Tom Harpur 4-Book Bundle. Tom Harpur
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where, when. None of the authors (or editors) of the Gospels is known for certain. Nor are their precise dates or places of origin. The earliest of the four, generally agreed to be Mark, has no birth story or reference to anything in Jesus’s life until John the Baptist comes out of the desert preaching and he is baptized by him. We know nothing about Jesus’s appearance, whether he was bearded or clean-shaven, short or tall, slim or chubby, with long or short hair, blue-eyed or brown. Absolutely nothing. To add to the confusion, the Gospels frequently contradict one another. For example, Matthew and Luke disagree over Jesus’s place of birth, and the Resurrection accounts differ markedly, as I have shown in Water into Wine.
I found it difficult at times, since the students were almost uniformly conservative in outlook—that’s why they came to Wycliffe in the first place—to raise these kinds of issues with them. For certain, the question of whether or not Jesus was a truly historical person was a cloud “no larger than a man’s hand” on my horizon at the time, so it was never mentioned at all. Some of the largest and growing questions in my mind were accordingly kept in pectore, as is said when the Pope wishes to keep secret the names of certain cardinals whom he has elevated until it is politically safe to reveal them. Nevertheless, the Form Critics (scholars who study the literary form of Scripture material) had to be dealt with. They had given evidence that many if not most of the Gospel stories had had a lengthy history outside the New Testament before being included, and that they conformed to certain recognized literary formulae, whether they were stories of miracles or brief anecdotes ending in a pithy saying. And there was much, much more. While expounding familiar texts in the classroom, I was privately busy with some more acute academic puzzles and difficulties of my own. They would be many years in the background of my thinking and research.
In the sixties, when I did most of my seminary teaching—apart from the lectures given on the theology and practice of mass media in the first half of the eighties at the Toronto School of Theology—one of the foremost themes in New Testament scholarship was the increasing interest in the alleged Jewishness of Jesus. I duly relayed this to the students in class, but at the same time there was a dimension of this development that it seemed nobody was addressing. I had no immediate answer myself, but the question niggled away on the fringes of my consciousness all the same. The problem was this: The scholars were (and today still are) convinced that if there was a historical Jesus in first-century Judea, he undoubtedly spoke Aramaic, a Semitic dialect, as his native tongue. It makes perfect sense that his words and deeds would later be translated and put forth into the wider Mediterranean world in Hellenistic Greek, the lingua franca of that world ever since Alexander the Great’s conquests in the fourth century BCE. But where are the supposed Aramaic originals of the Gospels to be found? Since obviously the redactors or editors of the four Gospels, whoever they actually were, purported to believe that the acts and sayings of Jesus were those of the divine Son of God, why were these not held worthy of being preserved in their pristine, original form? True, there are one or two Aramaic words preserved in the Gospel records, but their amazing paucity merely serves to highlight this lacuna in the “birthing” materials all the more. Let it be stressed that this is no minor matter for scholarly quibbling; it is an omission of huge proportions to be faced by traditionalist thinking. Yet for the most part it is—like many such issues—simply glossed over or ignored completely.
While it was clear to me that the New Testament documents, at least in the form they have come down to us, were chiefly the work of Jewish hands and minds, certain other aspects of this situation troubled me as well. There were two specifics in particular that raised for the first time in my mind the possibility that perhaps the Jesus Story might be the telling of an older, more universal tale in a carefully Judaized dress or terminology. Accepting for a moment the Jewish matrix for the story, that of a Saviour figure for the world, how can one explain the wholly remarkable fact that the central sacred, ritual meal—the chief sacrament—laid down for all times in these texts, sets forth and celebrates the eating and drinking of the body and blood of the God himself? Anyone who has ever read Leviticus or who knows anything whatsoever about Judaism then or today, anyone who understands even one iota of the beliefs about the kosher killing of animals and kosher food in general, knows how utterly abominable all of this sounds in Jewish ears. Abominable and blasphemous too. Indeed, it was commonplace in the various Mystery Religions and other circles in the ancient world, but we are talking about one of the most un-Jewish of all conceivable ideas. Even if, as surely most reasonable people do, one understands the terminology to be symbolic or metaphorical in nature, the problem for Jews remains simply enormous.
The second problematic “specific” in relation to the growing emphasis upon the Jewishness of Jesus—and let it be said that in general I believed this to be an overdue and hence welcome correction of a previous tendency to overlook the Jewish content of the New Testament almost entirely—has to do with the very nature of the Jesus Story itself. As said above, it is the narrative of a Saviour man-God come for the deliverance of all mankind. But as the earliest critics of Christianity in its infancy were quick to point out, this dying/rising God soteriology (to use the technical term for a theory of salvation) was already well known in the other religions of Mediterranean and other Middle Eastern antiquity. Even the very first Christian apologists, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus for example, were profoundly embarrassed by the obvious parallels with the Mystery Religions and came up with far-fetched and even contradictory explanations. I was to become more aware much later in my career of the extent to which this was a thorny obstacle to the traditional telling of the Christian story, but it troubled me then also from time to time.
Unfortunately, I had more than enough on my plate in meeting the demands of a fairly heavy lecture load, plus doing Sunday duty to supplement Wycliffe’s less than bountiful salary schedule, to be able to devote the kind of time it required to further research just at that moment. But the question was there to be pondered at odd breaks in the college rhythms, even at times in chapel when thoughts should have been elsewhere. It returned again repeatedly throughout all the following years. Here is the question starkly put: “How do those who deny that there is direct input to Christianity from Pagan religions account for the glaring fact that there is no basis or pattern in ancient Judaism for a dying/rising-again Saviour motif?” Yes, there is the Suffering Servant of Deutero-Isaiah—who seems to represent or personify the Nation of Israel as a whole—but no suffering-dying-rising God. From today’s vantage point I realize that I was far from ready for the answer. The stakes at a very deep level were much too high.
Early on in the course of preparing a series of lectures on the Sermon on the Mount one summer, I realized that the latest commentaries and Bible dictionaries were now emphasizing the to me radically disturbing truth that, as hinted at already, virtually none of the material was original. The “Sermon” pronouncements—Matthew chapters 5 to 7—are now recognized as a collection of logia, or sayings, rather than as one continuous discourse. Interestingly, the mountain on which the Sermon is supposed to have taken place remains unnamed and its situation vague. (In Luke a shorter version of the same “Sermon” is said to have taken place, not on a mountain, but on an equally vague plain.) I discovered, I must say with a certain sense of shock, that most of the key sayings could also be found in the Talmud and Mishnah, and even at times in earlier Pagan authors. For example, the saying of Matthew “Many are called but few are chosen” and the logion or saying that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven are both found virtually verbatim in the writings of Plato, roughly four hundred years earlier.
The motto of Wycliffe College, Verbum Domini Manet, “the Word of the Lord Abides” (or stands firm), now had to be viewed from a different perspective. That, together with my growing recognition that the Greek text of the New Testament had at least 150,000 variant readings in the different manuscripts (many of them minor, but some very serious and important for the overall meaning), combined to force me to review and correct my view of Holy Scripture. In this latter connection it is worthwhile to look at the work of Christian Lindtner, Ph.D., author of The Secret of Jesus. Lindtner, a Sanskrit scholar, believes he has proven that much of the Gospel material is anticipated in earlier Buddhist scriptures. There are other noted scholars who agree. It was becoming very clear that, rather than being the product of pure visionary revelation or sudden inspiration from Above, all sacred scriptures were the product of composite human effort, from varying sources, in some cases over a