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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.〔"An Interview with Prof. Wells - Jesus: There Was No Such Person", ''Freethought Today'', April–May 1985〕 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 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 now disagrees with Robert M. Price on the information about Jesus being "all mythical".〔''Can We Trust the New Testament?'' by George Albert Wells (Nov 26, 2003) ISBN 0812695674 pp. 49–50〕 Wells believes that the Jesus of the gospels is obtained by attributing the supernatural traits of the Pauline epistles to the human preacher of Q.〔''Can We Trust the New Testament?'' by George Albert Wells (Nov 26, 2003) ISBN 0812695674 p. 43〕 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. ==Work on early Christianity== Wells's fundamental observation is to suggest that the earliest extant Christian documents from the first century, most notably the New Testament epistles by Paul and some other writers, show no familiarity with the gospel figure of Jesus as a preacher and miracle-worker who lived and died in the recent decades. Rather, the early Christian epistles present him "as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past".〔 Wells believed that the Jesus of these earliest Christians was not based on a historical character, but a pure myth, derived from mystical speculations based on the Hebrew wisdom figure. Wells has summarized his argument about the original, pre-gospel, source of the Jesus figure as follows: I have argued here that, if we arrange extant early Christian documents into a chronological series, we find that only from about 90 did Christians regard Jesus as a teacher, miracle-worker and a near contemporary, crucified under Pilate. In the earliest documents (which do not include the gospels, which I give reason for dating from 90 to 110) Jesus figures simply as a supernatural personage whom God had sent in human form into the world to redeem it and who was crucified there in unspecified circumstances. These early writers are so vague in what they say about his life that they may well have believed only that he had been crucified in obscure circumstances long ago. I show that such a view is likely to have been suggested to them by the Jewish wisdom literature they knew well and by traditions they must have known concerning actual crucifixions of living men in Palestine one and two centuries before their time. And I argue that they were in fact probably wrong in believing this much of him. (''The Historical Evidence for Jesus'', 1988, p. 217–218).According to Wells, the gospels' composition was a later stage of the development of the Jesus myth, which was given a historical setting and a figure subsequently embellished with ever increasing details. In his books ''The Jesus Legend'' (1996) and ''The Jesus Myth'' (1999), Wells modified and expanded his initial thesis, and indicates his disagreement with Robert Price: "In my first books on Jesus, I argued that the gospel Jesus is an entirely mythical expansion of the Jesus of the early epistles. The summary of the argument of the ''Jesus Legend'' (1996) and the ''Jesus Myth'' (1999) given in this section of the present work makes it clear that I no longer maintain this position. The weakness of my earlier position was pressed upon me by J.D.G. Dunn, who objected that we really cannot plausibly assume that such a complex of traditions as we have in the gospels and their sources could have developed within such a short time from the early epistles without a historical basis (Dunn, (Evidence for Jesus'' ) 1985, p. 29). My present standpoint is: this complex is not all post-Pauline (Q, or at any rate parts of it, may well be as early as ca. A.D. 50); and if I am right, against Doherty and Price - it is not all mythical. The essential point, as I see it, is that the Q material, whether or not it suffices as evidence of Jesus's historicity, refers to a personage who is not to be identified with the dying and rising Christ of the early epistles." (''Can We Trust the NT?'', 2004, pp. 49–50).Wells now allows for the possibility that the central figure of the gospel stories may be based on a historical character from first-century Galilee: "()he Galilean and the Cynic elements ... may contain a core of reminiscences of an itinerant Cynic-type Galilean preacher (who, however, is certainly not to be identified with the Jesus of the earliest Christian documents)."〔 Sayings and memories of this preacher may have been preserved in the "Q" document that is hypothesized as the source of many "sayings" of Jesus found in both gospels of Matthew and Luke. However, Wells concludes that the reconstruction of this historical figure from the extant literature would be a hopeless task. The updated position taken by Wells has been interpreted by other scholars as an "about-face", abandoning his initial thesis in favor of accepting the existence of a historical Jesus.〔 However, Wells insists that this figure of late first-century gospel stories is distinct from the sacrificial Christ myth of Paul's epistles and other early Christian documents, and that these two figures have different sources before being fused in Mark. In the Gospels, the two Jesus figures — the human preacher of Q and the supernatural personage of the early epistles who sojourned briefly on Earth as a man and then, rejected, returned to heaven — have been fused into one. The Galilean preacher of Q has been given a salvific death and resurrection, and these have been set not in an unspecified past (as in the early epistles), but in a historical context consonant with the date of the Galilean preaching. (''Can We Trust the NT?'', 2004, p. 43) 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「George Albert Wells」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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