We live in an age where nothing is what it seems. Take a look behind any news article and the truth is often very different – if not diametrically opposite – to the story being told. This takes many forms – so please indulge me; I am going to take you from a trans woman in prison to the historicity of Christ via a holiday home – all to prove my point that you can’t believe what you read in the news. Whoever said 5 Minute Break isn’t diverse!
Let’s start with the story of the trans woman who was convicted in Scotland of rape before beginning their transition. This person was moved from a female prison to a male facility after an outcry. ‘How can they be allowed in a women-only space?’ was the demand, and one can certainly see the point. But, according to journalist India Willoughby, trans people, just like anyone who breaks the law, deserve to be sent to “a jail that is suitable for them, and where everybody else is safe.” Willoughby says that this person was actually kept in isolation away from the other inmates, and was never allowed to present any real threat to their safety. She explained that [there is] “categorically no way someone who has committed rape would be moved into the women’s estate”.
Now I don’t know, but it sounds much more plausible to me that a sensible decision is taken by a properly constituted board to keep a convicted rapist away from women, than there is some daft and blasé wokeness that allows such a rapist to self-identify as female, slap on a bit of lippy, then march freely into a space that gives them unfettered access to women. So when I read about the ‘outrage’ over this, I take it that it is the outrage itself which is the story, not necessarily the truth behind it.
But it’s not just a modern-day issue. Here’s a story from my personal experience, where the truth was completely different. Many years ago, my parents rented a small weekend flat in a coastal sailing town. Part of the rental contract was that each year we had to vacate the flat for two weeks, as it was already let to someone else for that period. Which was fine, until that other person suddenly became very, very famous. “London solicitor and family thrown out of flat by Mr X!” screamed the story in an outraged tabloid paper, making it sound like all this had happened recently, and only because this person was now very famous. If you strip away the embellishment, there was nothing there at all. But hey, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
And we can go even further back in time to see that it has ever been thus. Early humans developed communities around shared stories, and it seems likely that these were embellished and grown by successive re-tellings, until they lost almost all contact with any original truth.
Nowhere is this clearer to me than the question of the historicity of Jesus. I think it entirely plausible that a mythological set of stories grew up around the exploits of various different mendicant preachers wandering around first century Judea with their bands of followers, all spouting their religious philosophies to the locals. And as these stories were repeatedly re-told, who is to say they did not start to come together into tales of a single preacher; one who became known as ‘Yehoshua’ or ‘Jesus’?
Just like the story of the trans woman or my family rental, we can try to strip away the many layers of accumulated embellishments to see if there was any truth behind the Yehoshua story. Was there, for example, an actual person by that name, or even a single mendicant who did any of the things attributed to Jesus in the bible? Sadly, we can never really know, as we don’t have any verifiable corroborating evidence outside the gospels (and even they are contradictory on several key points). That is because Roman historians, who were notoriously good at recording the major events of the empire, actually maintained a resounding silence on this particular story.* Funny, that.
So if you strip back the stories, did Jesus actually exist? Personally I think it is highly unlikely. The silence of the Roman historians speaks volumes, which leads me to conclude that the Jesus story has its origin in the tales that grew and developed from the first century mendicant preachers. Like the other news stories I mention above – but just on a much grander scale – the Good News does not really stand up to a factual scrutiny. I bet if you manufactured a time machine and went back to the right time and place, you wouldn’t actually find a recognisable Jesus figure anywhere.
Incidentally, time travel and story-telling are devices I have used in my book, The Witchfinder’s Well. My time-travelling character Justine arrives in 1565 from 2015 and early-on she says a four-word expletive. In time, after many, many re-tellings by Tudor-era folk, her few words have grown into a whole paragraph. I had a lot of fun with the idea, as each person sensationally adds more words as they tell the story. But the tragedy for Justine is that it is the final version which is used to substantiate the claim that she is a witch.
So we may live in an age of fake news and Photoshop, but boy, have we been telling whoppers a lot longer.
And that’s the truth, believe me.
* Yes, yes, I know there was a first century historian who mentions Jesus; he was a Jewish chap called Josephus. But the passage that mentions Jesus was in a wholly different style to Josephus’s and clearly inserted into a pre-existing section of his history. So it is generally accepted that this was actually a later Christian forgery.
The Witchfinder’s Well is available on Amazon. Click the image below for more.