George Albert Wells
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George Albert Wells (born 1926) is an Emeritus Professor of German at the Birkbeck College, University of London, but he is more widely known as a New Testament scholar. He is an advocate of a theory that Jesus is a mythical rather than a historical figure.
George Albert (usually "G.A.") Wells is a former Chairman of the Rationalist Press Association. He is married and lives in St. Albans, near London. He studied at the University of London and Bern, and holds degrees in German, philosophy, and natural science. He has taught German at London University since 1949, and has been Professor of German at Birkbeck College since 1968.
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Work on early Christianity
Wells argues that the earliest extant Christian documents from the first century, most notably Paul's epistles, show no familiarity with the Gospel tradition of Jesus as a preacher and miracle-worker who lived and died in the recent decades. Rather, they present him as a mysterious figure that lived an obscure life in some indeterminate past. Wells believes that the Jesus of these earliest Christians is not based on a historical character, but a pure myth, derived from the mystical speculations based on the Jewish Wisdom tradition. According to Wells, the Gospel tradition was a later stage of the development of the Jesus myth, which was given a concrete historical setting and subsequently embellished with more and more details.
In his last works, Wells has somewhat moderated his views, allowing for the possibility that certain elements of the Gospel traditions might be based on a historical figure from the first-century Palestine. However, Wells insists that this line of first-century traditions is separate from the sacrificial Christ myth of Paul's epistles and other earliest documents and that these two traditions have different origins. Wells concludes that the reconstruction of this historical figure from the extant literature would be a hopeless task.
With his mythicist position, Wells is in minority among the New Testament scholars, but his views have been a major influence on some even more radical proponents of the Christ myth theory, most notably his former student Earl Doherty.
Books
German
His major works in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German language thought and letters are
- Herder and After (1959)
- The Plays of Grillparzer (1969)
- Goethe and the Development of Science (1978).
- The Origin of Language (1987)
Early Christianity
- The Jesus of the Early Christians (1971)
- Did Jesus Exist? (1975)
- The Historical Evidence for Jesus (1982)
- The Jesus Legend (1996)
- The Jesus Myth (1998)
- Can We Trust the New Testament?: Thoughts on the Reliability of Early Christian Testimony (2004)
- Religious Postures
- What's in a Name?
- Belief and Make Believe
- Who Was Jesus?
See also
External links
- G.A. Wells, The New Humanist, Vol. 114, No. 3. Sept 1999, pp. 13-18, "Earliest Christianity" (http://jeromekahn123.tripod.com/newtestament/id20.html)
- G.A. Wells at the Secular Web (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/g_a_wells/index.shtml)
- G.A. Wells at Peter Kirby's page "Theories of the Historical Jesus" - contains links to Wells' books on Amazon (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/theories.html#wells)sv:George Albert Wells