Be that as it may, it is the case that he writes also about a large group of devout Egyptian Jewish ascetics called Therapeutae, or healers, who lived near Lake Mareotis close to Alexandria. They were already well established long before Philo’s time and had similar communities scattered around the Mediterranean basin in key centres. In his De Vita Contemplativa, Philo says they were also enthusiastic allegorizers of the Hebrew scriptures and, in addition, had arcane or esoteric writings of their own. Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea in the fourth century, knew little or nothing of their origins but was struck by the similarities of their way of life to that of Christian monks.3 He even speculates that the “writings of the ancient men who were the founders of the sect,” referred to by Philo, “may well have been our Gospels and Epistles.” This is an intriguing possibility. Epiphanius (c. 315–403) was a bishop and church historian who also linked the Therapeutae with the early Christians. He notes that the name Jesus (Yeshua, or “God saves”) is similar to the Greek word therapeutae, a “healer” or “saviour.” Godfrey Higgins in Anacalypsis says that the Therapeutae were physicians of the soul and had churches, bishops, priests and deacons all but identical with the Christians. He says they had missionary stations or colonies of their community in Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae and Thessalonica, just as in the Pauline churches.4
In The Pagan Christ, I have documented the parallels between Osiris/Horus of Egypt and Yeshua-Joshua-Jesus in the New Testament. It is easy to see how allegorizing Jews, living in Egypt, could have made the shift. The Therapeutae could conceivably have been the original Christ communities and have first been called Christians at Antioch. What is certain is that there was widespread expectation in Jewish communities in the very early first century that Joshua or Yeshua the Deliverer might suddenly return to usher in a Messianic Age. Yeshua the Anointed One becomes Iesous Christos, or Jesus Christ, in Greek. His elevation to a central, mythical figure in Hellenized Jewish mysteries would have been a seamless transition.
But, it must be stressed again, nobody knows for sure how it all began.5 However it happened, it is the “old, old story,” this time in Jewish dress. To those who perhaps find it difficult to abandon a long-held opinion that every major religion must of necessity have its foundation upon a historical person, I commend the chapter “Can a Vibrant Religion Exist Without an Actual Founder?” in Living Waters.6
Before going any further, I would like to give here a very simple introduction to the Gospels, because I’m well aware that terms and ideas familiar to some readers are not necessarily shared by all. If you find it too simple or familiar, you can turn a few pages and get right into the book.
The Synoptic Gospels:
Mark, Matthew and Luke
None of the Gospels have come down to us carrying the names of their “authors” or editors, and nobody really knows for certain who their final editors or “redactors” were, but I will use the traditional titles for the sake of simplicity.
It is important to know that Mark, Matthew, Luke and John and the rest of the New Testament documents were all written in Hellenistic Greek. Greek was the lingua franca, the universal language of the educated class, in the ancient Mediterranean world, ever since the conquests of Alexander the Great, who died in 323 BCE. Two things stand out when this fact is recognized:
1) It is agreed among scholars that the language in which any historical Jesus would have thought, spoken and taught was Aramaic. None of his teachings, however, have come down to us in Aramaic. Together with others, most notably the American critic Harold Bloom, I am amazed that more New Testament scholars are not wholly perplexed by this fact. Nothing, other than possibly five or six words, has been preserved in the language actually spoken by a personage of such extraordinary standing in human history!
2) The Gospel of Mark makes no secret of the fact that the first disciples were uneducated fishermen. He even paints a picture of them as slow-witted at times. The idea that any one of them helped create and write a new literary form, a Gospel, needs to be put aside. None of the Gospels was written by an eyewitness. Paul, the earliest New Testament writer, never met a historical Jesus, only the mythic Christ.
So, nobody knows for certain when or by whom the Gospels were created. It must be remembered that they were never “written” in the way a modern author writes a book. They are highly edited works showing the evidence of having been compiled from earlier collections of sayings and, I believe, ancient myths and “miracle” plays depicted in the Mystery Religions.7 Mark’s Gospel was by general scholarly agreement the first, written most probably sometime between 70 and 90 CE. Matthew was probably written around 90 CE, Luke shortly thereafter. Because Matthew and Luke contain nearly all of Mark and they can thus all be viewed together, they are called the Synoptic (from two Greek words meaning “to see together”) Gospels.
Since the finding of the Gnostic gospels at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945, it is recognized that there were at least twenty gospels circulating in the early centuries. Most were named after prominent Gospel figures to guarantee a feeling of authority and authenticity—that is, to ensure a readership. The Gospel of Thomas is the best known of these.8 The four canonical (officially approved) Gospels were declared to be so by the Church during a lengthy process, and all others were hunted down and destroyed. The likely reason the books found at Nag Hammadi had been buried there was to escape the vigorous attempts after the Council of Nicaea, in 325 CE, to silence all but the official line.
Scholarly study long ago led to the conclusion that whoever “wrote” or were the final redactors/editors of Matthew and Luke had Mark in front of them when they wrote their Gospels because, between them, they reproduced the bulk of it verbatim. It should be noted, however, that they certainly don’t treat Mark as the untouchable and inerrant Word of God, because at times they make specific corrections or depart from his account altogether. Mark includes no birth narrative (“his” Jesus is an adult from the very beginning), only a very few parables, and little other specific teaching of Jesus. There is no Sermon on the Mount. (Incidentally, the Sermon on the Mount becomes the Sermon on the Plain in Luke.) Also, Mark records certain (perhaps embarrassing) details—such as the cry of dereliction and forsakenness from the Cross—that Matthew or Luke either soften or, as I have said, leave out entirely. Mark frequently underlines as well the disciples’ well-nigh total inability to understand what was happening.
In addition to Mark, Matthew and Luke seem to have another common source of material not found in Mark. The traditional hypothesis here is that this source, called Q (from the German word Quelle, “source”), was a “sayings” gospel with no story of the Cross and Resurrection, much like the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Over the years, this hypothesis (no document has ever been found) has spawned many books and a plethora of Ph.D. theses, and it is still widely believed in by critical scholars. However, a formidable challenge to the theory has recently been issued by the scholar Michael Goulder of Birmingham, England, in an article in a prestigious scholarly journal titled “Is Q a Juggernaut?” In this article Goulder says that there is scarcely a Biblical scholar in Oxford today who would vouch for the authenticity of a Q document. He believes that the simpler explanation for the common non-Markan material is that Luke had Matthew as well as Mark in front of him when he wrote.9
The final element in both Matthew and Luke is material peculiar to each alone. This is generally referred to as L for Luke’s and M for Matthew’s. We must remember that the Gospel authors often were acting as redactors or editors, collating material from a range of sources, not all of them known to us today and many of them much more ancient than scholars from traditional backgrounds would care to admit. For example, there was a vast store of oral, as well as written, “wisdom” sayings that circulated widely in the ancient Near East, particularly in the Mystery Religions. The Mystery Religions were movements that restricted full admission to those who had gone through certain secret initiation rites, or mysteries. The most famous were those of Demeter in Eleusis in Greece, as well as those of Dionysus, Mithras, Serapis and Isis. The “parts” acted out and spoken by the sun god or central speaker in the many Mystery Religion dramas formed a part of this