Confronting the Mythicists

NT revision in the line of Earl Doherty is based on the belief that Paul wrote before the Gospels. Doherty shows that Paul depicts a heavenly Christ (a myth) that has no connections with the Gospels. Jesus was later transformed into a man by the evangelist writers.

The DSS Messiah Code shows that the tandem Qumran Messiahs represented community clans. A winning Priestly Messiah engendered by God is overpowering a lesser David Messiah. The Gospels use the same modus operandi in their texts with a winning Messiah, also engendered by God, representing a clan against the second Gospel Messiah John the Baptist. Representing clans means that the two Gospel Messiahs were invented by the first evangelist writer Mark to be able to register the community dissent from his point of view. Having been composed around 75 AD also means that Jerusalem is no more than a historical niche that suited the writer's purpose. Nothing real happened during the Pilate years, accounting for the complete lack of extra biblical contemporary witnesses. It also means that nobody could write about Jesus before the Gospels were composed. Exit Paul's so called anteriority and exit the mythicist's construction. The simple fact that Paul speaks of Jesus and the resurrection therefore connects him directly to the Gospel community. He was initially against them, turned his coat and taught a very biased message to the Greco-Romans.

I will explain more in another article.

Doherty, rejecting the Scroll antecedents, has little understanding of the implications of the Scroll's Messiah Code. This is what he wrote to one of his 'disciples(?)'

"This may not come as a surprise, but Chris Albert Wells' review makes little sense to me. He is letting some kind of pet theory of his override other considerations. In fact, what he says is really quite garbled, and I cannot understand what he is claiming. When is he dating Paul? Is he claiming Paul really existed, but lived and wrote after the Gospels were written? Some radical scholarship (which I argue against) claims the Pauline letters are 2nd century forgeries, not written by the person they present, but this does not seem to be what Wells is saying. How early does he date the Gospels? He doesn't say, though I trust he does not do so before 70 CE. Where is his evidence that Paul, if an authentic author, wrote after the Gospels? My book (and the work of other mythicists) demonstrates that the Pauline letters contain virtually nothing that could be derived from the Gospels or the traditions they contain, so how is that cart to be placed after that horse? It is in fact more common (though infrequent) to claim that Mark knew Paul and that his Gospel is derived from Pauline principles, though I disagree, since any commonalities between the two are only broadly general and even trivial.

"What is he claiming about Eusebius, who is notoriously unreliable about Christian traditions? Here again he is garbled and unclear. What does "the early writings of the founders of the Scroll community were probably the Gospels and Epistles before they were written" mean? (As stated, it is non-sensical.) What did the Scroll community write that constituted specific antecedents of the Gospels and epistles? One might as well say that Plato was the antecedent of the epistles, since the latter contain clear Platonic philosophy and cosmology, but does that mean the epistles are directly dependent on the writings of Plato? The Scrolls are about Jewish scriptural exegesis and Messiah expectation, and the New Testament writings involve the same, but that doesn't mean that the Gospels and epistles came out of the Essene community, merely that they reflect certain general ideas that lay in the thinking and expectation of the times-and in fact they treat them quite differently. He says: "The connection between Scrolls and Gospels is necessarily Messiah-mediated." Yes, they're both about Messiahs, but so what? That simple fact does not create some kind of meaningful connection or direct derivation between the one and the other. None of this does anything to discredit my case, let alone illustrate that Paul and the epistles came after the Gospels.

"If Wells wants to present a background picture of how ideas of the times influenced Christianity, and how Christianity reflects a development of earlier broad concepts, this is fine (the history of ideas always follows such a pattern), and fits my own views of the early Christian movement as a syncretism and evolution on such antecedents. But I fail to see how he goes from this to the claims he makes about the early documentary record. I "dismiss" the Scrolls community in less than one page because I don't see any reason to subscribe to a popular view that Jesus or John the Baptist was an Essene, or that the roots of the Gospels and epistles can be found at Qumran. Wells seems to reflect this in saying: "but Jesus is not even a myth (initially), but had a very precise meaning within the Essene community before it turned into a Christian one." This, too, is extremely unclear. What? Jesus lived among the Essenes, which is why he is not a myth? "Jesus" was a "meaning" but not a myth? I have no idea what he is talking about."