Water Into Wine. Tom Harpur
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had an earthly life but was wholly mythical himself. As the scholar G. Bornkamm has observed, it is “an astonishing fact” that Paul nowhere mentions Jesus of or from Nazareth, who was a prophet and miracle worker who ate with tax collectors and sinners. He never once calls him “Jesus of Nazareth.”
Among other things, Paul is silent about:
• The Sermon on the Mount, and all the rest of Jesus’ ethical teachings. He discusses ethical issues, even some doctrines familiar to us, such as “bless those who persecute you,” but he gives them on his own authority, with no sign that Jesus taught the very same truths.14 He appeals instead to passages from the Old Testament to support his teachings. The Gospel itself was already written in the pages of the Old Testament, according to Romans 1:2. He says there that the Gospel was “promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures.”
• The virgin birth. Paul simply says Jesus was “born of a woman,” but so too were the Pagan deities, for example Horus and his mother Isis. He never mentions the virgin birth.
• The Lord’s Prayer. This omission is all the more remarkable in that Paul discusses prayer at length in chapter 8 of Romans and says plainly that Christians don’t know exactly what to pray for and have to depend on the Spirit’s praying within us with “groanings that cannot be uttered.”15
• The temple cleansing—which is cited by all four Gospels.
• All the miracles that abound in the Gospels. In fact, he seems to deny that Jesus worked miracles, since he puts down that whole approach: “Jews demand signs [miracles] and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified . . .”16
• He knows nothing of Jesus’ command to go and baptize everyone, since he explicitly says: “Christ did not send me to baptize.”17
• He fails to support his lengthy plea for celibacy by any reference to Jesus’ reported praise for those who renounce marriage for the sake of the kingdom.18
• Even when writing about Jesus’ death, he never mentions any of the trials, Pontius Pilate, Herod or Jerusalem. In 1 Corinthians, 2:6–8, Paul writes about the crucifixion of Christ by “the rulers of this age,” but this is not a reference to any earthly powers. Rather, he is referring to the widespread view in the Judaism of his day that the world was in the grip of evil angels and other malignant forces.19 Kittel, in his Theological Wordbook of the New Testament, says that by “rulers” Paul is not here referring to any earthly governors but to heavenly or spiritual ones.
Critical scholars agree that Paul gives Jesus’ Crucifixion “no historical context” whatever, so that nothing is known from him as to where Jesus had lived, where he was killed, where he was buried or the story of his Resurrection. E. Kasemann, the distinguished New Testament scholar, has found that “the scantiness of Paul’s Jesus tradition overall is surprising,” to say the least, but adds that his silence over the circumstances of the Crucifixion, which is so central to his theology, is “positively shocking.” G.A. Wells in Did Jesus Exist? notes that scholar W. Schmithals is on record as saying that Paul’s silence about the entire substance of the Gospels is a “problem to which no satisfactory solution has been given during two hundred years of historical and critical research, and to the solution of which great theologians have sometimes not even attempted to contribute.” They simply refuse to tackle the issue at all.
In addition to the above, the following facts need to be known more widely:
Paul’s mention of James, the Lord’s brother, does not necessarily mean a blood brother of Jesus.20 The Jerusalem group of believers were called by Paul “the brethren of the Lord.” Paul frequently uses the term “brother” for a fellow believer. Jesus, in this tradition, spoke of his close followers as his brothers, just as certain religious groups still do today, for example the Brethren churches. I even get letters from people wholly unknown to me that begin: “Brother Tom.”
It is argued that 1 Thessalonians 1:6 says Christians received the Word in much “affliction” and so are imitators of Christ. This might seem to imply that Christ was known to have suffered, that is, on earth. But other gods had similarly been regarded as suffering—Osiris, Orpheus, Adonis, etc.
Paul speaks of the faithful as having “received Christ Jesus,” in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Wells notes this is “the purest mysticism” and that the knowledge of Christ comes from communion “with hidden powers or spirits.”21 In 1 Corinthians 4:1, Paul designates himself and his fellows as the “stewards of God’s mysteries,” which was exactly the technical name for the stewards at the temples of the popular Egypto-Greek deity Serapis.22
Finally, Paul uses the language of mysticism and of Mystery Religions over and over again. He speaks of being in Christ, through Christ, with Christ, unto Christ, as suggesting some indescribable relationship between himself (or the believer) and Christ. It’s a relationship, according to Wells, for example, that the context wholly fails to explain. The real explanation is that Paul knew only the mystical Christ, the “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”23
Finding Personal Meaning in the Myth
Know what is in front of your face and what is hidden from you will be disclosed.
– THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS, Saying #5
When I was in my teens I led a youth Bible class at St. Peter’s Anglican Church in the heart of downtown Toronto. One of the favourite old-time hymns the young people used to ask for began with the words: “Who is on the Lord’s side? Who for him will go?” The answer came ringing back in a later verse: “We are on the Lord’s side; Saviour we are thine.” It was a fine evangelical call to service for Jesus.
Later, however, in my first year at University College, at the University of Toronto, I happened upon the chapter in the book of Exodus from which the key words of the hymn were taken. It was chapter 32, where the mythical story is told of Moses’ descent from the mountain bearing the two tablets of stone upon which God’s “finger” had written the Ten Commandments. Moses discovers that in his long absence on the mountain the people have strayed and made for themselves the image of a golden calf. Moses throws a major temper tantrum, smashes the two tablets on the ground, seizes the calf and, after reducing it to powder in a fire, scatters the ashes upon water and forces the Israelites to drink it.
The true significance of all of this no doubt revolves around the author’s awareness of the ending of the zodiacal Age of Taurus the bull and the beginning of the Age of Aries the ram. (Notice that in Genesis, when Abraham was about to slay his son Isaac, he was told to offer up a ram caught in a nearby thicket instead.) But it’s what happened next that arrested my full attention. Here is the text itself:
When Moses saw that the people were running wild (for Aaron had let them run wild, to the derision of their enemies), then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, “Who is on the Lord’s side? Come to me!” And all the sons of Levi gathered around him. He said to them, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbour.’” The sons of Levi did as Moses commanded, and about three thousand of the people fell on that day. Moses said, “Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of a son or a brother, and so have brought a blessing on yourselves this day.” (Exodus 32:25–29)
I have never heard this part of the story read in church. The hymn, of course, like the Church in general, wholly slides over this horror—the total antithesis of common humanistic morality, never mind of the complete ethical teachings of the New Testament. Notice also another major but usually overlooked phenomenon: The “Lord” in the story is Yahweh, later to become God the Father. The hymn, however, as almost always happens in unthinking, popular Christian theology, transfers the title “Lord” to the “Saviour,” that is, to Jesus. In other words, the entire passage is twisted to suit the cause of “the Gospel.”
Anyone