The trustworthiness of the Gospels, the failure of the swoon theory in all of its forms, the lack of a valid historical basis, and the decidedly illogical lines of argumentation demonstrate the failures of these theories. This is not even to mention their hopeless contradiction of one another as well. Summary and Conclusion
There have been many popular attempts to discredit the Jesus of the Gospels. Even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these attempts were prevalent. While they have been rejected almost unanimously by careful scholars, especially those who remember similar attempts disproven long ago, they still receive widespread attention among lay people. There have even been strictly fictional, novelistic attempts to deal with these subjects.^85
It is because of this attention among the general populace that we have considered these popularistic “lives of Jesus” in this chapter. Accordingly, we investigated hypotheses involving swoon, Qumran connections, perversions of Jesus’ message, and theses involving Jesus as an international traveler. Each was refuted on its own grounds by a number of criticisms.
Louis Cassels responded rather harshly to such “debunking” attempts:
You can count on it. Every few years, some “scholar” will stir up a short-lived sensation by publishing a book that says something outlandish about Jesus.
The “scholar” usually has no standing as a Bible student, theologian, archaeologist, or anything else related to serious religious study.
But that need not hold him back. If he has a job—any job—on a university faculty, his “findings” will be treated respectfully in the press as a “scholarly work.”^86
Although such satirical comments remind one of Schweitzer’s similar remarks concerning the “imperfectly equipped free-lances” who composed the “fictitious lives of Jesus” from 130 to 200 years ago,^87 these statements cannot fairly be applied to all of the writings in this chapter. Yet they do remind us of characteristics that are true of many. Accordingly, while all of the theses surveyed in this chapter are refuted by the facts, some of them are additionally to be viewed from the standpoint of fictitious attempts to avoid the Jesus of the Gospels.
84 Louis Cassels, “Debunkers of Jesus Still Trying,” The Detroit News, June 23, 1973, p. 7A.
85 Templeton, Act of God; Irving Wallace, The Word(New York: Pocket, 1973); Og Mandino, The Christ Commission(New York: Bantam, 1981).
86 Cassels, “Debunkers,” p. 7A.
87 Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 38.
