1] Jesus of Nazareth and the Gospel story cannot be found in Christian writings
earlier than the Gospels, the first of which (Mark) was composed only toward the
end of the first century CE.
[2] There is no non-Christian reference to Jesus earlier than the second century.
The two references in Flavius Josephus (end of the first century) are unreliable
and can be dismissed in their entirety as later Christian insertions.
[3] The early epistles, such as Paul and Hebrews, speak of their Christ Jesus
(Messiah Savior) as a spiritual, heavenly being, one revealed by God through
scripture, and do not equate him with a recent historical man. Paul is part of a
new salvation movement acting on revelation from the Spirit.
[4] Paul and other early writers place the death and resurrection of their Christ
in the supernatural/mythical world based on Platonic and Semitic cosmology,
and derive their information about these events, as well as other features of their
heavenly Christ, from scripture.
[5] The ancients viewed the universe as finite and multi-layered: matter below,
spirit above. The higher world of the heavens was regarded as the superior,
genuine reality, where spiritual processes and heavenly counterparts to earthly
things were located. Paul's Christ operates within this system.
[6] The pagan "mystery cults" of the period worshiped savior deities who had
performed salvific acts. Under the influence of Platonism, these acts came to be
interpreted by the cults as taking place in the supernatural/mythical world, not on
earth or in history. The Pauline Christ was similarly regarded as undergoing
death and resurrection in the heavenly realm. This new Christ belief also shared
other mythological concepts current in the ancient world.
[7] The most prominent philosophical-religious concept of the period was the
intermediary Son, a spiritual channel between the ultimate transcendent God and
humanity. Such intermediary concepts as the Greek Logos and Jewish
personified Wisdom were models for Paul's heavenly Christ and Son, who took
on an additional, sacrificial role under the inspiration of scripture.
[8] All the Gospels derive their basic story of Jesus of Nazareth from one
source: the Gospel of Mark, the first one composed. Subsequent evangelists
reworked Mark in their own interests and added new material. None of the
evangelists show any concern for creating genuine history. The Acts of the
Apostles as an account of the beginnings of the Christian apostolic movement is
historically unreliable, a second century piece of legend-making.
[9] The Gospels were not written as historical accounts, but present a symbolic
representation of a Galilean kingdom-preaching sect, combined with a fictional
passion story set on earth, probably meant to allegorize the heavenly Christ's
death and resurrection in the supernatural realm. They are constructed through
the process of "midrash," a Jewish method of reworking old biblical passages
and tales to reflect new beliefs. The story of Jesus' trial and crucifixion is a
pastiche of verses from scripture, and has nothing to do with "history
remembered."
[10] "Q" is a lost sayings collection extracted from Matthew and Luke, and
made no reference to a death and resurrection, or soteriological role for its Jesus.
It can be shown to have had no Jesus figure at its roots: some of which roots
were ultimately non-Jewish. The Q community preached the imminent coming of
the kingdom of God and the arrival of the heavenly Son of Man, and its
traditions were eventually assigned to an invented founder who was combined
with the spiritual Christ Jesus of the Pauline type in the Gospel of Mark. The
case for the existence of Q is much superior to any alternative explanation for the common material in Matthew and Luke.
[11] The initial variety of sects and beliefs about a spiritual heavenly Christ and
Son of God, some with a revealer role, others with a sacrificial one, shows that
this broad movement began in many different places, a multiplicity of largely
independent and spontaneous developments based on the Jewish scriptures and
other religious expressions of the time, not as a response to a single individual or
point of origin.
[12] Well into the second century, many Christian documents lack or reject the
notion of a past human man as an element of their faith. The type of Christ belief
which became later orthodoxy developed only through the course of the second
century, to eventually gain dominance toward its end. Only gradually did the
