From: loren@sunlight.llnl.gov (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Richard Helms's _Gospel Fictions_
Date: 21 Feb 90 01:18:02 GMT


        I have read Randel Helms's book _Gospel Fictions_ (available
from Prometheus Books). He proposes that much of the four canonical
Gospels, which are much of our source for the life of Joshua of
Nazareth, better known as Jesus Christ, are essentially fiction.  How?
He suggests that the authors of the Gospels saw the Old Testament as
essentially "prefiguring" the life of Jesus Christ, and
"reconstructed" his life from parts of the Old Testament. The
miracles, for instance, seemed to be copied off of the Old Testament
miracles worked by Elijah and Elisha. Not surprisingly, there are some
screwups here and there.

        Some of what he presents is not exactly new; some of you would
probably be familiar with what he says about the nativity stories, for
instance. Joseph is traced to the kings of Israel during its glory
days by two genealogies that contradict each other; yet, we are also
told that Joseph was not Jesus Christ's real father (virgin birth, you
know). The concept of a virgin birth is absent from the Old Testament,
but is to be found in abundance in pagan mythology; it was taken for
granted that a male deity can make a woman pregnant. Such historical
figures as Pythagoras, Plato, and Alexander the Great were alleged to
have had divine fathers, Apollo for the first two and Zeus for the
third. Helms even quotes an early theologian, Justin Martyr, who
complain that there are some who think that the Virgin Birth was a
myth, comparing it to Zeus making Danae pregnant. The main Old
Testament "support" is a Septuagint mistranslation, with a word for
"young woman" (Hebrew: almah) being translated to "physical virgin"
(Greek: parthenos). For my part, I think that one legend of a virgin
birth is as plausible as any other.

        Helms even seems to account for that story about Jesus Christ
cursing that fig tree. In Luke, there is a parable featuring a fig
tree that would not bear any figs. In Mark, that gets turned into
Jesus Christ cursing a fig tree for not bearing figs when he wanted to
eat, just because it was not in season. Matthew tells it that way, but
with the overtones of childish petulance toned down.

        He even starts his book with a dramatic beginning -- he
describes a religious prophet who lived in the eastern Mediterranean
in the first century AD, who taught the worship of one true God and
that true religion does not consist of sacrificing animals but of
living virtuously, who was charged with treason, and whose followers
believed that he was the son of a god. Is this Jesus Christ? No,
Apollonius of Tyana. Helms's whole thesis is that the Jesus Christ of
the New Testament was made to fit certain mythological patterns, the
patterns followed by (among others) Apollonius of Tyana.

        I was a bit disappointed that Helms did not take on the
question of what the "historical Jesus" was like; but if he is correct
in stating that much of the Gospels is manufactured pseudo-history, we
may never know for sure.

        It would be interesting to evaluate other famous figures by
this sort of technique. First on my list would be Socrates. There are
two main sources on him, the general Xenophon and the philosopher
Plato, and they have (1) serious discrepancies between them and (2)
differing agendas. There have been controversies over how much of the
Socrates described by Plato is the "real" Socrates and how much is an
invention of Plato's for illustrating philosophical ideas. As a
personality, Socrates had a lot in common with Jesus Christ, including
the conviction that he was on a divine mission, and his having been
prosecuted and executed for allegedly subversive activities.

        There are others worth considering, like the Buddha,
Zoroaster, and Mohammed; I wonder what's been done on them? I get the
impression that Buddhism, for instance, is less dependent on the
purported historicity of the Buddha than Christianity (for example) is
dependent on the purported historicity of Jesus Christ.

        Perhaps not surprisingly, this kind of "history" is not
confined to ancient times. Just consider the story of George
Washington and the cherry tree. After he (supposedly) chopped it down,
he confessed this black deed to his father. Or consider the
Fundamentalists who believe that our Founding Fathers were
Fundamentalist theocrats -- wrong on both counts. Or ideologically
motivated revisionism -- slavery was a good thing; or else that the
United States is an evil, imperialist power and the Soviet Union a
persecuted victim; or else that the Soviet Union is the cause of all
the trouble in the world, with the United States being a champion of
truth, goodness, and democracy that is worshipped by right-thinking
people everywhere.

        Possibly the champions in the field are the Soviets
themselves. Consider that disgraced Communist Party leaders tend to
get written out of their history books. Leon Trotsky had been a
leading figure in the Bolshevik takeover, but when he lost out to
Stalin, he was officially turned into a nobody. Stalin set up a
massive personality cult out of himself when he was alive, but was
thoroughly hushed up by his successors. I have a little Russian
history book that I bought back from the Soviet Union when my family
visited there in 1970. It talked about Lenin's being persecuted by the
Tsarist regime before he came to power (there's no good reason to
doubt _that_), but made no mention of Trotsky. In fact, it made no
mention whatsoever of any other Soviet leader, not even Brezhnev, who
was on top at the time. It pictured the Soviet Union developing
econonmically, prospering, and winning military victories against the
"fascists" under the wise guidance of "the Party." Instead of Stalin,
it was the Party which called people to the front to fight Hitler, for
instance. It pictured the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as one big
happy family (no mention of the Soviet invasions of Hungary and
Czechoslovakia, of course) and it pictured the "Korean People's
Democratic Republic" and Vietnam as victims of aggressions perpetrated
by a certain militaristic, imperialistic evil empire -- the United
States. There was no mention whatsoever of China.

        Even scientists have been known to indulge in such dubious
history. Stephen Jay Gould points out that Darwin, in his
_Autobiography_ for his children, claimed that he followed Baconian
induction; even though Darwin pointed out elsewhere that Baconian
induction is an inadequate model for scientific procedure. In effect,
what Darwin said is that if one does nothing but collect facts, one
will end up with a mass of disconnected information. Yet Darwin may
have been trying to demonstrate to his kids that he had practiced
reputable research techniques, and offered simple induction in the
absence of any fully worked-out improvement on that model of research.

        So if Helms is right, and I think that contention very
plausible, then the Gospels in the New Testament, our major source on
Jesus Christ, must join the ranks of ideologically slanted and
fictionalized histories.

                                                        ^
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