PREFACE
The subject of the Historicity of the life of Jesus of “Nazareth” and the questions it raised have agitated the thoughts and disturbed the dreams of people of nearly every rank and class over the Western world, for the last five hundred years. Following the hegemonic centuries of Church dominion, interest in the mystery of the origin of Christianity, within the Jewish world of the remote Judean Province of the Roman Empire, has grown unabated.
The German High Critics of the Nineteenth century exemplified by Strauss, and the French Rationalists of the Ernest Renan persuasion, have greatly eroded the religious faith attached to the Gospel narratives, due to their intense study and profound scholarship.
The theory developed by David Friedrich Strauss in his Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835) was that Jesus is the impersonation of an ideal of purely mythic derivation: having existed in idea, he was afterwards conceived to have had a corresponding existence in fact. His view was partly supported and partly contradicted by the Church theology, which, while it asserts in confirmation that “Jesus was the lamb slain from the foundation of the world," it also asserts in opposition that he was slain again in the flesh when Pontius Pilate was procurator of Judea, around 31CE. But this theory is unsatisfactory, because it is not historically grounded, and because no authentic historical explanation is supplied to account for the rise and spread of the traditional belief.
Ernest Renan's theory, as given in his romantic Vie de Jesus (1863) was as fanciful in conception as that of Strauss, and was formed in equal disregard of historical accuracy. His chief interest rests in the beauty and sublimity of the moral teachings of Jesus, as these are reported by the four Evangelists. Renan emphasizes the Jesus character’s basic self-consciousness, which, he maintains, because it is absolutely human, boldly asserts itself to be equally divine.
Both these theories rather reflect the philosophical opinions of their respective authors than any sound criticism of history. Most of the books published in the past fifty years have mainly repeated or amplified the same arguments. Yet, the English-speaking public, generally intensely conservative, is prone to look with skepticism on any departure from ancestral beliefs. It was therefore deemed essential by this author to reopen the case for or against the historical reality of Jesus, as the answers are of transcendental consequences for believers and unbelievers alike.
The various Christian Churches and the Western World in general have in a higher degree accepted the traditional narratives handed down from the time of Constantine, the first Roman Emperor to officially recognize Christianity as State-protected, in 325CE. A honest search for documentary proof of the facts has led the author of this Essay to seriously question the historical value of the records known today as “Apostolic Writings” and “Early Church Fathers” – as this has been abundantly discussed in the scholarly volumes of Emil Walter, Arthur Heulhard, Robert Eisler and others referred to in this work. But the surprising development was the rediscovery of genuine historical accounts confirming the existence of certain authentic “Messianic” characters alive within the geographical setting and timeframe alluded to by the Christian Tradition. George Solomon wrote The Jesus of History and the Jesus of Tradition Identified in 1880, in which he severely condemns the Christian religion as a heresy from the Jewish beliefs, opening up a theological debate that went beyond historical considerations. Solomon, however, clearly indicated the keys necessary to entangle the greatest of the mysteries of History. This Essay will, therefore, leave out the conflicting theological arguments from the case and, while relying on George Solomon’s impeccable research, offer conclusive evidence to prove that the story of the traditional Jesus is a garbled development from a historical root.
For the first time in recent years, we shall strive to introduce to the modern public the real Jesus as known to history, before his figure was distorted by popular belief and hopefully solve the riddle of How Christianity was Invented.