RFSet1
Luis and Janet write:
Your articles bring insight and clarity to points that must bother thinking Christians, or anyone who has tried to make sense of Christianity itself. This is a most welcome addition to the Secular Web.
I believe that critiques of Jesus' historicity ultimately fail. I think the references in Josephus have some validity...I don't put Acts in the second century. I think it was written by a companion of Paul, who did some research to try to find out about a real Jesus...John's Gospel differs in a lot of respects from the Synoptics, but does seem to have some historical validity. For example, the embarrassment about the baptising of Jesus by John the Baptist in John's Gospel does seem to point to a real event...
Response to Steven:
Josephus and Christian Forgery / "Brother of the Lord" / John's Jesus
[Note: The Josephus question, including consideration of the phrase "brother of the Lord," is dealt with at length in Supplementary Article No. 10: Josephus Unbound: Reopening the Josephus Question. Please see that article, which replaces my earlier remarks to Steven.]
. . . You are also a pretty rare voice these days in giving the Gospel of John "some historical validity." John's picture of Jesus is just too fundamentally divergent from the others. The Fourth Evangelist's embarrassment over Jesus' baptism by John was a reaction to the story of this 'event' which he found in the Synoptic Gospels, not to the event itself as an historical incident with which he was familiar. (Mark, who undoubtedly invented the story, felt no such embarrassment, presumably because it fitted his 'adoptionist' presentation of Jesus; whereas John is concerned with making his Jesus an uncompromised deity from heaven who would never undergo such a thing.) John is full of signs that he adapted in his own unique way the Synoptic presentation of Jesus' life and death, things he knew nothing about until he encountered some form of the Markan-based Gospels. He made the new historical Jesus fit his own Christology, his community's view of the spiritual Christ, a revealer Son who saved by being the intermediary for knowledge about God ("whoever eats this 'bread' shall live forever"). The cross, borrowed from the Synoptics, was adapted as a means to this end; it is not any atoning sacrifice for sin as the Markan group essentially have it. (See my Supplementary Article No. 2: A Solution to the First Epistle of John for more on this.)
Finally, for the date of Acts, I would recommend John Knox's Marcion and the New Testament, whose views some more recent scholars concur with (e.g., Townsend). An early date for Acts, let alone that it was written by a companion of Paul, cannot be supported and is largely rejected now by mainstream scholarship.
As a short comic once said "verrry interesting". Congratulations on pulling together many threads. Comments and questions: 1. I've always found it significant that there were no references to the birth "miracles" later in the Gospels. Are there any external references to the Magi or the slaughter of the innocents? I have never heard of any. 2. I have also found it fascinating that there were supposedly cults of John the Baptist that survived for centuries - or so I have read. And at least one author postulates that Jesus and John were of the same family working for the re-instatement of the Hasmoneans. Do you have any insight into the John cult as it relates to your hypothesis of a widespread cosmic Christ cult? 3. I am fascinated by your early cosmic Christ cult to explain the rapid spread of Christianity. This radically contradicts what I had previously thought convincing - the gradual accretion of messiah, son, deity, and deity from all time, to the growing concept of Jesus. 4. I am not clear how the lack of any historical Jesus can be consistent with the various Nazarene cults which seem to have prospered for centuries in a few locations. Has the evidence of these cults been exaggerated or misinterpreted?
Response to Lynn:
The Magi / Cults of John the Baptist / Jewish-Christian Sects
There are no references in any contemporary or later non-Christian documents (and no Christian ones outside Matthew until a few later apocryphal writings deriving their 'information' from Matthew) to the Magi or the so-called slaughter of the innocents. The latter is suspiciously like the similar legendary act of Pharaoh at the time of Moses' birth (Exodus 1:22). It may also have been influenced by Herod's notorious execution of so many of his own family members in the paranoia he felt during later life that plots were being hatched against him. Josephus' silence on this Matthean incident should be conclusive.
As for cults attached to John the Baptist, the first thing to be noted is that we can cast little more light on this figure than we can on Jesus. Some scholars refer to the "Quest for the historical Baptist", and express as much frustration with it as they do over the quest for the historical Jesus. (See the article of that name by John Reumann in Understanding the Sacred Text, p.183.) In Josephus we at least have a brief reference to him which is very unlikely to be a forgery (Antiquities of the Jews, 18, 5), but he makes no link of John to a Christian sect, let alone a Jesus. Reumann (p.183, following Enslin) suggests that "John and Jesus probably never met," that John was introduced into the Gospel story to serve as the messenger who was widely expected to herald the coming of the Lord. Malachi prophecied the coming of Elijah to prepare for Yahweh's arrival to establish the Kingdom. The evangelists needed an actual historical figure (since Elijah himself had not put in an appearance) to herald Jesus' coming. Actually, John first appears in Q, before any of the Gospels were written, and if we look at the layer Q2, we can see that in the earliest thinking, John was regarded as heralding the new preaching of the Kingdom as conducted by the Q community itself. Only later when a founding Jesus was developed did the figure of John have to be aligned with him and serve as his herald, and this role was carried over into the Gospels. (See my Part Three article.)
John was only one of probably many Jewish prophets of the time (he received special notoriety because of his execution by Herod Antipas, which is recorded by Josephus) who advocated repentance and practiced baptism, though not with a mystical meaning as Paul rendered it, but as Josephus says, for purification of the body as an adjunct to the repentance which purified the soul. Such baptist-type sects involving washing rituals were part of a renewal movement of the time which hoped to induce God to restore Israel. It is possible that a following did form around John the Baptist, or one after his death, though not significant enough for Josephus to mention it.
On the other hand, the existence of a sect specifically acknowledging John the Baptist as its founder is entirely based on an interpretation of the Gospels, i.e. from the perceived desire of the evangelists, especially John, to 'put down' the Baptist as subordinate to Jesus and make him declare himself as such. The reference to 'disciples of John' does not prove the existence of a later cult based on him. We have no independent witness to such a thing. Thomas L. Brodie points out that the reference in the third century Pseudo-Clement is problematic, and is based on varying secondary translations of a lost original. It cannot make secure any theory of a late first century Baptist sect.
Your question about the "Nazarene cults" is more complicated. (You probably have in mind those groups which come under the general heading of "Jewish-Christians", like the Ebionites, the Nazareans, the Elkasaites, etc.) A scholar like Burton Mack would be anxious to see these as survivals of his co-called "Jesus movements" which are supposed to have begun as responses to Jesus the teacher and did not consider him divine.
The Ebionites, for example, came to regard Jesus as a prophet Messiah but not the son of God. The trouble is, all these groups flourished after the first century, and the recording of fragments from their documents (as in Epiphanius and Hippolytus) come from the third and fourth centuries. Besides, there is much confusion among such preserved fragments (see below). Any evaluation of what their views of Jesus/Christ were in the earliest stages of their faith is an extrapolation backwards. Even the prominent tradition that the precursor of these movements was the remnant of the original Jerusalem church which at the height of the Jewish War fled Judea for Pella, a city in the Transjordan, is based on a fourth century report of the second century writer Hegesippus—and we know how notoriously unreliable (not to mention naive and tendentious) were later Christian traditions about the early period.
There is great difficulty in tracing later Ebionite views back to the Jerusalem community known to us through the letters of Paul, who, by the way, gives us not an inkling that Peter and James' view of Jesus was so radically different from his own. Theories that the later Jewish-Christian view of Christ as only a human man was the original expression of the Christ movement are impossible to maintain with any credibility. (Burton Mack's position—or "suspicion"—in his recent Who Wrote the New Testament?, that the Jerusalem group was of the "Jesus movement" type, not regarding Jesus as divine, is unsupportable from the only firm evidence we have (Paul's letters) and constitutes one of several notable flaws in his overall scenario. See my review of this book in the Book Review section.)
The progression of Gnostic writings during the second century, in my estimation, shows that groups outside the orthodox mainstream could adopt the newly-developed historical Jesus and impose it on their own view of a mythical savior figure. The Gospel of John shows this as well. So the simple answer to this question is that these Jewish reform sects essentially adopted those elements of the emerging Jesus figure which they could fit into their own views. They came to regard Christ's mission not as one of redemption but as one to teach, uphold the integrity of the Jewish Law, and condemn the sacrificial cult. (These were the primary concerns of these sects; Jean Danielou says that "only Jesus distinguishes the Ebionite doctrine from pure Essenism.") None of this is surprising. Fragments show (see below) that these sects probably began with beliefs in some kind of angelic Son or Messiah; as such, they would have existed on the fringes of the larger picture of the spiritual Christ cults. The figure of Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnation of all these expressions of a heavenly being became a juggernaut no one could resist.
Judging by the fragments later preserved of the second century Gospels of the Ebionites and the Nazareans, it is thought that these Jewish-Christian sects based their Gospels largely on Matthew, itself the most Jewish of the four canonicals. This would indicate that such sects grew out of the same milieu which produced the Matthean community. The nature of the Ebionite sect's original belief in Christ is illustrated by one of the fragments preserved by Epiphanius:
"They say that he (Christ) was not begotten of God the Father, but created as one of the archangels. . . that he rules over the angels and all the creatures of the Almighty, and that he came and declared: 'I am come to do away with sacrifices, and if ye cease not from sacrificing, the wrath of God will not cease from you.' "
This angelic origin for Christ contradicts other sources about the beliefs of the Ebionites, that Jesus was entirely human, illustrating the confused (and much lamented) state of the preserved traditions. I suspect that over the two centuries of the sect's development, it may have moved toward an entirely human Jesus; or this divergence may reflect a range of sects. In any case, the above fragment shows that from a spiritual, angelic Son of God who revealed the doctrines of the sect, Christ has evolved into a being who "came" to earth to actually preach these doctrines. This is the fundamental dynamic in sectarian development leading to the invention of a human Christ. The Proclaimed (the sect's doctrines and the spiritual heavenly figure who revealed them) evolves into the Proclaimer (a human who was actually on earth to do the preaching). As I say in my Part Three article, the activity of the sect crystallizes into a founder figure who is seen to have established the group and first promulgated its doctrines. This tendency is a common feature of sectarian behavior around the world and it is on this basis that we should interpret the evolution of the various stages of Q (from the heavenly 'personified Wisdom' to Jesus, the child of Wisdom).
The extent to which these sects could form their own myths even when adapting a Gospel like Matthew is illustrated by the first fragment from the Gospel of the Hebrews:
"When Christ wished to come upon the earth to men, the good Father summoned a mighty power in heaven, which was called Michael, and entrusted Christ to the care thereof. And the power came into the world and it was called Mary, and Christ was in her womb seven months." (From Cyril of Jerusalem)
Another fragment says:
"Even so did my mother, the Holy Spirit, take me by one of my hairs and carry me away on to the great mountain Tabor." (From Origen and others)
Such traditions point to ideas which ignored or were prior
to the Nativity story developed by Matthew. This Gospel also makes James
the Just a participant at the Last Supper and the first witness to Christ's
resurrection. Since James would have been a key figure in the legendary
beginnings of these sects, one can see how tendentious all reports about
'historical events' were in Christian records, and consequently how unreliable
we must judge all information in the Christian documents, including those
which ended up in the canon.
(For a discussion of these fragments, see New Testament Apocrypha, ed. W. Schneemelcher, vol. 1, p. 153f and 158f.)
Finally, the Elchasaites are a very interesting group. Their later traditions said they were formed around the year 100. They too seem to have been a schismatic Jewish sect close to the Essenes. According to Hippolytus, they also believed in a Son of God who was an angelic being (a giant one), and that he had granted to the founder Elchasai visions and knowledge. (The Holy Spirit was also a giant female angel.) The problem is, no external evidence for this sect exists before 220, and the founder of the sect is judged by several scholars never to have existed. The sect's "Book of Elchasai", based on a Hebrew term meaning 'Hidden Power', seems to have been later understood as the book of the man Elchasai, invented as the recipient of this knowledge. Not all sects are without founders, of course, and in some cases an actual founder will be aggrandized and accumulate all sorts of legends. But in the case of those that lack a single founder, growing instead out of a coalescing group as in the case of the Q community, or the Hebrew 'race' as a whole, the invention of a founding figure or patriarch is a natural, even inevitable occurrence. That the former was not the case with Christianity, is a judgment that comes from the study of the movement as a whole and all its surviving documents.
RFSet2
Sam writes:
AN EYE OPENER! I'LL START LOOKING FOR ANOTHER RELIGION! THANKS. SAM.
Bro. Eric writes:
Jesus loves you so much. Even if you choose to not believe in Him. Jesus is so loving. God is so Holy. Jesus loves you so much and desires to save you. No matter how you try to disprove Him, He is still so real! He will come back, just like He said! It will not be much longer, you better be ready. . . [etc.]
My primary problem with attempts to prove or disprove the historicity of Jesus is that, even if we can show that the mythology surrounding Jesus in the New Testament was fabricated from various sources, that does not, in and of itself, disprove that there was an actual man at the core. The example I like to use is Arthur. Here we have a huge body of mythology and legend, obviously assembled from various earlier sources, but attached to a figure that may well have been historical. And this happened much more recently than Jesus. My point is, yes, it is unlikely that a man ever lived the life and said all the things attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, but that does not eliminate de facto the possibility that there was indeed a figure, perhaps of some prominence, perhaps not, that was the root of these stories. If Paul indeed considered Jesus to be a figure in the obscure past, might he in fact have had some knowledge of the Yeishu ha-Notzri mentioned in the Talmud (died c.4 CE)?
Response to Jack:
Comparing Jesus and Arthur
Your point is one that is often voiced, and not just in answer to me. At first glance, it sounds reasonable, except for a number of considerations. First, as I have pointed out in several places, the picture offered by the early writers about their faith and its history is often presented in ways which exclude room and role for "an actual man at the core." (Titus 1:3, for example, or Paul's talk of the Spirit.) If we had near-contemporary material about the history of England which covered the presumed time and place of the legendary Arthur, and this said things which tended to exclude the possibility of such a king having been on the scene, this would very much weigh against any historical Arthur's existence.
Second is the highly problematic nature of any thesis which postulates that a human man, especially one who did not do the amazing things attributed to him in the Gospels, could have been raised to the cosmic level this Jesus was supposedly raised almost as soon as he was laid in his grave (and especially in a Jewish milieu). One does not turn an obscure preacher, let alone a crucified criminal, into a transcendent deity for no justifiable reason. And the record shows, by its silence, that he would not have been a figure of any great "prominence". This dilemma I discuss at the end of my Postscript.
Attaching "a huge body of mythology and legend" to a humble rabbi makes far less sense than translating a mythological figure into a story of a human man, and the latter fits the documentary record, especially in terms of order, much better. I would also maintain, as a third point, that the profound depth of the silence which is found in the non-Gospel and Acts record, about any "actual man at the core", is strong evidence in itself against such a man's existence. Your comparison with Arthur is not really valid, because the myth and legend attached to him is still at the human, historical level; it has not turned Arthur into a god with absolutely no reference to any kingship on earth.
You also misunderstand (your last question) my presentation of Paul's view of Jesus. You may be confusing my interpretation of things with the views of Professor G. A. Wells, another writer on the myth theory, who has suggested that Paul saw his Jesus as a human man who lived in obscurity perhaps two or three centuries before his own time. As outlined in Part Two (and I refer to my disagreement with Professor Wells in the Preamble), I find no evidence of such a view on Paul's part. Rather, I think that Paul and the rest of the early 'Christians' believed in an entirely spiritual Christ who had never been on earth, but lived and worked in heaven, in the layers of the spirit world. Such activities were revealed in scripture. This was in keeping with views of the universe at the time, and exactly as the mythical deities of the Greek mystery cults were envisioned.
Great! For me the most astounding thing of our times is that the Jesus myth survives. Does anyone have any ideas or plans to wake up the misled? Perhaps a well-financed, professionally done (made for TV) documentary would help.
Response to Tom:
In our dreams!
I would say that your thesis is one of the most compelling I have ever read on the subject....I think it's brilliant and a tremendous contribution to scholarship.... Yet a gut instinct about human nature compels me to feel as well that "something" motivated the social program attributed to Jesus, if for no other reason as regards its inclusion of women, both as active participants in the gospel narratives, and as the first witnesses to the resurrection, where women's roles were so otherwise culturally marginalized both before and particularly afterward by the early church itself. This seems like something very strange for first century men...to have invented.
Response to Doug:
Jesus as Epitome of Broad Movements / Women at the Tomb
If Jesus did exist, what was he if not a "first century man"? You seem to be saying that you can accept that a solitary individual could come up with an innovative social program, and yet not that a society as a whole, or certain innovative segments within it, could do the same thing (without at least being prodded by some unusual individual). I would see it differently. One of the ways of looking at the historicized Jesus is that he served to epitomize more general trends of development within "reform" movements of the period.
It has always been a natural human tendency to want to regard the development of progressive ideas, new technologies, better social and political systems, as the product of exceptional individuals, idealized forerunners, sometimes even as proceeding from divinities. In reality, it is usually a society as a whole or a group within it, a trend that is 'in the air', a process taking place over time, which produces an innovation or a swing in a new direction. There may be many subtle factors involved. Eventually, these developments can become attached in the popular or group mind to a famous figure in their past, or embodied in an entirely fictitious personality. History is full of invented founders for religious, social and national movements, such as Taoism's Lao-Tse, Lycurgus of Sparta, or William Tell as the architect of the Swiss Confederation. (It is now thought that none of these ever existed.)
This means that many of the things attached to a fictional Jesus of Nazareth, the pieces of the Gospel picture, are really descriptive of the communities which produced these Gospels. They represent the experiences of their leaders and preachers, of the foot soldiers who carried on the sect's activities. It is the sectarian community itself which is in conflict with the establishment around it.
The idea of God's imminent Kingdom was one of the driving forces of the age; groups like the one which produced the Q document had formed to preach it. It was Christian prophets who performed 'miracles', a phenomenon that was an expected and indispensable sign of the coming of the Kingdom. The movement as a whole produced the innovative ethics, drawing in some cases on precedents and outside sources. Indeed, the urge to such reform was one of the main impulses to the movement in the first place.
The human Jesus, the catalogue of what he says and does, is simply the epitomization of all these trends and personalities. He was developed essentially to provide a focus for all these things, a hook to hang them on, so to speak. In this way, they could be rendered more understandable, more authoritative. This was made more inevitable by the fact that among some groups, this human figure was able to crystallize out of a previous stage of belief in which the sect worshipped a spiritual divinity who had operated in the mythical realm and communicated with believers from there. It was a relatively simple task to bring him to earth and make him the originator in history of the sect's activities and doctrines.
As for your point about the unusual (for the time) role given to women by the evangelists, something which tends to be focused on in certain circles of modern New Testament scholarship, such a judgment may not be as justified as it first seems. The principal appeal is usually to the supposed honor given to women as the first witnesses to the risen Jesus. But think about it. All the Gospel accounts of the passion and resurrection go back to a single source: Mark. But Mark (whose original version ends at 16:8) had no idea of offering resurrection appearances on Easter morning. As the 'inventor' of the Jesus story, he had not progressed that far. The angel at the tomb simply announces that Jesus will appear in Galilee to his disciples at some unspecified time, which may refer to the future Parousia, or End-time. (Paul, of course, has nothing to say about such women, or even a tomb.)
Thus, all Mark needed was someone to witness the empty tomb, simply a literary vehicle for his story's ending. It seems likely to me that he got the idea that this could be women who have gone to anoint the body (16:1). When Matthew and Luke and later John came to revise Mark's passion story for their own Gospels, they were stuck with this element of women being the first at the tomb. But each of them had also decided to add actual resurrection appearances to Mark's threadbare ending. Matthew gave the first appearance of Jesus to these women, as did John (to Mary Magdalene). Luke was reluctant and instead gave the honor, curiously, to two minor disciples on the road to Emmaus.
In view of what is now acknowledged (by groups like the Jesus Seminar) about the contradictory and evolving nature of the resurrection traditions in the Gospels, it is no longer possible to regard early Christianity as deviating so much from contemporary attitudes toward "women's roles", especially since certain references in the New Testament epistles would indicate that any deviation, at least in those circles, was virtually non-existent.
As an attorney I found your arguments interesting. However, your heavy emphasis on the lack of statements made about Jesus by first century "historians" wouldn't hold up very well in court. Your explanation is nothing more than your opinion. I can think of numerous other explanations for the lack of first century historical writings that would sound just as interesting and compelling as yours. I am curious, are there any second century authors you can quote that vehemently deny the historical basis for Jesus?
Response to Christian:
The Silence in the Epistles / Christian Denial of an Historical Jesus
First of all, I hardly think a brief reference buried in my Postscript is a "heavy emphasis", if I am correct in assuming that you are referring to Josephus and company, and not "historians" like Paul. But then, maybe you're not. In which case, yes I do place an emphasis on the pervasive silence to be found in all the Christian correspondence about the figure of an historical Gospel Jesus. There is no sensible explanation, let alone a "compelling" one, for three generations of Christian letter writers to ignore any and every aspect of their divine Christ's earthly life and identity. I don't know how many desperate, farfetched, fallacious and sheerly ludicrous arguments I have read in various New Testament commentators' works to explain this or that silence, which collectively extends to parentage, places of life and ministry, sayings and teachings, miracles, details of the trial (or even that he was tried), details of the passion, words on the cross, holy places, etc. etc., even the very fact of incarnation to earth.
This is not the quirk of one document or one writer, but of all the epistles and many non-canonical writings. You will have noted that I have recourse to declaring only two brief passages as interpolations, and in this I have the agreement of many regular scholars.
To these 'negative' silences we must add the 'positive' ones: how Paul and others speak of the early Christian movement in ways which not only show no knowledge of an historical Jesus, but often clearly exclude the possibility of such a figure. Again, scholars regularly tie themselves in knots trying to explain such things or reinterpret them along fanciful lines. We thus have a case which in any other discipline would bring in a verdict of "guilty beyond any reasonable doubt." Finally, when the whole Jesus-as-myth theory is measured against the religious and philosophical patterns of the time, and can be seen to fit perfectly into that context, I would simply say, "I rest my case."
As for your last question, if you mean by "second century authors" non-Christian ones, then no, I can quote no pagan writers who deny the historical basis for Jesus. Unfortunately, men like Celsus and the satirist Lucian were as misled by the Gospels as most Christians were, and seem not to have possessed the ability or opportunity to track down sources or analyze the documents themselves.
However, where we can detect denials is, ironically, in a number of Christian writings. The dispute in 1 John 4 is clearly over whether there was an historical Jesus. The writer condemns those (and they are Christian preachers, welcomed into some believers' homes, as 2 John 10 indicates) who deny that "Jesus Christ has come in the flesh." Hebrews 8:4 virtually tells us that in this writer's mind Jesus had never been on earth. Ignatius in his letters, such as Trallians 9, warns his readers not to listen to those who do not preach a Jesus born of Mary and crucified by Pilate. Justin, in his Dialogue with the Jew Trypho, has his Jewish opponent say, "You have invented a Christ for yourselves," which must reflect an accusation of the time. And most tellingly, as you can read in my "Second Century Apologists" article here on the Web site, the apologetic document known as Minucius Felix (or Octavius) heaps scorn on those who believe in 'a crucified man and his cross'. If that's not a vehement denial of the historical Jesus—and by a Christian to boot—I don't know what your evidentiary standard is. I would call it a true "smoking gun".
Guilty, or not guilty? Well, this is not a court of law, but in the field of historical research we do examine evidence and we do try to arrive at "probabilities" in the absence of mathematical certainty. It may not be a matter of an individual's life and death, but if the last 1900 years of Christianity have been based on, not a deception, not a lie, not a fraud, for nothing was deliberate, but a bizarre twist of creative writing and mythmaking, then for these two millennia all of us in Western society (not to mention those who have suffered at the hands of Christian pretensions all around the world) have been the victims of a fantasy whose dimensions are simply too disturbing to contemplate.
Jan writes from The Netherlands:
Thanks for your wonderful essays on the Jesus Puzzle. It is by far the best I have read on this problem in years. It is brilliantly written and as far as I know, the only theory that explains how all these bizarre developments were possible in a Jewish context. I am familiar with Jewish culture and could never understand how, in that context, a human being could be promoted to the status of God. Your theory provides the answer: it was the other way around, a Hellenistic divine being was gradually historicized in a gentile context. I also agree with your assessment of the Jesus Seminar. It's a subtle and modernized form of Christian apologetics in my opinion. Crossan, for instance, creates his own Jesus of wishful thinking, transparently related to his Irish background (poor peasants under the yoke of imperialism). If you don't mind I have a few remarks about your essays. First of all, Herman Ridderbos is not German but Dutch. Furthermore, one fundamental issue is not entirely clear to me. From your essays, I get the impression that the Gospels were--in a Jewish context--written as a kind of midrash and were later misinterpreted in a gentile context as history. This view is very convincing, in my opinion. On the other hand, you might get the impression from your story that the Gospels were written as part of that historicization process itself, to give the Jesus movement a historical founding story. Both views are not entirely compatible; it's either midrash or writing (intended) real history. Am I overlooking something or is there some kind of unclarity here in your account?
Response to Jan:
The Historicization Process: Mark, Q, Ignatius and the Epistle of Barnabas
Thanks for your encouraging review of The Jesus Puzzle. I'll offer you a special apology, as a resident of The Netherlands, for getting Herman Ridderbos' nationality wrong. And I would like to address myself to the query you put forward, which may reflect an "unclarity" on my part, though partly because of space considerations.
I said in Part Three that "historical developments tend to be more subtle and complex than any academic presentation of them on paper," and I am perceiving this more and more. But let's look at the evidence that is available to us. You are right in noting that I do speak of two "processes" that are quite distinct in the creation of the historical Jesus. There is little doubt in modern liberal scholars' minds that Mark, and even the later evangelists, are engaging in midrash techniques in the creation of the Gospel story. That is, in the absence of concrete historical tradition (so the scholars put it) these writers are 'filling in the blanks' by drawing on scripture to create their tale of Jesus. Some claim that the evangelists regarded scripture as pointing to history, that Jesus acted in fulfilment of the prophets, but this idea is all but ignored in the earliest Gospel, Mark. And where Mark is concerned, virtually his entire Gospel is 'filled blanks'. A handful of echoes of Q-like traditions, perhaps, plus Paul's "Lord's Supper" scene (readily identifiable as a mythic creation) are the only precursors Mark seems to draw on (Burton Mack notwithstanding).
In addition, Mark's Gospel, as a piece of whole fabric, fits the midrash mold so well that one has to suspect it is substantially invention from start to finish. It is the story of God's establishment of a new covenant, one that includes gentiles and introduces innovative social patterns and ethical rules (liberalized in defiance of Pharisaic tradition); all of it is in preparation for the establishment of the Kingdom. Every element of Jesus' character and activities is made to fit into this picture, with parallels in the story of the establishment of the old covenant. This mirroring of the older archetype is typical of midrash. I won't go into detail here, but the point is, broader concepts were often gotten across through the vehicle of a fictional, midrashic story, and it is wholly feasible the "Mark" sat down to reflect the fulfilment of scripture and God's plan for the world (typified in his own sectarian community), one previously grounded on a cultic spiritual Christ (like Paul's), but which Mark decided to embody in a vivid, metaphorical tale of a Jesus acting on earth and in recent history. (See the book review of John Shelby Spong's Liberating the Gospels for a further view of Mark's intentions.)
Now, did Mark have any other influences or "sources" acting upon him? He seems to have been exposed to some Q traditions, but not likely the written document form which Matthew and Luke used, since so much from this is missing. Did a member or members of the Q community in Galilee migrate at some point to the place where Mark wrote his Gospel? (Mack suggests this might be Sidon or Tyre.) Did they carry some newly developing traditions (though nothing written) about an invented founder figure to whom the Q community's history of preaching and controversy with the establishment were in the process of being attached, who was perhaps already being identified with the eschatological Son of Man? (The latter was something 'in the air' at the time among both Jewish and Christian circles, and Mark's own community may already have been speculating about him.) Did this Q founder figure have an influence on the development of Mark's midrashic tale?
It's important to realize that, in my theory, the development of a Q founder was at first something quite distinct from the cultic Jesus; that is, he was not, in the Q community's mind, the Messiah or identifiable with any spiritual figure believed in by circles like Paul's. There is throughout all but perhaps the tail end of Q development, no overlap whatsoever between Paul's Jesus and the invented Q founder, even though both movements were more or less partly co-existing in time. The Q community would have been entirely Jewish in character, and scholars have long accepted the fact that the Q Jesus is completely lacking any elements concerning a death and resurrection, let alone a redeeming role. (This leaves one nagging question which I will address at the end of this response.) The ultimate 'wedding' of Q traditions with the midrashic Jesus of Mark—if this is indeed what happened—would have been a melding of two originally distinct elements.
On the other hand, quite apart from the influence of any Q traditions about a founder figure, can we see evidence of a process acting within the cultic movement itself which was urging the historicization of the spiritual Christ? Was it independent of the Gospel-writing process and perhaps itself had an influence on Mark? I believe we can see that process in Ignatius, as well as glimmers of it in 1 Clement and the Epistle of Barnabas.
In several key passages in his letters, Ignatius urges belief in the historicity of the bare details of a life of Jesus, including that he was born of a mother named Mary and that he died at the hands of Pilate. (There are good arguments, which some scholars support, for rejecting that these particular statements are part of an 'anti-docetic' stance.) The fact that Ignatius never appeals to any Gospel as proof of these historical details is sufficient to establish that he knew of none, and this scholars generally admit. The one Gospel-like scene he does draw on (Smyrneans 3), to prove Jesus' resurrection in flesh, is not identified as coming from a Gospel and would constitute a very inaccurate rendering of a Lukan or Johannine passage. I would suggest it is an anecdote developed in certain preaching or teaching circles known to Ignatius, as well as to the evangelists. Ignatius is not dealing in midrash here, so he gives evidence of historicizing tendencies within the cultic movement independent of the Gospels.
What was the impulse to these tendencies? Perhaps a mix of factors, but Barnabas (unlike Ignatius) spells out that it is scripture itself which provides details of Christ's life, a life he does seem to set in an unspecified historical past. (Barnabas is usually dated c.115-120, in Alexandria.) In 5:3, for example, Barnabas praises God for giving information about the past through scripture, implying that this is the sole source for such information. He even seems to say (5:12) that "we know" that the Jews were responsible for Jesus' suffering and death because scripture tells us! Somewhere, too, he has gotten the idea (5:8-9) that Jesus taught the people of Israel and worked miracles (though he never gives examples of either), and that the apostles he chose "were sinners of the worst kind", hardly a valid judgment from any Gospel picture. In fact, he seems to deduce this from a line he quotes, that Jesus "came not to call saints but sinners," something he does not attribute to Jesus himself or any Gospel, and in fact interprets in a contradictory fashion to the way in which the Gospel of Mark uses it: applying it to apostles instead of people in general. (If we compare it to another line quoted in 4:14, again not attributed to Jesus, we may assume Barnabas got it from a piece of writing he regarded as sacred.) Scholars are more or less agreed that Barnabas knew no Gospel, since his 'descriptions' of Christ's passion are entirely quotations from Isaiah and the Psalms.
And so on. But did this 'historicizing' process influence Mark? It's impossible to be sure, though perhaps the idea that the cultic Christ had lived on earth could have been floating about when Mark was writing. I think 1 John, written probably in the 90s, points to the time when the idea first arose (and met opposition) that "Jesus Christ has come in the flesh" (4:1f). Barnabas is a couple of decades later, and I would tend to place Mark no earlier than the late 80s, but it's possible Mark could have been working under the nascent impression that scripture was pointing to some historical situation. As I say, "historical developments tend to be subtle and complex," but that's the nature of many historical investigations which rely on a hodge-podge of loose and contradictory documentation. In the field of historical research, often all we can arrive at are 'probable interpretations', hopefully compelling ones.
Finally, that "nagging question" about Q? It's this: If their founder figure, as he arose in the Q3 stage, was entirely human (epitomizing the activities of the Q people themselves, as invented founders do), and was unrelated to the cultic Christ and not a redeemer, why was he named "Jesus", which was a name in use throughout most of the cultic circles (not all) and means "Savior" in Hebrew?
To answer that question I will quote a passage from my "Jesus Puzzle" novel, in which the central character, an historical novelist who researches the question of the historical Jesus and comes to the conclusion that no such man existed, addresses this very point. (Part of his research, for variety's sake, is presented through dialogue passages and character interaction, and all of it is set against a background plot of the emerging secular society of our time and the struggle with Christian fundamentalism.) Anyway, here he is, at the end of an investigation of the whole Q question. . . .
(Note: for Web-posting purposes, I am forced to separate paragraphs by spaces and eliminate first-line indentations.)
. . . Once again I emerged into a bleary-eyed dawn—I calculated it to be Wednesday morning—with one question unresolved. At the moment I could see no avenue to an answer other than speculation.
Why had the Q founder been named Jesus?
Why did he appear with the same designation as the divine lord of the Christ cults and other expressions of the spiritual Son dotting the early Christian landscape? After all, the Q Jesus was not regarded as a savior, which was the meaning of the name itself.
Except perhaps in a general way, as the Q preachers themselves might be said to offer salvation to those who responded to their message. Would this have been enough?
Or was the term by now so widespread among Jewish sectarian circles across the empire that the offer simply couldn't be refused? Yet this would imply that the Q community by this time, perhaps in the decade or so following the Jewish War, was aware of the spiritual Christ cults flourishing in the wider world, and thus of the higher significance of the name. If so, did this impel that move toward divinity discernible in the final phase of Q3?
Another possibility. Could the latest stage of Q possibly post-date the earliest roots of Mark, and had there been some crossover influence? Some scholars speculated that this may have been the case, though it would require pulling the initial version of Mark to an earlier date than I had decided upon.
But there was another possible explanation, and I knew I was going out on a limb for this one.
Had Q3 in fact used the name Jesus at all?
Even if it nowhere appeared in the Q text, even if another designation had been used by the Q3 redactors in passages like the dialogue between Jesus and John, Matthew and Luke would have changed it to Jesus.
And as I fell into bed to sleep once more through the light of day, a further corollary occurred to me. Since Matthew and Luke only took up Q to amalgamate it with Mark probably no earlier than the end of the century, presumably after the Q community's demise or passage on to other things, it was even possible that some intervening hand had already altered Q3's original designation for its founder to fit a deepening trend: the universality of the name Jesus. It may have been at this later time that the crossover influence from a newly-written Mark had occurred. Perhaps the altering hand was someone who saw the Q document as a surviving record of the now humanized and historicized divine Christ of the Gospel of Mark.
In fact, had Matthew and Luke each inherited the two documents, Q and Mark, from a common source? Had they arrived by the same post, so to speak? The idea made some sense.
I stared at the lightening ceiling with drunken, heavy-lidded eyes. Did it make sense that such wholesale revamping of a community's material could be performed so blithely at turn after turn?
Yet we could see it before our very eyes in the hatchet and recasting jobs which Matthew and Luke had performed on Mark and Q.
Not even the very words of the Lord had been sacrosanct. The evangelists had practiced wholesale and blatant invention. In order to show, for example, that Jesus had risen bodily from the dead, Luke had concocted a scene in which Jesus showed the disciples his hands and feet, let them handle his 'flesh and bones'. To prove the reliability of the witness to the resurrection, the evangelist had made up a 'reliable' anecdote to support it!
To the 20th century nose, the whole practice gave off an unsavory odor. Surely its perpetrators had to regard it as shameless deception. And yet the evidence, from all branches of Christianity for its first few hundred years, showed that this was the universal way of doing things: rewrite, recast, invent without compunction sayings and dialogues, deeds and miracles, whole scenes, whole Gospels, letters written by famous apostles of the past, entire careers for those apostles, letters between Jesus and foreign kings, between apostles and philosophers, between a Christianized Pilate and the emperor, birth stories, genealogies, astronomical phenomena, scenes in heaven itself, not to mention fabricated insertions into non-Christian writings.
The minds of these men had simply not functioned like ours. They followed none of the modern principles of logic, of science, of integrity. Truth knew different criteria. Historical honesty was subsumed and vanished under an allegiance to a higher religious truth and necessity. . . .
One final point to Jan: It's not quite 'kosher' to say that "a Hellenistic divine being was gradually historicized . . ." Although he owed much to Hellenistic influences, both first and second hand, the spiritual Christ of Paul was definitely a Jewish character, or more specifically, a Jewish-style version (within 'unorthodox' sectarian circles) of a widespread religious phenomenon shared with Greek religious and philosophical trends. Christianity lived within the broader thought world, and was a product, of its time. There is still much debate over how much Paul was influenced by the Greek mysteries, but that he was immune to their pervasion of the world around him is impossible. He was, after all (if Luke in Acts is to be believed), a native of Tarsus, and it was in this Greek and highly Stoicized city that the Hellenistic version of the cult of Mithras arose (beginning of 1st century BCE) and was flourishing at the time of Paul—Mithras, with its cultic sacred meal so close to the one Paul gives us in 1 Corinthians 11:23. Even then, the world was a small place.
Although I do accept the historicity of Jesus, I would join you in rejecting all extra-biblical references to Jesus (except Josephus). My question for you is this: how do you respond to Christian apologists who cite Tertullian's reference to Tiberius' reference to Jesus?
Response to Jeff:
A Letter from Pilate to Tiberius about Jesus?
Ah, yes. Pilate's letter to Tiberius on his execution of Jesus, and the ageing emperor's championing of Christ and his divinity before a hostile Senate at Rome. This is reported around the year 197 by Tertullian in his Apology (5): "Tiberius . . . having himself received intelligence from Palestine of events which had clearly shown the truth of Christ's divinity, brought the matter before the Senate, with his own decision in favor of Christ."
Any scholar today who would suggest that this is anything more than a piece of naive nonsense would be laughed out of the halls of academe. In Hennecke's 2-volume New Testament Apocrypha, the reviewer of the literature of this sort surrounding Pilate (vol. 1, 444-84) considers that Tertullian had access to a recent, forged Christian document under Pilate's name. In fact, several different versions of such a letter have survived, cast in such pious language on the part of Pilate that Tertullian could suggest that the Roman governor had been converted to the faith! Such things only serve to illustrate the shameless and ludicrous invention (not to mention the church Fathers' own credulity!) which we know abounded throughout the entire documentary career of early Christianity. To claim that the same kind of invention did not extend into those documents chosen for the canon is itself a piece of astonishing naivete.
In one version of Pilate's letter, the governor enlightens the emperor on the wondrous state of Lazarus' body as he emerged from the tomb, gives an account of the darkness over the whole world during the crucifixion (which Tiberius himself, along with the rest of the empire, had presumably experienced), and recounts the words of Jesus at one of his post-resurrection appearances. Pilate also records events the evangelists overlooked, including the swallowing up of various Jewish leaders and even whole synagogues in a series of earthquakes, as punishment for their role in the killing of Jesus.
RFSet3
David writes:
Thank you for making your writings and research available on the Web. The Jesus Puzzle is excellent! It ties together so many loose ends and explains so much that had been confusing and contradictory to me. A true revelation!
Allen writes:
Mind-Bogglingly Undeniable! Who this side of Sensibility can honestly castigate you with the same old, miserably dogmatic boilerplate which some of them yet continue to do? Seriously, great job! Beats Crossan all to hell.
I have two points: "But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother." Galatians 1:19. This is an odd, and EARLY, statement. It does not fit any type of Community situation. "Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a wife, as the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord?" 1 Corinthians 9:5. Wouldn't apostles, disciples or brethren have enough authority?
Response to Sean:
James "the Brother of the Lord"
There is no denying that Christians for 19 centuries have taken the phrase in Galatians 1:19 as meaning "sibling of Jesus," and traditions that James the Just was a (half) brother to Jesus of Nazareth may well be solely dependent on James' designation as "ton adelphon tou kuriou", which here makes its one appearance in the New Testament epistles. But was Paul referring to a blood brother?
The term "brother" (adelphos) appears throughout Paul's letters, and was a common designation Christians gave each other. In 1 Corinthians 1:1 Sosthenes is called adelphos, as is Timothy in Colossians 1:1. Neither of them, nor the 500+ "brothers" who received a vision of the spiritual Christ in 1 Corinthians 15:6, are being designated as siblings of Jesus or anyone else. "Brothers in the Lord" (ton adelphon en kurio) appears in Philippians 1:14 (the NEB translates it "our fellow-Christians"). Surely this is the clue to the meaning of the phrase applied to James. Indications are that James was the head of a particular conventicle in Jerusalem which bore witness to the spiritual Christ, and this group may have called itself "brethren of the Lord." (Just as the term adelphos was common in Greek circles to refer to the initiates who belonged to the mystery cults.) The position of James as head of this brotherhood may have resulted in a special designation for him as the brother of the Lord. Or Paul may have used the phrase simply to identify him as one of these "brethren". Thus I cannot agree with Sean that the phrase in Galatians "does not fit any type of Community situation." Note, too, that such designations are always "of the Lord", never "of Jesus."
Paul's listing in 1 Corinthians 15 of those who had undergone a "seeing" of the Christ suggests a number of things. The "more than 500 brothers" seems to be distinct from "all the apostles", although the latter may be a sub-group within the overall brotherhood. Paul implies that 500 is only a portion of it, making it a sizeable organization. Probably its members lived in Jerusalem and its environs, and assembled for meetings and ceremonies. At one of these, a group of over 500 (is this exaggeration on Paul's part, or of the tradition as it came down to Paul?) had some kind of revelatory experience of the spiritual Christ.
The size of this group makes it difficult to believe that it would not have been known in Palestinian circles in its day. If this were a new religion, following an executed messianic pretender or teaching sage, especially one whom all these people were convinced had been raised from the dead, first century commentators would hardly have been so silent about it. But if it were essentially a Jewish sectarian group (the "Lord" of "brothers of the Lord" may even have referred to God), one holding commonplace apocalyptic expectations as well, it would have blended into a landscape with many such manifestations and would not likely have been treated as a separate movement (including by Josephus). However, its size might at the same time have given a certain profile to its leader, James the Just, and notice was taken of him by Josephus—in Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1, where he describes James' murder. (For more on the Josephus passages, including the phrase "brother of the Lord," see Supplementary Article No. 10: The Josephus Puzzle.)
Let's take a close look at 1 Corinthians 9:5, which Sean offers, and note especially the words Paul uses. Here is a literal translation: "Have we not the right to take along a sister (adelphen), a wife, as do the rest of the apostles and the brothers (adelphoi) of the Lord and Cephas?" Look at the word "sister". No one would say that Paul is referring to his own or anyone else's sibling. He means a fellow-believer of the female sex, and he seems to use it in apposition to (descriptive of) the word "wife". Indeed, all translations render this "a believing wife" or "a Christian wife."
This should cast light on the meaning of adelphos, both here and elsewhere. It refers to a fellow-believer in the Lord. Our more archaic rendering as "brethren of the Lord" conveys exactly this connotation: a community of like-minded believers, not "siblings" of each other or anyone else. Thus, a "brother of the Lord," whether referring to James or the 500, means a follower of this divine figure, and in 1 Corinthians 9:5, Paul would be referring to some of these members of the Jerusalem conventicle.
It is sometimes argued that the "brothers of the Lord" mentioned here cannot signify the Jerusalem group with James as its head, since Peter is named separately, and "apostles" are also referred to as distinct from these "brothers". I don't see a problem. Paul himself is an apostle (as he vociferously claims in this passage) and he is not a part of James' group; the reference to "the rest of the apostles" may simply be to missionaries like himself, whether from Jerusalem or other places. Or it may be that he is referring to those among the brothers in Jerusalem who specifically do apostolic work. As for Peter, Paul may simply be picking him out of the group for special mention, as someone well known to his readers, even if only by repute. It is even possible that Peter, like Paul, was not formally one of the "brothers".
Can we find other support for the view that James was not known as the blood brother of Jesus? Two of the non-Pauline epistles offer pretty strong evidence. The letter ascribed to James himself opens this way:
"James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. . ."
Few believe that James the Just actually wrote this letter, but if a later Christian is writing it in his name, or even if only adding this ascription, common sense dictates that he would have identified James as the brother of the Lord Jesus if he had in fact been so, not simply as his servant. A similar void has been left by the writer of the epistle of Jude. (Few likewise ascribe this letter to the actual Jude, whoever he was.) It opens:
"Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ, and a brother of James. . ."
Now if James is Jesus' sibling, and Jude is James' brother, then this makes Jude the brother of Jesus, and so he appears in Mark 6. So now we have two Christian authors who write letters in the name of supposed blood brothers of Jesus, neither one of whom makes such an identification. How likely is this?
Scholars have attempted explanations for this silence, but none of them are convincing. E. M. Sidebottom's claim that the absence of a reference to Jesus by James "would be natural in his brother" is unsupported by any reasoning as to why this would be so. Helmut Koester wonders whether the silence in Jude was "chosen for polemical reasons." J. N. D. Kelly suggests that Jude's reticence was due to "humility and reserve." Too bad the letter itself gives no evidence of such traits, with its doom-laden condemnation of those who follow beliefs and practices which make them "brute beasts." Besides, no one would expect or value such "reserve". And the "avoidance of presumption" (another suggested reason) is hardly a strong characteristic of early Christian writers either.
As in all such cases, commentators ignore the overriding consideration that would surely operate. In the highly contentious atmosphere of much Christian correspondence, nobody passes up anything that would help their cause. For "James" and "Jude", the advantage of drawing on a kinship to Jesus himself to make the letter's position and the writer's authority more forceful would annihilate any other dubious motive for being silent about it.
The standard arguments make even less sense in letters that are pseudonymous, because the writer has chosen to adopt a famous name of the past precisely to add authority to his words. He also makes links to others (such as Jude's link to James) in order to increase that authority. There is no sensible reason to think that such a writer would pass up a link to the greatest authority of all, Jesus himself.
Scholars are particularly concerned to hang onto Jude's relationship to Jesus, since if this letter shows that there was no tradition familiar to its author that Jude was in fact the brother of Jesus, and yet he declares Jude to be the brother of James, then James cannot be the brother of Jesus. And that would be a blow. Mark 6 would have to be acknowledged as an invention, or at best a misinterpretation of earlier terminology. With this much at stake, it is not surprising that not a single commentator I've encountered ever raises the question as to whether there might have been no such tradition in the minds of first century Christian writers. No one uses the silence in the Epistles of James and Jude to question whether in fact Galatians 1:19 has been properly interpreted. In any other historical discipline where confessional considerations do not come into play, such a possibility would be closely examined.
In Acts 9, the Lord stopped Paul in his tracks and in an instant Paul's life was changed. Now, after being engulfed in a blinding light and hearing the voice of Jesus booming from heaven, how earthly do you expect Paul to view Christ? You state (in Part One): "Read passages like Romans 16:25, Colossians 1:25-27, Ephesians 3:5-10, and ask yourself where is Jesus' role in disclosing God's long- hidden secret and plan for salvation?" Jesus' role is pretty obvious. He IS the "long-hidden secret and plan for salvation."
Response to Charity:
Jesus' Missing Ministry / Paul's Call
Taking your last point first, you have it exactly right. This is precisely Paul's view of Christ. And he tells us clearly that God has revealed this Christ, the long-hidden divine secret, to inspired apostles like himself, through the Spirit. The question I asked is, why does Paul make no mention of the idea that Jesus himself, on earth during an earthly ministry, had anything to do with disclosing his own role, with the revelation of himself as God's long-hidden secret and plan for salvation? To hear Paul tell it, and the later writers pretending to be Paul, God's first disclosure was to him and others like him. Why does writer after writer speak of the revelation of God's secrets surrounding Christ and never express the thought that the Son on earth was the first and primary revealer of such things?
You go on to say that the reconciliation between God and man is the ministry of people like yourself, "to those who are lost. Jesus himself commissioned this to us." It's too bad Paul (or any of the other epistle writers) couldn't have said the same thing, referring to the directives given and the examples set by Jesus in his earthly ministry, as recorded in the Gospels? Why does no one speak as though they are carrying on the work of Jesus? Why do they all describe the current apostolic movement preaching the Christ as something which has proceeded entirely from God, by revelation through the Spirit? Why is there no such thing as apostolic tradition going back to Jesus in the first century correspondence?
Nor does Paul ever speak of that dramatic event you quote from Acts, about the "blinding light and Jesus' booming voice from heaven" on the road to Damascus. If he had undergone such an experience, why in 1 Corinthians 1:1 is it "the will and call of God", why "approved by God" in 1 Thessalonians 2:4, or "called to the gospel of God" in Romans 1? In Galatians 1:16, it is God who has revealed his Son to Paul, God's actions which made him an apostle to the gentiles in 2:8. In 2 Corinthians 3:6, it is God who qualifies Paul to dispense his new covenant. (And didn't Jesus, in his ministry, do any of this dispensing?) The pseudo-Pauline writers continue in the same vein. It is the "commission God gave me," in Colossians 1:25. Paul is commissioned "by the will of God," in Ephesians 1:1; in 3:7 he is "made a minister by God's gift and power." (For more on this, see the Robert Funk Book Review.) And I'll combine both your points by quoting Titus 1:2-3:
"Yes, it is eternal life that God, who cannot lie, promised long ages ago (or, before the beginning of time), and now in his proper time he has openly declared himself in the proclamation which was entrusted to me by God our Savior."
By God—our Savior? And can you see a crack in this facade where Jesus could gain a foothold? In the past lie God's promises of eternal life, and his first action on those promises is the present revelation to apostles like Paul who had gone out to proclaim the message. Jesus' own proclamation of eternal life has evaporated into the wind.
Note that 1 Corinthians 15:8 is a reference to some visionary experience of the Christ, similar to the ones Paul has just listed to Peter, James, other apostles, etc. But this is not specified as a conversion experience, and considering that Paul's other references speak exclusively of a call by God, not by Jesus, we must assume that this revelatory "seeing" of the Christ was an experience subsequent to his "call". It may well have been under the influence of the visions of the others, and motivated by Paul's need to claim, as a late arrival, that he too was authorized to be an apostle. In fact, he points to such a vision in 1 Corinthians 9:1 as a vindication of his claim, implying that proper apostleship had to do with visions and inspiration from the Spirit, and nothing to do with whether one had known and followed an earthly Jesus. The latter idea is another deafening silence that fills the epistles.
How "earthly" do I expect Paul to view Christ? Whether Paul is overwhelmed by his vision of the divine Christ or not, I expect him to show an awareness of the human man's ministry, not cut it out of the picture entirely. I expect him to appeal to those elements of Jesus' ministry which would have supported his own activities and the great debates he is continually engaged in. I expect him to face demands from his hearers and converts (who didn't experience the blinding light and booming voice) that he give them some details about this man who was God. I expect him to have to defend before critics and believers alike the unprecedented and (for Jews) blasphemous elevation of a mortal, a crucified criminal, to full identification with the God of Abraham.
And yes, I expect him, precisely because he is overwhelmed by this divinity, to feel an intense interest, a fascination with his incarnated identity and experiences, the work he did on earth, the places where he lived and taught and died and rose from the dead. At the very least, considering what he says in Philippians 3:10, Paul would surely ache to stand on Calvary's hill, on the sacred ground where that great sacrifice for sin he is always talking about took place, or at the very spot before the empty tomb where Jesus' followers saw clear evidence of the resurrection which Paul is so anxious to assure his readers, and himself, has guaranteed a resurrection for the believer.
Wouldn't you, Charity?
I would say that Paul's (and others') continual references to Jesus having died as a result of crucifixion only makes sense if they are talking about an actual event. You assume that the Gospel writers basically invented most of their material. Why all the specific circumstantial detail? Why did they choose to put him within the lifetime of people who might read their accounts? I'd be sure to put him a good 200 years prior! The writer of John's Gospel obviously has absolutely no problem in using the most outrageously spiritual language of Jesus, and at the same time making it clear that he's talking about an actual person. Why not Paul?
Response to Emma:
Mythic Deaths / Writing Mark and John
For centuries, the devotees of the Mithraic mysteries spoke vividly of Mithras' slaying of the bull. The same applies to the myths of other Greek salvation deities, many of whom underwent a gruesome death. Did all these believers feel that such things could only make sense as "actual" events—in an historical sense? Remember that the ancient world's "reality" contained spiritual dimensions which were counterparts of and closely interactive with the world of matter. "Actual events" could very well take place in the higher spiritual realms. (See Part Two and Supplementary Articles No. 3: Who Crucified Jesus? and No. 8: Christ as "Man": Does Paul Speak of Jesus as an Historical Person?)
All good fiction writers use vivid (and often accurate) circumstantial detail to bring their stories alive. And I'm not so sure "Mark" wrote when many people's lifetimes went back to the time of Pontius Pilate. Certainly the later evangelists didn't. Besides, if Mark originally meant his Gospel only as a piece of midrash, his first hearers and readers would not have regarded it as history anyway. In any case, I don't think you appreciate the extent of the upheaval created by the first Jewish War throughout all of Palestine. Three quarters of the population were either killed or dispersed. There wouldn't have been too many records, memories, or warm bodies around from the earlier period which were in a position to dispute anything the evangelists wrote. And those that were could simply be ignored or condemned as the product of Satan, an attitude we can see from writers like Ignatius (and, unfortunately, some modern readers of this web site).
Keep in mind, too, that the writer of Mark would have been forced to place his midrashic tale during the period of the earliest traditions about apostles of the Christ. Peter, John and other legendary figures (their visions of the Christ are placed by Paul about 20 years before his letters) could well have represented for Mark the beginnings of the Christian movement.
There are two things to note about your observation on John. One is precisely that the evangelist does "make it clear that he is talking about an actual person." Unfortunately, Paul and the other New Testament epistle writers make it anything but clear; it is we who must bring Gospel assumptions to Paul. And John is outrageous, isn't he? Which should tip us off. All this spiritual language (like Paul's cosmic attributes for the Christ) would be perfectly acceptable if it were applied to a wholly spiritual figure, an intermediary force that reveals God (in accordance with the philosophical thinking of the time). It's only when metaphors describing this force as "living bread", "living water", "the door of the sheepfold", etc., are subsequently applied to a presumed historical man (or worse still, placed in his mouth) that it becomes outrageous and ridiculous. This is one indication that the language in John came first, and the invented Jesus (borrowed from the Synoptics) was superimposed upon it. I discuss this analysis of the Gospel of John in my Supplementary Article No. 2: A Solution to the First Epistle of John.
Your web page is well researched and very informative, but I still believe that a man we now call Jesus did exist at one time. I believe SOMETHING must have happened to get the entire movement started. I think it would be extremely difficult to get people to follow you based on a fictional character that you had no evidence for. Jesus was probably a "wise man" or "sage" who preached that the Kingdom of heaven would soon be arriving. Perhaps Jesus was a little wiser or more charismatic than the others preaching similar things, so that he gained such a following. . . .
Response to "Johnson":
How Christianity Started / Rules of Authenticity
The first and second centuries witnessed the preaching of many salvation cults and the deities attached to them: Isis, Mithras, Attis, etc. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, with popular success, went about preaching the brotherhood of men (in the sexist language of the time) and the existence of a beneficent divine Providence. We have a record of at least one Hellenistic sect which treated the Greek "Logos" principle as a saving divine being. What was the "something" that got all these movements started? Certainly not the life of a human being who was turned into a divinity. The preaching of savior gods and personal salvation was the obsession and spirit of the age. Paul and others like him were simply reflecting that expression in their own ways, preaching a divine entity like all the rest, and had no trouble finding an audience to listen and believe.
As for groups who preached the Kingdom of God, this too was an expression of the age among Jews, based on five centuries of prophetic expectation. It came to a head in the first century in a spate of reform and repentance movements (baptist sects, groups rejecting the Temple cult, etc.), aggravated by a spirit of rebellion against Roman occupation. Such things needed no unique individual 'starter'.
Besides, if the "something" was a wise man or sage who preached the coming of the Kingdom, how did this sage manage to get himself turned into the divine Son of God (a blasphemy to Jews), pre-existent creator of the world, sustaining force of the universe and a cosmic redeemer—as the epistles variously describe him. Such things are hardly the usual paraphernalia attached to even the "wiser and more charismatic" among such figures. This mind-boggling elevation, together with the fact that the early record about the Christian divine Son shows no sign of him having preached (or even lived a life) as a "wise sage", is one of the greatest obstacles to accepting the view which Mr. Johnson supports. That, and the fact that writers like Paul simply make no room for such a human antecedent.
Mr. Johnson goes on to offer another argument, which I will paraphrase. It is a common one and needs addressing. It is often argued that the Gospels introduce certain events, behavior on the part of the Apostles, characteristics allotted to Jesus, etc., which are seemingly embarrassing, unflattering, or paint a negative picture in one way or another, and that if such things are not based on actual traditions why would a writer (even of fiction) choose to introduce them? Mr. Johnson offers examples like the rejection of Jesus in his home town (Matt. 6:1-6), the failure of the disciples to understand Jesus' teaching (Mark. 4), the denial by Peter during the Passion story, etc. This, he claims, hardly presents a picture of "a perfect Son of God".
Very true. But why assume that this is the evangelists' primary objective, or that he would feel this to be necessary? In fact, if the Gospel of Mark is fiction, and was originally meant as such (a metaphorical piece of midrash, let's say), the readers or hearers would sense that such features served other purposes. They would recognize that many elements of the story reflected the experiences of their own community. In a sectarian setting, justification for the present always lies in the past, in a sacred archetype. If the establishment scoffs at the sect's beliefs and practices, this is illustrated as having a 'sanctified grounding' in the similar experiences of the presumed founder: thus the portrayal of Jesus as rejected in his home town. The failure of Jesus' disciples to understand him makes acceptable the failure of outsiders to understand the sect's preaching. Sectarian groups, in the face of failure, often take refuge in declaring their doctrines fit only for the spiritually mature, inaccessible to any but the mind with an 'inside track'. God himself has set up this 'chosen-few' response capability, a kind of predestination, which is the theme of Mark 4:11-12.
Originally, Mark's piece of midrash may have served these sectarian purposes simply in a literary and metaphorical way, but I have little doubt that one of the impulses to eventually regard his tale as having a basis in history (the religious mind is capable of many forms of self-deception) was the advantage, both for the sect's self-image and in its dealings with the outside world, that would come through regarding such a founder and such archetypes as being historically real.
Mark's dim-witted Apostles, slow to understand, serve these archetypal purposes. Sometimes they are portrayed as guilty of other failings, even of denial of Jesus himself (three times before the cock crew). This would show members of the sect that even those greater than they had possessed such weakness, that they could repent and be forgiven, even as Peter was. Many scholars realize that much of Mark's portrayal of the Apostles was designed to provide "lessons" to the community. And by extension, what better role model for such lessons than Jesus himself? Look how even the Lord himself could doubt and fear, during his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. If even he, on the cross, could cry that God had forsaken him (if this is indeed how Mark's cry should be interpreted) no Christian believer with similar fears need feel ashamed or be cast out. Such psychological underpinnings could well be the governing factor in most of the "problem" passages which Mr. Johnson and others hold up as objections. (See the book review of Robert Funk's Honest to Jesus for more on "Rules of Evidence".)
We might note that when the later evangelists deliberately change such potential "problems", this helps prove the rule. Matthew, Luke and especially John regularly change Markan features which they, or their communities, cannot accept, because they would have had different standards. John recasts Jesus as indeed "the perfect Son of God", fully in control of the situation, never doubting, barely suffering, not needing baptism (because he was perfect). This is hardly to be taken as historically accurate, but rather as a fictional creation fitting John's tastes and requirements. But if John and to some extent Matthew and Luke could create their own revised portraits of Jesus to fit their needs, why not Mark? If it is claimed that Mark had to be "true to tradition" and was forced to include elements which were supposedly problematic, why didn't the same strictures apply to the others? John in particular shows not the slightest compunction about doing a thorough recasting job on his Jesus story. He chucked not only the baptism but Gethsemane and the Last Supper. If such important events had taken place—and how could he not have known of them—could they really have ended up on his cutting-room floor?
The whole picture of how the various evangelists have constructed their stories of Jesus leads to only one conclusion: they were not following tradition, they were not reproducing history, they were not the slightest bit concerned with any sort of factual accuracy. However they viewed and used it, each community was constructing its Jesus story for its own needs and purposes, and thus we must assume that every element within that story was completely acceptable and fitted the pecularities of that community's beliefs and practices.
(Commenting on the Postscript passage about the "ludicrous proposition" that almost overnight, Jews and Gentiles around the empire were converted to the idea that a crucified criminal had risen from the dead, was the Son of God and redeemer of the world.) Jesus dies about 30 AD, and now you say that at least ten years is "overnight". A fact that you fail to mention too is Pentecost, and the converted Jews who were there from all over the empire who then went back to their respective cities and undoubtedly spread the word. They had heard the message from Peter, and in fact had been there for the events of the crucifixion.
Response to Victor:
The Spread of Christianity / Acts' Pentecost
Within a handful of years of Jesus' supposed death, we know of Christian communities all over the eastern Mediterranean. As Ernst Haenchen points out in his study of Acts, "the congregations at Damascus, Antioch, Ephesus and Rome were founded by unknown Christians." (As no doubt were countless others.) Reading between the lines of the picture Acts presents concerning the spread of the faith, one perceives that Damascus in Syria already possessed a Christian community before Paul was even converted (that is, within a couple of years of Jesus' supposed death!), and that Antioch and Rome had congregations long before Paul got there.
Scholars are increasingly coming to realize that Paul founded almost no congregations himself, he simply built on circles of belief that were already in place. His letters indicate that it was the nature of this belief in the spiritual Christ that he brought new ideas to. In other words, to groups which already believed in a divine Son, he introduced new concepts and emphases of his own, especially concerning the idea that this Son had been crucified (in the spiritual realm) and the significance of that sacrifice. In this work he was challenged by rival apostles who had different ideas. For a look at a good example of this rivalry, that between Paul and the apostle from Alexandria, Apollos, with whom Paul has to deal in the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians, see Supplementary Article No. 1: Apollos of Alexandria and the Early Christian Apostolate.)
So who founded all those congregations of the Christ so soon after (perhaps even earlier than!) the supposed death of Jesus? Rome is a case of special interest. If Suetonius' reference to "Chrestus" refers to Christ, Jews who professed the Christ belief were, as I said in the Postscript, numerous and troublesome enough to be expelled from Rome by Claudius in the 40s. The date may even have been as early as 41, hardly more than a decade after the crucifixion, if that. (I acknowledge the possibility that Suetonius' reference may not be to a Christian sect, but simply to messianic Jews, or may even refer to an agitator named "Chrestus", so that his witness to the presence of "Christians" in Rome in the 40s is uncertain.)
However, Paul's letter to the Roman Christians reveals a community that has "many years" behind it (15:23). How could such a community have formed so soon? Who brought the kerygma there?
Jews visiting Jerusalem at the time of the first Easter and (Christian) Pentecost, as Acts maintains, and suggested by Victor? Well, few critical scholars today would subscribe to much, if any, of Acts' picture of the beginnings of the missionary movement. Acts is a tendentious creation, probably from well into the second century, whose object was to create a golden-age, perfect scenario for the onset of Christian preaching, including the role of Paul, even if it was flatly contradicted by the early evidence found in Paul's letters. And one of the deafening silences in that early record is the lack of any reference to Acts' Pentecost, that collective visitation of the Spirit to the Apostles in Jerusalem after the departure of the risen Jesus.
The epistles, especially those of Paul, are full of references to the Spirit and God's bestowal of it upon Christian apostles, but there is not a whisper of the event in Acts which is supposed to have launched the entire missionary movement. In fact, Paul gives us a quite contradictory picture of an apostolic frenzy across the empire, of uncoordinated preachers and prophets like himself (many with no apparent connection to the Jerusalem group), all having received their own individual inspirations from the Spirit. Some of them were so incompatible with Paul's that he could curse such rivals as apostles of Satan (2 Corinthians 10 and 11; compare 1 John 4). And they in turn were no friends of Paul, going about trying to undo or override his work.
Visiting Passover Jews carrying to all parts of the empire the report and their own sudden faith about a crucified subversive risen from the dead who was the Son of God? And welcomed back at home with open arms? This is even more ludicrous than the idea of conversion from the preaching of the "dusty disciples" themselves. At the very least, if Acts' picture were correct, Jesus and the new religion, with its claim that a preacher and miracle-worker had walked out of his grave, would have been the talk of Jews and Gentiles from one end of the empire to the other, and the silence we find in the entire Jewish and pagan record of the next 85 years would have been impossible.
Acts' story of Pentecost is a piece of mythmaking that was designed to translate that amorphous (perceived) activity of the Spirit during Paul's and Peter's time into a representative event which had supposedly launched the golden-age beginning of the Christian movement. Such reconstruction of the past is the epitome of sectarian expression.
Actually, the true state of affairs may be indicated by the later churchman known as Ambrosiaster, who in the 4th century remarked in his commentary on the epistle to the Romans that, "One ought not to condemn the Romans, but to praise their faith; because without seeing any signs or miracles and without seeing any of the apostles, they nevertheless accepted faith in Christ, although according to a Jewish rite."
Whether such Christians were Jews or Gentiles (some scholars even postulate two separate congregations in Rome), such a tradition points to something very telling: that Christian belief in Rome arose independently of any proselytizing movement from outside. How is this possible? Because the genesis of Christianity, all over the empire, was a spontaneous, concurrent expression of the religious and philosophical concepts of the time (see Part Two) and did not begin from any central point or figure of origin—although various travelling apostles could 'spread' their own particular ideas. It expressed a belief in a spiritual entity who, like all the savior deities of the day, operated in the spiritual world.
RFSet4
I am very impressed with your web site. You have
brought together a lot of material and made it
understandable.
It seems to me that one aspect of your theory of
Christian origins is weakly argued, namely your
agreement with the common scholarly belief that the
Gospels and Acts are very late documents. (J.A.T.)
Robinson gave some very interesting reasons for dating
all these books before 70 AD. His strongest argument
was their lack of any clear reference to the destruction
of Jerusalem, an argument strikingly similar to the
fundamental reason for doubting Jesus' historicity,
namely the silence of later writers!
Response to Michael:
Dating the Gospels and Acts
First of all, I would not say that there is a "common scholarly belief" that the Gospels and Acts are very late. All 4 Gospels have generally been placed within the period 65 or 70-100, with Acts somewhere in the middle of that span. Measured against other theories (arising in the 19th century and continuing in some circles to this day), which regard the Gospels as entirely second century documents, this is not "very late".
My own preferred dating is to see Mark no earlier than perhaps 90, with the others following by 125, and Acts not appearing until around 150, perhaps even a little later. This, of course, refers to the earliest versions of the Gospels, which did not enjoy any notable circulation at first, and which were not finalized in any canonical form until after Justin. And it regards those earliest versions as not intended to be history, though they began to make their influence felt in that direction by the second quarter of the second century. (Certain glimmerings of the idea that the spiritual Christ had been on earth, some with bare biographical details, were already emerging prior to the dissemination of the Gospels, such as we find in 1 John 4 and Ignatius of Antioch.)
On the other hand, there is almost no scholarly agreement with the picture of the late J.A.T. Robinson. His very early dating of the Gospels (with John as the earliest!) has even been labelled "donnish antics". One could devote much space to discrediting Robinson's theories, but I will refer the reader to G. A. Wells' The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Prometheus Books, 1982) in which he tackles Robinson's position in several places. Wells deals very convincingly, for example, with the question of whether Luke's reworking of the Markan apocalypse (Mark 13) shows that the destruction of Jerusalem lies behind him.
For me, one very strong, indeed overwhelming, argument against dating the Gospels so early, is that they do not show up in the rest of the Christian record until Justin, almost a full century later. Acts puts in an appearance only subsequent to Justin, in the 170s! One would be hard pressed to show why four accounts of the life of Jesus (all the Synoptics coming from the same area, possibly southern Syria, with John probably not too much further afield), together with the only account of the beginnings of the church and the missionary movement, would not have found their way into wider Christian awareness and usage for some one hundred years.
I would consider that a passage like Luke 19:41-4 ("For a time will come upon you, when your enemies will set up siege-works against you, etc."), and even Q's (third stage) "Look, there is your temple forsaken by God" (Mt. 23:38, echoing Jeremiah 22:5), are pretty clear indicators that these writers knew of the destruction of Jerusalem. Even Mark 13 can be regarded as specific enough for such a conclusion. In any case, the Gospels locate Jesus' words and actions three decades before the Jewish War, so it would hardly be surprising to find that the evangelists were being deliberately anachronistic, presenting the destruction of Jerusalem only in a prophetic way. Unless Robinson would have us believe that these are indeed genuine prophecies spoken by a precognizant Jesus, it's impossible to countenance his views seriously.
It seems to me Satan would use the word "puzzle", which denotes something a human can work out, vs. the word "mystery", which implies faith, a word your rationalizing humanistic mind has no use for. What good is it doing misleading all these souls for your miserable 72 years of existence??? Jesus have mercy on your ego!!
Response to Anonymous:
Satan's Language
I make no apology for possessing, and using, a rational mind. Hopefully, we are nearing a time when the increase in rational thought which our society has enjoyed over the last few decades will finally become great enough to effect the demise of concepts such as "Satan".
(Normally, I decline to respond to any mailing which does not supply at least a first name, but a reaction like this epitomizes many of the comments I have received, and serves as a pointer to the pressing need to examine the Christian myth and the effects it has had on the Western mind for almost 2,000 years.)
I find some problems with the idea that Jeshua never lived. 1. To deny his existence, it seems to me, must also call the existence of John the Baptist into question. However, we have a remnant group called the Mandeans with a history of their own and a memory of their Johannine foundation. 2. There are also the Ebionites who, apparently, refused the deification of the Nazarene. The problem with them was the reverse of what is stated in your thesis: they were denying the apotheosis. 3. There is the reaction of the Jews at the time. They did not deny his existence while, at the same time, disparaging him as much as possible. It seems an all too obvious retort, if it were true, to say he had never been. 4. Within your overall thesis, would it not be just as likely that the Jerusalem Pillars, and/or the Galileans, grafted their own teacher onto the extant Son of God cults thereby literalizing the mythic elements of the mystery cults? It would not be a matter of a poor teacher being suddenly elevated to the level of a mythic god; but, rather, it would be the attaching to the itinerant healer an already-existing theogony.
Response to Robert:
John the Baptist / Ebionites / Talmud
There is no reason that I can see why John the Baptist's existence needs to be called into question. Josephus attests to him (Antiquities of the Jews, XVIII, 5), without, by the way, connecting him to any Jesus or Christian cult. Q (Lk. 16:16) attests to a view by certain Palestinian circles preaching the Kingdom that John the Baptist marked the beginning of a time of such preaching, and it was easy enough for a later stage of that community, as well as the first evangelist, "Mark", to choose to link the invented Jesus to him, whether in midrashic fashion or as perceived history.
Our evidence for what the Ebionites thought comes from the third and fourth centuries. (See my response to Lynn.) All this tells us is that once the historical Jesus was developed and everyone eventually came on board, certain "Jewish-Christian" groups decided that this Jesus of Nazareth could not have been divine. They were not "denying the apotheosis," they were abandoning the previous exalted phase of belief in a spiritual Christ as no longer applicable to a presumed human figure. In any case, we can't tell anything definite about the continuity of such later Jewish-Christian sects with earlier groups.
For your objection to be valid, we would have to postulate that certain Jewish-Christian groups right at the beginning did not elevate Jesus to divinity. But we have no evidence for this. Even the clearly Jewish epistles like James and Hebrews give us no non-divinized human Jesus. And Paul would seem to disprove the idea, since he provides not a hint of such a vast difference of opinion about Jesus between himself and the Jerusalem apostles (to whom the Jewish-Christian groups tend to trace themselves). As for Q, drawing from its early layers the picture of a non-divinized historical teacher is very shaky (see Part Three and my review of Burton Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament?). Furthermore, as I point out in my response to Lynn, the earliest preserved traditions about the view of Christ held by certain Jewish-Christian sects show quite the opposite: Christ seems to be of an angelic, spiritual nature, so that the much-quoted Ebionite position on Jesus as entirely human would have to be a later development.
As for "the reaction of the Jews at the time": if you are referring to the later Jewish references to Jesus in the Talmud, such things began to be written down only in the third century and are so garbled they can hardly provide a reliable witness to anything. Most were a reaction to Christian views of a later time, and only a handful were attributed to rabbis living at the end of the first century, none earlier. Nor could a third century Jew be in any better position than a Christian to deny the already firmly established misinterpretation of the Gospels, and I doubt that a third century record of what first century rabbis were supposed to have said can be taken as any more reliable than the later Christian witness about many of its own first century traditions. The transmission and preservation of almost everything in those times was tendentiously determined. Ironically, Justin records (or invents to reflect a stereotype view) a Jew of his time (mid-second century) who accuses Christians of "inventing a Christ for yourselves" (Dialogue with Trypho 8:6).
I don't see much of a difference between elevating a man to Godhead, and attaching an "existing theogony" to him. And the end result is the same. In any case, such processes would seem next to impossible in a Jewish milieu, and neither viewpoint can explain the total eclipse of all record of the human antecedent once the elevation had taken place.
Your scenario (not quoted here) about a seditious Jesus crowned by his followers, who then took over the Temple, could not possibly have escaped Josephus' (and others') attention. Had Josephus recorded such a dramatic scene, it would hardly have been simply excised by later Christians tampering with Josephus to insert the famous Antiquities 18 interpolation.
Robert (in a second mailing) also writes:
Wouldn't the fact that (the Jesus movement) preached a new covenant have required a new Moses? In the Jewish mind, wouldn't there have to be an historical moment on which to hang the new agenda? It seems easier to conclude that some unknown was attached to the process gratuitously to give substance to the idea of a new covenant than to think that there never had been anyone.
Response to Robert:
A New Moses for a New Covenant
Well, we look in vain within all of the epistles for an "historical moment" on which the new agenda was hung. If it was so required by the Jewish mind, why does Paul transport the crucifixion to the spiritual world at the hands of the demon spirits? (1 Corinthians 2:8. See Supplementary Article No.3: Who Crucified Jesus?) Why is no trace of interest in the historical event, indeed the entire life Jesus is supposed to have lived, to be found in all the early Christian correspondence? You fail to accord sufficient weight to the mythological and philosophical thinking of the time, which had its eye fixed on the upper "genuine" realm of reality, where the activity of all savior gods was perceived to take place. In this realm, the "new Moses" could exist and do his work without ever touching terra firma.
Look at the Epistle to the Hebrews. Few things in early Christian expression are closer to portraying Jesus as a new Moses, establisher of the new covenant, and yet this writer (see chapters 8 and 9) places his Jesus firmly in the higher heavenly world. Jesus and his sacrifice are the spiritual (Platonic) equivalents of the earthly High Priest and the atoning sacrifice he performs. He also fails to mention a word about the Last Supper, where Jesus in the Gospels pronounces the words of the eucharist which establishes that new covenant! Now turn to chapter 12, verses 18 to 29, the peroration of the entire epistle, where the two covenants are placed side by side. First the reader is reminded of the mount of Sinai where the old covenant was granted, and we hear the voice of Moses, the mediator of the old. When the author turns to the scene of the new covenant, where does he place his readers' vision? Upon the mount of Calvary, beneath the cross on which Jesus of Nazareth hangs? No. Where Mt. Sinai symbolized the old covenant, it is Mt. Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem—still an Old Testament motif—which symbolizes the new. And whose voice does he give us in parallel to Moses'? Not the voice of the earthly Jesus, which has not been heard throughout the entire epistle, but the voice of God. (See my Supplementary Article No. 9 on the Epistle to the Hebrews.) I fail to see any "historical moment" in evidence in all this, or anywhere else in the early Christian correspondence.
Finally, I must disagree that it is easier to conclude that all this otherworldly theology was attached to an unknown man. Such an attachment makes no sense, especially by Jews. On the other hand, if the spirit of the times has populated heaven with layers of spiritual and salvific activity, I can see no problem in placing Paul's Christ in such a setting, particularly since he gives us nothing else.
What I do not see you examine in your writings is the supposition of the "secrecy in a mystical cult". If these people were referring to "mysteries" orally transmitted during initiations, and secret get-togethers, they would only do it symbolically and in a cursive manner. Compare the Eleusinian mysteries, of which practically nothing is known, although very prolific writers partook of them. Masons are still playing this game. This, in my opinion, would explain the "silence" on the historical Jesus in the writings.
Response to Anna:
Christianity as a "Mystery"
There is no evidence that early Christian cults acted under principles of "secrecy" in the same way that the Greek mystery religions did. (I regard the "secret of the kingdom of God" in Mark 4 as not much more than a 'rationalization' for the rejection of the sect's teaching by the outside world.) In Paul, the use of the term "mystery" refers not to secrecy but to the mystery of God's purposes and workings in the spiritual realm. These were long hidden "secrets" of God that were now being revealed to men such as Paul through inspiration and their reading of scripture (see, for example, Romans 16:25-27). The "secret of Christ" (e.g., Colossians 2:2) encompasses the very existence of the Son, his sacrificial death and the role it now plays in salvation, things being learned for the first time through revelation.
In fact, mystical meanings and significances, because they are difficult for the average person to grasp, tend to get translated into more mundane elements and mythic tales; these serve as symbols for those higher meanings and mystical realities. Thus, if such a thing as you suggest had been operating in early Christianity, we would see a different effect. The meaning of the spiritual Christ would have been translated into a human and earthly story, and the holders of the secrets would then explain the higher meaning of these stories to the initiates, usually in closed ceremonies, as in the Greek mysteries. But it is precisely those mundane elements that are missing in the early Christian writings about Jesus. Paul never refers to such things, and is constantly doing his best to lay out directly the mystical significance of Christian faith and ritual. He never conceals.
One might say, of course, that this is exactly the role the Gospels played; they were translations of that higher spiritual reality, the "secrets" which God had revealed through scripture and the Holy Spirit, into a mundane, historically based story, making such things more accessible and comprehensible. I have no doubt that this was one of the psychological factors at work in the creation of the Gospels, although I also lean toward those theories (see Part Three and my book review of John Shelby Spong's Liberating the Gospels) which view the Gospels as an exercise in midrash, perhaps for liturgical purposes, not initially intended as history.
This mundane story, however, didn't come along until quite a bit later than Paul, and when it began to be looked upon as factual, the mystical setting and higher reality was abandoned. Everything was now transferred to earth and history. (Instead of crucifixion by the demon spirits, as in Paul, "the Jews" were now responsible.) And there was no "secrecy" about it.
A magnificent achievement of scholarship and
interpretation! I have been reading and rereading your
web page over the last few weeks. So much that was
puzzling before about the New Testament seems much
clearer.
In your view, the author of Mark sat down and created
his story from the scriptures and from myths of a spiritual
Jesus. None of these sources would have contained
Galilean place names. Internal evidence rules out the
possibility that the author was familiar with the geography
of Galilee, for he has Jesus coming and going in a sequence
that does not make any sense when plotted on a map. This
supposedly fits well with the idea that Mark had heard
about all these incidents (including the names of the towns
where they had occurred), but had to guess at the sequence.
Have you given any thought to this aspect of Mark?
Response to David:
The Problem of Markan Geography
Scholars have long noted that Mark does not seem to understand Galilean geography, even if he is familiar with place names. Howard C. Kee, Community of the New Age, p.102-103, offers a good capsule discussion of this problem, and he believes that the Markan community was located in a non-urban area of Syria. Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, p.289, places Mark "outside Palestine." Burton Mack likes him in Sidon or Tyre. On the other hand, there are those, such as Willi Marxsen (Mark the Evangelist) who are untroubled by the discrepancies and place the community in Galilee itself. Marxsen suggests that the arrival of Christ at the impending End-time was anticipated to take place in Galilee, and that the evangelist was pointing toward this in his Gospel (14:28 and 16:7). This may have been because the community was located in Galilee; sectarian groups always feel that they are at the center of the universe's workings.
For whatever reason, Mark chose Galilee as the setting for his story, but as he was writing a midrashic tale intended to be symbolical only, he may have felt no compelling need to make Jesus' movements topographically accurate. His "sources" contained no reference to Galilee, for these were stories and passages from the scriptures which were recast in new terms. See my book review on John Shelby Spong's Liberating the Gospels. Spong reveals a structure to Mark which forever destroys the possibility that this account is history, or that the incidents of Jesus' life and ministry can be anything other than a fictional midrash on Old Testament precedents.
In the Preamble to your work "The Jesus Puzzle" you
state: "...it is no longer fashionable (or valid) to maintain
that much of what is distinctively Christian was derived
from the mysteries."
Could you please tell me where I can find the documents
on which this statement is based? For several months now,
I have been seeking confirmation or criticism of works such
as "Sixteen Crucified Saviors" by Kersey Graves and "The
Lost Light" and others by Alvin Boyd Kuhn, to no avail.
They are certainly provocative but somehow lack the aura
of hard scholarship.
Response to Miles:
Greek Mystery Cults
In the early part of this century, based on the ground-breaking work of respectable scholars like Richard Reitzenstein and Franz Cumont, sweeping claims were made about Christianity's derivation from the Greek mysteries by the "History of Religions School". At the center of these claims was the concept of "dying and rising gods," as in Wilhelm Bousset's scenario that ancient thinking had merged all the mystery deities, including Christ, almost into a single collective myth across the ancient world, about the suffering and dying god who is resurrected and thereby confers salvation. As time went on, such claims became discredited when it was seen more clearly that the myths and artistic representations of the various hellenistic cults actually contained nothing tangible about any resurrection of the god from the dead.
However, pendulums have a habit of swinging too far in the opposite direction. Many scholars writing from the 60s to the 80s have claimed that there was virtually no common ground between Christianity and the mysteries. Some of them tried to knock down the mysteries to little more than social guilds and intercessionary exercises; people appealed to the cultic gods for help in coping with life's problems, somewhat as Christians do of the saints in heaven. For example, see Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (1987), and Gunter Wagner, Pauline Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries (ET, 1967).
Wagner in particular was anxious to discredit the mysteries as having any possible influence on Christianity. He went so far as to say that not only were the so-called savior gods never thought of as resurrected, but that no concept existed within the cults that the initiate partook of the deity's nature, that he linked his destiny with that of the god, that baptismal rites in the mysteries were any more than ritual washings. He claimed to find no evidence that Attis and the other cultic deities were the ground for personal hopes of immortality or of quality of life after death. Wagner chose to interpret in one direction every point of ambiguity, every gap and uncertainty in the very sparse evidence we have about the cults. (Their injunction to secrecy seems to have been faithfully observed for a thousand years!) But Wagner thereby painted himself into a corner, for he was left with the problem (which he never addressed) of explaining what their appeal was. Why was Christianity locked in a virtual life and death struggle with the cults for 200 years, a struggle whose outcome was far from certain? The need of the age was for personal salvation, especially after death. It is intellectual dishonesty to try to cook the meager surviving evidence of the mysteries to suggest that they did not in their own way offer precisely that.
As for the question of dying and rising gods, from the 2nd century BCE and even earlier, the Jews developed a concept of the righteous dead rising to participate in God's Kingdom, which was to be established on earth. Physical resurrection was therefore required. Jews had always been very "this world" oriented and had a weak concept of a spiritual afterlife. The Greeks, on the other hand, were very different. Christianity's second century opponent, Celsus, said that the doctrine of resurrection of the flesh "is so repulsive that there is opposition to it even among Jews and Christians. . . the soul may have everlasting life, but corpses ought to be thrown away as worse than dung." Obviously, we should not expect those who held such an outlook to invent gods who are resurrected in flesh to bestow the same fate on humans. Proving that the Greek savior gods were not conceived of as "rising from their tombs" is to knock down a straw man.
The existence of significant conceptual differences should not be allowed to obscure the fact that both Christianity and the mysteries were an expression of the same needs and urges, that both proceeded from a common pool of religious impulses of the age, and that cross-cultural influences could help shape the particular expression each group formulated for itself.
As for the question of comparative dating, rites like those of Eleusis and the god Dionysos predate Christianity by many centuries. Mithra (Mithras in the Greek) was an ancient Persian god who seems to have been adopted by hellenistic circles in Asia Minor around 100 BCE. (See the fascinating The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, 1989, by David Ulansey, who has located the basis for the Greek cultic myth in an astronomical discovery of the time.) When was Attis added to the cult of the Great Mother Cybele? Dates vary. But cults do not form overnight, nor do the ideas underlying their rites and myths spring fully into being at one moment. The basic concepts and practices of the mysteries were ancient. They undergirded much of the religious expression of the era. Both Christianity and the cults were an outgrowth of them, even if Christianity had its own particular Jewish content as a prominent part of the mix. No one today is going to claim that Paul's Christianity is derived from the equivalent of the fully-formed cults we see in the second century CE.
Wayne Meeks represents a recent swing of the pendulum back toward a more median position. In The First Urban Christians (p.182, n.44) he says: "On the mysteries, I wonder if MacMullen has not been too skeptical. Apuleius Metamorphosis 11.6 presupposes some kind of personal immortality that will be enhanced, though not created, by the initiation. The initiate in the Elysian Fields, in "the subterranean vault," will still be Isis's worshipper and under her protection. So, too, MacMullen is too cavalier about the Mithraist promise (according to Celsus) of the soul's ascent through the seven planetary spheres. Bousset's description . . . erred in details and drew too schematic a picture, but this was nevertheless a powerful kind of belief apparently shared by many, not least by the Christian and non-Christian Gnostics. . . . Teachers of rhetoric recommend that speeches of consolation include reminders of the soul's return to the divine realm as a source of comfort for the bereaved."
Even more recently, Hyam Maccoby has reopened the case for Paul having much in common with ideas which were central to the mysteries. He explores the fact (in Paul and Hellenism) that Paul's interpretation of the eucharistic (thanksgiving) meal is unlike Jewish concepts (even blasphemous from a Jewish point of view) but very close to Greek sacramentalism. Paul's language resembles that of the Greek cults, even if there are important distinctions in meaning and application. Paul's Christ who dies a violent death (at the hands of the demon spirits of the firmament, if we are to judge by 1 Corinthians 2:8: see my Supplementary Article No. 3) is unrelated to any previous Jewish ideas of God's salvation, but fits in with the many Greek savior gods who "are the centers of rites in which their deaths are rehearsed for some salvific purpose" (p.65). I would highly recommend all the books of this British scholar.
And so on. It is undeniable that Paul was a hellenistic Jew who grew up in pagan surroundings. If in Tarsus, this city was the birthplace and focal point of the hellenistic Mithras cult, with its sacred meal so like the Pauline version of the eucharist. It would be foolish to claim that Paul enjoyed complete immunity from the religious concepts that permeated the atmosphere he breathed. This absorption does not have to have been conscious—or static. Paul's was an innovative and roving mind, and many ideas in early Christian theology are thought to proceed from him. Yet no one's ideas spring out of nothing, unrelated to precedents. Paul can be no exception.
Paul's Christianity compared to the mysteries may well have been a superior expression on several counts, for it contained an ethical dimension the Greek cults notably lacked, and his concept of dying and rising to Christ through baptism was more subtle and profound than any parallel in the mystery rites. But this does not disprove that some of the roots of his ideas lie in broader, humbler hellenistic precedents. On the other hand, if we do not impose the Gospels on Paul and his contemporaries, we find that the conceptual differences are not as great as some like to think.
The claim (constantly reiterated by scholars) that the cultic myths are just that, whereas Christianity is grounded in the record of an historical man, is something Paul and the other epistle writers never make clear for us. And is the concept behind 1 Peter all that different from the post-death activities of Osiris and other savior gods in the underworld? For if Christ was brought to life only "in the spirit", and subsequently went to the Jewish Shoel to raise to heaven the souls of the righteous dead (3:18-19), where is the dramatic point of contrast with the cult deities? If Paul maintains (1 Cor. 15:50) that "flesh and blood can never possess the kingdom of God and the perishable cannot possess immortality," can we say that his thought about a post-death "spiritual body" (modelled on Christ's own) is essentially different from the Platonic, or that he has not been absorbing hellenistic influences? Can we say that he envisions Christ's resurrection (now seen by modern liberal scholars as not involving a corporeal return to earth) much differently than did the Greeks of their gods? The great contrast arises only when Christ is historicized and made to walk out of his tomb with the wounds still fresh in his side. The very fact that early writers like Paul never draw attention to Jesus' historical humanity as a significant point of contrast with the competing deities of the other salvation cults—one of the most amazing silences of all!—should provide compelling evidence that for them no such contrast existed.
An excellent article which tries to maintain a middle ground is "Mystery Concepts in Primitive Christianity and In Its Environment" by Devon H. Wiens (1980). I know only of its publication in a German series of scholarly papers on the ancient Roman world. An older classic on the subject is A. D. Nock's Conversion (1933) which, though written by a Christian apologist, is full of solid data and comparisons concerning the mysteries. Gary Lease, in his article "Mithraism and Christianity" (also in that German series) declares that: "The insight has become widespread that Christianity shared deeply in the cultural and religious milieu of the Near East during the beginning centuries of our common era. Indeed, one may quite accurately say that Christianity is first and foremost an Oriental religion, and like so many of its counterparts during the Hellenistic and late antiquity periods, it drank often and deeply from the same spiritual and cultural wells which nourished contemporary movements in that age of upheaval." We need a modern and thorough study of the mysteries from this point of view: a challenge to any writer because of the paucity and enigmatic nature of the evidence.
The book by Kersey Graves was first published in 1875, so the relevance of its 'scholarship' has to be questionable. To draw comparisons, as he does, with mythology and ritual from around the world, serves no practical purpose. Many of his prolific parallels are forced, if not downright fanciful, such as his "Mithra of Persia Crucified" (p.128); there is no death of Mithra(s) in any known version of his cult. Comparing Christ with Krishna or the Mexican Quetzalcoatl only illustrates that the human mind is surprisingly homogeneous and that there are only so many basic religious ideas to go around.
I have encountered Alvin Boyd Kuhn only on the Internet where some of his books (written around the middle of this century) have been published. While he and I seem to have gone down some similar paths (to judge by a few passages I have read), I can't speak for the depth of his scholarship, and his language is somewhat overwrought. Those interested can check out these URLs: http://www.irdg.com/pc93/shadow.htm (and whosking.htm).
I would like to know if the Theophilus that Luke wrote his Gospel for is the same as the one you mentioned, the bishop of Antioch in 168.
Response to Michel:
Luke's Theophilus
This is not too likely, if only because Luke wrote his Gospel much earlier in the century (probably around 110-120). Was Luke's Theophilus a real person? Perhaps not. The name means literally a "lover of God." The evangelist may have used it to symbolize recent converts to Christianity who were interested in the story of Jesus begun by Mark.
RFSet5
Colin writes:
Excellent web site! At last the epistles and the writings of the apologists and the jigsaw puzzle of early Christianity make sense to me.
Thomas writes:
Great job on the new “Quick Assembly” of the Jesus Puzzle. Only through clear, easy to understand explanations can the (Jesus) myth be put in its place. Your “Quick Assembly” feature is a big step in the right direction.
You have an excellent site. Your presentation is
clear and your arguments are compelling. I refer to
this site often.
I came across this quote in another Web page and I
would appreciate your comments:
“Perhaps the earliest piece of Scripture surviving is a
fragment of a papyrus codex containing John 18:31-33 and
37. It is called the Rylands Papyrus (P52) and dates from
130 AD, having been found in Egypt. The Rylands Papyrus
has forced the critics to place the Fourth Gospel back into
the first century, abandoning their earlier assertion that it
could not have been written then by the Apostle John.”
I would also like to know: exactly what are the earliest
manuscripts we have for the Gospels? I have seen some
claims on the Internet of fragments from as early as 60 AD!
What are the facts?
Response to Glenn:
Dating Gospel Fragments
I wish it were possible to offer “facts” in the field of New Testament research, or in any area of historical investigation, for that matter. As scholars have found for two centuries, certainty about questions concerning Christian origins is elusive and mercurial. What one generation believes it has established about Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity may be completely overturned and discredited the next. And in few other fields have investigators been so vulnerable to arriving at conclusions under the influence of wishful thinking—and, of course, confessional interests.
Dating the Rylands Papyrus to 125 (a common preference) or 130 CE is a case in point. No such narrow nicety is possible. As Robert Funk points out (Honest to Jesus, p.94), this fragment has been “variously dated from 125 to 160 CE.” Dating it closer to 150 would not require anything like a first-century composition for the Gospel of John, and in fact Justin, who writes in the 150s and refers to his “memoirs of the Apostles” quite frequently (mostly the Gospels subsequently ascribed to Matthew and Luke), seems not to know it. A. N. Wilson sums up the situation (Paul: The Mind of the Apostle, p.251): “In spite of claims by journalists and non-papyrologists in recent times, it is difficult if not impossible to date papyrus within a 50-year margin.“
We possess other fragments of the canonical Gospels from the end of the second century, and complete Gospels only from the middle of the third. The idea of a canon of four to be regarded as an historical record of Jesus comes not earlier than Irenaeus around 180 CE, and it was during this period that much collecting, weeding, and final redaction of texts was performed in order to arrive at a body of supposedly inspired and “foundational” literature to support the emerging orthodoxy of a church centered on Rome. (By that time, many many competing Gospels and other writings were in existence, reflecting a great variety of beliefs and presentations of a Jesus figure, both spiritual and historical. Nor, generally speaking, do the canonical ones enjoy an earlier attestation. Those not accepted into the canon became regarded as spurious or even heretical.)
As for recent claims that fragments of Matthew can be dated to the mid first century, or that Mark has been found at Qumran, these have been thoroughly discredited by reliable critical scholars. I don’t know what Internet location you are referring to, but the claims are those of Carston Thiede, who published a book a few years ago called Eyewitness to Jesus. In it, Thiede announced that he had examined fragments of Matthew which had lain in an Oxford College library since 1901, the so-called Magdalen Papyrus, and decided that instead of the late second century dating scholars had previously given them, they were likely from a decade or two after Jesus’ death. This also indicated to Thiede that they were written by an eyewitness. The book, together with Thiede’s press interviews, were seized on by the popular media, but fairly quickly shot down by more responsible scholarly voices.
Thiede’s earlier cause celebre was his championing of a theory put forward by the papyrologist Jose O’Callaghan that a fragment found at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls was in fact a tiny piece of the Gospel of Mark. This would place the composition of Mark’s Gospel earlier than is generally proposed, and linked the evangelist’s circle much more closely with the Essenes.
An article in the December 1995 issue of Bible Review dealt with both these contentions, written by Graham Stanton, who also addressed the ‘Mark at Qumran’ issue in his book Gospel Truth? around the same time. And in the January-April 1996 issue of The Fourth R, a Jesus Seminar publication, Daryl D. Schmidt similarly addressed both the Magdalen Papyrus and Qumran Mark controversies. In these articles, Stanton and Schmidt both demonstrated that most of Thiede’s statements about the fragments are “utterly unfounded”, and that Thiede himself, with ties to conservative Christian circles, had already advanced some fanciful notions about the evidence for Christian origins.
Dating based on scribal characteristics can only establish a range of possible dates, which must be given a fair leeway, since even the possession of dated ones with the same sort of characteristics cannot and does not rule out the survival of those characteristics in other, unattested circles for even decades longer, since “styles of writing do not change suddenly or uniformly” (Schmidt). Thiede, in fact, in more scholarly articles for an audience of his peers (as opposed to the popular press and his bestselling book), never claimed a firm date for the Magdalen Papyrus earlier than the end of the first century, which completely removes it from any contention for likely eyewitness, or even for an earlier date than that accorded by standard scholarship.
As for the ‘Markan’ fragment, Schmidt has this to say: “The fragment is so small that its only unambiguous Greek word is kai, the conjunction “and”. . . Surrounding the kai are half a dozen other recognizable letters and another near dozen partial ones. If one of the letters is modified, and if it is assumed that at least one word was misspelled and one whole phrase left out, it can be seen to match a piece of Mark 6:52-53.” Stanton, in his book and Bible Review article, brings similar observations to bear. Both reject Thiede’s contentions.
It is clear that one must always take dramatic ‘discoveries’ and declarations in the field of New Testament research with a healthy dose of skepticism, and only after careful inquiry into the investigator’s own agenda. I am willing to allow that my own work should not be exempt from the same requirement, and I simply invite the readers of this site to consider my observations about the documentary evidence, check them as best they can, and see if they agree with the reasoning I have applied and the conclusions I have drawn.
Stephen writes:
As one who once lived as you still do, allow me to ask you this: how is it you can totally reject the overwhelming physical evidence that proves the Bible is true? The law of Thermal Dynamics and the law of Homogenesis prove that creation is a reality and that the Creator is none other than Jesus Christ, as He Himself claims. This will be the greatest mistake you will ever make, for you will find out in the not too distant future that you were wrong.
Brother Kanya writes:
I compliment you on your unflagging dedication to spreading THE LIGHT. Your detailed response to every writer is indeed commendable. As one who has pursued this light for more than 50 years, I know the cost of such diligence.
Thank you for putting up this site. I was really
impressed — and pleasantly surprised, given the
content-weakness of many sites, especially when it
comes to Jesus — with the level of discourse.
Do you know of any traditions of a pre-Jesus
crucified-and-resurrected redeemer? Is there some
crucified-redeemer “ur-myth” Paul has latched on to?
Response to Avram:
Crucified Redeemers
I am not too sure where all this apocrypha about crucified redeemers supposedly prior to the Jesus myth came from. It was current up to a few decades ago and I suspect it was the product of an over-enthusiastic History of Religions School in the last and early part of this century, or some fringe of it. But I have not been able to confirm a single reliable myth, let alone an “ur-myth”, about a crucified redeemer prior to the early Christian construction. A century ago, a large literature was available outlining close parallels to the Jesus myth in religions around the world, much of it centering on the dying and rising god concept (a concept now largely watered down, if not as thoroughly discredited as some would like to think). The name of Kersey Graves and his Sixteen Crucified Saviors (first published 1875) is still regularly appealed to in this connection. But one is often hard put to discover, when reading those old researchers, just exactly on what hard evidence they base some of their parallels and claims. The abandonment of this type of research by modern scholars shows that it has, to some extent, come to be regarded as questionable. If anyone could enlighten me in this area (preferably with some of that hard, primary evidence), I would be pleased to hear.
I suspect that the Jesus-Crucified myth was largely the result, in certain Jewish sectarian circles within the larger context of messianic expectation, of fevered interpretations of the Hebrew scriptures: passages involving “piercing” and “nailing”, especially in the Greek Septuagint. These were probably influenced, of course, by parallels in the Greek mystery cults about variously ‘sacrificed’ savior gods (see my response to Miles). Even the crucifixion of holy men and would-be Messiahs by the Romans and the earlier Maccabean Alexander Jannaeus probably had some influence on the imagination.
I also suspect that the “crucified” concept may have grown up by increments. The hymn of Philippians 2:6-11, which most scholars regard as pre-Pauline, contains the idea of the descending ‘Son’ undergoing death, while the words “even death on a cross” in verse 8 are thought to be Paul’s personal emendation, perhaps showing the evolution of ideas as to how this Savior had died—in the spiritual realm. (This is not to say that Paul himself was necessarily the inventor of the concept.) Some sources (e.g., the Ascension of Isaiah 9:13) have the Christ “hung on a tree” by Satan in the firmament (the lowest celestial sphere between earth and moon), which may not quite be crucifixion yet, at least not in the Roman sense. The “hanging on a tree” idea (which is also suggested in 1 Peter 2:24) may originally have been inspired by Deuteronomy 21:23, which was not about crucifixion at all.
Your research and writing regarding the Jesus Puzzle
is excellent. For a non-academic like myself, I found
your thoughts clearly presented and easy to grasp.
I think that the Jesus myth is not without an historical
basis. The myth is colored, given personality, by human
personalities. (It) is a composite myth, with characteristics
of possibly at least three people. Who they are is irrelevant;
they are purely of historical interest and have no salvation
value whatever.
I think the Gospels and Acts contain condensed history.
After all, we are dealing with salvation theories, and
salvation theory tries to find meaning or purpose or a
better future from an interpretation of history.
Response to Mary:
Models for the Gospel Jesus
I can well acknowledge that elements of several representative, historical figures fed into the myth of the Gospel Jesus, since even mythical characters can only be portrayed in terms of human personalities, especially ones from their own time that are familiar and pertinent to the writers of the myths. However, just because certain models were drawn on, this does not constitute the existence of an historical Jesus. Even if Mark, shall we say, focused on a certain messianic pretender figure—even one named “Jesus” who some suggest could have been mentioned by Josephus as acting around the 30 CE mark (something I still doubt very strongly)—this figure would have served only as an historical hook for a writer of midrashic fiction. We would no more claim that the modelling of Captain Ahab on one or more known whalers of the time would justify saying that Melville’s hunter of Moby Dick was an historical person. And the bottom line of such a proposition would be that the pre-Gospel cultic figure of the Son, from Paul and the other New Testament epistles to the Odes of Solomon or the early layers of the Ascension of Isaiah, as well as many reflections of the Gnostic Christ, would have had nothing to do with any historical man or model.
I can’t quite agree that “salvation theory tries to find meaning or purpose . . . from an interpretation of history.” In this era, salvation came from above, from the spiritual reality which lay in the higher, unseen portion of the universe. I rather think that the effort to understand this, to convey it to others, led to the placing of the myth in an historical setting. This would initially have been only symbolic with no intent to mislead, and it simply took on a life of its own through eventual misconception.
I have enjoyed your works very much. I have struggled
for years to make sense out of a hodge-podge of writings
and beliefs that seemed to make no sense to me. I always
felt that something was amiss.
My investigation always led, not to a Jesus as lowly
teacher, but to a Jesus who was a revolutionary, closely
aligned with the Zealots. Until reading your works, this
seemed to explain much. Would you like to comment on
the obvious revolutionary acts accorded to Jesus in the
Gospels, such as the ride into Jerusalem as the Messiah,
or the arrest of Jesus by a “cohort” of soldiers, which
points to a large army confronting a large band of followers,
or Jesus confronting the money-lenders which would have
required a rather large contingent of followers. Why were
such things included in the Gospels?
Response to Barry:
The Gospel Jesus as Revolutionary
One of the purposes of midrash is to convey certain truths, lessons and rules for new times and situations. While the widespread belief in a spiritual, redeeming Son was a mark of much first century sectarian belief, this was usually set in an apocalyptic context, part of a general trend of expectation that the world was about to be violently transformed. This was a key element, too, in the whole revolutionary atmosphere of Palestine, with its messianic fever, throughout the first 3/4 of the century. It would seem to me, then, that any ‘modern’ setting for a Jesus myth on earth would tend to be placed in such a context of revolution and apocalyptic promise. This, after all, was part and parcel of the new ‘truth’.
The midrashic Jesus of the evangelists was also cast as a teacher (even if one might feel the two to be somewhat incompatible) because this too, this focus on a new ethic for the imminent Kingdom, was a prominent element in the dynamic of the time. All sorts of radical teachings, parables of the Kingdom, controversy stories reflecting the experiences of preachers and sects in conflict with the establishment, were being created in this period (some in entirely pagan circles, such as the Cynics) and were available to the evangelists for incorporation into their midrashic story. Mark’s Jesus of Nazareth attracted and epitomized all these sectarian and political expressions of the time.
I am having some difficulty understanding the nature of any process whereby philosophical concepts of Jesus/Logos could transform themselves into a belief in a literal historical man. By what process can someone change his philosophical idea into a literal historical person? This is the missing link in the theory you present.
Response to Neil:
From Mythical Figure to Historical Man
It’s not quite as black and white as that. There are gradients from “Philosophical Idea” to “Historical Man”. One particular believer does not go to bed one night worshipping the former and wake up the next morning deciding to adopt the latter. This Philosophical Idea is a fairly concrete entity who operates in the spiritual realm, with features which are the higher world equivalent of lower (material) world human characteristics. It’s really a case of transferring him from the one to the other, which in the ancient mind would not have been too great a distance.
Nor would this transfer have been uniform across the full spectrum of Christian sects, or even within specific groups. The disputes that are in evidence in 1 John 4:1f, and in Ignatius (such as Trallians 9), together with some of the—in my view, misunderstood—docetic developments around the end of the first century, show that some people very much resisted adopting the idea that “Jesus Christ (i.e., the divine figure in the spiritual world) has come in the flesh (i.e., that he was on earth, in a material body).” Justin describes his conversion at the beginning of his Dialogue with Trypho, an account in which (presumably faithful to his memory of the occasion) he makes no mention of a human, Gospel Jesus; yet a couple of decades later, when writing his Apology and Trypho, he has made the leap from the earlier Logos-type spiritual Son to the human man of the Gospels. It would be interesting to identify the stages in his mind between the two—which, unfortunately, he has not left us any record of. Other apologists of the second century have made no leap at all, and never speak of an incarnation of their Logos-Son (see my “Second Century Apologists” article).
We must remember that the Gospel Jesus would originally have been created as part of a symbolic story. In his first few decades of existence lying on a limited number of shelves, Jesus would not have been regarded as an historical man. Yet the earthly character of this midrashic tale would gradually have percolated through ever widening ripples of Christian thinking and observance, gradually supplanting the older cultic mindsets, until it reached some kind of critical mass and began to be accepted as history.
In addition to the Gospel influence, I believe that certain sectarian impulses would have helped generate a belief in a Jesus come to earth—as reflected in Ignatius and 1 John—with no necessary input from copies of a written Gospel. The need to focus Christian teachings and developments on an historical founder figure would have been another factor in the rise of such an evolution (see my response to Jan). The intervention of the great upheavals of the Jewish War, and the radical reconstitution of the Christian movement which followed it, from a largely Jewish mindset to an increasingly gentile one, would facilitate such a descent of the Christ from spirit world to earthly life, as well as guarantee that there would be little or no controls which could be exercised over such a development.
RFSet6
Julian writes:
Thanks a load for trashing my last two decades of
researching, theorizing, philosophizing, hypothesizing,
etc. with your “Jesus Puzzle.”
Actually, your writing has in fact been a great help.
I also found the letters from the “Jesus loves you” &
“you’re gonna burn in hell” brigade quite entertaining.
I agree that proving the existence of an historical Jesus is nearly impossible. But I wonder if you feel that John the Baptist was a real person (described by Josephus), and that Pontius Pilate was also certainly a real procurator. You surely know that an inscription on a stone with his name was unearthed in Germany some time ago.
Response to Dave:
Pontius Pilate and John the Baptist Historical?
I have no doubt that Pontius Pilate was a real person. But proving the existence of the historical characters and settings to which the evangelists have linked their artificial Jesus of Nazareth says nothing about the latter’s existence. Every good ‘historical novelist’ provides an accurate and realistic setting for his or her story. Accuracy and realism prove nothing other than the novelist’s competence. Just because the evangelists have incorporated features which can be shown to be correct does not make their story line in all its aspects true. It is surprising how many people (I won’t include Dave here) fall victim to this fallacy.
As for John the Baptist, it may not be possible to feel as secure about his existence, though that’s where I would lay my money. The reference in Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews 18, 5) seems dependable, but it is the only non-Christian witness to John before the Mandaean texts of the 3rd century or later. Josephus’ reference, by the way, fails to link John with any Jesus character or sect of Christians. Q’s picture of the Baptist (before the Gospels) seems to have progressed from a prophetic figure—whom the Q community regarded as its predecessor (Q/Lk. 16:16) and who was credited with prophecying the coming of an apocalyptic judge (not any recent man or teacher)—to one who evolved into the forerunner of an invented founder in the later stages of the Q community: see Part Three.
Scholars recognize that the Gospel information about John the Baptist is highly unreliable (and contradicted by Josephus in respect to the nature of his baptism); they often speak of the “quest for the historical Baptist” (see, for example, John Reumann's article of that name in Understanding the Sacred Text, p.183). For more on John, see my response to Lynn.
What, may I ask, do you seek to prove? If Christianity is a hoax, then it would be the biggest hoax of the last 2000 years, but what damage has it done? Kept families together? Strengthened the work ethic and moral code in our society? I believe it has offered hope. Hope never hurts. And if Jesus doesn’t exist, then what do you think happens when we die?
Response to Marie:
On Hoaxes and Hopes
This sounds a bit like the principle of “the end justifies the means.” And your assumption that such ends as family cohesiveness, a moral code and the availability of “hope” are only possible in a Christian context, is hardly tenable. Such things have existed in all societies, with their many different religions and even in the absence of religion; they are common human capacities and usually find a way to express themselves in whatever the resident philosophy.
I have never said that Christianity is a “hoax”. No one, I believe, set out deliberately to deceive. A piece of creative writing based on a traditional Jewish method of scriptural interpretation known as “midrash” was misunderstood by later generations of Christians whose own character had changed (from predominantly Jewish to predominantly Gentile). As it turned out, the Jesus story proved not only seductive, but politically useful as well. Its adoption as history was probably inevitable.
I personally believe in the paramount principle that we should always aim at discovering the truth, no matter what it is, and that basing our beliefs and actions on anything less cannot help but keep us from achieving our full potential. Finding out whether Jesus existed or not will bring us that much closer to understanding what is likely to happen “when we die”, not to mention a host of other philosophic considerations.
If the Gospels’ Jesus originated as a heavenly spirit
and not as an historical human, then would one not expect
to see in the Gospel record an evolution of his human-ness?
Yet the standard view of the sequence of the Gospels is that
those depicting the pre-resurrection Jesus as the more divine
came later. Does not Mark portray the pre-resurrection Jesus
as the most human of all?
If the Synoptic Gospels were written long after the fall
of Jerusalem, how do you respond to the reply that since the
Synoptics link the promise of the Parousia to the fall of
Jerusalem, a more plausible date for their authorship would
be around the time of that event?
Response to Neil:
Evolution of the Gospel Jesus / Mark and the Fall of Jerusalem
Your first question is a subtle one. But I think it is predicated on the assumption that Mark set out to tell the story of a recent man, and that those who came after and reworked him felt compelled to increase that man’s deification. But suppose Mark’s intention was not to tell the tale of an historical figure, but simply to present, through midrash, a picture of the process of salvation and the imminence of God’s Kingdom in the form of a comprehensible, and exemplary, story set on earth with human characters. Mark’s Gospel, being the first, would naturally prove the most primitive, open to embellishment; and that embellishment could only proceed in the direction of a more complex christology being applied to his Jesus of Nazareth. Each redactor would refine previous thinking and plumb greater depths of meaning (according to the needs of his own group) in how Mark’s Jesus was portrayed.
Matthew and Luke also had more to work with, namely a written Q. And John, a dark horse if there ever was one, seems to have been part of a distinct community with a highly developed Revealer-Christ (at first entirely spiritual), and this evangelist was determined to preserve the character of that Christ in his own version of the Gospel story. (See my Supplementary Article No. 2: A Solution to the First Epistle of John.) So John chucked things like Jesus’ baptism, suffering, silence before Pilate, and the whole ignominious crucifixion atmosphere, all as unworthy of the perfect divine figure he implanted into the borrowed Synoptic setting.
If one considers the early Christian record as a whole, then we see precisely your sequence. It is the epistles, many of which were written before the Gospels (and all of them before the Gospels were widely disseminated), which contain a Jesus who is exclusively divine, one who then progresses to the human figure of the Gospels and later ‘apocryphal’ writings. It is here that we see the clear progress of the early Christian Son of God from heavenly spirit to historical human.
As for your second question, there can be little doubt that the destruction of the city of Jerusalem, with the Temple itself razed to the ground, was an unparalleled traumatic event which stayed in the forefront of Jewish and Christian minds for a very long time. But I would say that the primary link between the Gospel Jesus and the fall of Jerusalem was related to Jesus’ death, not his Parousia. That is, Mark considered the destruction of the city and looked backwards from it. He embodied the guilt of the Jews for rejecting and persecuting the new cult of the spiritual Christ within a tale in which such rejection and persecution was allegorized as the killing of an earthly version of that Christ; and from this act resulted the destruction of city and Temple, symbolizing God’s wrath and the abandonment of his former people. Mark’s ‘lesson’ was that the fall of Jerusalem was a punishment for the Jews’ failure to believe in the (spiritual) Christ and for persecuting the new sect. This sort of thing is what one type of midrash is all about.
You will note that Mark’s ‘link’ is missing in Q, whose latter stages should perhaps be dated following the Jewish War (the “Woe” sayings and Q 13:35 seem to be prophecies after the fact). Instead, it is the “killing of the prophets” which is linked to that event (Q/Lk. 11:47-51), with Jesus himself conspicuous by his absence. The idea of linking a death of Jesus to the destruction of Jerusalem was apparently an invention of Mark.
Does Mark also link the Parousia of Jesus (his coming at the End-time) to the fall of Jerusalem, as you suggest? First of all, one of the aftermaths of the Jewish War was an increase in apocalyptic expectation generally, among Jews and in some Christian circles. Mark 13 reflects this, and yet the heightened trauma and expectation persisted for decades. (Revelation, usually dated in the mid-90s, testifies to this, as do other documents.) Even if Mark were written as late as the end of the century, he would still have been expressing an ongoing expectation of the advent of the Messiah. And in fact, he seems to slip in telltale remarks to explain to his readers why some time has passed since the War and yet the End has not arrived. In 13:7, he says (NEB) that “such things (as noise of battle) are bound to happen, but the end is still to come.” These manifestations are only the “beginnings of the birth pangs of the new age” (13:8). He even makes Jesus say that “before the end the gospel must be proclaimed to all nations” (13:10). This does not sound like something written in the heat of the War or its immediate aftermath, when a prophet-evangelist would certainly have been convinced that the Parousia was imminent, allowing no time for any widespread proclamation of the gospel.
No, Mark is giving voice to the apocalyptic atmosphere and messianic fever still being generated by the destruction of Jerusalem, but he knows that the End was not imminent when that event happened because a fair amount of time (two decades or more?) has in fact passed. And so he hedges the prophecies he puts into Jesus’ mouth. Jesus also foretells a time of “false messiahs”, which suggests an extended period of disputes and sectarian rivalry, and disappointments over false claims and frustrated expectations. All these considerations should at least lead scholarship to hedge its own bets on a near-70 date for the first Gospel.
There have been commentators who suggest that the instructions in 13:14f—centering on the “abomination of desolation”—hardly make sense in the context of the Jewish War and a Roman invasion, and how was anything sacrilegious (which is the original significance of the phrase) to be “set up” in a destroyed Temple? A commonly suggested alternative is that the reference is to the anticipated events surrounding the Antichrist, which many of the elements of chapter 13 would fit. It is also possible, in the view of some, that Mark is working from an earlier piece of apocalyptic writing of entirely Jewish provenance, perhaps resulting from a threat against the Temple by the emperor Caligula around the year 40. The hodge-podge effect of chapter 13 may well reflect Mark’s reworking of such an apocalypse (one having nothing to do with a Jesus), to fit a post-70 situation and his own interests.
The Jesus Seminar scholars believe that at least some
of the parables and aphorisms of the Q and Thomas material
can be traced to an historical person named Jesus. Where do
you believe the red and pink sayings [referring to the colored
beads with which the Jesus Seminar voted on authenticity]
came from? If there never was a Jesus who created these
sayings, then some other genius of a philosopher/storyteller
dreamed them up. Who?
“Love your enemies” (rated red by the scholars) is a
basic teaching of Buddhism. Do you believe that Buddhist
teachings had any influence on the early Christians and
were later attributed to Jesus?
Why do you believe that the Gospel writers included
“embarrassing” incidents or sayings in their Gospels, if
not because they originated from an historical Jesus? . . .
Response to Roger:
Who Created the Red and Pink Sayings? / Criteria of Authenticity
In a way, you’ve already answered your first question. I’ll take your statement about Buddhism at face value, but it serves to illustrate that innovative ideas usually have a more widespread genesis than a single individual. (And history has shown that the same idea may arise independently in different locales.) In fact, since the sayings of Q1 bear such a strong resemblance to the teachings of the Cynic (Greek) movement of the time, there seems little reason to impute “Love your enemies”, or any of the other red/pink sayings, to a specific Jesus of Nazareth. This is especially true when all the early Christian epistles attribute no such sayings—or indeed any earthly teachings at all—to the Christ Jesus they speak of. These writings earlier than the Gospels are full of references to ethical maxims involving love, yet none of them are ever assigned to anyone, except occasionally God!
The pattern seems clear: the teachings of a complex of reform and anti-establishment groups into which several streams of innovative and traditional thought have fed, perhaps perceived as coming from some divine source, gradually became focused on an artificial figure who grew out of non-human antecedents. Whether these teachings were the product of “genius” is also a highly subjective judgment. Mixed in with admonitions like “Love your enemies” (itself perhaps of questionable wisdom and practicality—certainly Christians rarely if ever followed it), are other sentiments which to our minds are often strange, inward-looking, and even reprehensible—not to mention outdated.
Therein lies another trap which is often fallen into. You suggest that since the Gospel writers have included “embarrassing incidents or sayings in their Gospels,” these must have originated from an historical Jesus, since they “go against the grain,” the grain being your assumption (and that of many others) that the Gospels are designed to make Jesus “look good.” You offer by way of illustration sayings like “Anyone who does not hate their mother and father cannot be my disciple” (Q/Lk. 14:26). To which I would add things like the Woe sayings which consign whole towns and classes of people to hell, or promising the coming of the Son of Man who will wreak havoc upon the world. (Unlike your example, none of the latter are judged “red or pink” by the Seminar).
Yet as soon as we realize the context in which the Gospels were written, namely within sectarian groups for sectarian needs, such sayings can be seen as perfectly at home and acceptable—indeed, inevitable. Members of a sect are often forced (or expected) to cut themselves off from family and friends; and the sectarian mentality always responds to rejection by heaping condemnation on the outsider, on the establishment which fails to be swayed by the sect’s message. The above sentiments in the mouth of Jesus do not serve the primary purpose of making him “look good.” They serve the purpose of justifying the sect’s own beliefs, its own pronouncements, its stance toward the hostile world around it. So much in Mark's Gospel, from the sayings to the miracles, even the death of Jesus, can be seen as symbolic of what the members of his sectarian community said, did and underwent themselves. The story of Jesus’ baptism (which seems to betray no “embarrassment”), was included by Mark, I suggest, because the members of the sect themselves received baptism, and the sect’s founder (real or imagined) is always portrayed as having undergone the initial rite—perhaps even establishing it, as in the case of the Eucharist. He sets the pattern. This is a universal sectarian phenomenon. And to the extent that the founder is conceived as having provided the example, or instruction, for what the sect itself now does, one might say that he is thereby made to “look good.”
This does not preclude refinements to the portrayal of that primal act, as ideas evolve and other considerations intrude. Thus Matthew feels constrained to point out (through the Baptist’s words in 3:14) that Jesus really doesn’t need to be baptized, but Jesus bows to the formality of God’s requirements. Luke reduces Jesus’ baptism to a reference in passing (3:21), while John will have none of it, eliminating it entirely. Here the idea of Jesus’ sinless divinity gradually overrides the factor of sectarian need.
For more on this question of why the Gospels include so-called embarrassing features, I refer the reader to the latter part of my response to Johnson. I would suggest that scholars, in setting their criteria for authenticity, have too quickly applied judgments which are based on their own modern attitudes, not to mention preconceptions which themselves need closer examination.
Bill writes:
I am the author of the book “What Happened to the
Church?” I urge you to read it. It will help in your
personal study of the Bible and be a valuable tool to
explain what is happening on this planet. Ask Jesus for
guidance and please be expedient and obedient, for we
are at the end of the Church Age and running out of time.
Thanks, and if I don’t see you on this side of the
rapture, see you on the other side.
Lyn writes:
I was surfing through the net when i came to your
fabulous page. Being a Christian myself, i do not really
know this much and am really glad i came here as i finally
know some things which i have often pondered to myself.
Take care and God bless you as you continue in your
works.
Jerry writes:
It is almost midnight here so I will ask this plainly: do you believe in Jesus yes or no?