Miracles of the Gods: A New Look at the Supernatural (137 page)

the Council, persecution was not confined to Origen's numerous followers; the view halloo! to hunt all the other dissenters was also sounded.

(About this time the ring which bishops wear became a symbol of 'marriage' to the Church. A strange union, in my opinion, between man and Holy Ghost.) The Bible is not 'God's word'. Moreover, the dogmas concocted at the first five councils) by an army of princes of the church are not inspired by the Holy Ghost - in spite of the participants' supposed charisma. This comes as a severe shock to the average religious layman, because he is usually unprepared for it. What is left?

What is the truth about Jesus? Did he exist? Did he bleed to death on the Cross for our sins? Did he really preach what is recorded in the New Testament? And if the texts put into the mouth of Jesus are not by him, where did the 1,500 copies of the 'original text' originate from? Something must have happened. One single figure out of many who were crucified could not kindle and support such a colossal cult of personality. Clever heads were at work.

There are thousands of books about Jesus of Nazareth. Versions of the story of Jesus based on the latest research have recently been published by authors such as Johannes Leh-mann [8], Joel Carmichael [9] and Rudolf Augstein [10]. Naturally these critics of misleading interpretations of Jesus are contradicted by the theological party, yet when one analyses the prevarications of the group of authors [11] writing about Augstein's Jesus Menschensohn, one recognizes only the time-honoured technique that Joachim Kahl called 'camouflage'.

Christian theologians make the dogma of Jesus - the established religious doctrine with the claim to unconditional validity, the unproved proposition [12] - the salient point of the Christian religion. Even that seems understandable, if rash, to me, because the hundreds of thousands of pastors of all the Christian churches would lose their jobs and their personal raison d'etre if they could no longer act in the name of Jesus. To be honest they would have to say to the little man in the seventeenth row of the Jesus of Nazareth was not 'God's only begotten son' and that he himself never pretended that he was.

In fact, it would be asking a lot to expect such a pronouncement from the pulpit. What then was the real Jesus like?

Rudolf Augstein [13] asks: '... with what right do the Christian churches refer to a Jesus who did not exist in the form they claim, to doctrines which he did not teach to an absolute authority which he did not confer and to an affiliation with God which he never laid claim to.'

These are no novelties to the initiated, but I am addressing the ignorant, the laymen, who neither know nor understand theological double-Dutch. Once again, I am taking it on my broad back to translate professorial wisdom into generally intelligible language - knowing perfectly well what a sound thrashing by Christian specialists awaits me. It is not in my nature simply to believe 'par ordre du mufti'.

The wisdom of theologians has been printed in hundreds of thousands of books which can be found in archives and libraries. So that everyone can understand me, I must begin at the beginning.