How a Fictional Jesus Gave Rise to Christianity??

[Peter Kirby]

It's been a while since I read Wells. I do remember that he took exception to the translation "betrayed," but I don't know whether he invoked Romans 8:32 as the chief example against that translation....

Romans 8.32 was one of several that Wells liked to refer to. The Jesus Legend, pages 35-36:

To render it as 'betrayed' or even as 'arrested' (NEB) is to interpret him from the gospels. Mack, with many other commentators, observes that Paul is referring not to a betrayal, but to the martyr's fate, and that he nowhere mentions a third party involved in the 'handing over', the subjects of the verb being either Jesus himself (Galatians 1:4 and 2:20, Jesus "gave himself for our sins", "gave himself up for me"), or God (explicitly in Romans 8:32, "He spared not his own Son but delivered him up for us all"; and understood as the subject of the passive in Romans 4:25, "He was delivered up for our trespasses").

...or spoke much on the idea of "revelation" in the phrase "from the Lord."

Wells not infrequently went on at some length about words of the Lord in early Christian worship, unsurprisingly mining 1 Corinthians in particular; as for relating that to the eucharistic passage, here is The Jesus Legend, page 33:

The most striking instance of words of the Lord recorded by Paul is provided by Jesus's eucharistic words ("this is my body", and so forth). Paul expressly says that they came to him through a personal revelation from the (risen) Christ: he "received" them "of the Lord" (1 Corinthians 11:23).

In any case, Doherty is more accessible these days, even if there are multiple places from which these arguments could have been derived.

That seems to be very true. A shame, really. Not that Doherty is accessible, mind you, but that Wells seems to be so much less so.

Ben.

Right. Doherty isn't the ultimate source of all these observations, but his website seems to be the best guess as the immediate source for R. G. Price.

I actually had a good half dozen of Wells' books once but unloaded them when moving back and forth from Norway a few years back.