George Albert Wells

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 allows for the possibility that certain elements of the Gospel traditions might be based on a historical figure from the first-century Palestine: "[T]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)."

Wells' claim of a mythical Jesus has received support from Earl Doherty, Robert M. Price and others. The classical historian R. E. Witt, reviewing The Jesus of the Early Christians in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, offered some criticisms but concluded that "Hellenists should welcome the appearance of this challenging book.", while Wells' conclusions have been criticized by biblical scholars and ecclesiastical historians such as W. H. C. Frend. In response to Grant, Michael Martin "defend[ed] Wells against critics who dismiss his hypothesis."

In his book 'The Jesus Myth' (1999), Wells departed from his earlier insistence that there was no historical figure at the basis the Jesus of the gospels, acknowledging the Q document as early historical evidence. However, Wells still argues that Paul's Jesus was "a heavenly, pre-existent figure who had come to earth at some uncertain point in the past and lived an obscure life, perhaps one or two centuries before his own time." and was called a Christ Myth theorist by Price and was said to be an "eminently worthy successor to extreme Christ Myth theorists" by Price on the back cover of ''Can We Trust the New Testament?"

Books

German intellectual history

Early Christianity

See also

References