Gospel Fictions

By Randel Helms

Book Overview

Are the four canonical Gospels actual historical accounts or are they imaginative literature produced by influential literary artists to serve a theological vision? In this study of the Gospels based upon a demonstrable literary theory, Randel Helms presents the work of the four evangelists as the "supreme fictions" of our culture, self-conscious works of art deliberately composed as the culmination of a long literary and oral tradition.Helms analyzes the best-known and the most powerful of these fictions: the stories of Christ's birth, his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, his betrayal by Judas, his crucifixion, death and resurrection. In Helms' exegesis of the Gospel miracle stories, he traces the greatest of these - the resurrection of Lazarus four days after his death - to the Egyptian myth of the resurrection of Osiris by the god Horus.Helms maintains that the Gospels are self-reflexive; they are not about Jesus so much as they are about the writers' attitudes concerning Jesus. Helms examines each of the narratives - the language, the sources, the similarities and differences - and shows that their purpose was not so much to describe the past as to affect the present.This scholarly yet readable work demonstrates how the Gospels surpassed the expectations of their authors, influencing countless generations by creating a life-enhancing understanding of the nature of Jesus of Nazareth.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0879755725
• ISBN13: 9780879755720
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: Prometheus Books
• Length: 154 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.0" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Bible As Literature

Having taken Randel Helms' class Bible As Literature at ASU, I knew I wanted to read more from his previous research. He has a very succinct way of presenting his research without casting his opinion or making judgments unto others. In fact the book begins with his statement for what his intentions are: "This is a noble intention, and it is not my purpose here to articulate a quarrel with Christian faith, or to call the Evangelists liars, or to assert that the gospels have no historical content; I write as literary critic, not as debunker." And he does just this as he analyzes the four gospels as you would any other work of fiction. He quickly shows how the gospels intended to create their story, which was to use the already known and familiar Hebrew Bible (or Tanakh) to give their stories credibility. Helms shows this over and over again with an abundance of quotes and references that show how well versed he is in biblical scholarship. In fact most everything that was written about Jesus was either taken or copied directly from the Old Testament or the prophecies of Psalms were forced to fit the mold that is Jesus. An example, in the Hebrew Bible there is a Book of Jonah, where Jonah was in a sea monster's belly for three days and nights. Likewise, Jesus was then encased in his tomb for three days and three nights. It is the same story except transposed onto Jesus in order to give it credibility. Another is the use of common myths of the time to make a connection with Christianity's believers. Christian Jews saw Jesus born unto Mary by man and was adopted as the son of God. But Matthew did not see it this way and mistranslated "young woman" as "virgin woman", thereby coupling that with the standard belief of the time by pagans that deities regularly coupled with women. Combining the two essentially created the myth that the Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus, son of God. In the end Helms does a wonderful job in explaining and showing why the New Testament is nothing more than a work of fiction, which was based of yet another work of fiction that was older by far, the Hebrew Bible. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a close analysis of the New Testament and would like to understand their religion more in doing so. 5 stars

Cogent, compelling, and shocking

It's ironic that Christian fundamentalists feel qualified to question the science of evolution when the historical validity of the Bible itself has been so thoroughly refuted. In the past, intelligent people could persuade themselves that the Bible was an historical record of supernatural events, despite its internal contradictions and often bloodthirsty morality. Today, science and scholarship have shown that the Bible's stories of creation, the flood, Babel, and the Exodus are all fictions cobbled out of Egyptian, Near Eastern, and Greek myths to make the Israelite's god competitive (Greenberg, 101 Myths of the Bible). The stories of the patriarchs and the conquest of Canaan are fictions supporting the centralized temple-state in 6th century BCE Judah (Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed; Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?). In Gospel Fictions Randel Helms shows that the Christian New Testament gospels are also fictions. He uses literary analysis, rather than archeology, to demonstrate that there is no real biographical information about Jesus in the modern sense. Decades after Jesus' death, the gospel writers needed to come up with a biography and all they had to go on was their belief that the messiah's coming must have been predicted by the prophets of Israel. Scouring the texts for anything that could be construed as a such a prediction, including parallels to the lives of the patriarchs and King David, they cobbled together narratives of what the life of the messiah, whom they now considered to have been Jesus, must have been like. Helms explicates these fictions with exacting care, verse by verse. He shows how in many cases the first gospel, by "Mark", was unaware of the scriptural roots and implications of the stories he captured on paper, but Matthew and Luke were fully aware of them and revised or elaborated on them accordingly. His book nicely complements Burton Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament? which lacks the specific analyses that Helms provides but gives a broad historical and contextual account of the creation of all of the books of the New Testement and the works of the second century Church apologists. Gospel Fictions is detailed but coscise, devastatingly logical, and free of distracting rhetoric. This book is a sharp nail in the coffin of Christian claims of the historical truth of their faith. Thus the New Testament is a house of cards built upon the other house of cards that is the Old Testament. Virtually the entire Judeo-Christian epic is fictional. Thoughtful, mature Christians who value honesty must face the fact that the historical basis of their spiritual system is illusory. But Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament? shows that Christianity filled a need in the confusion that arose from the mini-globalization that was occuring in the wake of Greco-Roman empire-building. It was a synthesis of Jewish ethical thought and Greek philosophy that captured the imagination of people throughout the Medit

A Book So Good I Had Trouble Finishing It!

Let me explain the odd title of my review... Randel Helms makes his case in a compelling manner, and does it so clearly and effectively that before I was halfway through the book, I figured that he'd already completely vanquished the delusion that the New Testament is a history text. While some parts are open to debate, the preponderance of evidence would be utterly devastating to Biblical literalists who actually read "Gospel Fictions" instead of tossing it aside the moment it makes them uncomfortable. And it will indeed make them uncomfortable. In the course of the exposition, Helms provides examples of blatant contradictions in the gospels, doing so in an disarmingly off-hand manner, since that's not his main focus. (When I was younger, I studied the Bible intensely for nearly a decade and somehow missed all those contradictions. I wasn't looking for them; I wasn't told they were there; and above all I didn't WANT to see them.) Before reading this book, the few Biblical criticisms I'd read struck me as somewhat circular. For example, "So-and-so must have written this after the fall of Jerusalem because the text predicts it will happen." That presupposes that the text is NOT inspired, so that line of reasoning did not strike me as rigorously logical. However, when Helms demonstrates how the gospels took much material from the Septuagint -- including mistakes contained therein -- he takes things to a whole new level. He also clearly illuminates the themes that each gospel writer strove to emphasize -- and de-emphasize. This makes the provenance of each story much easier to understand. (I particularly enjoyed Helms's comment that Mark liked emphasizing the inadequacy of the disciples. Even when I was a Christian it struck me that those guys seemed like the stupidest people on the face of the planet. How many miracles do you have to see before you "get" that Jesus isn't just some guy?) This book is not a easy, breezy read, but it is well worth the effort. Just as "Who Wrote the Bible" (by Richard Elliott Friedman) helped me understand the provenance of the Old Testament, so too does this book help me understand the evolution of the New Testament.

Very well written, a revelation

This is a short simple little book. Anyone who is familiar with the Christian Gospels knows that they vary from each other in various details. This book provides and explanation why and in the process explains how they came to be written.The first Gospel to be written was that of Mark. It however from a doctrinal point has some problems. There is no mention of the Virgin birth, Mark in quoting a number of prophecies in the Old Testament misunderstands and misquotes them, the description of Jesus?s Baptism suggests that he only becomes the Son of God at that point and not at his birth and lastly the women who observe the resurrection tell nobody. Helms suggests that the Gospel of Luke attempts to deal with these issues by providing details about the birth, it quotes correctly from the Old Testament and it tries to make sense of the baptism of Jesus and gives a different account of the resurrection. The process of working out the events of Jesus life rather than coming from a historical narrative are often constructed by looking at Old Testament prophecies and then creating events which mirror these prophecies. Helms gives as an example of this Mathew?s use of a prophecy in Isa 7:14-16 to predict the Virgin Birth. It is clearly a passage which illustrates a suggestion that King Pekah of Israel will not reign for long. Mathew has misunderstood the nature of the prophecy. The writing of the Gospels has thus not come about from an inquiry into the historical Jesus but rather as a result of the Gospel writers creating a legend that fits in with their communities view of the personality and nature of Jesus. Helms refers to the large number of other Gospels which were in circulation `such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Phillip, the Secret Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene which have been disregarded from the Cannon. The survival of the current Gospels reflects their acceptance by the church as reflective of acceptable doctrine.The chapter on the biblical miracles is perhaps the best in the book. A number of these, especially the raising of the dead are borrowing?s from the Old Testament. Again it is shown how Mark presents a view of Jesus using clumsy magic like tricks whilst in the later Gospels the magic is replaced by Godlike power. However there is a discussion about the story of Jesus arrest and the cutting of of the ear of the servant of the high priest. This starts off as a simple story but the later Gospels tease out a miracle with the curing of the ear. The source of the miracles is shown clearly to be a number of Old Testament stories which have been copied closely. This book also shows the different treatment of miracles in the Gospels. In John they are proof of supernatural power and a reason to believe. In the other Gospels they are the result of the faith which Jesus inspires in people, Unlike some authors, Helms believes in the existence of a historical Christ. He believes that the crucifixion and t

A microscopic dissection of the Gospels....

The first of the Gospels (Mark) was written some 40 years after the death of Jesus (about 70 A.D.). Some thirty years later, Luke and Matthew separately updated, expanded, and edited the first document (using another unknown source as well). And after that, an anonymous writer put together the "Fourth Gospel", that of John. In Gospel Fictions, Randel Helms painstakingly, parable-by-parable, verse-by-verse, even word-by-word, analyzes the four Gospels. His thesis is: "The Gospels... are largely fictional accounts concerning an historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth, intended to create a life-enhancing understanding of his nature," A simple instance: After reading this work, one will not only be reminded that each Gospel quotes Jesus's last words on the cross differently, but -- one will have a better idea why each writer put different words into His mouth. This book will disturb those (like myself) who assumed that the Gospels were substantially historical, with minor differences of fact and emphasis. Helms paints a compelling picture of the exact opposite: almost none of the parables happened in fact, many stories were borrowed from the Old Testament, and the authors had little interest in leaving any record of facts. The only way to grasp the scope of Helm's challenge is to read this book. It will leave you a more informed person, if a somewhat disillusioned one.