Why Christ Myth is Likely

Historicists present little pertinent evidence for a historical, or a Gospel, Jesus. They simply assume his existence and work onward from there. Therefore, their consensus that Jesus existed is concluded from an unjustified, non-evidentiary over-confidence.

Their “proofs” are flimsy, since they have no contemporary evidence from Jesus or his earliest followers (such as “the Jerusalem Pillars”). Josephus’s references have been debunked as being a late scribal interpolation, and the rest of the “supporting evidence” is too late and does not cite original witnesses – and this therefore invalidates theoften-cited “testimony” of Pliny-Trajan, Celsus and all the others typically invoked. These writers merely repeat what their contemporary Christian interlocutors are saying, and that is based on non-eyewitness creeds and whatever Gospels they were reading. None of it supports a historical Jesus.

That Paul’s christology differs from that of the Gospels does not make Jesus a myth, but it does show that Paul, as our earliest known source, did not believe in a historical – or even a Gospel – Jesus of Nazareth. What makes Jesus non-historical is the fact that there is no eyewitness or contemporary account of, or from, him and his first followers.

Paul’s Christ never performed cures and exorcisms, never preached the sermon on the mount, never argued with scribes, priests and Pharisees, never knew John the Baptist or was baptized by him, never raised Lazarus or the widow’s son from the dead, never “pronounced all foods clean”, never had a mission based in Capernaum, never called Herod “that fox”, never stood trial before the Sanhedrin and Pilate, and was never discovered, by mourning female followers, to have vacated a Jerusalem tomb..

In short, the earliest “Jesus” we have is not in the least historical, and the few “proof texts” historicists bring forward – such as Paul’s saying Jesus was born of a woman under the Law, and that he had a brother named James, etc. – have been successfully stymied by mythicists. Paul neither refers to Jesus’ teaching on the Law – an issue that would have been crucial for Paul – nor does he appeal to Jesus’s moral teaching or ethical example. Therefore, the most parsimonious explanation for all these Pauline lacunae is that Paul had no historical or Gospel Jesus to work from, and that is most likely because no historical or Gospel Jesus ever existed.

When Heresy is Truth

Arius was right. By that, I mean that his christology remains faithful both to the limitations and the fullness of the NT’s (New Testament’s) own christology. Were I a Christian, rather than a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist, I would be an unabashed Arian. I would not be a fundamentalist-Protestant Arian, nor would I be a Jehovah’s Witness Arian. Instead, I would take into myself what I think are the most salient, cogent points of Arius’s thinking, and make them my own, whether or not I had a brick-and-mortar church in which to contemplate this great Mystery.

The most salient point of Arianism is that Yahweh’s “Great Angel of Many Names” made himself known and procured a novel kind of salvation for his adherents. That is, the Incarnation did not involve an ontologically divine Trinitarian Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, because for Arius – as for the NT – God’s numerical oneness is not open to challenge or contradiction. Thus for Arius, Jesus as the Great Angel is divine, but not (like the Trinitarian Son) “of one substance with the Father”. God remains uniquely God. Jesus, as exalted, preexistent Angel, remains a created being.

When most of us think of creatures, our minds envision human beings, animals, microbes, perhaps plants, and any extraterrestrial denizens who might inhabit portions of the larger cosmos. This is why I prefer not to call the Arian Jesus a “creature”, even though as the primordial Angel, there was a point at which he was created – which is also a point before which he did not exist. Because his existence was wholly non-material and thus non-biological before the Incarnation, it would not be right to assign to the Son the creaturely attribute of being an organism, as we assume all created beings are – with the exception of angels, of whom the Arian Jesus is the greatest.

Both the Arian and the NT Christ are preexistent, angelic, celestial “Sons”, antecedent to the world, and active in God’s creative act. As such, the Son is the “first-born of creation”, the “subcontracting agent of God’s world-construction. The Son is also the “express image of God”. But of course, an image is never the same entity as that which it reflects or mimics. So the Son is not, and cannot be, the same as God. The Son is an ancient product of God, and therefore subordinate to God. Jesus said, “The Father is greater than I” … “I can do nothing of my own will, but only that of the Father” … “You, Father [are] the only true God”. Here, Jesus speaks like an angel par excellence, the perfect image, agent, messenger and representative of the Deity who brought him into being.

The four canonical Gospels also identify Jesus as an angelic being whom they – and parts of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) – call “the Son of Man”. In the Synoptic Gospels’ Passion Narrative, at his trial before the Sanhedrin, Jesus identifies himself with the heavenly angel/Son of Man, whom he tells the priests they will see on the day of judgment, “coming in the clouds of heaven, at the right hand of Power, in great glory”. The Great Angel – Jesus – will come to judge the world (exercising divine judgment) and reigning at the side of “Power” (the term is a reverent circumlocution for God). The Son of Man/Great Angel will appear with God (just as the preexistent – and the risen – Jesus sits at God’s right hand, like the Angel always has).

The central christological mystery which Trinitarianism obscures is the revelation that a primordial angel – a creating heavenly Power – has, and does, reign in heaven; has paid us a visit; and is even now mediating for humankind.

No Trinitarian “God the Son” ever incarnated in human flesh. Rather, a great angelic Presence was manifested to us and “in” (Paul’s wording) us. Is the incarnation of an angel really any more fanciful an idea than an incarnation of a “second God”/Second Person of the Trinity…? After all, both NT and Arian christology make the much more humble claim that God revealed himself through a highly exalted created being, who shares with us a derivative dependence on the one divine Source – but who also functions (precisely as a created being) as “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Letter to the Hebrews). We can hope to follow in the footsteps of a suffering and exalted angel, who shares our created nature, but we cannot do the same with an ontological, inherently divine “God the Son”. Arius was right.

God and Subjectivity

For me, “God” is not a matter of belief, religious faith, science or philosophy, but rather of experience. As the late atheist and social critic Gore Vidal wrote:

“God, or what have you, is not to be found at the far end of a syllogism, no matter how brilliantly phrased.”

Agreed: since I tend to eschew the popular notion of God as a Creator, I cannot deduce his existence from the existence of nature or the cosmos – thus science does not qualify as a means of discovering God. Since philosophy can both affirm and deny God’s existence, I can’t appeal to that intellectual dialogue. And because faith is a substitute for knowledge, I can’t invoke religious faith. That leaves God as an object of experience, rather than an object of intellectual pursuit and/or faith. To know God, for me, is the only pertinent spiritual category. Experience of God through divine union mysticism is to claim personal participation in God, unmediated by philosophy or by religious faith. This is also called “gnosis”, which means unmediated, raw, undomesticated experience of the divine. If faith and philosophy are involved in this, it is only secondarily, as interpretive tools utilized to put the original, raw, experience into normative language, as far as that is possible.

Because the experience of God (or the Spirit, the Sacred, the Wholly Other, the Transcendent) is completely subjective, it cannot be proved by pointing to any external object or process. Experience of God, of course, is profoundly evidential for the experiencing, participating person, but it is useless to anyone else, except as a kind of invitational map or guidebook to those who are also interested in acquiring the experience. Hence: God can be experienced subjectively, but not proved objectively.

As I said, in terms of “proving God”, this path of divine experience is a dead end. In a way, in fact, it “defines God out of existence” – precisely because it so very narrowly conveys God only through the lens of the individual soul (soul defined as one’s deepest subjectivity) – and thereby falls outside the standard parameters of proof.

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A Spiritually Powerful God

To a religious view, not all divine protection is necessarily conceived as a deity’s miraculous intervention for the sake of the safety and preservation of biological organisms/”creatures”. Spiritual protection can mean redemption, salvation and enlightenment – quite separate from any question of manipulation of the chains of physical causation that make up the material universe. That is:

God can vivify, spark, and lead to spiritual enlightenment, unworldly wisdom and compassion, and salvation without intervening in the world’s material processes.

This can be if we cease regarding God solely and necessarily as a creator-intervener. If God did not create the world, it is then quite possible that God has no interest in, or responsibility for, the world’s existence and its maintenance. Hence, God and world can coexist without physical interaction between the two separate domains, categories or magisteria. Producing miracles in order to cure or save “meat-body” organisms may simply not be part of God’s job description, whereas care of the soul – “soul” defined as our deepest subjectivity – may at the same time be God’s special province.

Some of the ancient philosophers were correct in saying that if God is a creator, “He” must be evil, incompetent, or powerless because he permits not only the existence, but the persistence, of evil in his creation. Therefore if one wants to hold on to the notion of a compassionate God, one has the option of denying – as I do – that God is a creator at all, and to also thereby to deny that God has the 1) the power and 2) the obligation to miraculously intervene in a material world God never created to begin with. God is not a guilty bystander, but rather a loving “Presence” which transforms human beings from within. As Jesus notes in the Gospels, a sparrow falls but within the Presence and awareness of God, which for religiously-oriented people, makes all the difference in the world, because it means that God is “immanent”, that is, present with-and-to all that unfolds in the world. This does not make God impotent, since his “powers” and his “talents” are sufficient and wholly adequate in the realm of spirit – the realm which “really matters” for those who seek spiritual transformation in and through a deity.

Such a God is powerful as relates to what he is claimed to do best, namely, to infuse the soul with divinity, and thereby with salvation. This conception exists in Christianity. In the Eastern Church, it is called “theosis” and in the Latin Church it is called “deificatio”, and it has a biblical basis in the Second Letter of Peter which states that Christ’s chief work was “to make us partakers of the divine Nature” (2 Peter 1:3-4).

A coda from the Jodo Shinshu/Shin Buddhist perspective:

In Shin, it is not God, but rather Amida Buddha, who is both immanent and transcendent, and whose storehouse of merit enables Him to bless us with the unearned gift of Shinjin (perfect, pure, adamantine faith) in this world, and which enables him to vivify our Buddha Nature when we take birth in the Pure Land in the next life. Amida Buddha is not a god – He is neither a creator nor any other kind of deity – but His salvation is more certain and effective than any that is purportedly offered by the earth’s various deities. Our moment-to-moment experience of Shinjin is our experiential guarantor of the Buddha’s reality and His salvific power. As such, it is “the Raft from the Other Shore” which carries us safely to the Pure Land of Enlightenment that Amida Buddha crafted for us over countless kalpas for the express purpose of awakening to our Buddha Nature and thereby becoming Buddhas ourselves.

Why “The Trinity” Is Unnecessary

Classical Trinitarian doctrine posits that there are three “Persons” in one God: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. This theology is a development from early Jewish Christian conceptions and from the New Testament (“NT”), Unfortunately, it is a misleading and distorted development. And worst of all, it is wholly unnecessary, because its source material does not demand it.

The NT’s christology clearly thinks of Jesus the Son of God as “divine” – he is a primordial, preexistent, angelic being who was present with God at the Creation – he even said to have had a hand in Creation, as a kind of “subcontractor” who carried out the Father-Creator’s “blueprint”. Also in the NT, the Son is granted the title Kyrios or Lord, and is charged with the role of executing future divine judgment. The Son, however, is nonetheless a creature who was “begotten”. As such the NT calls him “the first fruits” of Creation. But even as a creature – the most exalted and divine creature – he can say things like “I return to the glory I had with you, Father, before the world was made”, “before Abraham came to be, I am”, “who sees me sees the Father”, and “the Father and I are one”. These affirmations/confirmations are not statements of deity, but rather of preexistence, union with God, and preternatural wisdom.

Jesus Son of God is God’s perfect image, in whom the fullness of divine glory resides; he is God’s ideal agent to Creation, the earth, and humankind; and because of his preexistent longevity and ancient wisdom, he has personal knowledge of God not shared with others; he is the self-emptying (“Kenotic”) savior who refuses to cling to his God-ness and who takes on the form of a servant even to the point of tortuous death, he is buried but God resurrects him and he returns to his former place “at the right hand of the Father”, from whence he takes up residence in the believer’s heart and will eventually manifest himself on earth to exercise God’s final judgment on a wayward world. This last role is particularly impactful for christology and for Trinitarianism.

No Gospel but John’s has John’s ornately extensive, specific divine christology, but all the other (“Synoptic”) Gospels agree in identifying Jesus with Daniel’s heavenly Son of Man (so does John, along with several other “high” christological titles). Jesus either outright identifies himself with this preexistent angelic figure, or claims at the very least to have a specialized knowledge of the Son of Man. Jesus tells his foes at his Sanhedrin trial that they will see the Son of man, accompanied with “Power” (a circumlocution for God’s power and glory) “coming in / or/ on / the clouds of heaven in great glory”. Again, in describing the final judgment day, Jesus says that the Son of Man will execute his Father’s judgment and separate the “sheep” (heaven-bound people) from the “goats” (damnation-bound people).

In these capacities, Jesus is not claiming to be, nor is he operating as, “God”. On the contrary, as God’s perfect image-and-agent, Jesus either by nature or through divine ordinance is God’s ultimate “Shaliah” or agent. This is why his own christology is “high”, but also at the same time “low” enough. that Jesus can also say that not even the Son knows the exact time of the final judgment, and it is how he can remind his hearers that “the Father is greater than I” – these words being an apt descriptors for a supreme archangel and preexistent servant-“Son”.

Therefore it is clear that in the NT, “Jesus Son of God/Son of Man” is an exalted prexistent angelic being – exalted enough, in fact, to carry many attributes and the wisdom, and even the Name – of God, without “being God”himself. And it is equally clear that Trinitarianism – against NT’s own christology itself – has falsely transformed Jesus into an ontological “God, the Son” – who is claimed to be “homoousios”, “of one substance with the Father”… certainly an identity and a role that Jesus as the servant-Son would in all humility reject. If only Trinitarians would adopt this “mind that was in Christ Jesus”, they might return to, and rediscover, that original celestial Son of Man and cruciform Servant in whom the New Testament places its faith.

Spiritual Truth

If we look at religion and spirituality as means to an end, their truth or falsity comes clear in a functional sense.

I view “true” religion as an invitation to personally experience a Sacred Transcendent, to participate in the kind of unitive immersion that is claimed (say) to occur in divine union mysticism.

Experience trumps faith – both faith-in and faith-about. Like a feeling – in a sense – an experience is true, regardless of its moral or intellectual content. It’s a psychic (mental, subjective) fact. After having the experience, one can analyze its probity or lack thereof.

Since I believe that God is an object not of faith, but of experience, I view theologies as secondary interpretive tools that are utilized to make the original mystical/God-experience somewhat understandable to the intellect, and to vet said experience for its validity or its invalidity.

Because in my view the mystical experience of union and communion with God (or the Holy, or the Sacred, or the Spirit, or the Ultimate-the Absolute, or the Divine) is the source of most religions, my measure of spiritual truth as applied to religions is to analyze how they accord with the data that is disclosed in the mystical literature. The Bible, of course, falls under this rubric.

So it does not matter for me if Adam and Eve were seduced by the Edenic Serpent, if the Noah/Flood story is literally true, or if Jesus’s “Good Samaritan” was a real historical person. What really matters is not only the meaning of these stories, but more importantly, their meaning in the mystical/spiritual sense. That is, as the late New Testament scholar M.J. Borg advised: Believe what you want about the historicity of this story, but now let’s explore what it says about the mystical union of humankind with the divine.

Viewed from this perspective, truth is not always equivalent to (historical-scientific) fact. Such spiritual narratives are designed to be true even if they do not conform to “modernity’s” post-Enlightenment notions of the hegemony of mere fact. This is because they necessarily use allegorical and parabolic language to convey the message, language which is tailored not to the “rational intellect”, but rather to the “archetypal soul”. Scientific and historical accuracy is rarely essentially significant to the truths that religious stories and myth seek to impart.

These kinds of stories were, and are, sacred – at least inasmuch, and to the extent, that they convey a counter-intuitive, often even subversive, message about experiential acquisition of spiritual knowledge or “gnosis”. Their relationship to material/quantifiable factual truth is tenuous at best, and this is how it should be.

Arius Trumps Trinitarianism

The monotheistic Arius had it right. The Trinitarian Athanasius had it wrong.

The NT (New Testament) Jesus is not “of one substance with the Father”, as Trinitarianism asserts. He is subordinate not only in his earthly life, but also in his heavenly preexistence. As the Arians said, the Son is of “like” (homoiousios) substance with the Father, but not of “the same” substance (the Athanasian homoousios).

The Gospels’ preexistent Jesus is not the Trinitarian Son. He is much more like a super-angel. Which is probably why all the Gospels, including John, label Jesus as the biblical (Books of Daniel and Ezekiel) heavenly Son of Man. The Son of Man is an ancient angelic being. He is created or begotten, and therefore subordinate to God, who is the original Creator-Begetter. However,at the same time, he is the one unique, superlative creature in that he is the express image of God and the “subcontractor” in God’s work of Creation. But he is not “God”, because even the most perfect image is never identical or equivalent to that which it reflects; he is not Creator because God is the Creator – who handed his blueprint to the Son for doing the actual labor of cosmos-construction; and on the final day he will exercise God’s own judgment (again functioning as the Son of Man) – again, not because he is “God”, but because God ordained him to that ministry or capacity; and he forgives sin not because “only God can forgive sin”, but because – again – God empowered him to do so.

Even John’s Jesus is not the same as God. He explicitly excludes himself from the Godhead in texts such as John 17:3 where he calls the Father, “You – the only true God” (there is no room here for the Son or any other divine figure);

where he tells Mary Magdalene that he must “ascend to your God and to MY God” (God cannot have a God);

and where he calls himself “a man who has heard, and obeys, the will of God” (God cannot obey God).

Significantly, John’s Jesus never refers to himself as “the Word”. On the contrary, John only calls Jesus “the Word” in the Prologue, which is an antiphonal hymn John borrowed from other sources, and interspersed with John the Baptist material. In the main body of John’s Gospel, Jesus never calls himself the Word – he calls himself the Son of Man, the Son of God, the Shepherd, the Living Water, the Bread of Life, etc., but never the Word, never the Logos.

Therefore even if we were to read between John’s lines and still manage to see the Word speaking in and through Jesus, we still have the portrait of a subordinate being because of course, a word that is spoken is secondary to the speaker’s originating motive and intent. The Word is not the Father-Creator, but as Creation’s subcontractor, of course the Word was there with God “in the beginning”. Of course as the primordial Son, the Word existed before all Creation – and of course has to exist “before Abraham came to be”; and naturally the Son/Word is planning, in John’s Farewell Discourse, to “return to the glory I had with the Father before the world was made” – a claim to preexistence, but not to deity. None of these affirmations indicates that the Word is of the same essence of God. Quite the contrary, they only emphasize his subordination and obedience to his true, only Source – his heavenly Father.

Thus, Arianism far better discloses the primordial angelic creature that the earliest christologies conceived Jesus to be. Christianity’s jettisoning of the Arian Christ remains its single most, greatest, self-inflicted wound. Only if and when new conventicles of Arian-based christology are convoked and become viable can the Christian Church finally say that it is actually worshiping “in spirit and in truth”.

That Rascally Trinity Again

Briefly, these are some important reasons for viewing the doctrine of the Trinity as a failed christology which is not carefully based on the NT (New Testament) evidence.

1. The Word-Logos in John 1 is not Jesus. Jesus only came to exist at his conception in his mother’s womb. It was Jesus’s human nature that was the “flesh” into which the Logos would incarnate.
2. It is therefore unbiblical to speak of Jesus being in the beginning, at least when citing John 1. Jesus was surely there “early” – as God’s created angelic Son, and as the first creature created prior to creation. But only God is eternal by biblical standards.
3. John is in fact explicit that Jesus is not God, because John excludes Jesus from the Godhead in 17:3 (saying to God that He, the Father, is “the only true God“), and when Jesus tells Mary that he will ascend to her God and to his God (God cannot have a God), and when he says that he is a man who obeys God’s will (God cannot obey God).
4. If the NT thinks of Jesus as God, then the NT ought to be replete with prayer to Jesus as to God. But it isn’t. All NT prayer is addressed solely to the Father, and only “through Jesus” or “in Jesus’s name”. The only prayer addressed to Jesus is addressed to him as Messianic Lord and God’s viceroy – i.e., in the Maranatha/Come Lord prayer, and in Stephen’s dying plea, “Lord Jesus receive my spirit!”. Again, these latter are not prayers to Jesus as to God. Only God is the NT’s proper recipient of divine worship. Prayer addressed to Jesus as to God is therefore at once unbiblical, blasphemous, and idolatrous. Better, then, that Christians should work to conform their prayer-format to NT rubrics.
5. Trinitarianism holds that Jesus is one person with two Natures (divine and human). This is false by NT christological standards because only two different persons can communicate with each other as happens in prayer – as when Jesus prays to the Father in Gethsemane. This is a case of one person, Jesus, praying to another Person, God. Two persons. Two individuals. The Son prays to the Father as a being external to, and separate from, the Son. Thus the situation is a case of two persons in communion with each other. It is not a case of – somehow – Jesus being one person and irrationally pleading to himself as Son and also answering himself as Father. In any case, it cannot be a case of the Trinitarian God the Son talking to God the Father, since it is not two Natures that talk to one another, but … again … two persons.

The NT’s Jesus is a separate individual person endowed with the “Nature” of a God-filled, God-exalted, God-blessed creature. A creature who is utterly dependent on the Father-God who Jesus insisted is “greater than I”. “Orthodox” Trinitarianism fails. And “heretical” Arianism beckons to those who would read the NT with clear vision.

Empty Tomb or Empty Faith?

The Gospel stories of Jesus exiting his now-empty tomb is so unhistorical that even Paul, writing relatively close to the supposed event, hasn’t heard of it. Paul only says that Jesus died and was buried. He never mentions an empty tomb, the mourning women who came to anoint the body, the wealthy-but-generous Joseph of Arimathea who provided the tomb, the sleeping centurions, the rolled-away stone, the annunciatory angels, or any other “historical” details mentioned in the Gospel resurrection narratives.

Resurrection faith did not begin with stories of an empty tomb, but rather with claimed visionary experiences of a risen celestial Christ. Not once in the entire NT is the empty tomb referenced as a cause of faith. Quite the contrary, the empty tomb is described as a terrifying, baffling, shocking, unexpected discovery. Mark’s, the earliest Gospel account, has the mourning women running away from the tomb in great fear, “telling no one” about it. And this is even after receiving an angelic explanation of why the tomb was empty.

Those who promote the empty tomb as a cause of faith are therefore in direct contradiction to what the Gospels say about it. And they expose themselves to justified ridicule about the emptiness of their faith. Resurrection belief was never dependent on an empty tomb. It was dependent on the perceived inner presence of the risen Christ, whom Paul knew as a “vivifying” or life-sparking Spirit, not a kind of tomb-exiting zombie.

Finally, that the stone was rolled away is in itself a strong argument against the resurrection. The Gospels say that Jesus’s resurrection body could pass through solid obstacles, whereas the notion that the stone was, or had to be, rolled away, contradicts the notion of Jesus’s miraculous resurrection body. The risen Jesus could have passed through the stone without it needing to be rolled aside. That the story insists that the stone was rolled away points to an all-too human, not divine, method of tomb-exit. People, not God or Jesus, had to remove the stone, plausibly in order to take away the body. That’s the immediate “lesson” of the rolled-away stone, and it is not friendly to the notion of Jesus’s resurrection and his resurrection body.

Christian Claims vs the New Testament and History

It is faintly surprising to find the degree to which Catholic, and Christian apologists in general, continue to weave comforting fictions about the origins of their own faith. This post attempts to address and refute, at least in part, some of these claims.

1. No surviving branch of Christianity has its major origins in Christ. There is no early, primitive Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura or sola fide. And there is no Catholic “Deposit of Faith”, only a church-contrived, self-congratulatory narrative spun by Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church. In actuality, Christian origins are rooted solely in the original Palestinian-Jewish mystical sect(s) that extolled the revelatory angelic/logos Christ. And the only legitimate “Apostolic Succession” was – fittingly enough – Jewish, and is mentioned by Church Fathers, historians and heresiogists as having consisted of members of Jesus’s supposed family, brothers, cousins, uncles, etc. (“the Jerusalem Caliphate”), until it passed into non-family, but nonetheless still Jewish, hands. Rome therefore has no pedigree in the true historical Hebraic apostolic succession.
2. Paul’s Jesus is solely a celestial being who in Paul’s view did not live on earth, which is why Paul never cites any of the Gospel Jesus’s teachings, parables, conflicts with foes /family / disciples, makes no mention of the sermon on the mount/plain, says nothing about Jesus’s teachings on the Law and kosher, teachings on the Kingdom of God, exorcisms, cures – not even mentioning spectacular miracles like the raising of Lazarus and the stilling Galilee’s storms. Paul knows nothing of a historical Jesus but claims to know all that is sufficient for salvation from private revelations of his inner mystical Christ of faith. Paul knows that Jesus had Jewish-Palestinian followers before Paul himself came along, but Paul does not think these people were disciples, hand-selected by an earthly Jesus in an earthly ministry. On the contrary, as Paul indeed claimed of himself, Jesus’s apostles were “Chosen” – but only through visions of the risen Christ and by having been given a prophetic calling by him from heaven – not being appointed by an earthly Jesus.
3. Jesus never claimed to be “God”. He explicitly excludes himself from the Godhead in John 17:3 where he calls the Father “you, the only true God“; where he tells Mary he must ascend to “your God and my God” – naturally, God can’t have a God; and when he says he’s a man who hears and obeys God’s word – obviously, God cannot obey God. (If one thinks Jesus is God, one needs to explain why in the entire NT, not a single prayer is addressed to Jesus as to God – NT prayer is only addressed to God “through” Jesus or “in Jesus’s name”, not to Jesus as “God” himself.)
4. Against one popular speculation about apostolic weak faith and “cowardice”: Paul never “won the apostles back to Christ”. On the contrary, he had to consult with them to make sure that in his doctrines “I had not been running in vain”. It was a matter of the apostles bringing Paul back to Jesus, as when they pulled his feet to the fire in Acts 21:20ff, when they found that – contrary to Paul’s own agreement at the first council of Jerusalem – Paul was deceitfully telling his Diaspora congregations that Jesus’s “atoning death” had invalidated the Law and Torah even for Jews and for Jewish converts to the Jesus movement. The apostles tell Paul to observe “the many thousands [of Jewish Christians] who are zealous for the Law“. The apostles never thought that Jesus’s death invalidated the Law and Judaism, and they chastised Paul for preaching that particular falsehood.
5. In regard to Eucharistic teaching: John 6 is a two-part discourse where Jesus calls himself “the Bread From Heaven” – a sort of divine-human “manna” that fell from heaven to nourish lost, wandering souls. The first part of chapter 6 is symbolic, with Jesus using obvious metaphor and allegory about “eating and drinking the flesh and blood of the Son of Man [Jesus himself]”. The second part is literal – a mandate directing that true disciples must “munch/gnaw my flesh”. But this second half is an interpolation of non-Johannine Eucharistic doctrine. Had John himself written it he would almost certainly have embedded it in his scene of the Lord’s / the “Last” Supper, in order to flesh it out and to include even more Eucharistic teaching. But instead, John completely ignores “the Institution of the Eucharist” and substitutes it with a foot-washing(!). This strongly indicates that John was not the author of chapter 6’s more physical-literal second half, which was probably inserted later by a pro-Eucharistic scribe.
6. In reference to a Catholic-or-Christian office of priesthood: the apostles were never priests or even presbyteroi (elders). They do not function as such in the post-Resurrection sections of the Gospel, and more importantly, are never described as such in Acts or in Paul. Not even Paul describes himself as a priest or an ordained officiant at the Eucharist. Which is why the early and extremely Jewish Didache refutes any Catholic understanding of the Eucharist as a proto-Mass. Nowhere in Acts are the apostles – or any other officiants – portrayed as ministers of the Eucharist or as priests who offer “the unbloody sacrifice of the Mass”. When Paul describes his own Eucharist, he is clear that he’s not deriving it from any extant apostolic tradition or practice. On the contrary, he says that he received it privately, in a special revelation “from the Lord”. Paul had no Jewish Christian or apostolic “Jerusalem tradition” of the Eucharist to cite, because there wasn’t one. All that Acts reports is a “breaking of the bread”, without reference to the Pauline Eucharist and without reference to any kind of specialized or ordained Eucharistic officiants.

Thus, it is clear that Catholicism and Christianity as we have it today are by no means some pristine iteration of what the New Testament describes and early history indicates, much less of what Jesus, if he existed, may have taught. “Getting back to Christian roots”, although an admirable project, demands going back to what can be reconstructed from a critical reading of the NT and of early Christian history. And that will demand a ruthless self-examination by Christians of long-held and cherished doctrinal assumptions, because the picture of Christianity that will emerge from such an effort will differ in significant ways from the way the faith is commonly regarded today.