Book Review

Flawed analysis of the Jesus of History

How Jesus Became Christian: the early Christians and the transformation of a Jewish teacher into the Son of God

In re-examining the birth of Christianity, this book purports to be "based on real historical evidence" and to show "how the early Christians hijacked a Jewish Jesus" and turned him into "the Christ" and a Gentile "God". In so doing, Paul and Luke (the two main villains) "sowed the seeds for centuries of Christian anti-Semitism". For several decades in Jerusalem, James, a relative of Jesus, kept the Jesus movement (based on the Torah) going, but eventually Paul's Christ movement prevailed. According to Barrie Wilson, a professor of religious studies at York University, Toronto, Paul was "totally indifferent to the Jesus of history", and fashioned a "brand-new religion entirely". The new religion "ceased being in any sense Jewish".

In maintaining such positions, Wilson never drops a hint that his thesis of Paul creating a new religion by turning the Jewish Jesus of history into the Gentile Christ of faith has often been tried and has often been found wanting. With his experience of Christ on the Damascus Road, Paul entered a community that already professed faith in a more-than-human Jesus. They did so on the basis of the resurrection (something almost completely ignored by Wilson), the gift of the Holy

Spirit (also ignored by Wilson), and their memory of what Jesus had claimed about himself during his earthly ministry.

No mere Jewish teacher who assumed a political role by seeking the throne of Israel (so Wilson argues), Jesus made claims (about such matters as forgiving sins and changing the divine law) that put him on a par with God, to whom he related as the beloved Son. There is plenty of evidence that such high claims troubled some religious authorities, and led them to accuse him of blasphemy. Wilson makes the bold assertion that for Jesus "the basis for salvation" was not faith in him. To establish this, Wilson would need to expunge what Jesus repeatedly said about abandoning normal family ties to follow him and about confessing him in this life being decisive for one's situation before God in the next.

Wilson should read Rabbi Jacob Neusner's book on Jesus, in which Neusner recognises that "only God can demand of me what Jesus is asking". Neusner politely turns away, but he has the admirable honesty to acknowledge the claims to divine authority made by Jesus. The consciousness that Jesus disclosed of his personal, divine status was the historical starting point for centuries of Christian reflection that led to the classical creeds and their profession of him as the incarnate Son of God. Wilson dismisses all this development as "cantankerous disputes" and "power-struggles" among early Christians.

As for Paul, his allegedly "total indifference" to the history of Jesus does not tally with the evidence. The apostle reports that Jesus was born a Jew and was a descendant of King David and exercised a ministry to the people of Israel, which included teaching about marriage and divorce. Before his death by crucifixion, he celebrated the Last Supper and instituted the lasting rite of the Eucharist for his followers. After his resurrection he appeared to Peter and to "the Twelve" - evidently a group created by Jesus during his lifetime - and to further groups and individuals, including "James", seemingly the same James who was the leader of the Jerusalem Church (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). Others at the time of Paul's ministry, above all the eyewitnesses of the public life of Jesus, were handing on much more about what Jesus said and did, and the Apostle could rely on them to do so.

In Wilson's slanted picture, there is no evidence "that Paul thought of himself as Jewish in any sense"; "it is highly unlikely that he [Paul] considered himself Jewish by the time he was writing his letters"; he even wanted to "deny Judaism its heritage and validity". Based on a distorted reading of Galatians, these are perverse untruths about Paul's presentation of his own Jewishness in Philippians and in Romans. Wilson should read Romans 9-11 (which he never mentions) and what Paul writes about God's calling and gifts to Israel being irrevocable. Far from dismissing Judaism and its Ten Commandments, Paul sums up those commandments in terms of love (Romans 13:8-10). Moreover, Wilson passes over in silence the enormous importance for Paul of raising funds through a collection for the needy Christians in Jerusalem. So much for Paul's hostility towards the mother church, headed by James.

According to Wilson, Luke composed the Acts of Apostles some time early in the second century, a date that only a few, maverick "experts" would accept. Acts has to be dated late, since its "fictitious history" was responsible for a final, dreadful "cover-up". After Paul's new religion had replaced the true religion of Jesus and his original followers, Luke wanted to falsify and repackage history, so as to conceal cleverly what Paul and his associates had achieved.

Wilson completes his reconstruction with the startling claim that mainstream Christianity "ceased being in any sense Jewish". Has he never noticed the Ten Commandments reproduced in churches and elsewhere, or how the majority of the books in the Christian Bible are of Jewish origin, or that the Book of the Psalms became the Christian prayer book? On the jacket of Wilson's book the shameless claim is made that "it is beyond doubt one of the most significant works on early Christianity to appear in decades". So much then for the great contributions made in recent years by leading scholars - from Richard Bauckham to Bishop Tom Wright.

This is a book written for credulous readers. Yet even they might have some doubts when they see that Wilson's bibliography opens with Dan Brown (of The Da Vinci Code notoriety) and those pseudo-experts Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, whose fabrications about the Priory of Sion were exposed at the end of the last century.

Back to homepage

       

The clear message that emerged from the symposium on child sexual abuse held in Rome from ...

According to the chairman of governors at the Cardinal Vaughan School, west London, one ...

There was an old Sixties TV series, Branded, about a disgraced soldier that always began ...