Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman (read book .TXT) 📕

Jesus did not exist and those who claim he did] lie in recognition of the fact that the two parties are arguing on different subjects—that there are indeed, two different Jesuses, a mythical and an historical, having nothing in common but the name, and that the two have been fused into one?”19 In Robertson’s view, Paul was “a Gnostic missionary who, even if he knew anything of a Messiah executed in Palestine, cared nothing for him or his followers.” For Robertson, it is Mark who effected the fusion of the two Jesuses. And so the historical Jesus did exist. But “we know next to nothing about this Jesus.”

Wells takes this ball and runs with it, a considerable distance. Wells thinks that the early Christians who invented Christ were particularly influenced by Jewish traditions that spoke of God’s Wisdom as if it existed as an actual divine entity, distinct from but obviously closely related to, God himself. Wisdom preexisted with God and was used by God to create the world. Wells is right that this is indeed a known figure from Jewish traditions, appearing as far back as the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament. The most famous passage occurs in Proverbs 8, where Wisdom itself is speaking:

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,

the first of his acts of long ago.

Ages ago I was set up,

at the first, before the beginning of the earth….

Before the mountains had been shaped,

before the hills, I was brought forth….

When he established the heavens I was there,

when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,

when he made firm the skies above,

when he established the fountains of the deep….

Then I was beside him, like a master worker;

And I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always.

In a book of Jewish tradition not found in the canon of the Hebrew Bible (but included in the Apocrypha), called the Wisdom of Solomon, we learn the following about Wisdom:

She is a breath of the power of God

and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty….

For she is a reflection of eternal light,

a spotless mirror of the working of God,

and an image of his goodness….

She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other,

and she orders all things well….

For she is an initiate in the knowledge of God,

and an associate in his works. (Wisdom of Solomon 7–8)

Here we have a figure who was preexistent with God, who perfectly reflects God, who was used by God to create the world. This, for Wells, sounds a good deal like what we find in a passage celebrating Christ in one of the letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament:

For he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for all things were created in him—things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things and all things subsist in him. And he is the head of the body, the church, he who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that he might be preeminent in all things. Because in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell and, through him, to reconcile all things to himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross, whether things on earth or in the heavens. (Colossians 1:15–20)

This passage, which Wells points out is very similar to the Philippians hymn, which we just considered (Philippians 2:6–11), portrays Christ as the Wisdom of God, the image of God himself who created all things, who comes to earth and dies for the sake of reconciling all things back to God. In Wells’s view, the idea that Christ was crucified came to Paul as he reflected on the traditions of Wisdom that he inherited through the Jewish traditions. Before Paul, “some Christians…did not share his view that Jesus was crucified.” But in the Wisdom of Solomon we hear of the wise man who suffered a “shameful death” (see Wisdom of Solomon 2:12–20). “It may well have been musing on such a passage that led Paul (or a precursor) to the idea, so characteristic of his theology, that Christ suffered the most shameful death of all.”20

The key point for Wells, however, is that Paul explicitly calls Christ the “Wisdom of God” in 1 Corinthians 1:23–24: “We preach Christ crucified, which is a scandal to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles; but to those who are called, both Jews and Gentiles, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.” And later in the same book Paul says, “We speak wisdom to those who are mature, but it is a wisdom not of this age nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away. But we speak a wisdom of God that has been revealed in a mystery, which God foreknew before the ages unto our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew. For if they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:6–8).

According to Wells, then, Paul held to the view that Wisdom had become incarnate in Christ. The myth of Christ as Wisdom made incarnate was eventually historicized—that is, made into a real, historical, human being—when the Gospels were written toward the end of the first century.

Despite the inherent intrigue of this proposal, it is, I am afraid, riddled with problems, which may be why most other mythicists have not latched on to it. For one thing, while it is true that Paul calls Jesus the Wisdom of God in 1 Corinthians, this is not the normal way that he refers to him and is certainly not the way he first thought of him. There is no reason to privilege this conception over the many others that can be found in Paul. Within this passage alone, for example, Paul calls Jesus