Luigi Cascioli, The Fable of
Christ: Book of Accusation.
www.luigicascioli.com.
2006?
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
This
lively and interesting volume briefly claimed public notice through
recent news reports of a lawsuit Luigi Cascioli brought against the
Roman Catholic Church (actually, a local priest, as synecdoche for the
whole Church), accusing them of perpetrating fraud. Cascioli took
Catholicism to task for imposture in their use of a mythical figure, one
Jesus Christ, to support their claims, bamboozling the faithful with a
theological boogeyman who had never really existed. The case did not
seem to Italian courts to possess much merit, but a European Union
Humanities court announced they would consider whether or not to take
the case. I do not know where things stand at the time of this writing.
I can only say that the case appears to me to be frivolous, in that,
even if one could prove (as Mr. Cascioli seeks to do) that Jesus Christ
never existed, there is no reason whatever to believe the leaders of the
Catholic Church share that opinion or see themselves as bilking the
faithful. But our business here is to address the “irrefutable proof”
this book claims to offer for its hypothesis that Jesus as such
never existed, though he was closely modeled upon a nearly forgotten
historical individual, John of Gamala, firstborn son and heir to the
revolutionary Zealot Judas of Galilee. Indeed, one might hope that Mr.
Cascioli’s suit does make it a bit farther into the courts if only to
prompt wider public discussion on the Christ-Myth theory, of which he
propounds a new variation.
Luigi Cascioli is quite
literally a “village atheist,” and his book is laced with the vitriol
one might expect from such a local gadfly. His tone of sarcastic disgust
with the whole biblical tradition and its admirers does not offend
me, as I am something of a connoisseur of florid invective as an antique
form of rhetoric. I reckon that, if one can stand the smothering piety
of the tone of many overtly Christian works on the Bible and yet find
them worth reading, one ought to find the anti-Christian counterpart no
more daunting. But the “village atheist” character of the book and its
polemic also makes one fear for the quality of scholarship therein. It
is quite common for self-educated scholars, even when they are deeply
self-educated, to suffer from idiosyncrasies and blind spots, and
especially, the inability to tell historical reconstruction from wild
speculation. And these fears are realized in the case of The Fable of
Christ.
The learned Cascioli spends
many chapters getting a running start, arguing that the Old Testament
history is largely fictive and is designed to further the theocratic,
nationalistic imperialistic aims of Jews, for whom he seems to bear no
love. For him, the Bible is something like The Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion, a mythic manifesto of nationalistic
megalomania. (Not that it is inherently unlikely for there to be such
world-beating cabals of dangerous lunatics, as witness today’s Islamo-Fascists.
It’s just that Jews never did it.) He is very interested in the
Hasmonean campaign against the Seleucids and the revolutionary
trajectory Judas Maccabeus and his brothers began. He considers there to
have been a uniquely Messianic period datable between 6 BCE, with the
tax revolt of Judas of Galilee, and 70 CE, the Jewish War with Rome,
though he quickly extends it to 136 CE, the defeat of Simon bar Kochba.
Problems not only of interpretation but even of factual assertion begin
to crop up even here. Cascioli confused Herod Antipas with Herod Agrippa
at one point, not that it matters much in the context. Worse, he asserts
that the Hasmoneans were direct descendents of the Davidic dynasty. But
of course the Hasmoneans labored under the handicap of being Levites,
not Davidic Judeans.
Cascioli tantalizes and
frustrates with a whole series of assertions about the ancient Mystery
Religions and their rather exact analogies to Christian Passion and
resurrection mythologies. Was Marduk arrested, Mithras crucified on a
pole? Had Mithras given his own Sermon on the Mount? Cascioli offers not
one bit of documentation for any of this. One may be forgiven for
wondering if he is recycling hackneyed myths from previous
pseudo-scholarly Christ-Myth polemicists. He is either impatient with or
oblivious of the distinction between Mithraism and its evolutionary
ancestor, Zoroastrianism, making the latter the official religion of
Rome in early Christian times. And, while there was no doubt very
significant Zoroastrian-to-Jewish influence, Cascioli indulges in sheer
speculation when it comes to Christian-era Jewish borrowing from what we
should recognize as Mithraism. For Cascioli, all Mystery Religions
offered mythic Soters (saviors) who had preached a doctrine and then
been persecuted and martyred for it, only to rise again.
The Christian Jesus Christ,
he says, was an intentional fabrication in the mid-second century CE by
revolutionary Essenes. The Essenes were not pacifists, but only
pretended to be in order to evade Roman persecution, though the Qumran
War Scroll tells us their true feelings. That is possible, and there is
renewed controversy over who the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls were.
But it is a bit odd to interpret the chief, public tenets of a sect as a
mere smokescreen by people who believed the opposite. That is a peculiar
way to read evidence, it seems to me.
Anyway, the Essenes
realized they needed, not only the hope of a coming Messiah who had
never been on earth, but the figurehead, albeit artificial, of a
returning savior who had already won men to his cause, died, and risen.
But they knew, did these Madison Avenue Savior designers, that no one
would fall for a Christ of pure fancy and imagination. They had to hang
him on an appropriate figure of the recent past, one moreover, from
their own violent, nationalistic tradition. They fastened upon John of
Gamala, son if Judas the Galilean/Gaulonite. Why? He was a revolutionist
in good standing, and, unlike the rest, he had been a preacher, too.
(Why not his father? Wasn’t he, too, a rabbi?). To this hypothetical
Jesus-like John, Cascioli ascribes various gospel sayings, sometimes
with a twist of rewording. John-Jesus even did “miracles,” tricks
learned from Indian fakirs, including apparent resurrections. So
Cascioli is going a good deal farther than he first seemed to do; he is
contending that “Jesus” was actually a glorification of John of Gamala,
not just a handy peg on which to hang the messianic halo. The name
“John” survives in the tradition, applied instead to the Son of Zebedee,
whose name was originally Lazarus, whom Jesus loved, therefore the
Beloved Disciple (as many hold).
Cascioli posits a schism
among his Essenes. Those who had converted, as many did, from pagan
Mystery Religions, believed that their new Christ had to have been
incarnated, like the other Mystery Soters. Other Essenes preferred
Docetism. Still others believed that, though Jesus had manifested
himself, he had never come to earth as a man. Such a view, Cascioli
says, underlies Galatians 1:1, where Paul says he had learned his
doctrine from no man—which therefore must have included Jesus, a purely
heavenly being! Jezebel and the Nicolaitans must have upheld a fleshly,
incarnate Jesus. Huh? Mr. Cascioli says he is presenting “irrefutable
evidence” for all this, but I’d be satisfied with any evidence at
all.
Cascioli does not merely
fill the space between bricks of evidence with the cement of
speculation; he makes bricks without the straw of evidence at all. The
heart of the theory is the speculative part. The whole thing seems
completely arbitrary. It is not that the resultant scenario is
inherently silly or absurd. But what reason is there to think it
happened? He is essentially positing a cult of John of Gamala as a slain
messiah destined to return in glory. That is nothing unparalleled, but
why believe it happened in this case?
Cascioli’s own inerrancy is
again debunked when he gets to Marcion. He imagines that Marcion himself
penned the Book of Acts, an absolute impossibility, given the plainly
anti-Marcionite tenor and raison detre of the writing.
Marcion, Cascioli says, bribed the Roman church into accepting his
docetic doctrine with his gift of 200, 000 sesterces—uh, doesn’t
Cascioli know that the church returned the money and sent Marcion
packing? Was Irenaeus one of the authors of the Gospel of John?
Interesting speculation, but that’s about it. Is it true that “the
gospels we have now are the revised and corrected versions which came
out in the sixth century” (p. 157)? The sixth century? Cascioli
seems to think the Veronica’s Veil episode belongs to the gospels
(p. 162). He quotes what one would have to call “apocryphal apocryphal
gospels” I’ve never heard of: Hebrew Gospels 8:57 (“How can you
know these things if you are not fifty years old yet?”—of course he
means John’s gospel.). The “Pseudogospel of John” says: “Christ had
begun his activity at the age of 46” (p. 160). And there is more, and
worse.
Cascioli offers a number or
arresting ideas, conjectures, and new interpretations of familiar
passages. The book is worth reading, certainly. But it is an interesting
failure. If he gets to court with this case, expect Mark Garagos to
represent him.