Book Description

An investigation into the historical Jesus and the veracity of the Gospels • Reveals the biblical Jesus as a composite figure, a blend of the political revolutionary Judas the Galilean and Paul’s divine-human Christ figure • Matches the events depicted in the New Testament with historically verifiable events in Josephus’ history, pushing Jesus’ life back more than a decade • Demonstrates how each New Testament Gospel is dependent upon Paul’s mythologized Christ theology, designed to promote Paul’s Christianity and serve the interests of the fledgling Gentile Christian communities Scholars have spent years questioning aspects of the historical Jesus. How can we know what Jesus said and did when Jesus himself wrote nothing? Can we trust the Gospels, written by unknown authors 40 to 70 years after Jesus’ death? And why do other sources from the time not speak of this messianic figure known as Christ? Drawing on the histories of Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls, Daniel Unterbrink contends that the “Jesus” of the Bible was actually a composite figure, a clever blend of the Jewish freedom-fighter Judas the Galilean and Paul’s divine-human Christ figure created in the middle of the first century CE. Revealing why Paul was known as a liar, enemy, and traitor in other Jewish literature, he shows that the New Testament Gospels are not transcripts of actual history but creative works of historical fiction designed to promote Paul’s Christianity and serve the interests of the fledgling Gentile Christian communities. He demonstrates how each Gospel is written in light of the success of Paul’s religion and dependent upon his later perspective. Matching the events depicted in the New Testament with the historically verifiable events in Josephus’ history, Unterbrink pushes the dating of Jesus’ life back nearly a generation to a revolutionary time in ancient Judea. He shows that the real historical Jesus--the physical man behind the fictional stories in Paul’s Gospels--was Judas the Galilean: a messianic pretender and Torah-observant revolutionary bent on overthrowing the Roman government and galvanizing the Jewish people behind his vision of the coming Kingdom of God. In the greatest cover-up of history, this teacher of first-century Israel was replaced by the literary creation known as Jesus of Nazareth.