How to be a Jesus Myth Historian

Last updated on: December 31, 2014 at 3:52 pm by Mark Shea

How to be a Jesus Myth Historian 2014-12-31T15:52:21-07:00 Mark Shea

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Language is important. Christian terms such as ‘salvation’, ‘Eucharist’, ‘word made flesh’ and ‘lamb of god’ are common currency today. Therefore when translating or paraphrasing pagan sources always use modern Christian language. Never mind that the ancient pagans would not have known what you were on about – you are not talking to them. In this way you can call a woman being raped by various kinds of wildlife a ‘virgin birth’, you can call having ones body parts stuck back together a ‘resurrection’ and you can call just about every Greek hero a ‘son of god’. Also it is helpful to use King James Bible phrases and style when quoting pagan texts. It gives them some more gravitas.

More hilarity here.

One of the many fun things about this method is that it habitually strains at gnats and swallow camels. The camel swallowing is well-illustrated here, the gnat straining is seen in such things as those tedious 9/11 truther-mentality attempts to parse some saying of Jesus like “Why do you call me good? There is none good but God” and then cry out “Aha! Now we clearly see that Jesus himself clearly denied being God! Yet the Church has covered it up!” while totally forgetting that the only reason we know Jesus said this is because the Church carefully preserved the saying. Or else you get the strange comparisons of the Resurrection accounts which make much of the minor variations between them and ignore the Elephant in the Living Room fact that they all affirm that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and seen by many witnesses (500 of them, according to Paul, most of whom were still alive when he wrote). It’s like some future historian arguing that, because people reportedly heard different numbers of shots from different directions at Dealey Plaza and have multiple theories about why it all happened, we can confidently conclude that JFK was never assassinated and that the whole thing–indeed the very existence of JFK–was a myth.

I mean, seriously, you expect me to believe that a supposedly Harvard educated “President” would stand before the people of a great nation and say “I am a jelly donut”? Clearly this is a ritual meal legend which became attached to a minor tribal leader of the mid-20th century (details are unclear since so much documentation was destroyed in WWIII). But scholars are now confident that “Camelot” was a purely legendary construct and that the myth of the Handsome Leader Struck Down in His Prime and who offers himself as food for the people is borrowing motifs from some earlier religious tradition (now obscure). So we can confidently say that “JFK” never existed as a historical figure. He is an amalgam of various mythic figures and motifs that summed up the hopes and anxieties of Americans of that time. The Quest for the Historical JFK is a wild goose chase. Far wiser to just acknowledge that the JFK of Faith is a noble construct of the human heart.

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