George Albert Wells Quote
Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion.
Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion.
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About George Albert Wells
From the late 1990s, Wells said that the hypothetical Q document, which is proposed as a source used in some of the gospels, may "contain a core of reminiscences" of an itinerant Galilean miracle-worker/Cynic-sage type preacher. This new stance has been interpreted as Wells changing his position to accept the existence of a historical Jesus. In 2003, Wells stated that he disagreed with Robert M. Price on the information about Jesus being "all mythical". Wells believed that the Jesus of the gospels is obtained by attributing the supernatural traits of the Pauline epistles to the human preacher of Q. In 2012, Wells reaffirmed that he agreed that Jesus existed and acknowledged he had changed his stance.
Wells was Chairman of the Rationalist Press Association. He was married and lived in St. Albans, near London. He studied at the University of London and Bern, and held degrees in German, philosophy, and natural science. Wells taught German at London University from 1949, and was Professor of German at Birkbeck College from 1968.