George Albert Wells (born 1926) is an Emeritus Professor of German at the Birkbeck College, University of London, but he is more widely known as a New Testament scholar. He is an advocate of a theory that Jesus is a mythical rather than a historical figure.
Wells argues that the earliest extant Christian documents from the first century, most notably Paul's epistles, show no familiarity with the Gospel tradition of Jesus as a preacher and miracle-worker who lived and died in the recent decades. Rather, they present him as a mysterious figure that lived an obscure life in some indeterminate past. Wells believes that the Jesus of these earliest Christians is not based on a historical character, but a pure myth, derived from the mystical speculations based on the Jewish Wisdom tradition. According to Wells, the Gospel tradition was a later stage of the development of the Jesus myth, which was given a concrete historical setting and subsequently embellished with more and more details.
In his last works, Wells has somewhat moderated his views, allowing for the possibility that certain elements of the Gospel traditions might be based on a historical figure from the first-century Palestine. However, Wells insists that this line of first-century traditions is separate from the sacrificial Christ myth of Paul's epistles and other earliest documents and that these two traditions have different origins. Wells concludes that the reconstruction of this historical figure from the extant literature would be a hopeless task.
With his mythicist position, Wells is in minority among the New Testament scholars, but his views have been a major influence on some even more radical proponents of the Christ myth theory, most notably his former student Earl Doherty.
Books
- The Jesus Myth
- The Jesus of the early Christians
- The plays of Grillparzer
- Did Jesus exist?
- Religious Postures
- What's in a Name?
- The Origin of Language
- Goethe and the development of science, 1750-1900
- Belief and Make Believe
- Who Was Jesus?
Links
