George Albert Wells (22 May 1926–23 January 2017), usually known as G. A. Wells, was a 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.[1]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 andArthur 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 Galileanmiracle-worker/Cynic-sage type preacher.[2] This new stance has been interpreted as Wells changing his position to accept the existence of a historical Jesus.[3] In 2003 Wells stated that he now disagrees with Robert M. Price on the information about Jesus being "all mythical".[4] 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.[5]
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 holds degrees in German,philosophy, and natural science. He taught German at London University from 1949, and was Professor of German at Birkbeck College from 1968.
He died on 23 January 2017 at the age of 90.[6][7]
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".[2] 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 Jewish Wisdom figure.[8]
In his early trilogy (1971, 1975, 1982), Wells denied Jesus’ historicity by arguing that the gospel Jesus is an entirely mythical expansion of a Jewish Wisdom figure—the Jesus of the early epistles—who lived in some past, unspecified time period. And also on the views of New Testament scholars who acknowledge that the gospels are sources written decades after Jesus's death by people who had no personal knowledge of him. In addition, Wells writes, the texts are exclusively Christian and theologically motivated, and therefore a rational person should believe the gospels only if they are independently confirmed.[9] Wells clarifies his position in The Jesus Legend, that "Paul sincerely believed that the evidence (not restricted to the Wisdom literature) pointed to a historical Jesus who had lived well before his own day; and I leave open the question as to whether such a person had in fact existed and lived the obscure life that Paul supposed of him. (There is no means of deciding this issue.)"[10]
In his later trilogy from the mid-1990s, The Jesus Legend (1996), The Jesus Myth (1999), and Can We Trust the New Testament? (2004). Wells modified and expanded his initial thesis to include a historical Galilean preacher from the Q source
