Searching for an ‘historical Jesus'
Part 2 : Gospels as Historical Sources

In part one of this discussion I suggested that the ‘search for the historical Jesus' figure was actually a political battle, and thus riddled with bad scholarship and rhetorical stunts, for in politics all that matters is ‘winning' and thus political arguments such as those used by the Christian apologists and their opponents are less concerned with the requirements of scholarship and instead framed to convince and thus ‘win'. In this section I examine the complexities of the gospel writings, which demonstrates that the documents were produced by evangelists who were attempting to spin doctor the Christ story in order to win converts to diverse points of view (from what we would today call ‘Evangelical Fundamentalism' (Matthew) to ‘Left Wing Socialism' (Luke and Acts). This familiarity with the source materials is important since it is required that if one disposes of an ‘historical Jesus figure' (the man behind the myth) then out of necessity one must turn for an explanation of the historical existence of church and documents to the ‘Jesus Conspiracy Theory' which holds that a powerful clique ‘forged every document.' Anything is possible in history, but that proves nothing, since by definition anything is possible, however what really matters in historical research is that some things are probable and some things are less probable, and a determination of probability, and thus the acceptance of a scientific historical theory that stands the test of time is that such a theory adequately explain all the facts (and not just some of the facts). It is that some theories do not adequately explain all the facts that some theories have been discredited and discarded, being assigned a lower probability, while the theory that best explains all the available facts is a theory which is then assigned a high probability. A familiarity with the documents in question, as well familiarity with documents outside the church canon which indicate a furious feud took place that lasted centuries over ‘heresies' that are written in the gospels (the true source of all so called ‘heresies') indicates that the ‘Jesus Conspiracy Theory' which suggests that these documents were all forged is the least credible hypothesis, and the misinformation being spread over the internet that suggests that this invention and forgery took place is an indication of a lack of any deep familiarity with the source materials, and thus evidence for really bad scholarship..

The process of canonization

One of the purposes of my discussion in part one was to establish that attempts to debunk early church writings as being worthless as historical documents is nothing more than an ideologically driven rhetorical stunt. Now one thing we know is that a Christian movement existed early in the first century, and we know that lots of documents existed, most of which you do not find in the Bible. The canon, as it is called, was only voted into existence during the fourth century, with the voting process being under the control of right wing, socially conservative priests who had allied themselves with Caesar and the state, and thus their choice of manuscripts reflects their political orientation. For example we read that slaves must ‘obey their masters with fear and trembling', women were to be ‘silent' for it was shocking for women to speak, unless they spoke to their husbands at home, they were to be obedient to their husbands, doing housework and making babies, and were to have no position outside the home, and were to never appear in public without their head coverings (it is from these socially reactionary writings that Muslims picked up the practice of covering women and forbidding them to speak to people on the street).

What is alluded to above does not even begin to scratch the surface of the kind of backwardness we find inserted, by vote, into what is supposed to be, now, ‘the Word of God'. For some reason after some priests vote on some narrow selection of books that is now supposed to be ‘authoritative' and thus ‘the source for all doctrines.' However to suggest that this clique of priests had complete control over the vote and the process of canonization is an over simplification of the social forces at work which resulted in ‘canonization'. For example, we know that the Gospel of Mark was a heresy. For example we are told that the Bible contains ‘human traditions' (referring here to what we call the Old Testament). It was acceptable to break the Sabbath (although it was supposed to be a death penalty offense). Yeshua (the original form of the name ‘Jesus', which I reserve to describe the mythological god figure) was a sinner, who got baptized for his sins, and scolded people if they called him good since no one was good except God.

Even though the doctrines of the gospel of Mark were just as much a heresy as the many documents those voting church fathers burned in the fires, they voted that book into the canon (they also did some editing, for example, someone added on the ending found in the last chapter of the gospel of Mark...originally the manuscript ended with the crucifixion and then the mysterious empty tomb, and that was it). There are fragments of the gospel of Mark being discovered all over the Roman Empire, in North Africa, in the Middle East. Because so many churches were using the gospel of Mark, this led to ‘canonization by usage.' The manuscript was forced into the Bible because it was so widely used that it would split the unity of the church movement to exclude it, and thus the church fathers did not have complete power over the canonization process. Later on, they would co-opt the gospel of Mark churches, and all those ‘heresies' you hear about, such as Arianism or Marcianism, all have their roots in the gospel of Mark, since in those days, all you had to do was quote that supposedly sacred gospel of Mark, and you were damned for heresy.

On religious issues the Gospel of Luke always straddles the fence and takes the middle ground. On controversies over Kosher food laws, as one example, the position of the Luke gospel is that Jews should be allowed to be Kosher, while Gentiles should be allowed not to be Kosher. This type of middle road on religious controversies is typical of the documents of Luke and Acts, and is a way of saying ‘it just doesn't matter' (for if it did matter you would come down on one side or the other). While the Gospel of Luke is middle of the road when it comes to religion (even salvation is a curious hodge podge tossed together from different doctrines of different churches, with no clear doctrine emerging) the book was unrepentantly radical when it came to politics, and allowed no compromise. If you wanted to go straight to hell in Luke's gospel, well just refuse to go along with the left wing agenda and you will fry in hell along with all those other rich people Luke fried in hell.

Like the gospel of Mark, the gospel of Luke also contains a heresy, in that the book describes the establishment of a political order best described in modern terms as ‘Trojan Horse Socialism' (setting up socialism in one town or one region at a time within a larger hostile culture) or you could describe the Luke ideology as ‘a strong welfare state.' If you follow the social system of the Gospel of Luke to its logical conclusion, what you would do is you would raise taxes on the rich and never stop until you had totally eliminated poverty, by setting up a totally complete, one hundred per cent successful welfare system. If any rich people didn't want to pay those high taxes, well then they could go right straight to hell (fire and brimstone leftism being characteristic of Luke's gospel). It goes without saying that the political orientation (far left) of the Luke gospel was treated like a heresy, in that the church did not bother to fulfill it, but the gospel of Luke and Acts were voted into the canon.

Other documents, such as Matthew and the Book of Romans describe the Right Wing Authoritarian system, class divisions and obedience of lower class to upper class, and describe a dictatorial system of rule, including torturers and death squads, and so the left wing churches could be absorbed and then, like the Mark churches, could be co-opted and destroyed over time, with the church taking up authoritarianism and even torture at the end of the process. Given the selection of documents then, you can see that the church should turn to the RWA movement, and not bother with those other left wing heresies (they call it the ‘religious right') it just goes to show what those churches were really interested in, since they did have choices and they made them. Furthermore, they knew enough to make a temporary truce with those other churches they were going to swallow up, co-opt, and eventually destroy, and history has some lessons for the world there (lessons you can only learn if you read the Bible critically, and then think critically about the historical processes that were involved in the creation of RWA Christianity).


In the Gospel of Matthew we find a description of what we would today call the ‘Right Wing Fundamentalist' viewpoint. Matthew's famous Sermon on the Mount contains a declaration of the infallibility of the Bible (the Bible, both the Torah ("Law of God", the first five books of the Bible) and the prophets are said to be so perfect that not one dot over one letter ‘i' will ever be mistaken, and we are told that anyone who tries to relax even one of the rules laid out in the Bible will become the lowest of the low. This classic declaration of fundamentalism is used by fundamentalists to this very day, and this is not surprising, since fundamentalist wrote the declaration of infallibility in Matthew's gospel and now their descendants, the fundamentalists of today, use the quote as a proof text for the doctrine of inerrancy.

Like all fundamentalists the Matthew gospel contains a description of the Right Wing Authoritarian social order. We are told that the Jesus figure sets up torture chambers where dissidents are tortured ‘until they pay the last cent' and a ruthlessly punitive justice system doles out severe punishments for violations of the rules that causes those on the receiving end to be cast into dark prisons where they shall ‘weep and grind their teeth.' It is also in this RWA gospel that we are told that the Jesus figure keeps on hand death squads whose job is to bring forward all those who rebel against the Christ government and then murder them at the feet of the Christ King figure. All this doctrine is classic RWA social philosophy and is entirely in keeping with the declaration of infallibility of the Bible found in the same document, which is also a classic RWA religious doctrine.

Like modern fundamentalists, the Matthew church movement was not entirely consistent in their doctrine of inerrancy of the Bible. For example, today you could ask a fundamentalist, who claims to believe in the infallibility of ‘God's Word', why they allow women to speak outside of their own homes, and why they allow women to go around without being veiled under the chador. For you see it says right in the Bible that women must keep silent, for it is shocking to have them speaking out in public places, such as at church, and they should keep quiet and then talk to their husbands at home. They must also be kept veiled under the chador, like Muslim women are required to do (for Muslims were influenced by Christianity, and that is where they got that idea from in the first place, and this explains why the Taliban were beating women with sticks when they caught them talking to people out in public or not properly veiled...these are originally Christian concepts from the Bible, and did not originate with the Koran, which was written over half a millennia later). Today's fundamentalists let women speak to someone other than their own husband, they also let them speak at church, and they don't force them to hide themselves under some sack with only their eyes peeping out, because, you see, the Bible is infallible but you do have to make some exceptions. Apparently, after having made all those exceptions, you should then be stubbornly insistent that you did not make an exception, even though it is obvious that you did. Similarly, the Sermon on the Mount contains weird inconsistencies, but then that would make it typical of fundamentalism. For example, the Bible is so perfect, you cannot ever relax even one rule. Well, except for that one about an eye for an eye. That should be relaxed, or perhaps even canceled, just like fundamentalists today have canceled lots of rules. Something other rules, such as the sex laws, well they should not be relaxed but toughened up, and made even stricter than they were before.

There are deep ideological divisions present in the gospels of the Bible. In Mark's gospel we are told, in chapter 7, that the food laws of Leviticus were invalid. Nothing you eat can make you ‘unclean', and then Mark tells us ‘and in saying this he declared all meats to be clean.' You would need to be familiar with the earlier declaration that certain meats were ‘unclean', found in such documents as Leviticus and Deuteronomy, to understand that what this statement means is that ‘in saying this he declared null and void the Bible laws declaring certain meats unclean.' Mark also includes an allusion to the criticisms of these laws found in the prophets. ‘You hypocrites, you nullify the prophets for the sake of your human traditions.' The food laws, Mark is saying, was one of these human traditions. To uphold these as laws of God was to ‘nullify the prophets'. What he is referring to is all the damnation of the purported ‘law of God' (the Torah) found in the writings of the Jewish prophets. For example, in the 7 chapter of Jeremiah, the 21stverse we read a damnation of the animal sacrificing laws, which states that Moses did no bring down laws from Mount Sinai describing the animal sacrifice, and then as the sermon continues, in chapter 8, verse 8, Jeremiah makes his criticism of the Torah even more explicit, by stating ‘how can you say, ‘We are wise, for we have the Torah', when, actually, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie.' The animal sacrificing laws in the Bible are thus forgeries he insists, and Mark insists that the food laws, well those were ‘human cultural traditions' which is a very modern interpretation of those regulations, and that is exactly what they were. Or, if one wishes to be more severe, as Jeremiah was, one could also damn those food laws in the Bible as forgeries, because, since they were not ‘laws of God' but human traditions, thus they were forgeries, because they were masquerading as ‘Laws of God'.

Like modern fundamentalists, Matthew's doctrine is found to be riddled with contradictions, since it is impossible to hold the contradictory Bible to be ‘infallible and inerrant' without the doctrine being inherently inconsistent and contradictory. Just one look at the prophets and the Torah would be enough to convince anyone that one cannot declare both the prophets, who damned the Torah, with the Torah, and then declare both those diametrically opposed ideological positions to be ‘infallible'. There is thus a deep divide between the RWA ideology of Matthew and the ideology of Mark, which does not attempt this ridiculous fundamentalist ‘harmonization' of two polar opposites, but instead comes down squarely on the side of the Jewish prophets, and thus takes a stand against the Torah. (Note that many writers have described Mark's gospel as ‘anti- Semitic', but the Jewish people are portrayed as waving palm branches and celebrating the Christ figure, hardly ‘anti-Semetic' - Mark's is ‘anti-Torah' and, since Jewish prophets were equally against the Torah, that would not make Mark any more ‘anti-Semitic' than a Jewish prophet.)

There are deep divisions in the gospels, and in the church letters on the subject of Biblical authority, and given the nature of the dispute the theory that holds that all the gospels were forged by a group of conspirators displays a real lack of any intimate familiarity with the actual source documents. For example, we know that. Matthew's gospel is a rewrite of Mark's gospel, since, after Matthew's fictional introduction, Matthew follows Mark step by step, parable by parable, chapter by chapter, and such a close correspondence between two literary works cannot be coincidental. Matthew was a fundamentalist, who believed that the Bible was literal, right down to the last dot over the last letter i. Given how harshly Mark criticized the Bible you can understand that Matthew would not like Mark's gospel, and that is why he rewrote the whole thing. After all, why reinvent the wheel, if you are satisfied with the wheel as it is. Each step of the way Matthew destroys Mark's original meaning when it is required to do so to fit that ‘infallible' agenda of his. For example Mark's damnation of the food laws is ‘cleaned up' by Matthew so that the big argument was no longer about Leviticus, but about hand washing. You see, hand washing was a ‘human tradition' thus Christ could demand that people not be required to wash their hands and thus he would not attack the sanctity of the most sacred Torah. The entire meaning of the allusion to the prophets in the passage is destroyed, but then that was what Matthew wanted to accomplish so as to preserve ‘Biblical infallibility'. And that explains the need for a rewrite job on that terrible gospel of Mark.

What we have here is evidence for an interesting church feud between a more ‘liberal' church (at least concerning the doctrine of inerrancy) in the Gospel of Mark, and their foes, the fundamentalists, in the Gospel of Matthew. Forgery is not the most probable explanation for all the facts an examination of the records reveal, but a real feud, between two real church movements, best explains the appearance of these two opposing and contradictory manuscripts, written by evangelists who were each peddling a certain point of view.

The "Jesus Conspiracy'

Now we now that the world was flooded with Christian documents, most of which never made into the Bible (those small heretic churches, as they were called, had their books burned, while large heretic churches were swallowed whole and then had the heresies beat out of them over a span of centuries...some of those burned books have turned up, hidden in a hole in the desert, being recovered in the middle of the last century, and can now be read once again...they show the early church to be a surprisingly diverse movement with a wide divergence of experience and doctrine). We know that a movement sprung up, and we know how diverse the movement was, in that we have documents. If we dispose of an historical Yeshua, a person who inspired this movement, we must of necessity turn to the Jesus Conspiracy to explain this sudden flowering of Christianity in the first century. You see, if we purge Yeshua from history, and wipe him out, all that is left is a conspiracy theory.

Now in part one of this treatise, I discussed how history is not a question of sure and certain facts, but consists of probabilities. Furthermore, given that history is built upon questionable documents, requiring rigorous examination and interpretation, you can put one hundred historians into a room, and get various scenarios which supposedly describe what we would call ‘our history'. If something is generally accepted as being ‘history' this means that it has been conceded by most historians that the described sequence of events is the most probable explanation for what happened, and history is fluid, in that what we once believed, we often no loner believe, since new information has become available, which then makes the improbable suddenly more probable, and the probable suddenly becomes improbable. This is history.

So then we must ask ourselves whether it is more probable that a great Jesus Conspiracy theory best explains what happened in the first century, and thus it is most probable that an historical Yeshua never actually existed. Or then again, is the best, most probable, explanation, that a movement rose up because of the activity of a living human being who actually existed.

All those who try to debunk the existence of an historical Yeshua must become conspiracy theorists, and in the process, I have found, they must then do some atrociously bad scholarship as they vainly attempt to make that conspiracy theory probable which states that nefarious and powerful church leaders plotted to invent Jesus to trick the people and thus gain power. This is the short description of the Jesus Conspiracy theory, which is what you get when you deny the existence of the historical Yeshua. You see, you have to explain that sudden rise of the Christian movement, which is an undeniable historical fact, and you have to explain all those documents, the vast majority of which never made it into the Bible.

Now we must argue, if we adopt this conspiracy theory, that the documents were cooked up by forgers, and here some of the worst scholarship I have ever encountered on the internet comes to the surface. It shows a truly astonishing ignorance of the nature of these documents for anyone to suggest that a small group of conspirators cooked up the Christian documents as part of that Jesus conspiracy they were hatching. You could then insist that they cooked up all those inconsistent politically diverse documents, they even cooked up those damnable heresies they would then spend centuries crushing and wiping out, yes, they even cooked up socialism and the destruction of the very status quo they tried to protect and defend with that nefarious conspiracy of theirs, because by faking diversity, they would have a much more credible conspiracy.

In the end of it all, everything comes down to a matter of probabilities. You either assign a high probability to that Jesus Conspiracy, and then assign, out of necessity, a high probability to that clever forgery theory, or you don't. To believe in such a conspiracy theory shows a lack of deep understanding of the nature of these documents, I would argue, and it leads me to conclude that those who postulate this, which is required if they are to ‘prove the non-existence of the historical Yeshua' have never actually read the documents in question in any depth. Perhaps they have skimmed over them, but that would be about it. To believe in such conspiracy theories is to fail to understand the complex social forces that were at work in both the rise of the movement, and then to fail to understand the desperate struggle that followed, which you can uncover from the writings of those church fathers, as the elite status quo of the Roman Empire sought to co-opt and then destroy the movement by turning it into a Right Wing Authoritarian religious dogma (and thus a form of political propaganda that was pro-torture, pro-death penalty, pro state terrorism, and so on). Once again the processes here are so complex that such a simplistic conspiracy theorist could not have familiarized themselves with all the historical documents in question, and certainly never spent any deep time studying the documents in question or the history of the times or they would find that the Jesus Conspiracy theory was so improbable as an explanation for what happened, that it isn't even worth granting any serious consideration.

This sort of gross over simplification is characteristic of so many conspiracy theories, which ignore social forces, and attribute great powers to supposedly super powered cliques (the Elders of Zion, just one example, and their control of all the world's money). The real world just never is so simple that it can be explained by such over simplifications characteristic of such conspiracy theories. And yet these theories can hold a grip over the minds and hearts of people, for in simplifying the problem they simplify the solution (if only we could get rid of that one little clique of conspirators then our problems would be solved...this is much less scary, because it seems much easier to do, and so conspiracy theorists of this sort spend all their time trying to get people to join up with them in overthrowing the Elders of Zion, and so on, because they take comfort in knowing that this will solve our problems...such people cannot live with uncertainty and challenge and prefer to see the world in terms of simplified conspiracy theories for that very reason...its just more comforting and that explains the emotional attraction...)

Gospels as Source materials

Previously I described the Gospel of Mark as ‘a heresy'. What this means is that the gospel of Mark is an early document, in that the mythology has not yet fully developed in this manuscript. Yeshua is not a god, he is a sinner, who is not good. This low Christology is in direct contradiction to the High Christology of the later Christ Cult movement, which to this day, holds that Christ was perfect, sinless, and a divine god, who by definition, one would call perfectly good. This under developed low Christology, which is the root source for what were called heresies, such as Arianism or Marcianism, suggests that the Gospel of Mark was created before other Gospels which include a much more developed mythology (indicating that much more time had passed).

We know that the Sanhedrin, a type of Jewish Court, was not formed until about 54 C.E. We also know that the Gospel of Mark contains an apocalypse which refers darkly to the abomination of desolation (an interpretation of the book of Daniel) being placed in the temple in Jerusalem. Mark somberly warns the reader to take special note of this warning and that when that abomination from the book of Daniel gets put into the Jerusalem temple well then everyone should start running and head for the hills. (The phrase ‘head for the hills' comes from the gospel of Mark, by the way...just a bit of trivia for you). Mark also promises that according to his interpretation of all those numbers and weeks of years and so on in Daniel that all this abomination will happen in the temple during the life time of those who were his contemporaries...Yes, surely Mark tells his readers, that there are those who are standing here today who will not taste death before all this happens. The abomination in the temple was coming, it was imminent, and Mark tells us, that current generation would not pass away before all this took place. You see, Mark had that all figured out based on calculating out all those numbers in Daniel.

In the later Gospels, Matthew and Luke, we have a much fuller mythology, with Yeshua now becoming a god like being, without sinfulness, becoming more and more perfect, which is a sign that these gospels were written later than the gospel of Mark. The temple was destroyed in 70 C.E., and since Mark is gloomily watching that temple for the abomination we can then say that the gospel of Mark was written no sooner than 54 C.E. (Mark mentions the Sanhedrin, which did not exist before that time) and the manuscript was written before 70 C.E. when the temple was destroyed. We also know that both Matthew and Luke were written later than 70 C.E. since they know that the temple was destroyed, and so Mark's word's were edited (we are told that ‘the generation which is alive at that time and sees the abomination in the temple will not die before everything happens.' The authors introduce subtle changes in Mark's temple apocalypse which shows that in their time the temple was destroyed and gone, so it made no sense to talk about the temple and the current generation, as Mark was able to do, so they edited Mark to make his apocalyptic scenario make more sense to readers contemporary to their own time, by placing the event off into the future. (And to this day, no one ever reads Mark's apocalypse, but they use that future tense introduced by later authors such as Luke, and then they agitate to knock down the Muslim mosque and build the temple again Jerusalem so that ‘prophecy can be fulfilled').

Now my purpose in going into this discussion is to establish that there are all sorts of good reasons to assume that the earliest document is the gospel of Mark. Some of the arguments are theological (a heavily developed myth, such as what we find in Matthew, Luke, or John) argues for a later date of composition, and this line of reasoning is also confirmed by an analysis of the dating of the manuscripts based on contemporary references which can then be compared to the historical record. The less mythology a manuscript contains, the closer it is likely to be a real historical situation, I would suggest.

Matthew contains heavily edited versions of material which already exists in Mark's gospel. Because Mark has such a low theology, Matthew rewrote the manuscript, and edited it to make the Christ figure into a god like being, a pattern you can see emerging as you bounce back and forth between the original low theology version of a story in Mark, and the high Christology of Matthew's edited version. Documents such as Matthew or Luke are better sources as histories of the church, and if a person is interested in studying the evolution of two church movements (right wing authoritarian, fundamentalist in the case of Matthew, ‘communist' left wing in the case of Luke) then these documents are invaluable as source materials. Gospels often contain controversy stories, and attempt to answer the controversy by delivering what today we might call ‘spin doctored interpretations.' There is history to be found embedded in these controversies (ignoring the spin doctoring of gospel evangelists). Some controversies relate to the person of the Yeshua figure at the center of the movement while others describe controversies within a diverse church community, and thus a certain time and place not contemporary to the historical Yeshua. For this reason the controversy stories in later gospel manuscripts can only be used as historical sources (examined using the ‘argument from embarrassment') with great care, since some controversies are actually quarrels and disputes between factions within the church movement, which have been dressed up and spin doctored by making the claim that Yeshua took a position on one side or another of the disputed issue..