There are quite a few different ideas about the “Historical Jesus”. I run into people who know just one of them and think it’s the only one. Almost always they’re surprised and disappointed that this is an open question.

• Reza Aslan. Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Random House, 2013.
• John Dominic Crossan. The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. HarperOne, 1991, 1993.
• Bart D. Ehrman. How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. HarperOne, 2014. “Ehrman sketches Jesus’s transformation from a human prophet to the Son of God exalted to divine status at his resurrection.”
• José Faur. The Gospel According to The Jews. Moreshet Sepharad, 2012. This is the lightweight in the bunch.
• Richard Smoley. How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying About God and the Bible. Tarcher Perigree, 2016. Smoley thinks Jesus was a preacher, and maybe saw himself as the Messiah, but definitely was not political.

Me, I’m not much of a believer. I tell people I didn’t get the True Believer gene. I think most people in my generation will get that cultural references. Younger folks, probably not.

Another way of saying the same thing is “Neither accept nor reject.” That’s supposed to be an old saying but I hear it only rarely. Maybe.

Have you ever had the feeling that the religious stories we have might be older—far older—than anyone imagines?

"Focusing on the oldest available texts, buttressed by data from archeology, comparative linguistics and human population genetics, Michael Witzel reconstructs a single original African source for our collective myths, dating back some 100,000 years. Identifying features shared by this "Out of Africa" mythology and its northern Eurasian offshoots, Witzel suggests that these common myths--recounted by the communities of the "African Eve"--are the earliest evidence of ancient spirituality. Moreover these common features, Witzel shows, survive today in all major religions."

Oxford’s abstract of the book’s Introduction says:

"This introductory chapter explores the definition, scope, and past investigations of myth: a “true” narrative that tells of cosmology and society as well as of the human condition and that is frequently employed to explain and justify social circumstance. Worldwide similarities between individual myths are habitually explained by diffusion or by common human psychic traits (Jungian archetypes). However, the current Laurasian proposal supersedes these approaches as it involves a whole system of myths, notably one characterized by a narrative structure (story line) from the creation of the world to its end. The Laurasian scheme also supersedes the Jungian proposal because the actual formulation of myths and their arrangement in a complex narrative system are located on higher planes than that of the archetypes. The artistic arrangement of myths in Laurasia (and beyond) is explored and traced back in time to the Mesolithic or Upper Paleolithic period. Finally, the history of the Laurasian scheme is sketched, from the Paleolithic until today."

Witzel’s theory is controversial. How can our stories go back so far? Yet, it makes sense intuitively there must have been a continuous oral transmission for much of human history, as malleable and changeable as that transmission must have been.

More Information

• E. J. Michael Witzel. The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. Oxford Univ. Pr., 2013.

• E. J. Michael Witzel. “Introduction (Abstract).” The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. Oxford Scholarship Online <oxfordscholarship.com/>. Retrieved May 13, 2020.

The Christian Identity movement has its roots in British Israelism. Amazing. So does Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God. And so do some of the ersatz genealogies connecting medieval Europe to the Bible.

“The history of the Christian Identity movement reveals its startling foundations — which posit that both Christians and Jews are God’s chosen people.

“The acidly anti-Semitic religion driving much of today’s extreme right first gained a following as a Victorian curiosity, a benign British eccentricity propounded by the son of a radical Irish weaver. Born as British Israelism, the belief system now recreated as Christian Identity saw Jews as the long-lost brothers of Anglo-Saxons, the fellow elect of God.“

The short version of British Israelism is that some religious fundamentalists, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, developed the idea that the Anglo-Saxons (and other northern Europeans) are descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. That means they are God’s “Chosen People”.

There is no evidence, except wishful thinking.

• “How the Christian Identity Began“, Intelligence Report, Southern Poverty Law Center (Winter 1998: Mar. 15, 1998). Retrieved Nov. 2, 2019.

More Information

• “A Short Critique of Herbert W. Armstrong’s British-Israelism–The United States and Britain in Fantasy“, World of His Grace. Retrieved Oct. 30, 2019.
• J. Wilson, “British Israelism. A revitalization movement in contemporary culture“, Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions Année, 1968(26), pp. 73-80. Retrieved Nov. 3, 2019.

Revised Nov. 3, 2019 to add link.