Review: Jesus Never Existed

Kenneth Humphreys, Jesus Never Existed (Nine-Banded Books 2014)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19988610-jesus-never-existed

This is an easy summary of stuff we know about the conundrum that so little is known about ‘the historical Jesus’.
The placenames, as well as some of the names of major apostles, sound completely made up. There was no town in Galilee named ‘Nazareth’ in the 1st or 2nd centuries. Prophecies in the ‘Old Testament’ were primped and squeezed into being apparent proofs of ‘fulfilment’ of Jesus as the promised Jewish messiah—’we might as well call it copying’.
The story of Jesus we receive in the New Testament is neither history embellished like Caesar’s Gallic Wars, nor fiction placed in a historical setting like Sherlock Holmes.
It reads not so much like a remembered history but like a mediaeval drama. What we ended up with is a ‘join the dots’ approach—a nativity fairy tale, some wise parables and miracles, and a dying and rising god—which has been ‘reformed a hundred times’.
His is a theory of ‘syncretism’ in which many authors played a part. He doesn’t believe that the Roman state would have ‘invented the whole nine yards of Christianity’; rather that they acquired a product already formed. The Church began ‘providing its own bread and circuses’, and found a ‘winning formula’: a simple story + mystery religion (like Mithraism) + ethical philosophy (like Stoicism) + public ceremonies (Like Magna Mater), backed up by manufactured ‘evidence’ (relics).
99% of the NT texts that are extant date from later than the 4th century. It is clear that the first Christians knew almost nothing about the historical Jesus.
Humphreys doesn’t go down the ‘Arrius Calpurnius Piso’ rabbit hole, and is more logical.
I do not subscribe to this theory, but it was interesting to read Humphreys’ ideas on the subject.
I hadn’t realised when I bought this that this is an ‘introduction’ version of Humphreys’ longer book, Jesus Never Existed: The Fabrication of a Saviour of the World.