George Albert Wells - Work On Early Christianity

Work On Early Christianity

Wells suggested that the earliest extant Christian documents from the first century, most notably the New Testament epistles by Paul and some other writers, show no familiarity with the Gospel figure of Jesus as a preacher and miracle-worker who lived and died in the recent decades. Rather, they present him "as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past". Wells believed that the Jesus of these earliest Christians was not based on a historical character, but a pure myth, derived from mystical speculations based on the Hebrew Wisdom figure. According to Wells, the Gospels composition was a later stage of the development of the Jesus myth, which was given a historical setting and a figure subsequently embellished with ever increasing details.

In his books The Jesus Legend (1996) and The Jesus Myth (1999), Wells allows for the possibility that the central figure of the Gospel stories may be based on a historical character from first-century Galilee: "he Galilean and the Cynic elements ... may contain a core of reminiscences of an itinerant Cynic-type Galilean preacher (who, however, is certainly not to be identified with the Jesus of the earliest Christian documents)." Sayings and memories of this preacher may have been preserved in the "Q" document that is hypothesized as the source of many "sayings" of Jesus found in both gospels of Matthew and Luke. However, Wells concludes that the reconstruction of this historical figure from the extant literature would be a hopeless task.

The updated position taken by Wells has been interpreted by other scholars as an "about-face", abandoning his initial thesis in favor of accepting the existence of a historical Jesus. However, Wells insists that this figure of late first-century Gospel stories is distinct from the sacrificial Christ myth of Paul's epistles and other early Christian documents, and that these two figures have different sources before being fused in Mark. Wells argues that Paul's Jesus was "a heavenly, pre-existent figure who had come to earth at some uncertain point in the past and lived an obscure life, perhaps one or two centuries before his own time."