christian theologians cannot dilute the hideous choice between eternal hellfire and absolute virtue that predominates even at the level of unverbalized consciousness. This terrible warning is exactly what Christ both said and meant in the Sermon on the Mount, generally accepted as having been transcribed from the Logia, the earliest record of his pronouncements. But what total madness!It would seem the seeds of the Inquisition and all the holy wars since Charlemagne were present from the very beginning. [xlvi]

Christ apparently borrowed the wording from Micah 7. 6, but Micah had used family disintegration to exemplify social corruption produced by God to punish lack of faith. Christ substituted himself for God and focussed on the simple choice between the acceptance of this "truth" and loyalty to one's family as an impediment to salvation. Explained by Micah, family disintegration was God's punishment; explained by Christ, it became the only way to avoid this fate.

In Luke 14. 26 Christ actually used the word hate (miseo) to describe how one should feel toward one's family:

Altogether, Christ employed one or another version of the word hate (including hated and hatest) twenty times in the four Gospels, but none more tellingly than here. And he said what he meant-hate thy family or endure eternal hellfire. Again, in Matthew 19. 29, Christ argued, "And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life. "When a disciple asked on another occasion, in Matthew 8. 22, to be allowed to depart to attend his father's funeral, Christ argued, "Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead. "And who were "the dead"?Simply enough, those to be excluded from heaven, where eternal life can be experienced as opposed to the perpetual agony of death by fire that occurs in hell. And so much for the funerals of our closest relatives, family distractions that can only diminish our prospect for eternal bliss come Judgment Day.

In Matthew, 19. 3-12, Christ proscribed divorce with the argument, "What God has joined together, let no one separate. "However, when asked by his disciples why he both defended and attacked marriage, he explained that not everybody could accept his teachings, but just as there are eunuchs from birth and eunuchs through the choice of others, "there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can" (Matthew, 19. 3-12). In order to guarantee salvation, Christ suggested, either resort to castration (as Origen later did) or learn to think and behave as if one has. Celibacy might seem to have been a possible compromise, but what salvation that?Once deprived of sex, most of us would be dogged by sexual fantasies, and these alone guarantee eternal hellfire, as already promised in the Sermon on the Mount.

Christ even dissolved marriage in heaven in Matthew 22. 30: "For in the resurrection they [husbands and wives] neither marry nor are given marriage, but are like angels in heaven. "The antithesis incidental to this comparison seems intended: angelic ecstasy versus marital encumbrances inescapable in daily life. But in falling short of heaven, marriage is ultimately aligned with hell, and for most of us such an imputation is distressing, even obnoxious. It is no accident that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress tells of a pilgrim, Christian by name, who is confronted with exactly this choice explained by Christ:

The message is simple: Christian can only find salvation by abandoning his family. And appropriately so in Christ's opinion, despite Bunyan's later decision to tell of Christian's effort to save his family as well. For Bunyan's second thoughts were his own, not any obligation imposed by Christ.

Why such uncompromising hostility toward marriage?One suspects because of Christ's homoerotic tendencies or perhaps because of his problems with his own family, as might be suggested by two particular references, the first of which established a clear-cut choice between two loyalties, family and religion:

Which left his family standing at the door, obviously the butt of his disparagement. One finds the same tendency in modern apocalyptic clans such as those of Jonestown and the Branch Davidian compound, both of which willingly broke up families in order to augment their membership. Christ's second aspersion on his family background occurred in Matthew 13. 57, when he explained to his disciples, "Prophets are not without honor except in their own country and in their own house. "Christ's house was of course the home he shared with at least one of his parents as well as his half-brothers and sisters--apparently a less supportive family context than Christ might have desired.

So here is one particular crux in Christ's teachings that stirs my explicative curiosity. There is excessive fascination with the threat of eternal hellfire as well as absolute confidence in Christ's singular status as the Son of God and repeated insistence upon the rejection of one's family for "higher" spiritual values. What gives emotional coherence to these three jarring compulsions?We will never know, since Christ seldom referred to himself except as the son of man or the Son of God, the latter a better and more eminent parental figure than Joseph, Panthera, or whatever male adult(s) helped to raise him as a child. Nevertheless, Christ's willingness to link his anti-family bias with the issue of hellfire suggests a sublimation of unexamined resentment through his apocalyptic inspiration as a prophet, indeed the one and only Son of God. Well enough if such a God were the father of Christ. But if Christ's father were mortal, Christ can be diagnosed, admittedly on an anachronistic basis, as the victim of severe delusional fantasies symptomatic of grandiosity and incipient paranoia.

Of course any application of Freudian analysis at this level is necessarily hypothetical because of the paucity of verifiable evidence about Christ's personal life. Nevertheless, Freud's classic diagnosis of the paranoid syndrome seems relevant to Christ's insistence on his status as the Son of God. [xlviii]According to Freud, the paranoid syndrome involves the combination of two displacements in order to suppress latent homosexual tendencies--denial ("I am not attracted to him, but hate him"), followed by projection ("It's not that I hate him--rather, he hates me"). In the case of Christ this double displacement would have featured a slightly different combination of denial and projection compounded by extreme grandiosity: "Nothing wrong with me--I am of singular importance," followed by, "Rather, these others who reject me are sinners. "In and of itself, each of these displacements could have helped to buttress Christ's compensatory self-esteem resulting from his doubtful parentage, or from his sexual ambivalence, or from a combination of shame and androgyny resulting from identification with his mother who had been disgraced by his birth. If severe reaction formation took place, denial might have entailed Christ's emphasis upon his unique perfection as the one and only Son of God, whereupon projection might have involved a castigation of universal sinfulness that could not be avoided except by the few who could truly accept his perfection. Thus a vivid and ultimately bizarre distinction between good and evil would have absolved Christ of his sense of worthlessness through his insistence upon his exemplification of the very highest ideals as well as his dedicated struggle against the enemies of these ideals. He could think he played a pivotal role in the grand Manichaean struggle between virtue and sin-God versus Satan, heaven versus hell, and devout worshippers versus the myriad sinners unable to believe in his sacred mission. Ironically, the censorship Clement later advocated in defense of Christianity would have been obliged by this more compelling denial strategy rooted in Christ's identity.

Christ's projective displacement of his compensatory needs to the issue of mankind's salvation could be justified based on the vision of cosmic struggle Zoroaster first proposed six hundred years earlier. But with what a difference!Zoroaster conceived of himself as nothing more than a prophet who anticipated not one but three messiahs, whereas Christ was utterly confident of his unique identity as both a prophet and the single Messiah and Son of God. Zoroaster also assumed a somewhat objective stance in describing his vision, as compared to Christ, who inserted himself in his vision as mankind's unique savior, its only true protector against eternal damnation. Zoroaster envisaged future developments after his death without any participation on his part, whereas Christ emphasized his central importance first as a martyr on earth, then as God's right-hand man at Judgment Day, helping to isolate the elect from sinners doomed to hell because of their refusal to believe in his divine origin. Zoroaster's eschatology had all the merits of teleology-a final theory of human destiny remarkable for its inclusiveness; for Christ it also provided a mandate to declare his pivotal importance as the Son of God and mankind's primary fount of moral rectitude.

Morally insightful but paranoid, even at times delusional-this was not an uncommon syndrome in ancient and modern society. However, it has never been achieved before or since with such righteous intensity, nor with such extraordinary results!For Christ attained the supreme role he pursued as a Messiah precisely because he dared to pursue it. His megalomania justified itself through its widespread acceptance by others once he was martyred because of it. The breathtaking audacity that bares itself at the root of his self-fulfilling grandiosity thus confirms my sense both that his vision was the product of a unique true-to-life personality rather than an iconic identity pasted together by loyal disciples (which means that Christ did in fact exist as a human being), and that his essential message survived editorial revision by these disciples well enough to reveal emotions predictably out of control (which means that Christ's most compelling ideas were finally his own). In the words of Freud, Christ sublimated his emotions by inventing a "universal" neurosis that has spared the great majority of our forbears the task of constructing a personal one. [xlix]Only a real person could have done that--only a genius almost at the edge of psychosis.

What I am suggesting here is that Christ went over the top-at times well over the top-as have so many others in the history of western civilization, but none quite so well as he. In true apocalyptic style he deified himself in the pursuit of meekness, dispensed hatred in the pursuit of love, castigated enemies in the pursuit of forgiveness, and, not least, consigned most of humanity to hellfire in the pursuit of its salvation. Who else has offered such a grand paradoxical philosophy to the ordinary mind?What other sons of gods were so adept at provoking both shame and righteousness, at converting personal rage into a universal message of peace?Thus Christ existed in flesh and blood, just as Swedenborg, Blake, Kierkegaard, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Jim Jones, and David Karesh did, but his views, like theirs, must be carefully sifted on a scale more appropriate to our admittedly modest aspirations in life. Yes, marriage can be rejected by some, and, yes, the threat of hellfire offers vivid cautionary warning to the otherwise impenetrable mind, and, yes, divine retribution is always a lovely idea. But are these tenets of Christian faith of any value to most of us in our daily conduct?Can we benefit more from Christ's apocalyptic vision than from, say, Aristotle's Golden Mean that emphasized moderation, or from the negative version of Christ's Golden Rule already expounded by others, including Confucius, Thales, Zarathustra, and the Rabbi Hillel?For most of us, if we think about it, probably not.

If Celsus was accurate (and there is nothing supernatural in what he claimed), Christ elevated himself from a truly miserable childhood to the role of prophet and savior by combining Judaism and several pagan religions in a syncretistic fusion that has persisted for two thousand years. Christ can also be admired for having taught an inhibitive ethics of thou shalt nots beneficial to the many worshippers able to glean for themselves its most useful lessons. He has likewise offered hope and consolation to all who want to believe in God's providential grace and the prospect of a better life after death. Moreover, as Clement of Alexandria emphasized, Christ's truths "according to faith" afford something better and more reassuring than "the truth which merely seems true. "Most Christian worshippers have taken these "higher" truths for granted, as guaranteed by the simple injunction already observed (and deplored) by Celsus as early as the second century, A. D. E. (p. 54), "Do not ask questions; just believe. "According to Celsus this dictum was frequently repeated by early Christian apologists, and it has remained in currency ever since, even into the twenty-first century: not to ask, just believe; not to ask, just believe. Unavoidably, however, a small but persistent minority of skeptics finds it difficult, if not impossible, to accept Christian dogma. And the more questions we ask, the less we are able to believe.

Footnotes

[ii]Jesus: A Myth (Albert & Charles Boni, 1926).

[iii] My source for the linkage between anointed and meshiah is a paper by Frank R. Zindler at the web site, http://www. atheists. org/church/jesuslife. html#B4-5-6.