6.  God Incarnate
=================
Christianity is the bastard progeny of Judaism.  It is the
basest of all national religions.
  -- Celsus, _True Discourse,_ c. 178

Jesus saves.  At least that is what evangelical Christians say.
Apparently he saves them from evil spirits, from the unforgivable sins
that taint their souls, even from death.  He also manages to help out
more liberal, scholarly Christians.  He saves them from despair, the
sense that nothing really matters.  Jesus leads to God our loving
Father, though whether he is _the_ way to God does not seem so clear
anymore.  Not bad, for a dead Jewish preacher.  Unfortunately, all we
know about Jesus are uncertain bits and pieces we dig up from under
Christian myths.  Scholars paint many pictures of Jesus, always all
too human.  Not God, not even a way to God.

1.  In Search of Jesus
----------------------
According to traditional Christianity, Jesus is our Redeemer, the
Perfect Man, the sacrifice for our sins, our Judge when we come to
account for our deeds.  In fact, Jesus _is_ God, fully human and fully
divine at once.  This is like saying something is both fully a
fruitcake and a complete fruitbat; nonsense to the infidel, a profound
and fruitful doctrine to Christian philosophers.  And at no extra
charge, traditional Christianity also throws in a Holy Spirit to make
three gods in one.

Whether it makes sense or not, Western culture has certainly treated
Jesus as God.  Jesus's deity is not a dry doctrine recited at boring
church services; like any god worth the name, he appears as the
leading figure in our myths.  And like any good myth, we keep
rewriting the story of Jesus to fit our time and place.[1] This myth
is all the more powerful because we think it is history: there is
supposed to be an orthodox, gospel truth about Jesus.  Conservative
Christians insist that the stories told in the four canonical gospels
of the New Testament are more or less accurate; that Jesus, as
declared in the Apostle's Creed, was "born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and
buried;. . . the third day he rose again from the dead." Jesus, Son of
God and God himself, went around Palestine preaching and performing
miracles, fulfilled the prophecies in the Jewish scriptures, and died
a horrible death in order to save from Satan all who believe in him.

If the traditional Christian story was real history, a God could help 
us make sense of these events.  It seems Jesus was at the center of an 
awesome outpouring of supernatural power; furthermore, his life 
confirmed and completed the revelations given to the Jews.  Jesus was 
at least a great prophet, perhaps the focal point of God's plan for 
creation, maybe even God Incarnate.

Conservative Christians also tell us why we should trust their story.  
After Jesus was crucified, he rose from the dead and ascended to 
heaven.  His apostles started proclaiming the good news, faithfully 
preserving the memory of Jesus's words and deeds.  This first 
generation passed on the true understanding of Jesus as both God and 
man, which was expressed in the early creeds of the holy Catholic 
Church.  The gospels were based on eyewitness testimony, written by 
disciples or their close companions.

Like so much in old-time religion, the Christian story began to fall
apart a few centuries ago.  Through the eyes of the church, the
canonical gospels were a harmonious whole, complementing one another
with their different points of view.  As historical documents,
however, it was hard not to notice the gospels told very different
stories.  In the gospel we call Mark, for example, Jesus is a
wandering miracle-worker who talks of the coming Kingdom of God.
However, he also takes care to keep his message and his status a
secret.  Even his disciples are a bumbling lot, unable to grasp what
is going on.  In the gospel of John, Jesus is a different
character---an unearthly Redeemer come down from heaven.  This Jesus
does not keep quiet about his divinity; though once again his message
is not for the Jews, who seem quite incapable of understanding him.
Mark tells us the end of the world is near, John stays away from an
immediate apocalypse.  Even common events in their stories occur at
different times.  For example, they say Jesus caused an incident in
the Jerusalem Temple by overturning the tables of the moneychangers.
In Mark, this happens at the end of Jesus's public career, shortly
before his crucifixion.  In John, it comes at the very beginning.

Conservative Christians still try and harmonize the conflicting
stories in their gospels, especially where important miracles like
Jesus's resurrection are at stake.[2] Mainstream scholars have long
given up on this; the gospels look different because they _are_
different stories.  Our gospels are heavily edited collections of
traditions; they were origin myths for different Christian
communities, not historical biographies.  For example, themes like
Mark's messianic secret arose because the gospel writers had to
explain why Christianity failed to catch on among most Jews.  The
tradition about disciples faithfully transmitting the orthodox story
is very dubious; the gospels are actually anonymous works dating from
70--120 CE, long after the crucifixion in the early 30's.  Mark is the
earliest gospel, loosely stringing together stories about Jesus to
create a narrative.  Matthew and Luke use Mark as a source along with
a sayings gospel known as "Q," and also throw in independent
traditions and their creative imagination.  John spins a different
tale, put together mostly from different traditions.[3] There were
many early Christianities, all producing myths to justify their
existence.  Our gospels survived because they fit the emerging
orthodox ideology; others were suppressed or forgotten.  Like Islam,
Christianity has murky origins; sorting out actual history from
fictions created for political and theological purposes is very
difficult.

To recover hints of history, scholars have to perform a kind of
textual archaeology, uncovering different layers of composition,
trying to find material expressing earlier beliefs rather than the
needs of the author's community.  The results are often quite curious.
For example, among the earliest statements in the New Testament about
the nature of Jesus, some say Jesus was adopted as the Son of God at
his resurrection.  In Romans 1:3-4 the apostle Paul says, "on the
human level he was a descendant of David, but on the level of the
spirit---the Holy Spirit---he was proclaimed Son of God by an act of
power that raised him from the dead." Paul is here probably quoting an
already existing creed, which suggests the resurrection story began as
a tale about how God vindicated a martyr by raising him from the
dead.[4]

Most Christians naturally find modern scholarship hard to accept.
Creationist Henry M.  Morris says "Just as creation is the most
certain truth of real science, so the bodily resurrection of Jesus
Christ is the most certain fact of genuine history."[5] Unfortunately,
the orthodox story has become as unbelievable as special creation.
Liberal Christians who took critical history seriously ended up
dismantling traditional beliefs.  The old creeds are no longer
literally true for liberal theologians; even the idea of God Incarnate
has become a mythical way of expressing the significance of Jesus.[6]
We see God shining through in the radical novelty Jesus introduced
into history, not in fantastic miracles or how history followed a
salvation plan scripted in heaven.  The Resurrection is not important
because a corpse got up and walked, but because a mysterious event
beyond the ordinary must have propelled the radical vision of
Christian faith into the world.

Much has changed since the days we lived in Christendom, but many of
us still understand God through Jesus.  We go in search of Jesus to
find out whether our spiritual hopes have substance.  Conservative
Christians still proclaim the old stories.  Indeed, critical history
could have supported their views, giving us reason to suspect there is
a God.  Liberals retreat from supernatural claims, but still hope to
find inspiration in the historical Jesus.  And infidels, of course,
love to criticize the Christian story, from its historical
inaccuracies to its moral shortcomings.

Now we run into a problem.  Our search for Jesus seems to produce too
many different results.  As John Dominic Crossan observes in his own
biography of Jesus, "Historical Jesus research is becoming something
of a bad joke" on account of "the number of competent and even eminent
scholars producing pictures of Jesus at wide variance with one
another."[7] Crossan's Jesus is a peasant sage; we also find
apocalyptic prophets, faith healers, magicians, Jewish nationalists,
bandits, rabbis and more.  Scholars have a disturbing tendency to come
up with portraits of Jesus which reflect their own circumstances.
John C.  Mellon, for example, argues that Mark was produced by a
community of alcoholics, and describes Jesus as a humbled person on
the road to recovery.  Mellon is himself a recovering alcoholic, and
sees signs of the spirituality of modern twelve-step recovery
movements in Mark.[8] It seems we have too many ideas about Jesus but
too little evidence to converge on a single picture.

So we will not find a clear-cut Jesus which satisfies all our
historical curiosity.  But we can at least look at some of the more
plausible portraits of Jesus, and try and understand how the myths and
supernatural claims behind the traditional story came about.  We do
not know much about Jesus, and there is much we probably never will
know.  Even so, we know enough to be able to see Jesus as a human
being---without bringing in supernatural powers, or indeed any sort of
God.

2.  An Apocalyptic Prophet
--------------------------
Some gospel stories are probably historical.  Mark begins with John
the Baptist dunking Jesus in the Jordan river.  It would be peculiar
for the eternal Son of God to start out with a baptism for the
forgiveness of sins, subordinating himself to John.  The later gospels
alter the story to emphasize Jesus's superiority; Matthew 3:14 makes
John say "It is I who need to be baptized by you." When we find
potentially embarrassing material in our gospels, there is a good
chance it was not invented to glorify Jesus.  The story of Jesus's
baptism probably has historical roots, or is at least an early
tradition too well known to be censored by the gospel writers.

Some gospel stories are myths.  Matthew and Luke start with two
different fairy tales about Jesus's birth of a virgin and his
precocious infancy.  We know these tales are fiction because they are
fantastic to begin with, they contradict one another, and they get
their history wrong when they make claims we can check independently.
When Muslims invented stories about how Muhammad's birth and childhood
foreshadowed his prophethood, they were following a long tradition of
imagining their leader's life as that of an ideal prophet.  Christians
did the same.[9]

We want to strip away the layers of Christian myth to get at the
historical Jesus.  Unfortunately, Jesus seems to have become a figure
of myth so quickly that finding the actual Jesus is an infuriatingly
difficult task.  We are not completely in the dark, of course; it is
fairly obvious that a story like Jesus's baptism is much more credible
than the Virgin Birth.  But we cannot just start digging in the gospel
texts armed with some rules about what is more credible.  For example,
if we start collecting embarrassing stories which go against the
sensibilities of early Judaism or the emerging church ideology, we
will end up with some episodes which have a reasonable claim to be
historical.  But if we stop there, we will be left with a biased
picture of Jesus.  Surely Jesus said many things which were perfectly
in line with the Judaism of his time, and early church ideology may
well have been based in part on the memory of Jesus.[10] Some
theologians like a picture of Jesus which makes him look unique in his
time and place, but this is bad history.

To hold our picture of Jesus together, we need to see Jesus as a man
of his times, inhabiting a social and cultural environment.  Of
course, we can fit Jesus into many social roles: prophet, teacher,
revolutionary, healer, and so on.  So we have to look at the
alternatives, and see if any one best makes sense of the historical
evidence and the fact that early Christians created so many fantastic
tales about Jesus.

The most straightforward starting point is to think of Jesus as a Jew.
The New Testament was written in Greek, when Christianity was
increasingly becoming a non-Jewish religion.  Myths like the virgin
birth of a savior-god have a very Greek flavor.  But the first
Christians were Jews, and the gospel stories take place in a Jewish
environment.  The stories are steeped in Jewish beliefs about God,
angels and devils, prophecies and apocalyptic upheavals.  So it is
reasonable to think that Jesus was a wandering Jewish preacher and
healer who was put to death by the Romans occupying Palestine, quite
possibly with the collusion of Jewish priestly elites.  He probably
was not a military insurrectionist, since the Romans did not round up
and execute his followers.  The gospel stories would then be correct
in outline, though much embellished by a mythic imagination and the
apologetic concerns of later Christian communities.

This bare outline does not tell us much of Jesus, what he taught, or
why he was crucified.  But upon looking closer at the New Testament
stories, many scholars have encountered an apocalyptic prophet.  This
does not mean Jesus was the ancient equivalent of a wild-eyed man
bearing a "Repent, The End is Near" sign; rather, scholars such as
E.P.  Sanders and Paula Fredriksen portray a prophet of Jewish
restoration.[11] Restoration theology expected the imminent redemption
of Israel and a Gentile world which would recognize the sovereignty of
Yahweh.  The Bible's prophecies for Israel would be fulfilled.  A
Messiah would come---perhaps to restore the Davidic monarchy.  The
Temple in Jerusalem would be destroyed and re-erected by a miracle of
God, the dead would be resurrected, and much more.  Jesus believed
God's Kingdom on earth was near, and that he was charged with
announcing its coming.

E.P.  Sanders describes Roman Palestine in Jesus's time as a buffer
zone for an empire; not heavily occupied, not close to revolt.  Jews
were not on the edge of their seats with messianic hopes, though many
did expect some sort of divine intervention.  Most religious people in
fact preferred to be ruled by priests rather than a king.  In this
environment, Jesus was "an individual who was convinced that he knew
the will of God."[12]

Sanders's Jesus starts out with John's baptism, and like John the 
Baptist, proclaims a message squarely in the tradition of Jewish 
restoration theology:

    Jesus saw himself as God's last messenger before the establishment
    of the kingdom.  He looked for a new order, created by a mighty
    act of God.  In the new order the twelve tribes would be
    reassembled, there would be a new temple, force of arms would not
    be needed, divorce would be neither necessary nor permitted,
    outcasts---even the wicked---would have a place, and Jesus and his
    disciples---the poor, meek and lowly---would have the leading
    role.[13]

Signs of restoration theology are all over the New Testament.  For
example, take the story about Jesus overturning the tables of the
money-changers and pigeon-sellers in the Jerusalem Temple.  Christian
tradition saw this episode as Jesus cleansing the Temple.  Judaism,
the story goes, was trapped in ritual rigidities, and even Temple
worship was corrupted by crass commercial activity.  But this does not
make sense.  Pilgrims from all over needed to purchase unblemished
animals for their ritual sacrifices.  Money-changers and
pigeon-sellers were performing a vital service, not corrupting the
Temple.  And Jesus's disciples continued to worship in the Temple
after Jesus's death---not exactly an indication that Jesus condemned
normal Temple observance.  Jesus thought the Temple's days were
numbered, not that it was corrupt.[14] In Mark 14:58, Jesus says "I
will pull down this temple, made with human hands, and in three days I
will build another, not made with hands." Overturning tables was an
act symbolizing imminent destruction, exactly what Jesus threatened
would happen to the Temple.  This destruction was a prelude to a
miraculous rebuilding at the coming of God's Kingdom.

Other actions of Jesus also make sense when we see them as part of his 
hope for Israel's restoration.  As Paula Fredriksen remarks, the 
gospels, even though they have a different theology, preserve signs of 
a prophet of restoration:

    his calling twelve disciples to represent all the tribes of
    eschatological Israel; his intensification of the ethical norms
    embodied in Torah; his journey to Jerusalem to greet the coming
    Kingdom; his prophetic gesture at the Temple, in anticipation of a
    Temple not made by hands; his prophecy of the imminent fulfillment
    of God's promises to Israel revealed in Torah.[15]

This sort of restoration obviously requires divine intervention.  So
Jesus and his followers expected to be delivered by a great miracle,
not military force.  Jesus may have entered Jerusalem preaching
apocalypse and restoration, which could well mean that Jewish elites
saw him as yet another troublemaker stirring up people and inviting a
violent Roman response.  He would have been tried and executed in an
offhand manner---like John the Baptist---but his disciples would be
left alone as they were harmless without a leader.

What about Jesus's teachings, which Christians have thought to be a
radical novelty, a revelation of how God wants us to live with one
another?  Sanders points out that Jesus's preaching was distinctive
since he did not call for _national_ repentance: "His special mission
was to promise inclusion in the coming kingdom to the outsiders, the
wicked, if they heeded the call."[16] But though Jesus was not
mainstream in the way he emphasized the wicked and downplayed
repentance, this did not place him in opposition to Judaism.  The
"legalistic, externalistic Judaism" rejected by Jesus in favor of
grace and inner experience is a Christian myth, not history; the
notion that Jesus was killed by the Jews for preaching God's grace is
sheer nonsense.  Christians have traditionally thought their God
Incarnate must stand out by his uniqueness, but Sanders argues that
"we cannot say that a single one of the things known about Jesus is
unique: neither his miracles, non-violence, eschatological hope or
promise to the outcasts."[17]

As an apocalyptic prophet, Jesus is believable; a man of his time and
place.  With such a Jesus, we can be conservative about the New
Testament.  Though garbled and presented through theological
perspectives different from that of Jesus, much in the Christian story
is based on actual history.  But now how do we explain Christianity?
How does a Jewish apocalyptic prophet who was dead wrong about the
coming Kingdom and who was crucified as a pest end up starting a Greek
religion?

Since we are being conservative, we can continue with the gospel
stories.  These say that shortly after Jesus's crucifixion, his
disciples had visions of him, apparently risen from the dead.  The
accounts we have of these experiences are a complete mess, and a
belief like a resurrection would naturally acquire a very heavy
overlay of myth, no matter what the initial experiences were.  So we
cannot say much that is definite.  The disciples were expecting a
great miracle to usher in the Kingdom, so they may well have been
susceptible to seeing ghosts.  More importantly, their psychological
investment in the coming Kingdom was very strong, and Jesus's
unexpected execution would seem to make the prospects for this rather
unlikely.  Committed believers often respond to failed prophecy by
reaffirming their beliefs with slight changes and becoming zealous
missionaries.[18] Whether the disciples saw visions or not, they
responded this way.  They began to proclaim that their apocalyptic
hopes would be realized when Jesus came again, which was sure to take
place very soon.  If Jesus had expected the Son of Man announced by
the book of Daniel to arrive soon, the early Christians would begin to
think Jesus was actually referring to himself.

There is still a long way to go between revived hopes of Jewish 
restoration and the increasingly Greek Christianity of the New 
Testament.  Apocalyptic beliefs are conservative: they promise 
supernatural vindication for social values which are under attack.  
Why would Gentiles be attracted to ideals of Jewish restoration?

This is a difficult question, and some scholars resort to extreme
measures to answer it.  Hyam Maccoby argues that Gentiles were in fact
not attracted to the historical Jesus.  Jesus and his disciples were
observant, conservative Jews; Jesus claimed to be a messiah who would
restore the Davidic monarchy.  The true followers of Jesus made up the
early Jerusalem church, which the New Testament describes as being
strictly obedient to Jewish religious laws.  The apostle Paul, whom
Maccoby thinks was only superficially a Jew, invented Christianity.
He founded a libertine Hellenistic religion combining features of a
mystery cult and gnostic belief in saving knowledge brought by a
heavenly Redeemer, and made it more attractive and permanent by
claiming that the Jewish religious epic was really all about Christ.
The diverse theologies we see in the New Testament were generated by
the rivalry of Pauline and Jewish Christianity.[19]

Now, Paul was certainly very influential in shaping Christianity and
in bringing the new religion to the non-Jewish world.  But most
scholars think Paul was in fact an orthodox Jew before his
conversion,[20] and they look for reasons other than Paul's creativity
to explain how hopes for Jewish restoration started a Greek religion.
Most importantly, restoration theology expected that at the End Times,
the Gentiles would also come to know God and be redeemed.  A
missionary group proclaiming restoration may have tried to bring
Gentiles into the Kingdom as well.  Furthermore, Greek and Jewish
culture was not radically separate; there were plenty of Hellenized
Jews and "God-fearers" among Gentiles who were interested in Jewish
religion.  So an apocalyptic message may well have been a starting
point for a religious movement bringing together Jews and Gentiles at
the margins of society.

Jesus's apocalyptic prophecies had failed with his execution, but his
disciples had resurrected their hopes and sought new converts.
However, in a few decades the small but expanding Christian
communities faced failure once again, when Jesus neglected to return.
Christians made up marginal social groups expecting an imminent
miraculous change of the world, and they were beginning to get into
serious conflicts with mainstream Jews.  The gospel stories began to
take shape in such an environment.  Different Christian communities
responded to apocalyptic failure in diverse ways, making myths which
departed far from restoration theology.  To Paul, the second coming
was imminent; then Christians began to wait for the first generation
who had witnessed Jesus to die off.  Writing well into the second
century, the author of 2 Peter assured his readers that prophecy had
not failed, and told them that "In the Lord's sight one day is like a
thousand years and a thousand years like one day." Christian mythology
began to reflect the existence of an organized church, and started
falling into an orthodox mold.  Jesus started out as a failed prophet,
and ended up as God Incarnate who founded the universal Church.

This is a compelling account of Christian origins.  Scholars like E.P.
Sanders manage to explain the historical evidence, treat the gospels
as largely historical, and avoid being burdened by too much
theological baggage.  Of course, there are many points at which their
theory is strained.  While discussing how the diversity of early
Christian beliefs came about, proponents of an apocalyptic prophet
often resort to speculation, or call upon Christian experiences of the
Risen Lord as a catch-all explanation solving every difficulty.  This
does not mean Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet---history is full
of accidents, and when our evidence is poor in quality sometimes all
we can do is speculate on what kind of accidents which could have led
from Jesus to Christianity.  But it does mean we should look at other
portraits of Jesus, and see if they do a better job explaining
Christian mythmaking.

3.  Mythmaking
--------------
The early Christians were inventive, but theirs was not a haphazard 
creativity.  Jesus took on many mythic roles, and so his life had to 
reflect these roles.  He was, for example, the Messiah.  So Luke and 
Matthew list different genealogies to show Jesus was descended from 
king David---even though they also say he was not descended from any 
human male.  In other words, Christians made up historical fictions to 
satisfy their theologies.  They were not out to deceive people, but 
they were not critical historians.  They followed a mythic sense of 
how history ought to have been.  As Randel Helms remarks, they already 
knew what sort of story to produce:

    When the author of Mark set about writing his Gospel, circa 70
    !a.d.!, he did not have to work in an intellectual or literary
    vacuum.  The concept of mythical biography was basic to the
    thought-processes of his world, both Jewish and Graeco-Roman, with
    an outline and a vocabulary already universally accepted: a
    heavenly figure becomes incarnate as a man and the son of a deity,
    enters the world to perform saving acts, and then returns to
    heaven.[21]

New Jewish myths had to start from the Jewish religious epic.  So
Christians composed their tales with an eye on Jewish mythology,
convinced that Jesus fulfilled Old Testament promises.  Many Jews
outside of Palestine used the Septuagint, a Greek version of the Old
Testament.  As a result, our gospel stories often derive from the
Septuagint, sometimes showing close verbal parallels, even following
mistakes in the Greek translation.  For example, Matthew 1:23 quotes
the prophet Isaiah to say "a virgin will conceive and bear a
son"---obviously a prophecy of the Virgin Birth.  The Septuagint
passage speaks of a virgin, but the Hebrew original says only that a
young woman is with child; not to mention that its context has nothing
to do with Matthew's interpretation.

The gospels tell miracle stories about Jesus raising dead people, or
feeding multitudes with a few loaves and fishes.  These parallel the
Old Testament miracles of the prophets Elijah and Elisha; the gospels
even lift phrases straight out of the Septuagint.  Mark contains two
sets of five miracle stories, each beginning with a sea crossing,
continuing with exorcisms and healings, and ending with feeding five
or four thousand people.  Miraculous sea crossings and and feeding of
multitudes allude to the story of the Israelites' exodus from Egypt.
The healing stories, including Jesus raising Jairus's daughter, recall
Elijah and Elisha.  It seems that before Mark was put together, some
followers of Jesus began to imagine themselves as a new Israel.  So
they made myths which cast Jesus as a figure similar to Moses and
Elijah, except that his miracles were even more powerful.[22]

Our examples can be multiplied.  Christians elaborated their stories
based on the Jewish epic, and began to fashion a new, more Hellenistic
myth as Christianity became more Gentile.  However, this now brings up
an interesting question.  Christianity seems to have become a dumping
ground for so many myths that it becomes very difficult to say much
about the historical Jesus.  Even the evidence that leads us to think
Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet is not rock-solid.  A savior-figure,
for Jewish Christians, could well include stereotyped expectations
about a prophet of restoration, since restoration was part of their
story of salvation.  To further confuse matters, early Christianities
were precarious social experiments which would respond to hard times
by calling on the Jewish apocalyptic tradition.  So perhaps they cast
Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet only to fill yet another mythic role.
What, then, can we say about the historical Jesus at all?

Many rationalist critics of Christianity have suspected that the Jesus
stories are entirely mythical---that we cannot even say that Jesus was
a preacher in first-century Palestine who was executed by the
Romans.[23] Today, almost all historians of early Christianity think
it is preposterous to say Jesus never existed.  But G.A.  Wells still
defends a version of the myth theory, which at the least highlights
how little we really know of Jesus.[24]

Wells points out that non-Christian evidence for Jesus is virtually
non-existent.  We have a passage in the writings of Josephus, the
Jewish historian, but this is very obviously at least altered by
Christian scribes; Wells argues that the whole passage is
interpolated, and that in any case, Josephus was writing at a late
date and could have got his information from Christian sources.[25] A
few Roman historians mention Jesus, but their information probably
also derives from what Christians themselves claimed.  Even for a
minor prophetic failure, this lack of reliable independent
documentation is curious.

This would not mean much, if garbled historical memory was still the
best explanation for the gospel stories.  But what if we could see
signs of an originally unhistorical myth being elaborated over time,
even acquiring a historical setting for apologetic purposes?  We
suspect, for example, that Muslims fabricated many traditions, giving
them a concrete historical setting, though they addressed later
controversies in the Islamic Empire.  Wells argues that we can see a
process of myths becoming more concrete in the New Testament as well.

Aside from traditions incorporated into the gospels, Paul's letters
are our earliest Christian documents.  And these letters are
remarkably silent about the historical Jesus.  Paul loves supernatural
wonders as a sign of divine power, but he shows no knowledge of
Jesus's miracles.  He was struggling to assert his authority against
the church in Jerusalem, led by Peter, but he does not bring up the
story of Peter denying Christ.  He has plenty of advice for his
readers, but he almost never mentions that the earthly Jesus did or
taught the same thing.  Paul's Jesus is not a preacher and
miracle-worker only recently crucified in Jerusalem by the Romans, but
a pre-existing supernatural being who had descended into a world
dominated by hostile supernatural powers, lived in humble obscurity,
redeemed us through his death, and would come again very soon to usher
in the apocalypse.  Wells believes Paul's Jesus was a figure of myth
similar to Wisdom in Judaism.  Some Jews had begun to think of Wisdom
as the first creation of God, who participated in making the world,
and who came down to earth to seek a place among humans.  In some
versions of the myth, men reject Wisdom, so she returns to heaven; in
others, like in Ecclesiasticus 24, she makes her home in Jerusalem.
In 1 Corinthians 24, Paul calls Jesus "the power of God and the wisdom
of God."[26]

Other early letters besides those of Paul are also silent regarding
the historical Jesus.  Only after the gospels are composed do letter
writers begin to sprinkle biographical references in their
exhortations.  So Christian letter-writers had no objection to
detailed historical claims; their early silence suggests that they did
not know much about the historical Jesus.

Why, then, did Christians start giving their founder-figure a concrete
history?  Jesus had not returned as promised.  So Christians began to
emphasize how the first visit by Jesus was effective for salvation.
His sacrifice atoned for our sins, but Christians also began to think
he fulfilled scripture in a more comprehensive way, gave them ethical
instructions, and instituted church practices.  The Christ cult had
accumulated many teachings formulated by their leaders and by prophets
who spoke when possessed by Jesus's spirit.  Attributing these to
Jesus gave them a more definite authority.  The emerging church could
also use a more concrete Jesus, since the forerunners of orthodoxy
were constantly battling heretics.  There were Jewish Christians who
treated Jesus as no more than a great prophet; and proto-gnostics who
denied Jesus was human and interpreted their myth in individualist,
magical terms.  Hence stories about Jesus which made him a man who
walked the Palestinian soil, yet who was obviously much more than a
man.

Wells is correct to point out the massive mythmaking in early
Christianity.  However, it still is difficult to account for the
gospel stories by wholesale invention.  Why _our_ stories?  Why speak
of Jesus of Nazareth and cook up far-fetched tales about how he must
have been born in Bethlehem---would it not have been easier to avoid
the Nazareth business in the first place?  Of course, no such argument
can simply shoot down Wells's theory; though remote, it remains a real
possibility that Jesus never existed.  Such is the mess the New
Testament presents us.  If we want to show Wells is wrong, we have to
come up with a better theory of mythmaking.


Paul's Christians had no interest in history, only a supernatural
savior; they practiced cultic rituals like baptism and the Eucharist;
they engaged in faith-healing and became possessed by "the Spirit."
This was a Hellenistic Christ cult, the place where doctrines like
Jesus's atoning death and the proclamation of a Risen Lord came from.

The Christ cult, however, was not the only early Christian group.  In
fact, their focus on the story of Christ's death and resurrection did
not take over Christianity until much later.  Christian art begins to
obsess about Jesus's suffering and death only after the conversion of
the emperor Constantine.  Jonathan Z.  Smith observes that from our
non-literary evidence, early Christians appear as

    a heterogeneous collection of relatively small groups, marked off
    from their neighbors by a rite of initiation (chiefly, adult
    baptism), with their most conspicuous cultic act a common meal,
    and a variety of other activities that would lead a scholar to
    classify these groups as being highly focused on a cult of the
    dead.[27]

They seem to have cultivated the memory of their dead and believed in
a continuing relationship; Jesus's atoning death does not appear in
the picture.  We find signs of Christianities which were not
interested in Jesus's death in our texts as well.  For example,
Matthew and Luke incorporate a previous gospel scholars call "Q,"
which consists mainly of Jesus's sayings.  Q's Jesus is not a messiah,
a supernatural being, or a resurrected savior; he is a teacher which
inspired a novel social formation.  Burton L.  Mack points out that in
the "Jesus movements" there was none of the reflection on Jesus's
death which characterizes the Christ cult.  All Q does with Jesus's
death is to place it in the Jewish tradition about Israel killing its
prophets, reassuring the people of Q that they were correct in
following Jesus; nowhere does Jesus's death have any significance for
salvation.[28]

In fact, scholars like Mack find a bewildering variety of early
Christianities which imagined Jesus differently from the more familiar
Christ cult.[29] Paul tells us of the Jerusalem Church, made up of
orthodox Jews.  Mark's sets of miracle stories with Old Testament
themes probably come from a community which thought of themselves as
forming a new Israel.  Mark is also full of pronouncement stories
which picture Jesus like a founder of a philosophical school, produced
by a movement which found its identity in debate with orthodox Jews.
In the recently discovered Gospel of Thomas, we encounter an early
proto-gnostic community to whom Jesus was a Revealer of cosmic wisdom.
These communities and their stories have little in common beyond Jesus
as a founder-figure.

With a prophet of restoration, diversity came from apocalyptic
failure.  Christianity survived Jesus because of an obscure,
mysterious founding event which underlies our resurrection stories.
Mack, however, points out that the variety of early Christianities
causes difficulties for such conservative theories.  To understand
Christian origins, we must explain the mythmaking.  And mythmaking
takes place together with social experimentation: people tell new
stories about the world, trying to sanctify a new social ideal.  The
Jesus movements remembered Jesus as a teacher who called for a social
experiment, a Kingdom of God in which people from all ethnic and
social backgrounds would come together.  Jesus did not proclaim a
programmatic ideology; it fell to the the Jesus movements themselves
to imagine what the Kingdom meant and to flesh it out in their lives.
So we got diverging social groups which made different Jesus-myths.

This picture of Jesus as teacher is supported by some of the earliest
material dug out of the New Testament, which scholars such as John
Dominic Crossan have argued show Jesus to be a Cynic sage.  Cynics
were itinerant Hellenistic philosophers who made a career out of
poking fun at social conventions.  They behaved so as to upset the
usual order; and they relied on witty retorts and aphorisms, not
detailed ethical principles and teachings.  Crossan's Jesus is "a
peasant Jewish Cynic" who opposed the rigidly stratified order of an
agrarian society under imperial control; criticizing relationships of
patronage and rank, even the patriarchal family.[30]

Jesus encouraged social experiments, particularly experiments joining
together people from different cultures.  Jesus was from Galilee, a
province with a mix of peoples; not definitely Greek, not definitely
Jewish.  So he picked up the Greek example of Cynicism, but he infused
Jewish concerns about a proper community into Cynic individualism.  As
Mack puts it,

    two themes mark the genius of the [Jesus] movement.  One is a
    playful, edgy challenge to take up a countercultural lifestyle.
    . . . The closest analogy for this kind of invitation to live
    against the stream is found in Cynic discourse of the time.  It
    does appear that Jesus was attracted to this popular ethical
    philosophy as a way for individuals to keep their integrity in the
    midst of a compromising world.  The other theme is an interest in
    a social concept called the "kingdom of God." This concept was not
    worked out with any clarity, but the ways it was used show us that
    something of a social vision appeared in the teachings of Jesus.
    The kingdom of God referred to an ideal society imagined as an
    alternative to the way in which the world was working under the
    Romans.  But it also referred to an alternative way of life that
    anyone could take at any time.[31]

No wonder, then, that different communities all engaged in mythmaking
burst on the scene.  Christianity emerged out of this process, not
memories of Jesus's life, not the circumstances of his death.  The
Romans kill Crossan's Jesus offhandedly, without a trial, as a
potential source of trouble---the brutal execution of a peasant
non-entity would not attract much attention outside the circle of his
followers.  Jesus's body was most likely lost, cast in a pit to be
eaten by dogs.[32] The movements Jesus inspired later attracted
followers from the literate "retainer class," who would flesh out
their Jesus-stories by reflecting on Jewish scripture.  Jesus did not
return in a resurrected body; what happened was that Jesus's followers
remained committed to the ideal of a Kingdom where no one would be
oppressed.

The myths about Jesus quickly mutated.  Mack argues that we can see
stages in the composition of Q, corresponding to the changing
circumstances of the Q people.  Their experiment had taken a toll,
bringing them into conflict with traditional society.  So they began
to demand loyalty to the movement, setting themselves apart from the
unbelievers.  Eventually, their conflict with mainstream Jewish
identity led them to take up apocalyptic rhetoric, and make an inept
attempt to appropriate the Jewish epic in order to show that the
conventional Jews were wrong.  On top of the aphorisms and wisdom
sayings they had remembered Jesus by, they added a layer of
apocalyptic threats.[33]

The Christ cult evolved differently.  They proclaimed Jesus was a
martyr vindicated by being raised from the dead to God's side; and
they imagined a supernatural Kingdom of God, present and valid no
matter what the circumstances of this world.  Their social ideal was
still Jews and Gentiles coming together in fellowship.  So they
avoided concrete claims about Jesus's execution and resurrection, as
this would needlessly implicate priestly Judaism or the Romans as
oppressors.  The myth of the Risen Lord worked precisely _because_ it
ignored history.[34]

Mack believes our narrative gospels, particularly the story of Jesus's
passion and execution, came about because the author of Mark wanted to
join the myths of the Jesus movements to the resurrection story of the
Christ cult.  The Jesus movements had started out with an open
invitation to everyone, including the sinners and the wicked.
However, things did not go as they had hoped.  They were not able to
reform conventional society, and ended up as marginal groups which had
to exist independently.  Mark gave a rationale for this independent
existence in a new origin myth which used ideas from the Christ cult.
The Christ myth supplied martyr themes, a link to Wisdom traditions,
and made Jesus more than another rejected prophet.  Mark toned down
the cultic aspects of the Christ myth by historicizing it and joining
it to the figure of a teacher and prophet.  He wrote a mythical
biography portraying Jesus as more than a teacher, more than an
apocalyptic prophet, but as one whose life and death had cosmic
implications.[35]

Jesus may well have been a teacher after the Cynic mold; we can come
up with a plausible account of Christian origins this way.  Jesus's
vague ideas about how people should live caught fire, then fizzled
out; only to survive in the radically different form which is the
orthodox Christian myth.  Of course, no theory of Jesus we have is so
strong as to be _the_ answer.  A modern cynic will be suspicious of
this utopian-socialist Jesus---he seems too conveniently relevant to
today's socially engaged liberal churches.  Christianity was made by
communities at odds with the normal social order, and scholars
defending the Cynic hypothesis rightly focus our attention on social
history and mythmaking.  Yet somehow a teacher calling for social
experimentation seems unlikely to impress people so much that they
make bizarrely inflated myths about a Son of God.  We need to add
something more to the mix.

4.  A Miracle-Worker
--------------------
As an apocalyptic prophet or a Cynic teacher, Jesus is a man with a 
message.  He speaks words which inspire his followers to make a 
religion in his name.  But could words alone have such an effect?  
Muhammad impressed the faithful with his words, but he convinced them 
these words had a supernatural source.  He had regular esoteric 
experiences which put him in touch with God.  Jesus, the gospels tell 
us, knew the will of God and taught it.  But he also demonstrated that 
his message was certified by supernatural forces: he performed 
miracles.  Whether he was announcing the end of the world or a Kingdom 
where all could live as equals, he impressed people first of all with 
his supernatural connections.

Conservative Christians, quite reasonably, believe Jesus's miracles
are the best sign he was sent by God.  They even say Jesus
demonstrated the kind of control over nature only God could pull off.
He stilled storms, walked on water, created food.  When he died, there
was an earthquake and many of the dead were resurrected; or, if we
trust Luke rather than Matthew, a darkness fell over the land at
midday.  But these are obviously mythical.  No evidence exists for
them outside of Christian propaganda; not even all early Christian
movements testify to them.  And there are plenty of reasons to invent
miracle stories.  Miracles work wonders for origin myths and stories
enhancing Jesus's stature.  Old Testament-like miracles were supposed
to resume in Messianic times.  Indeed, the miracle stories in Mark and
John show signs of being crafted for apologetics, to parallel the
Jewish epic, and to be an origin myth for a new Israel.  And of
course, miracle stories were also useful for legitimating the
authority of the emerging church.[36]

Miracle stories about religious leaders are not unusual.  According to
Philostratus, a religious wonder-worker called Apollonius lived in the
first century !ce!, who performed miracles, raised the dead, and
exorcized demons.  He even rose from his own death, appeared to his
disciples, and ascended to heaven.[37] Muslims remembered Muhammad as
a channel for God's words rather than a miracle-worker, and they never
thought of him as a supernatural being.  But even he started appearing
in miracle stories.  His most striking nature miracle was when he
temporarily split the moon in two to demonstrate God's power to
infidels.

Jesus's healing miracles, however, are a different story.  Jesus often
deals with just the sort of psychological ailment a faith healer and
exorcist can cure.  Modern psychiatry recognizes many such problems,
including "conversion disorders" which lead to real loss of physical
functioning.  Ancient Galileans would not recognize these to be any
different from more straightforward organic disorders.[38] Jesus lived
in a time when everyone thought magic worked, and that the world was
infested with spirits and demons.  And naturally, the Mediterranean
world was also familiar with people who practiced magic, did exorcisms
and healings, and trafficked in esoteric experiences.  In Mark, Jesus
appears as just such a faith healer.  In his hometown, where people
knew him too well, he apparently did not find enough faith to work
with (Mark 6: 4-6).  Later he healed a blind man by spitting on his
eyes, which was not fully effective, and so he had another
go---apparently he could not just snap his fingers and produce a
miracle (Mark 8:22-26).

So Jesus practiced at least some small-time healing magic and
exorcism.  This would not be unusual for a teacher or prophet.  Muslim
tradition tells of Muhammad healing people by using the magical power
inherent in the words of the Qur'an.  Indeed, as a prophet, Muhammad
would have found it hard to avoid being a healer on occasion.  Magical
healing was probably much more important to Jesus's career.  John
Dominic Crossan argues that Jesus was a faith healer and folk
magician, and that this was part of his stand against established
authority.  After all, magic is "subversive, unofficial, unapproved,
and lower-class religion."[39] Someone who had a holy spirit,
exorcized demons and healed through magic would have been remembered
as a prophet as well.  Both Hellenistic holy men and Near eastern
prophets had ecstatic experiences and emanated healing power.  Old
Testament prophets were filled with the spirit of God.

Magic and ecstatic experience can help flesh out our picture of Jesus.  
But we should also explore whether we should think of Jesus primarily 
as a magician or healer rather than a man with a message.  After all, 
esoteric spirituality usually promotes an individual approach to the 
supernatural realm, not a social ideology.  If people believe a man 
has supernatural power, they will be impressed regardless of whether 
he taught much of anything.  And if Jesus used magic, we can more 
easily understand where the supernatural beliefs and cultic practices 
of the Christ cult came from.

According to Morton Smith, Jesus was a magician.  He believed that he
had acquired a supernatural spirit which gave him powers of healing
and exorcizing demons.  He also practiced magical techniques of
ascending into heaven, and taught these to his disciples.  In effect,
he started a mystery cult with baptism as a rite of initiation.  Smith
argues that the Kingdom of God was a supernatural realm accessible
through magic: "Initiates were given what they thought was an
experience of entering the heavens and they were thus trained to have
such visions as those reworked in the transfiguration and resurrection
stories." Such journeys into the heavenly kingdom are known from
magical texts, even the Dead Sea Scrolls.[40] In Mark 4:11, Jesus says
"To you the secret of the kingdom of God has been given; but to those
who are outside, everything comes by parables." If Smith is correct,
passages like these refer to an esoteric mystery granted only to an
inner circle.  This mystery was perhaps "a magical rite, by which
initiates were made to believe that they had entered the kingdom and
so escaped from the realm of Mosaic Law."[41] Those who have entered
the Kingdom or acquired the Spirit were no longer bound by the Law
given to the Jews.  The Christ cult and proto-gnostic groups continued
with personality-altering esoteric practices and the theme of being
released from the Law.

Ancient magicians performed rites to acquire a spirit and thus become
a god.  Magical papyri describe how the heavens open up, and the
spirit comes down in the form of a bird.  In Mark 1:10-11, Jesus
becomes the son of God after his baptism, when "he saw the heavens
break open and the Spirit descend on him, like a dove." Smith uses the
papyri to illuminate other obscure Christian passages and rituals.
For example, the Eucharist, where the disciples eat Jesus's body and
drink his blood in the form of bread and wine.  This is very similar
to rites magicians used to bind their disciples to themselves.

Just a set of parallels between magic and Christian scriptures would
be suggestive, but not much more.  Smith argues that other evidence
also leads to a magician.  If early Christians presented Jesus as a
miracle-worker, outsiders would accuse Jesus of being a magician.
Magic was a private relationship with supernatural beings, with
anti-social implications.  A big issue would be how to separate a
positive "divine man" from a shady magician.  Thus much of the
apologetic material in the gospels is driven by the need to respond to
charges that Jesus used magic.  Unbelievers must have accused Jesus of
having a demon---being a magician---so the gospels present Jesus as
producing wonders through his own power.  In Mark 3:22-30, for
example, we find that "the scribes" accused Jesus of being possessed
by Beelzebul, driving out demons by the prince of demons; Mark then
explains why this was not so.  Writings by rabbis and the pagan
philosopher Celsus indicate that non-Christians thought Jesus must be
a magician.  Early Christians were sporadically persecuted because
they were thought to belong to a magical association founded by Jesus.
And we know of other cases where a magician's followers responded to
accusations of magic by portraying their master as a holy man---most
notably Apollonius, that other first-century man who rose from the
dead and ascended to heaven.  Smith says such items of evidence "fit
together and give a coherent picture of a magician's life and his
work."[42]

Jesus the magician has not convinced many scholars.  Smith's magical
papyri do not reflect the world of folk magic; and his parallels
between the papyri and Jesus's practices are somewhat selective.
However, Smith forces us to take the esoteric experiences of early
Christians more seriously.  Whether it was conjured up by ritual magic
or not, Jesus's "spirit" probably had to do with strange psychological
experiences and altered personalities.  It is plausible that these
experiences---Jesus's spirit---remained available to the disciples
after Jesus's death, which led to a belief in his spiritual
resurrection.[43] And the spirit-filled prophets of the Christ cult
certainly did not pick up their habit from out of the blue.  We need,
if not ritual magic, another way of understanding Christian
supernatural experience; and we need, if not a magician, another
intelligible social type for Jesus explaining how he used such
experiences in his healing.

Recently, Stevan L.  Davies has argued that Jesus was a
spirit-possessed healer.  Smith's Jesus is a magician who thought he
possessed control _of_ a spirit, while Davies's Jesus believed he was
possessed _by_ a spirit.  Spirit-possessed healers are common in the
religions and magical practices of traditional peoples.  In modern
Western societies, we have Pentecostals who continue the Christian
tradition of spirit-possession and faith healing, and New Age
trance-channelers who speak in the voice of a being of light from a
distant galaxy.[44] It is very natural to interpret such experiences
in terms of folk theories which affirm that an outside spirit has
taken possession of the host body.

Many psychologists describe spirit-possession as an altered state of
consciousness; a state where part of the mind takes over the whole
stream of consciousness and adopts characteristics of a different
personality.  Others emphasize how the possessed person acts out a
social role appropriate to her ritual circumstances.[45] In any case,
nothing from outside descends on the brain.  A woman may use her role
as someone possessed by a powerful spirit to accuse her husband of
adultery, but she does not turn into a research chemist.  Beings of
light from far galaxies never give us new astrophysical knowledge,
only metaphysical verbiage.  Even so, spirit-possession is a powerful,
impressive experience.

Davies suggests that Jesus believed himself to be possessed not by any
old homeless ghost, but the spirit of the Jewish God.  As described in
Mark, his first possession experience took place after his ritual
baptism by John.  Being possessed by the spirit of God is quite
compatible with his acting as a prophet---he must somehow have got the
idea that he spoke God's will.  This made him all the more effective
in healing psychological disorders, since Jesus "could present himself
as the manifestation of God on earth (through spirit-possession),
announce forgiveness and set in motion a comprehensible set of
psychological factors that would lead to an elimination of the
presenting symptoms."[46] Ancient Galileans would of course explain
all this supernaturally.  In our more scientific age, we can compare
Jesus's practice with what we know of anomalistic psychology.  Some
modern therapeutic techniques induce an altered state in patients, and
then adjust the way they see themselves within a shared mythic
context.  Jesus may have done the same.  He induced spirit-possession
in others, and forgave their "sin" in the context of Jewish
mythology.[47] Naturally, he ministered to the sinners, the wicked,
the mentally ill.

In Davies's theory, as in Morton Smith's, the Kingdom of God was
originally an esoteric, altered state of consciousness induced by
Jesus in his disciples.  This state, and Jesus's spirit, was available
after Jesus's death.  Such a theory makes us see the gospels
differently.  Some scholars see signs of a Cynic in Jesus's
paradoxical, aphoristic speech; these may just have been part of the
process of inducing dissociation.  The weird, ethereal theology in the
gospel of John may come from trying to make sense of possession
experience.  So Davies argues that the earliest Jesus movements were
driven not by a social ideal of equality but by possession
experience.[48]

Christianity may well have started out as a cult based on magical or
possession experiences.  It would have attracted marginal, lower class
members of society; and it would have been a chaotic cult, not
organized around any real teaching or social ideal.  Later, more
literate types would join---Crossan's "retainers." Some of these would
try and fit the loose, chaotic movement into the Jewish religious
epic.  As distinct communities formed, ideology and mythmaking would
follow.  Others, like the proto-gnostics, would intellectualize
possession in more individualist terms, tying in esoteric experiences
to revealer-myths.

The history of early Christianity is in fact that of a cult moving
towards middle-class respectability.  As Christianity became an
organized religion, spirit possession and baptismal mystery themes
were toned down.  Even the idea of Jesus's resurrection became
controversial because of its cultic associations, until orthodox
doctrine stabilized on a bodily resurrected Jesus who instituted
church authority.[49] Gnostic Christianity, meanwhile, preserved rites
like baptismal initiations accompanied by visions;[50] and went on to
become a grab-bag of esoteric myths and practices from all around the
Mediterranean world.  Until orthodox Christianity became an imperial
religion, ecstatic prophecy kept breaking out in heretical
movements.[51] We expect a religion starting with ecstatic experiences
among marginal groups to grow this way.  It becomes institutionalized,
more mainstream, attracts educated and higher-class adherents.
Eventually, the chaotic pronouncements of spirit-filled prophets
become embarrassing---the religion settles down on older revelations
sanctified by official doctrine.  Nonsense becomes respectable
theology.

Once more, we have a compelling account of Christian origins, which
should at least be part of the puzzle.  Of course, we do not have the
kind of evidence to be certain about Smith's or Davies's scenarios.
Scholars will continue debating whether we should see Jesus primarily
as a prophet or a teacher or something else, and how much weight we
should give to esoteric experiences.  We have a lot more to learn
about possession-like experiences; the modern therapies Davies
compares Jesus's behavior to derive from trial-and-error, with no
solid theoretical understanding behind them as yet.  Nevertheless,
early Christians cultivated experiences they thought brought them in
contact with a supernatural realm.  This was an important part of how
they understood God, and how they came to believe Jesus was the son of
God.  And from a modern perspective, we have to conclude that they
were mistaken.  Perhaps understandably mistaken, even inspired to
lofty ideals by their mistake; but still mistaken.

5.  The Risen Lord
------------------
Jesus was human.  He was not a god, he was not the center of a great 
supernatural display of power.  In the Christendom of old, this was a 
strange, even dangerous opinion; for today's serious historical 
scholarship, it is a triviality.  Our evidence is sparse, so we can 
fit it with many different portraits of Jesus.  But in every case, we 
can make sense of Jesus as a man of his time and place.  We do not 
need gods and demons to explain the man or the myth.

This puts theologically-minded historians in a tight spot.  Christians
need a God revealed in history, so they must take historical
scholarship seriously and use the best knowledge we have.  As Paula
Fredriksen says,

    If history, for the church, is important, then undistorted history
    is very important.  Only by meeting this obligation with
    intellectual integrity can the church, with integrity, continue to
    witness to that message proclaimed by the first apostles,
    expounded by Paul, and reflected in the gospels: that the
    horizontal plane of the human and the vertical plane of the divine
    met at the cross of Jesus of Nazareth.[52]

So liberal Christians have to dismantle the Christian myth, and at the
end of their efforts, turn back and reassure believers that Jesus is
still where we meet God.  This is a hard task, when Jesus appears all
too human.  Many historians reconcile their work with their religion
by emphasizing the dogma that Jesus was completely human as well as
fully God.  He must have been a man acting in mundane history, not a
timeless celestial being; to say otherwise is nothing but an old
heresy.[53]

But if we are to find God through Jesus, never mind God Incarnate,
there must have been _something_ special about him.  What is left,
once we get rid of the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, all the
supernatural signs and wonders?  If Jesus was a spirit-possessed
healer, we have no reason to believe he was actually possessed by God.
If he was a man with a message, we have no reason to treat him apart
from prophets like Muhammad or Joseph Smith.  All we learn about Jesus
reinforces the way we understand religion as a natural human
phenomenon.  If Jesus was a mere man, with no miracles to his credit,
we have no reason to think Jesus was someone so special he must have
had some connection with a God.  A charismatic figure who
inadvertently started a religious movement which happened to become
successful is not enough.

Conservative Christians are correct to insist that where the human
meets the divine, supernatural sparks must fly.  They want to reaffirm
the old doctrines, particularly Jesus's bodily resurrection.  Perhaps
modern scholars are overly impressed with how science seems to have
exorcized the supernatural from our world.  Perhaps if we just let
historical testimony speak to us directly, we will find that in
Jesus's life, miracles happened.  Christian scriptures record
eyewitness testimony about the Risen Lord---resurrection appearances,
an empty tomb, disciples energized with missionary fervor after his
seemingly shameful death.  We should take these at face value, not
discard them because of philosophical prejudices against miracles.

Modern historians are not fond of divine intervention.  It is possible
that some resurrection-experiences underlie the story of Risen Lord,
and that these experiences were important for the rise of
Christianity.  But in that case, what exactly happened is lost to us.
Perhaps something like the psychology of spirit-possession can help us
fill some of the blanks.  But filling the gaps by divine intervention
is too great a leap---it is like deciding Santa Claus exists because
we cannot figure out who bought one of the presents under our
Christmas tree.  In natural science we find many gaps, but we also
have excellent reasons to believe these are gaps in our knowledge, not
discontinuities in an otherwise natural world.  The same is true with
history.  Historical inquiry does not exist in a limbo independent of
our other sciences; non-miraculous explanations which comfortably fit
our overall body of knowledge are much more credible than stories of
divine intervention.

So we must have extraordinarily solid evidence to accept a claim like
Jesus's resurrection.  This is appropriate even from a Christian point
of view.  Jesus's miracles and resurrection must have been truly
extraordinary events, if they mean he was the Son of God.  There must
be something to set them apart from the half-zillion other religious
miracle-claims.  If the gospels claim Jesus appeared to his disciples
after his death, well, Philostratus tells a similar tale about
Apollonius.  Mormon prophet Joseph Smith found three eyewitnesses to
the golden plates he supposedly translated, and later added eight more
witnesses.[54] The Roman historian Tacitus thought the healing
miracles of Sarapis, a recently invented god, were based on reliable
eyewitness testimony.[55] Neither the veracity nor the significance of
miracle-tales are all that clear, even if we take them at face value.

The Resurrection is a fantastic claim, supported by incoherent and
inadequate testimony, buried under obvious myths.  The traditional
story is a mess.  Plus we can make sense of Jesus without miracles.
If Jesus was a failed apocalyptic prophet, a Cynic teacher, or a
magical healer, it is hard to see why a God would bother resurrecting
him anyway.  All this is more than enough to dismiss the Resurrection.
But we can do even better.  Our theories of Jesus give us incomplete
but intriguing hints of how the Resurrection story began.


We are used to thinking Christianity is all about proclaiming the
Risen Lord---as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:14, "if Christ was not
raised, then our gospel is null and void, and so too is your faith."
Not all Jesus movements thought so.  The communities who produced Q
and the Gospel of Thomas did not make much of a Resurrection; they
quite possibly did not even know the story.  This alone makes the
Resurrection dubious.

However, we have evidence that belief in a Risen Lord existed very 
early in the Christ cult.  In 1 Corinthians 3--7, Paul says

    First and foremost, I handed on to you the tradition I had
    received: that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the
    scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised to life on the
    third day, in accordance with the scriptures; and that he appeared
    to Cephas, and afterwards to the Twelve.  Then he appeared to over
    five hundred of our brothers at once, most of whom are still
    alive, though some have died.  Then he appeared to James, and
    afterwards to all the apostles.

Here, Paul is quoting from an earlier, carefully composed creed.  Now,
Paul wrote only a couple of decades after Jesus's death, in which time
the resurrection belief arose and became the polished creed Paul
quotes.  Christian apologist Gary Habermas argues that here we have
eyewitness testimony to Jesus's appearances, which brings us, "for all
practical purposes, back to the original events." What better
testimony could a historian ask for?[56]

Paul, however, does not preserve a pristine creed.  The list of
appearances, which has an obvious apologetic function, is most likely
a later elaboration.[57] And curiously, the gospels know nothing about
these specific appearances.  The creed before the appearance list is
more interesting, since it tells us what sort of belief the very early
Resurrection was.

Burton L.  Mack points out that the creed combines a martyr myth with
a Wisdom tale.  Jesus dies for our sins---in other words, the Christ
cult believed Jesus was a martyr, like in legendary tales of Jewish
martyrs whose deaths washed away the sins of their community.  "Sin,"
of course, was a deviation from the will of God, or conventional
Jewish Law.  The raising of Jesus, on the other hand, recalls the
Wisdom tale of a sage who was persecuted by a foreign power, but who
was vindicated after his ordeal.  Jews of Jesus's time had begun to
imagine that God's justice would be realized in an afterlife, since it
was obviously not happening on earth.  So the Wisdom tale also changed
to let the vindication scene take place after death.  In the
Christ-cult version, God endorses Jesus---who is a Wisdom-figure in
Paul's letters---by raising him to a position of honor in heaven.[58]

So a movement seeking significance in Jesus's death had plenty of
mythic material to draw on.  They were concerned about sin, perhaps
because they interpreted Jesus's teaching to bring Jews and
Gentiles---sinners---together in one community, or because they found,
as in the Pentecost story in Acts 2:1-13, that people from all nations
could be possessed by the holy spirit.  A myth like Paul's creed,
where Jesus died for their sins and was vindicated by being raised up,
would very nicely justify the practices of the Christ cult.  And if
they were involved in spirit-possession, their self-conception was
probably already permeated by dying-and-resurrection themes, since
dying in the spirit and being born again would be a very natural way
to describe some of their experiences.

It may seem incredible that a group could be so immersed in their
mythic imagination as to believe their fictions.  But the Jesus Paul
found in the Christ cult was only vaguely historical; he proclaimed a
resurrection, but not a detailed story.  And the story fit the myths
they already thought described the world.  Believing in an
uncomplicated but deeply meaningful creed is not unusual for a fringe
religious group.  Later Christians would be convinced the Jewish
scriptures _had to_ be an oracle of Jesus's life, and write his story
accordingly.  Members of the early Christ cult were convinced Jesus
_had to_ be vindicated by their God, and converted the disaster of his
death into a reason for missionary fervor.

It does not take much to trigger fantastic stories.  Consider the UFO
myth.[59] In the 1940's and 50's, the idea of flying saucers piloted
by aliens burst on the scene.  Some began to interpret strange lights
in the sky as an alien presence, fitting this ambiguous information
into a story with themes from science fiction and cold war paranoia.
Soon, "contactees" appeared, who personally communicated with the
space brothers visiting us.  The old myth of superhuman saviors from
heaven acquired a space-age veneer.  Today, UFO beliefs center on
alien abductions and government coverups.  Strange experiences like
sleep paralysis, timeless religious hopes, sexual frustration, and
paranoia about the government now drives the myth.  Believers invent
their stories in collaboration with hypnotherapists, not priests; they
get their story-templates from the media, not scripture; but we still
have a classic case of mythmaking here.  Perhaps lights in the sky
were the "spaceship-appearances" for flying saucer cults, but these do
not go very far in explaining the UFO myth; they certainly do not show
there were actual spaceships in our skies.

The appearances, then, are not the key to the Resurrection story; they
might not even have happened.  On the other hand, it is plausible that
the disciples saw a ghost.  If they were cultivating spirit-possession
and visions, they probably did have the sort of experience which fed
into the Resurrection myth.  Indeed, we have some indication that the
Christ cult cultivated visionary encounters with Jesus, as well as
possession by his spirit.  After his list of appearances in 1
Corinthians, Paul adds "Last of all, he appeared to me too." This is
not, however, an encounter with a risen corpse.  It is a vision, of
someone raised in a "spiritual body." Resurrection-appearances were
not limited to the time between Jesus's death and ascension, and Jesus
was not a corpse returned from the dead.

The Resurrection story developed in different ways.  The orthodox,
respectable party began to imagine a more concrete, bodily
resurrection.  Some Gnostics, adopting a more individualist, esoteric
spirituality, retained a spiritual resurrection and tied it to their
myth of Jesus as a cosmic Revealer.  As Elaine Pagels points out,
"Some say that the person who experiences the resurrection does not
meet Jesus raised physically back to life; rather, he encounters
Christ on a spiritual level.  This may occur in dreams, in
ecstatic-trance, in visions, or in moments of spiritual
illumination."[60] The forerunners of orthodoxy were not comfortable
with the chaos of continual individual revelation.  No respectable
religion can live with spirit-filled prophets continually speaking
with supernatural authority and contradicting one another.  In the
process of moving from cult to church, orthodoxy needed a myth to
legitimate the church as an institution faithful to Jesus.  Revelation
had to be disciplined; its essentials had to be confined to the time
of the Lord himself.  Authority would derive from the few apostles
Jesus personally appeared to, not the spirit-filled prophets.  A
bodily resurrection would help: Jesus would rise by another impressive
miracle, establish the church by delegating authority to his
disciples, and then ascend and get out of the way.  Christians facing
martyrdom could follow the example of a Lord who physically suffered
and rose bodily.[61]

Now, this may look like the early church consciously set out to create
a self-serving myth.  Not at all; the actual process probably
resembled Darwinian evolution.  Our UFO myth is spread by the mass
media, so the stories of UFO-believers quickly fall into a stereotyped
outline.  Without the media, Christian stories could not spread very
fast.  However, this also meant that a stereotyped story could not
suppress the variant myths of separate Christian groups.  So very
early on, there was a large diversity of Christian stories.
Communities which promoted a stable, less individualistic practice had
a better chance of passing on their myths in the long run.  And when a
universal church authority began to crystallize, it joined the
selection process by promoting those stories congenial to itself and
suppressing Gnostic or Jewish-Christian stories.

The gospels are part of this process.  Mark ends with Jesus's empty
tomb, and women leaving afraid to tell anyone---not even any
resurrection appearances.  Paul did not know of the empty tomb story;
it may have been invented by the author of Mark.  The empty tomb and
the lack of appearances has an effect of toning down the cultic
implications of the Resurrection.  The Christ cult celebrated the
presence of Jesus's spirit, the empty tomb highlights Jesus's absence
until his imminent second coming.[62] Only the women come up to the
tomb, and are the first witnesses to the Risen Lord in later gospels.
Jesus's disciples fall away as his crucifixion approaches---finally
only the lowliest are truest to Jesus.

Matthew, Luke and John add appearances, though none of their stories
agree with each other.  Interestingly, their Risen Lord is still not
quite a material body; some of the appearance stories are designed to
support a bodily resurrection, while in others Jesus is insubstantial,
hard to recognize, like in a vision.  In any case, he authorizes the
disciples and zooms back up to heaven.  The gospels following Mark
also elaborate the story to provide more solid proof of the
Resurrection.  Matthew makes sure the tomb is guarded and sealed, so
the disciples cannot come and steal the body.  The non-canonical
Gospel of Peter adds seven seals on the tomb, soldiers keeping watch
two by two, a magnificent angelic descent to open the tomb, and many
witnesses to the whole event.

The Resurrection started as a myth of martyrdom and vindication, of
visions and spirit-possession.  By the time the universal church was
in place, it had become an elaborate tale of a bodily resurrection and
appearances legitimating apostolic authority.  At every step along the
way, the Resurrection was a myth.  Elvis did not fake his death
because of the burdens of stardom; he does not appear once in a while
to his faithful fans.  Hitler was not spirited away by Nazi allies
from within the Hollow Earth; he does not wait plotting his revenge.
Jesus did not rise from the dead; he will not come again.

6.  The Bad News
----------------
As critical history took hold, scholars---most of them devoutly 
Christian---set out to find the truth behind the good news about 
Jesus.  For centuries now, they have been encountering myths.  It 
would have been nice if God really took on flesh, but for Christians 
who take history seriously, God Incarnate must become a poetic way of 
claiming reality is human-centered at its deepest level.  The 
Resurrection used to be a miracle, even evidence for eternal life; now 
it is just a symbol of hope.  Yet theologians cannot, of course, 
banish Christ and God to the never-never-land of an ancient religious 
imagination.  Liberal Christians still confess Jesus is Lord, though 
they are no longer quite sure what they mean by that.

One way to discover God anew is to look for some divine mystery, some 
radical novelty, in the ruins of traditional Christianity.  Bishop 
John Shelby Spong, a popular spokesman for liberal Christianity, 
denies Jesus was bodily resurrected.  He manages to unsay what he 
said, however, by claiming Easter was still a mystic event where God 
touched our world.

    If. . . Easter and resurrection are aspects of a human experience,
    timeless but always subjective, breaking through our barriers now
    and again in mind-altering, consciousness-raising revelations,
    then we can use the words of our forebears in faith to journey
    toward the experience in which their lives were changed. . . . our
    ultimate goal is not objectivity, certainty, or rational truth.
    It is rather life, wholeness, heightened consciousness, and an
    expanded sense of transcendence.[63]

Modern, open-minded Christians like Spong too often reduce their 
religion to psychological handwaving and existentialist exhortation.  
Perhaps this has its place; all of us could do with a bit of 
inspiration.  But it is still strange to watch Christianity dissolve 
into the vapid verbiage and contempt for truth of a Californian 
psychotherapy cult.

Alternatively, we might ignore history.  Paul did not care about
history, he just charged ahead proclaiming the good news.  So
Christians may say the Christ of faith is more important than the
Jesus of history.[64] In the Christian message, however mythical, we
can still hear Jesus offering us God's mercy.  Even better, the mythic
nature of Christianity might be a positive.  After all, theologians
such as Reinhold Niebuhr assure us that myths point to realities mere
scientific rationality is unable to grasp, making us realize the
divinity and unity in all our experience.  In the end, it seems,
reality "can be revealed and expressed only in mythical terms."[65]

No doubt myths say much about our our hopes and fears.  And since
myths are invented and worked over by communities, they can tell us a
lot about social reality.  Somebody interested in the anxieties of
late twentieth century Americans can learn much from our UFO myths.
In that sense, myths are indeed not just false stories.  Myths can be
very useful in negotiating our social world.  But once we step outside
of social reality, we find an accidental world.  Within this
impersonal world we maintain a bubble of reality infused with
personality and purpose, overflowing with human meanings.  That bubble
exists because we do, not some sort of God.  _We_ keep our social
world alive, not emanations from a mythic deep reality.
 
This is not good news.  We do not live by truth alone; we want to feel
at home in our world.  Our religions and traditional philosophies
claim they can bring truth, happiness, and morality together in a
harmonious unity.  If we could discover a meaningful personal order in
the universe, we could get in tune with that order and everything
would fall into place.  We could find true happiness beyond the
pursuit of superficial pleasures.  We could pattern our social lives
after the harmonies of the universe and attain justice and virtue.
So, to achieve a sane society, we follow Jesus, God Incarnate and
Perfect Man.  Or, in today's New Age, we hope to find happiness by
recognizing our divine nature.  So we insist that the true physics
presents us with a world seething with the sublime energies of
consciousness; not impersonal matter in mindless motion.

For the philosophers of old, myth became metaphysics.  Our Rational 
Souls could come to know God and achieve immortality by contemplating 
metaphysical truths and purging themselves of material entanglements.  
Some would say God is so far above mere human thought that all myths 
and metaphysical systems only imperfectly reach out towards God.  
Nevertheless, harmony was there for us to seek.

But in an accidental world, there is no more harmony.  Jesus is not
the way, the truth, and the life; indeed, there is no way, truth need
not deliver happiness, and life is disappointingly finite.  For many
of us, this is unbearable news.  Somehow, there must be a way to bring
truth back in harmony with our hopes.  It is hard to do this if we
take our science and history seriously, but what if we go back to the
basics?  Maybe miracles do take place; not in a special time set aside
for revelation, not in any privileged religious tradition, but
everywhere, all the time.  Maybe we do have souls, maybe our minds can
magically control matter.  To find God, we have to begin with the
miracles of saints, the visions of mystics, the paranormal powers of
psychics.  The early Christians with their miracles and magic were
right: there really is a supernatural realm.

Some of us, on the other hand, are convinced we inhabit a godless
world never blessed by the Perfect Man.  We think we have to muddle
through without supernatural guidance, trying to make something of our
lives.  This is not necessarily a liberating belief; after all, it
means there are no saving truths.  Truth itself becomes tarnished,
dragged down to earth from the heights of metaphysical purity.  Of
course, an accidental world is an interesting place, so truth is worth
pursuing if we have a sense of wonder.  But truth is also often ugly,
something to shake our fists at---and change, if we are able.  So be
it.  We can look up at the stars not to praise God, but with
fascination, even some pride in what we have learned about them.  It
is not salvation, but it is no small accomplishment either.

Notes
-----

[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, _Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the
History of Culture_ (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1985).

[2] E.g. John Wenham, _Easter Enigma: Are the Resurrection Accounts in
Conflict?_ (Second Edition, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992).

[3] This has been common textbook knowledge for quite some time,
e.g. Howard Clark Kee, Franklin W.  Young, and Karlfried Froehlich,
_Understanding the New Testament_ (Second Edition, Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, 1965).  An excellent popular summary of the recent
state of scholarship is in the introduction to Robert W.  Funk, Roy W.
Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, _The Five Gospels: The Search for the
Authentic Words of Jesus_ (New York: Polebridge, 1993).

[4] Bert D. Ehrman, _The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect
of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New
Testament_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 48; Burton
L. Mack, _Who Wrote the New Testament?,_ pp.  79-87.

[5] Henry M. Morris, _Back To Genesis_ 99 (1997).

[6] John Hick, ed., _The Myth of God Incarnate_ (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1977).

[7] John Dominic Crossan, _The Historical Jesus: The Life of a
Mediterranean Jewish Peasant_ (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), p. xxvii.

[8] John C. Mellon, _Mark as Recovery Story: Alcoholism and the
Rhetoric of Gospel Mystery_ (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1995).

[9] Christians told the story of Jesus's infancy to parallel Old
Testament heroes like Moses; John Dominic Crossan, _Jesus: A
Revolutionary Biography_ (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), pp.  10-15.  The
apocryphal Infancy Gospels of Thomas and James are even more
fantastic; see Robert J.  Miller, ed., _The Complete Gospels_
(HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).  On stories about Muhammad, see
F.E. Peters, _Muhammad and the Origins of Islam,_ chap. 4.

[10] John Meier, _A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus_
(New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 168-184.  See also E.P.  Sanders,
_Jesus and Judaism_ (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), pp. 16-17.

[11] Paula Fredriksen, _From Jesus to Christ,_ chap. 5.

[12] E.P. Sanders, _The Historical Figure of Jesus_ (London: Allen
Lane: Penguin, 1993), pp. 28-32, 42.

[13] E.P. Sanders, _Jesus and Judaism,_ p.  319.

[14] _Ibid,_ pp. 73-76; Paula Fredriksen, _From Jesus to Christ,_
pp. 111-114.

[15] Paula Fredriksen, _From Jesus to Christ,_ p. 125.

[16] E.P. Sanders, _Jesus and Judaism,_, p. 227.

[17] _Ibid_, p. 319.  Christian historians still keep slipping into
portraying Jesus as unique within Judaism, though.  James
H. Charlesworth, _Jesus within Judaism: New Light From Exciting
Archaeological Discoveries_ (New York: Doubleday, 1988), is an
interesting example.  While warning against the tendency to portray an
ossified Judaism (pp. 45-46), he later adopts a variant of the
traditional argument (pp. 73-74).

[18] L. Festinger, H.W. Reicken, and S. Schachter, _When Prophecy
Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group The
Predicted the Destruction of the World_ (New York: Harper & Row,
1964).

[19] Hyam Maccoby, _The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of
Christianity_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).

[20] Though we have much more information about Paul than Jesus, he
still manages to be a somewhat enigmatic character.  In any case, even
quite conservative portraits of Paul remain viable; e.g.  Jerome
Murphy-O'Connor, _Paul: A Critical Life_ (Oxford : Clarendon, 1996).

[21] Randel Helms, _Gospel Fictions_ (Amherst: Prometheus, 1988),
p. 24.

[22] _Ibid,_ chap. 4; Burton L. Mack, _A Myth of Innocence: Mark and
Christian Origins_ (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), chap. 8.  See also
G.A.  Wells, _The Historical Evidence for Jesus_ (Buffalo: Prometheus,
1988), pp.  206-210.

[23] For a brief survey see Gordon Stein, _An Anthology of Atheism and
Rationalism,_ pp. 178-184.

[24] My summary here is based on G.A. Wells, _The Historical Evidence
for Jesus,_ and _Did Jesus Exist?_ (2nd edition, London: Pemberton,
1986).  For a philosophical defense of Wells, see Michael Martin, _The
Case Against Christianity_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1991), chap. 2.

[25] Most scholars think the Josephus passage is a Christian
alteration of a less complimentary original.  See, for example, James
H. Charlesworth, _Jesus Within Judaism,_ pp.  91-95, and G.A.  Wells,
_Belief and Make-Believe,_ pp.  143-148 in reply.

[26] An alternative to Wisdom is that some Christians thought of Jesus
as an angel---"son of God" was a title of angelic mediators between
humans and God, and angel worship is a concern in Pauline material.
See Alan F.  Segal, "The Risen Christ and the Angelic Mediator Figures
in the light of Qumran," in James H.  Charlesworth, ed., _Jesus and
the Dead Sea Scrolls_ (New York: Doubleday, 1992).  The comparison to
Metatron, the highest angel, is particularly interesting.

[27] Jonathan Z. Smith, _Drudgery Divine,_ pp.  129-130.

[28] Burton L. Mack, _A Myth of Innocence,_ p.  303; on the Q people,
see _The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q & Christian Origins_
(HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).

[29] Burton L. Mack, _A Myth of Innocence,_ chap. 3.

[30] John Dominic Crossan, _The Historical Jesus,_ pp. 299-302.

[31] Burton L. Mack, _Who Wrote The New Testament?_ p. 40.  See also
_The Lost Gospel,_ p. 120.  Against the Cynic view, see Hans Dieter
Betz, "Jesus and the Cynics: Survey and Analysis of a Hypothesis,"
_The Journal of Religion,_ <74>:4 (1994).

[32] John Dominic Crossan, _Who Killed Jesus?: Exposing the Roots of
Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus_
(HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), chap. 6.  Crossan's arguments are partly
based on his controversial suggestion that an early layer of the
Gospel of Peter, the "Cross Gospel," contains the earliest form of the
Passion story;_The Historical Jesus,_ pp. 385-387; _Who Killed
Jesus?,_ pp. 223-227.

[33] Burton L. Mack, _The Lost Gospel,_ pp.  140-147; his argument is
based on the work of John Kloppenborg.  However, finding compositional
layers in a text which is a reconstruction to begin with is risky
business; it is still possible that Q remembered Jesus as an
apocalyptic prophet from the beginning.  See R.A.  Piper, ed., _The
Gospel Behind the Gospels: Current Studies on Q_ (Leiden: Brill,
1995), for various views on Q.

[34] Burton L. Mack, _A Myth of Innocence,_ pp. 111, 354.

[35] _Ibid,_ pp. 319-324.

[36] John Dominic Crossan, _The Historical Jesus,_ pp. 396-410.

[37] Philostratus, _The life of Apollonius of Tyana, the Epistles of
Apollonius, and the Treatise of Eusebius_ (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1969).

[38] Stevan L. Davies, _Jesus the Healer: Possession, Trance, and the
Origins of Christianity_ (New York: Continuum, 1995), chap. 5; Morton
Smith, _Jesus the Magician_ (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1978),
pp. 8-10.  On the psychological basis for faith healing, see Leonard
Zusne & Warren H.  Jones, _Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical
Thinking_ (2nd edition, Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989), pp. 42-53.

[39] John Dominic Crossan, _The Historical Jesus,_ pp. 305, 336-337.

[40] Morton Smith, "Two Ascended to Heaven---Jesus and the Author of
4Q491," in J.H. Charlesworth, ed., _Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls._

[41] Morton Smith, _Jesus the Magician,_ pp.  134-135.

[42] _Ibid_, p. 152.

[43] Morton Smith, _The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and
Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark_ (New York:
Harper & Row, 1973), p. 117.

[44] Alice B. and Irvin L. Child, _Religion and Magic in the Life of
Traditional Peoples_ (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993),
pp. 90-94; Michael F. Brown, _The Channeling Zone: American
Spirituality in an Anxious Age_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1997).

[45] Psychologists are divided on how to interpret altered states.
Hypnosis has probably been best studied under laboratory conditions,
and the debate over altered state and cognitive-behavioral
perspectives is long-running and inconclusive.  See Steven Jay Lynn
and Judith W. Rhue, eds., _Theories of Hypnosis: Current Models and
Perspectives_ (New York: Guilford, 1991).

[46] Stevan L. Davies, _Jesus the Healer,_ p. 75.

[47] _Ibid,_ pp. 137-146.

[48] _Ibid_, chap. 9-11.  The synoptic gospels are usually thought
more reliable, but see Robin Lane Fox, _The Unauthorized Version,_
pp. 205-209.  Lane Fox believes John is based on a primary source.

[49] Jonathan Z. Smith, _Drudgery Divine,_ pp.
110-112.

[50] Helmut Koester and Elaine Pagels, introduction to The Dialogue of
The Savior, in James M.  Robinson, ed., _The Nag Hammadi Library,_
(revised edition, New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 244.  Also
interesting is the presence of a "double baptism" rite among Gnostics;
Giovanni Filoramo, _A History of Gnosticism_ (transl. Anthony Alcock,
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 179-180.  This rite is similar to
what is suggested by The Secret Gospel of Mark (Morton Smith, _The
Secret Gospel_).

[51] Especially the Montanists of the second century; Robert M.
Grant, _Gods and the One God_ (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986),
pp. 145-147.

[52] Paula Fredriksen, _From Jesus to Christ,_ p. 215.

[53] _Ibid_; James H. Charlesworth, "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the
Historical Jesus," in _Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls,_ pp. 5, 40.

[54] Ernest H. Taves, _Trouble Enough,_ pp. 46-48.

[55] Robert M. Grant, _Gods and the One God,_ p.  35.

[56] Gary Habermas and Antony Flew, _Did Jesus Rise From the Dead?
The Resurrection Debate_ (Terry Miethe, ed.; San Francisco: Harper &
Row, 1987), p. 23.  Against Habermas's various arguments, see Michael
Martin, _The Case Against Christianity,_ pp. 87-96.

[57] Burton L. Mack, _A Myth of Innocence,_ pp.  103-104.  Recently,
Robert M.  Price has argued that the whole creed is late; "Apocryphal
Apparitions: 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 As a Post-Pauline Interpolation,"
_The Journal of Higher Criticism_ <2>:2 (1995).

[58] Burton L. Mack, _Who Wrote The New Testament?,_ pp. 79-87.

[59] Curtis Peebles, _Watch The Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying
Saucer Myth_ (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994).

[60] Elaine Pagels, _The Gnostic Gospels_ (New York: Random House,
1979), p. 5.  Note that proto-gnostic ideas were not an outside
heresy, but they were pervasive _within_ early Christianity, including
in Paul's writings.  Kurt Rudolph, _Gnosis: The Nature and History of
Gnosticism_ (transl. & ed. Robert McLachlan Wilson, San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 158-160, 300-307.

[61] Elaine Pagels, _The Gnostic Gospels,_ p. 75.  See also
J.D. Crossan, _Who Killed Jesus?,_ p. 203.

[62] Burton L. Mack, _A Myth of Innocence,_ pp.  111-113, 308-309.

[63] John Shelby Spong, _Resurrection,_ p. 100.

[64] For some typical proclamation-theologies and their relation to
historical research, see Howard Clark Kee, _Jesus in History: An
Approach to the Study of the Gospels_ (2nd edition, New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1977), pp. 125-131.  For an example of a historian
taking a peculiar leap of faith, see John P. Meier, _A Marginal Jew,_
pp. 197-198.

[65] Reinhold Niebuhr, in _The Nature of Religious Experience: Essays
in Honor of Clyde Macintosh_ (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935),
p. 135.

