Namely, he proposes in a recent book, The Jesus Legend , that the Jesus of the New Testament is all legend and no history. In other words, he never existed. The last person to seriously make that claim was John Allegro , who came up with the idea in the psychedelic sixties that Jesus was really a cipher or a symbol representing a psychedelic consciousness engendered by initiating disciples into the cult of the sacred mushroom . Although this idea was a big hit in Berkeley and among Grateful Dead fans, he has since stopped eating acid and had to eat his words out of the sheer historiographical implausibility of such a theory. For Jesus to be merely a legend leaves too many embarrassing facts to account for.
Powerful legends can collect around powerful figures like halos on a saint.
But if we have the luxury of merely spinning legends in the creation of heroes, we tend not to include the things we are otherwise forced to own up to. The death of Jesus, for example is extremely problematic. These are just a few of the historiographical problems besetting G.A. Wells hypothesis. In addition, one is hard pressed to set aside the clearly early references to Jesus by the writings of Paul and a quite ample supply of both canonical and non-canonical sources. The writings of the Jewish historian Josephus and the traditional source material discerned to underlie the gospels also require some heavy-duty hypothesis, speculation, and theorizing to make evaporate.