My interest in religion lies in understanding the myth-making process, whereby human teachers of timely philosophies are transformed into divine entities. For the case of the origins of Christianity, much of the early attempts at myth-making are preserved for us in the strata of the gospels; however, there is also much that has been lost due to calamities or later Pauline Christian persecutions of atavistic heresies.

Many Christians would object to the use of the term "myth-making" to explain the origins of Christianity: After all, "myths" are "lies", so if early Christians were making up myths about Jesus, then they would have knowingly been making up lies. But that is not how myth-making works; we can gain insight by examining the myth-making processes that are still occurring in Christianity today:

To damn or not to damn.

Today Christians disagree on whether there is a hell: one disgustedly denies that the lyrical God of love would cast anyone into fire, sulphur, and eternal torment, while another looks to the Bible, reads these passages and insists that it cannot be otherwise. Allegedly both of them worship the "same" God... The SAME God? How laughable! One could not hope to come across such polar opposites in all the myriad mythologies that man has hitherto concocted! And how do these different-yet-identical Gods arise? In this manner: the first Christian needs love; the second, certainty. While the second can attain "certainty" with credulous acceptance of the Bible and the contradictory God it describes, the first must resort to creating a different God. Not too different though; it is enough merely to excise the undesirable qualities from the old God: in that way she can worship the new God in the same manner, in the same churches that were designed for the old. Of course she would deny that she has created a new God: "God revealed the truth to me in prayer" or "I know that my God would not do such a thing" would be her explanation.

Jesus: Homey or Hymie?

The preachers and congregations of certain black churches appear to have made a remarkable discovery: Jesus was a black man! Putting aside the utter ridiculousness of the idea, let us seek as to how it arose. One does not have to search far: the answer of course lies in the persecution that they have suffered at the hands of whites. The community wraps the thick mantle of this persecution tightly about them, refusing to let go of it and using it to ward off all that associated with evil men, that is to say, white men. A white Jesus could not hope to penetrate through such a tough hide. But a black Jesus! Jesus the black god crucified by white men! The community would open its arms to embrace him! Why, if he didn't exist, they would need to create him!

What do these examples show us? Simply that people, using myth patterns already familiar to them and accepted in their communities, will freely create from these myths new Gods that are more relevant to their needs, and will believe in the new Gods wholeheartedly! Myth-making is the midwife by which the needs of men give birth to Gods.

After reflecting on these examples of modern day Christian myth-making, consider this: Would not it always have been so? Were the men and women of 1st century Galilee, Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Rome not subject to this same all too human tendency? Could not their needs have transformed a human teacher into the Son of God; could not this be the true origin of Christianity? "But how?", do you ask? In this way: Yeshua was a teacher. He lived in a land in which both Jewish and Greek cultures came in contact and conflict and the time was ripe for a synthesis of the two. Yeshua had a remarkably fruitful, timely idea - the Kingdom of God: it provided a vision for a new Israel, in which Jews and Gentiles could live together in harmony as equals in a spiritual realm conterminous with yet transcending the soulless political realm of their Roman rulers. After Yeshua's death his idea captured the imaginations of many Jews and Gentiles throughout the lands of the eastern mediterranean. They made of it a social experiment and developed it further: to accomodate the needs of the Gentiles they had to discard much of the Mosaic Law in which Gentiles are distinctly second-class citizens. And so against Yeshua's Kingdom there stood a powerful adversary - the Mosaic Law, the old covenant revealed to Moses by God himself! Why did the early Christians believe in their Kingdom, even though it stood in direct violation of this old covenant? Why, because they had heavily invested their spiritual energies into the Kingdom, and so they needed the Kingdom to become a new covenant for their new "Israel"! But by what authority could this new covenant hope to prevail against that revealed to the mightiest prophet of the "old" Israel? Why, it could only be because it was revealed not by any mere prophet of God, but by God's annointed, God's messiah, God's Son... in other words: God! They needed it to be so, for otherwise the new covenant would not have the authority to replace the old. And since they needed it to be so, these early Christians made it so! This is how Yeshua the Jewish Teacher became Jesus the Son of God; this is the true origin of Christianity.

For additional information, I'd recommend these books:

• Who wrote the New Testament?, by Burton Mack
• A marginal Jew: rethinking the historical Jesus, by John Meier

I have a secret plan to de-mythologize Jesus