Отрывок из книги
Tom Harpur, former columnist for the Toronto Star, Rhodes scholar, former Anglican priest, and professor of Greek and the New Testament, is an internationally renowned writer on religious and ethical issues. He is the author of ten bestselling books, including For Christ’s Sake and The Pagan Christ. He has hosted numerous radio and television programs, including Life After Death, a tenpart series based on his bestselling book of the same name.
Living Waters
.....
This book is concerned with the mythic meaning of the Gospels, but it must be kept in mind that the earliest writings of the New Testament are those of St. Paul, who was the major force in the establishment of Christianity as a universal faith. He wrote his epistles around 50–65 CE, about twenty years before the earliest Gospel. He knew only a mystical Jesus, and his approach is wholly mythical—that of the Christ within. Paul’s knowledge of Jesus comes from visions and revelations; from the Old Testament (Paul viewed the whole of it as prophetic and as elucidating facts about Jesus); and from what was being said about the Christos in the Christian communities already in existence.11
The silence of Paul over the putative historical Jesus is virtually ear-shattering. But, because he does speak of Jesus Christ some two hundred times, the true nature of the problem escapes the average reader. He calls Jesus Lord and Son of God, but such titles already existed within both Judaism and the surrounding Pagan religions, and of themselves prove nothing. Paul presupposes that Jesus existed as a supernatural being before “God sent him into the world to redeem it.” Such pre-existence on the part of the Logos and Sophia, or Wisdom, was part of Judaic thought at the time. It was also part of Gnostic thinking, and there is considerable evidence to support the view that Paul was a Gnostic. According to Paul, Jesus assumed flesh (mythically) sometime after the reign of David, from whom Paul says, following what the Old Testament prophesied, that Jesus, as a man, was supposed to have been descended.12 In the myth, he was “made of the seed of David according to the flesh.” This, of course, was part of the traditional view of what or who the Messiah had to be. In Romans too he terms him a Jew “according to the flesh” and, later, the scion of Jesse to govern the Gentiles.13 As Professor G.A. Wells points out in Did Jesus Exist?, however, there were many centuries intervening between David and Paul, and the latter gives absolutely no indication in which of them Jesus’ earthly life supposedly fell. It is all supremely vague and mystical. We remember that Osiris too in the myth had an earthly life but was wholly mythical himself. As the scholar G. Bornkamm has observed, it is “an astonishing fact” that Paul nowhere mentions Jesus of or from Nazareth, who was a prophet and miracle worker who ate with tax collectors and sinners. He never once calls him “Jesus of Nazareth.”
.....
