THE "JESUS STORY" CONTINUES!

Where are you on the “Jesus Story”?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 14, 2015

First of all, I don't have any "drop dead" due date.  Thank you for your interest in my progress.

As I answered Henry recently, I read and read and read and let what I read settle in based upon where my mind is at the moment and governed by my experience, knowledge base, biases and limitations.

Remember, although a lifelong reader of matters religious, especially Roman Catholic, as well as the Bible and countless studies of Jesus and Paul, especially, but also Peter, James, Thomas, Judas and others, it is my "Jesus Story" and may not be relevant to anyone else.

Like all my writing, it grows out of my own curiosity, which currently is about God, about the place of the Bible, especially the New Testament, in my mindset and belief system. 

For me, a person who has lived in his mind perhaps more than in life most of his existence, none of the sources -- from my point of view -- have been honest with me.

I know little to nothing about Islam, and a little more about Eastern religions, thanks to Joseph Campbell, but at this point in my life I am kind of amazed that Christianity, which is essentially a made up religion, as is Rabbinical Judaism is unable or unwilling to share with the faithful what I have learned in this odyssey.

Only Paul's work, which was mainly a number of letters to the Gentiles, based upon two essentials of his belief system: that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead.  These two events turned Jesus from a great teacher to Jesus-the-Christ. 

In 70 C.E. (Christian Era, or Common Era whatever you prefer, no longer written as AD, or Adonis Domino), the equivalent of a nuclear explosion fell upon Jerusalem, completely destroying the entire province, all its records and the Second Jewish Temple, the seat of Judaism, and the seat of Jesus sect. 

The holocaust was the end of Jewish-Roman War in which Rome totally destroyed everything that was Jewish before.

The Rabbinical Judaism that was invented after that war was totally different than the Judaism that existed before the war. 

Nothing at all survives that was written about or concerning Jesus before 70 C.E.  In fact, most of what was to be written about him and the "new religion" was written in the late first century or early in the second century about Jesus, and the new religion called Christianity.

Only Paul's "epistles" survived.  Paul is believed to have died in prison or martyred in Rome in around 67 C.E.

Luke in the "Acts of the Apostles" uses an "air brush" to give the Paul experience the right twist, having prepared it for the Roman patron, Theophilus. 

Luke', writing about 90 C.E. portrays the struggling church as united in purpose to spread the gospel from Jerusalem to the Greco Roman world.

But acts as well as the gospels about Jesus were written decades after that mission (Jesus died on the cross about 30 C.E.), and after the catastrophic destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E.

In fact, it is the earliest letters of Paul written between 50-60 C.E. that provide the story or the firsthand account of the Jesus' first followers, whom Paul had met with and wrote about.

Before there was a religion called "Christianity," Paul also portrays a very different story of how the Jesus movement took root beyond the Jewish World, which is accepted as "gospel" or truth personified by the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, yet the names attached to the four gospels writers are not at all authentic.  Moreover, not a single word of these gospels can be authenticated. 

Alas, its far less than harmonious beginning for the Christian faith which belies the gospels attempts to suggest otherwise.

After reading A. N. Wilson’s JESUS: A LIFE (1992) and Donald Harman Akenson's SURPASSING WONDER: The Invention of The Bible and The Talmud (1998), which incidentally details how Christianity and Judaism separated and reinvented themselves after 70 C.E., I continued my reading, and rereading many books of the past.

This is especially true of books on or about St. Paul, the quintessential outsider, the apostle so unique he defies invention.

Listed are the current reads to give me the broadest possible picture of the man and his work.  I know there are many other works on Apostle Paul, but these are works that have formed my views of the man:

Hyam Maccoby, THE MYTHMAKER, Paul and the Invention of Christianity (1986)

Sarah Ruden, PAUL AMONG THE PEOPLE: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time ((2010)

Henry Burton Sharman, PAUL AS EXPERIENT (1945)

A. N. Wilson, THE MIND OF THE APOSTLE (1997)

Bart D. Ehrman, PETER, PAUL & MARY MAGDALENE: The Followers of Jesus in the History and Legend (2006)

Michael Grant, SAINT PAUL (1976)

Donald Harman Akenson, SAINT SAUL: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus (2000) 

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