The Story of Jesus is a Myth

I preface my discussion of Jesus by admitting that the results of my research into the historical Jesus surprised me. I began my research in the early 1990's when I realized that my spiritual development was tied to my understanding of who Jesus was. After decades of exploring Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, Judaism and Native American spirituality, I expected to learn that Jesus was something like a sage as described and revered in many other religions. In particular, Hinduism has many saints who they honor as avatars, incarnations of specific gods, who were described as powerful, free, healers, teachers, and miracle workers intent upon the spiritual uplift of mankind. That sounded a lot like Jesus, so I believed that I would learn that he was a similar lofty and gifted soul who had inspired and transformed those with whom he came in contact. As you'll see, I was in for a big surprise.

Before I continue, I want to explain what I mention above, namely that I realized that my spiritual development was tied to my understanding of who Jesus was. Basically, when I focused on breaking free from my Catholic programming, I noticed that Jesus still played a central role in my spiritual life. That means that, despite years of training in alternative spiritual practices, I was still using his teachings as my basis for comparison. I preferred spiritual paths that confirmed his teachings as well as preferring teachers who had a similar moral and ethical standard. That would have been easier if Jesus' teachings were simple and clear, but the reality is that his teachings are open to interpretation. The gospels have many contradictory statements in them and the different Christian sects differ greatly in their understanding of what Jesus might have taught or believed about many things. What's a spiritual person to make of that?

Looking more closely, I realized that Jesus' central role in my spiritual universe made perfect sense: as a child, I had been programmed to believe that he was necessary for my salvation, regardless of what his teachings meant. In simple terms, he was God incarnate while I was said to be a lost soul needing rescue. He was the healer and I was told I needed healing. He could work miracles and I supposedly needed a miracle to survive life's temptations. Actually, I didn't perceive him that way as an adult, but that didn't change my unconscious programming that siad I was completely dependent on his goodwill. I could tell that a part of me was afraid to break free of this dependence. I would frame my fear in the form of two questions: what if I was wrong and he actually was God incarnate? What if his teachings are correct and I lose my chance for spiritual fulfillment by ignoring them?

So I embarked on a quest to learn as much as I could about the historical Jesus as a way to learn more about myself. Obviously, my identity was tied to his somehow. I wanted to learn as much as I could about Jesus to see if that might free me from the programming that was limiting me so effectively. I spent more than ten years reading and studying all the well-known historical treatments on Jesus and gladly followed any promising tangents dealing with the history of that era. I was disappointed by the lack of agreement among authors regarding the simplest so-called facts of Jesus' life and was appalled by the extent to which the gospel writings had been edited and modified by later writers. After ten years, I still hadn't reached many conclusions about him. I experienced a breakthrough when I read Robert Eisenmann's James, the Brother of Jesus (see the historical section of the Related Readings pages). My culminating insights occurred while reading Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy's The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God? (see the gnosticism section of the Related Readings pages) in 2001. The following paragraphs express my present understanding regarding Jesus' historical existence.

Jesus in not an actual historical person. His life and story is a myth. Jesus is the main character of a Gnostic myth that was created by some Jewish Gnostics that wanted to renew Judaism and bring new people into their beleaguered religion/culture that was suffocating under Roman occupation. All Gnostic groups have myths, stories that attract people to the movement. This groups of Jewish Gnostics created a story about a beleaguered Jewish martyr named Jesus. When a person encounters this story for the first time, it sounds like an historical event. If the person is drawn to the story and the movement surrounding the story, he or she is gradually initiated into deeper levels of meaning and taught to understand its allegorical interpretation, ways in which this story describes and enacts a spiritual transformation within the seeker. The point of the story changes, then, from describing a historical event to inducing understanding and activating a personal transformation in the aspirant's spiritual life.

That makes perfect sense to me. None of the other interpretations of Jesus' life and ministry ultimately make nearly as much sense to me. Looking back now I can see how the pieces of information that the different biblical scholars collected fit together. For example, I was excited to read James, the Brother of Jesus, by Robert Eisenmann about eight years ago. Since there is so little historical information on Jesus because no one apparently thought to write much down, Eisenmann decided to study the abundant historical information available on his brother James instead. He reasoned that James became the first head of the Christian Church and was denoted as such by Jesus in the Gospels. Since the Gospels also described James as Jesus' brother, Eisenmann figured that knowing the details of James life, beliefs and activities would surely shed more light on the person of Jesus than all the historical speculation centered around the few scant references to Jesus made by historians writing during that period.

Eisenmann created a masterful work, close to one thousand pages, that detailed the life and teachings of James as well as his eventual martyrdom at the hands of the officials. Interestingly, the life and teachings of James differ dramatically from those of Jesus. The picture of Jesus that has survived through the ages does not correspond well with this description of his brother, his appointed successor and his most trusted contemporary. At the time I read Eisenmann's book, I believed that I was finally seeing into Jesus' actual mission and teachings. Looking back, now, I see it as supportive evidence for my inevitable conclusion. The reason there is so much historical data on James while there is virtually no information about Jesus outside the New Testament is that James was a historical person while Jesus is not.

As it turns out, it was James' murder, not Jesus', that set off the Jewish rebellion against Roman occupation that resulted in the Roman annihilation of Jerusalem, their temple and the Jewish people. So complete and effective was this genocide that few of the zealous Jews or early Christians survived the slaughter. In general, those that were killed during the rebellion were those who so strongly opposed the Roman occupation that they preferred death to continuing to live under its domination. That quality characterized the fundamentalist, zealot and Essene movements within Judaism and included the early Christian movement as well, given that early Christianity was essentially a reform movement within Jewish tradition. When all the leaders and adherents of this radically rebellious movement were destroyed by the Romans, few people remained who truly represented these traditions for later civilization.

Most of the survivors of the carnage were Jews already resigned to the Roman occupation who cooperated with the Romans. They were hated by the zealous factions of Judaism as coopted supporters of the Roman empire and traitors to the Jewish people. Although they were a minority before the great genocide of 72 CE when Jerusalem was destroyed, they formed a great majority of the surviving Jews and Christians afterwards. As a result, neither the Judaism nor the Christianity that survived the massacre resembled the versions that had thrived before the war. How could they? The survivors recreated their religions around the beliefs and compromises that had enabled them to survive the war and would endear them to Roman authorities in the foreseeable future. In particular, few Christians remained who had been initiated into the mysteries surrounding the Gnostic stories of Jesus. The majority of those who remained had only been taught the story as if it were literally true. So began the conflict between the Gnostic and hierarchical forms of Christianity that were not resolved until the hierarchical Church gained enough political power to have their Gnostic counterparts condemned as heretics and routinely slaughtered for their beliefs.

Thinking of Jesus' story as myth explains why so many of his teachings, including the Sermon on the Mount, can be found in earlier Egyptian writings. One historian, Morton Smith, had used this coincidence to speculate that Jesus was actually an Egyptian magician. From my point of view, it's reasonable to imagine that these important Egyptian gnostic teachings were incorporated into the stories of Jesus as a way to introduce them to the Jewish populace.