George Albert Wells

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George Albert Wells


Born
May 22, 1926

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George Albert Wells (born May 22, 1926), usually known as G. A. Wells, is an Emeritus Professor of German at Birkbeck, University of London. After writing books about famous European intellectuals, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Franz Grillparzer, he turned to the study of the historicity of Jesus, starting with his book The Jesus of the Early Christians in 1971. He is best known as an advocate of the thesis that Jesus is essentially a mythical rather than a historical figure, a theory that was pioneered by German biblical scholars such as Bruno Bauer and Arthur Drews.

Since the late 1990s, Wells has 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
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Average rating: 3.5 · 106 ratings · 17 reviews · 24 distinct works
Did Jesus Exist?

3.62 avg rating — 21 ratings — published 1975 — 7 editions
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The Jesus Myth

3.44 avg rating — 16 ratings — published 1998 — 2 editions
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The Jesus Legend

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3.47 avg rating — 15 ratings — published 1996 — 2 editions
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The Historical Evidence for...

3.21 avg rating — 14 ratings — published 1982 — 4 editions
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Cutting Jesus Down to Size:...

3.89 avg rating — 9 ratings — published 2009 — 8 editions
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Who Was Jesus ?: A Critique...

3.78 avg rating — 9 ratings — published 1989 — 7 editions
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Can We Trust the New Testam...

4.20 avg rating — 5 ratings — published 2003 — 3 editions
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What's in a Name? Reflectio...

4.67 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 1993 — 6 editions
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The Jesus of the Early Chri...

3.50 avg rating — 2 ratings
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Belief and Make-Believe: Cr...

it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating
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“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.”
George Albert Wells



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