RFSet7
Jay writes:
I found your website quite informative and was impressed with the clearness, logic and coherence with which you presented your hypotheses.
Willie writes:
Just wanted to say that your web page on the historical Jesus blew me away!!
Geoff writes:
Thanks for the web page. It’s very well done, courageous and fascinating.
Rusty writes:
You present nothing new here that your master has not
previously used to deceive the simple.
Genesis 3:1: “Now the serpent was more subtle than any
beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he
said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat
of every tree of the Garden . . .”
I was lazily surfing the net one day and, quite
randomly, came across your site. Wow! Interesting
articles; well written; many good points/questions.
Here is a point which would seem to support your
theory but which you did not mention. From the letter
attributed to James (the “Brother of the Lord”!) . . .
5:10: “As an example of suffering and patience, brethren,
take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.”
Should not the prime example of such suffering have
been Jesus himself? Did “James” forget to mention his
own brother? I am strictly new to this area. Did I miss
some context that would have made this omission a natural
thing for “James”? Note that this is a case where reference
to Jesus was entirely appropriate even given that James
knew that his readers were already familiar with Jesus’s life.
Presumably they were also familiar with the fact that the
prophets suffered - and yet James did not hesitate to remind
them. Even in James 1:1, James identifies himself as “James,
a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ” but does not
credit himself with being the brother of Jesus! He gives no
indication of having any special love for Jesus as his human
brother.
Paul’s lack of reference to the historical Jesus might be
understandable since Paul never met Jesus. James’ silence
is more perplexing.
Frustrating - these writers just could not bring themselves
to give us unambiguous references to the historical Jesus.
By the way, you handled Mr. Holding with grace and
dignity. Regardless of who scored the most technical points,
I much prefer your more civil style of discourse.
Thanks for your articles. I used to sit rather bored
through the readings at Sunday mass. I am no longer bored.
Response to Vincent:
The Silence in the Epistle of James
I couldn’t have put it better myself, so I decided to quote your letter at length. James 5:10 is indeed one of those silences in the epistles which cannot be dismissed (as J. P. Holding tries to do) as explainable by the fact that these writers did not need to refer to Jesus. Whether the reader is familiar with the point in question or not, here is a case where the context cries out for a reference to the historical Jesus, for he is surely the best and most compelling illustration of the point the writer is making. No Christian worthy of the name, and certainly not someone writing in the name of Jesus’ own sibling, would choose to draw on the prophets as an example of suffering and patience, and ignore Jesus’ own Passion experience. I can see no context you could have “missed” which would explain this omission.
Incidentally, a project I will undertake in the not-too-distant future is a listing on the site of all the silences which can be identified in the New Testament epistles, specific places where a reference to some Gospel detail could reasonably have been expected—at least some of the time. My own personal catalogue runs to over 200 of these.
You note the silence in the opening of the epistle of James to any reference to the fact that James is Jesus’ brother. I deal at length with this point in my Response to Sean.
Jan writes:
I read your Josephus article with pleasure and I must say I am quite impressed. You have convinced me that the “reconstructed Testimonium hypothesis” is untenable.
Cliff writes:
(Your Josephus article) is great, in a word. Well and sensitively written. You are thorough in your arguments and patient with your opponents. . . . You have covered all possible arguments in such a kind and gentle way that it would be an honor to be your opponent.
I am a great fan of your work and in fact I will be quoting your findings concerning Josephus. I would make one quibble. In “The Odes of Solomon” you say you “would maintain that no poet to equal the Odist was ever again produced.” I was wondering if you plan to edit this in the future, because I would count William Blake. His imagery is easily the most evocative in the English language, and it’s theological to boot.
Response to David:
Mystic Poetry
While I don’t deny the quality of William Blake’s poetry, I had in mind the Christian writers of the early (pre-medieval) period who were giving voice to new and evolving beliefs, often serving as apologists. Paradoxically, I suppose one might say that in later times, including that of Blake, Christian poetry again soared when it revisited the mystical heights which the Odist inhabited and dealt with Jesus as a spiritual manifestation.
This, however, is not to equate an aesthetic response to the lyricism of mystic poetry—or the poetry itself—with making any contact with genuine reality.
Have you considered another possible reason why no early references to Jesus appear: that they were in conflict with developing church doctrine, and were therefore suppressed?
Response to Bruce:
Conspiracy Theories
What kind of mechanism or central authority could have existed in the period when the New Testament epistles were being written which could have effected such a suppression? The epistles give no evidence of any tightly-knit state of cooperation and communication among Christian communities, and in fact the picture of earliest Christianity is one of fragmented diversity, showing a wide range of differences in ritual and doctrine between the various groups. Individual apostles like Paul were also operating largely on their own, and would hardly have had reason or inclination to obey some kind of ‘directive’ to suppress any mention of the man they were supposedly preaching, nor were they likely to all come to the independent conclusion that such a suppression was necessary or acceptable. A deliberate and cooperative burial of the historical Jesus on the part of every surviving letter writer of the first century is simply not feasible.
One might also question the conceivability of a “developing church doctrine” which was in conflict with the reality of “an historical Jesus.” Why would a movement which arose, presumably, in response to an historical man develop in a doctrinal direction which was so in conflict with that historical man as to require his suppression? This, in principle, is an inherently bizarre proposition. And yet it is precisely this proposition which represents the stance that generations of New Testament scholars have been forced to adopt in one way or another. It serves to point out the incompatibility of the picture of Christ Jesus, the cosmic redeemer found in Paul and other early writers, with the picture of the preaching wonder-worker Jesus of Nazareth, distilled from the Gospels or extracted from Q. The two don’t fit together, and the scenarios concocted by modern scholarship to try to force them into their uneasy partnership ultimately fail.
I must start by saying how impressed I am with your
concerted effort to find the answers to the many questions
surrounding the life of Christ. Your articles, what I read
of them, were interesting. I am a Christian (about 10 years)
who is extremely interested in Christian apologetics.
One overarching thought: which historical figures (let’s
say A.D. 100 and earlier) do you believe actually existed?
Can you prove their existence beyond a shadow of a doubt?
Another question: you use the fact that we have not found
any Christian writings that date within one to twenty years
after Christ’s death as a proof against his existence. Who
is to say that all of the closest followers of Christ could
write? And what about the material on which people of that
day wrote? It wasn’t fireproof nor waterproof. Of course,
we also can’t simply believe that someone wrote about Christ
during this period. Likewise, we can’t prove someone didn’t
exist because of a lack of writings about him after his death.
Response to Matthew:
Documentation and the Argument from Silence
Firstly, I don’t say that the lack of surviving documents for the first twenty years after Jesus’ presumed death is “proof” or even evidence against his existence. What I have said is that the nature of the early documentation we do have, extending almost a century after that presumed death, provides strong evidence against an historical Jesus. Those early Christian writings not only contain a pervasive silence about such a man, to an extent which defies logical and acceptable explanation, they also contain descriptions of the nature of early Christian belief which tend to rule out a recent historical man as the object of its worship and the genesis of the movement.
I accept the historicity of most reputed historical figures of the ancient world simply because there is no compelling reason not to, which is not the case with Jesus. It is sometimes suggested that we have no proof, for example, that Socrates is not an invention of Plato, who may have created him as a device to give voice to his own philosophy. But the works of Plato have a much greater unity and integrity than do the haphazard pieces of writing brought together in the New Testament, and they do not show the inconsistencies, contradictions, and contrary indications contained in the early Christian documents. Plato’s authorship of the writings in his name is known and virtually uncontested, and these were works published in his own lifetime which would have been studied by many. A Socrates who was an invention would hardly have been possible. Nor did factors like religious rivalry, political advantage, a time of upheaval and much else, all present in the early Christian situation which would explain and motivate the gradual invention of an historical Christ, play any part in the production of Plato’s works.
You acknowledge that we can’t simply assume the existence of something which has not survived (referring to possible early works mentioning an historical Jesus) just because it is possible to come up with speculative explanations for their lack. And yet the questions you posit intimate as much. It would be theoretically possible to come up with explanations for why no one has ever seen a unicorn and yet believe that they exist (people do it all the time with various religious claims), but this does not mean that such “explanations” have any compelling force. This is especially true when the evidence we do have tends toward supporting the entirely mythical nature of unicorns.
It is true that we can’t “prove” someone didn’t exist because of a lack of writings about him. But the argument from silence does have valid weight in that direction when (a) we are justified in expecting non-silence, and (b) the extent or nature of the silence cannot be satisfactorily explained by any suggested reasons. It is too convenient to say—and highly unlikely—that all the early documents which have survived are those which argue against the existence of Jesus, whereas all those which did not are those which could have supplied the missing evidence.
I have been hearing a lot about the theory that Jesus was in a coma when he was removed from the cross and healed in secrecy. Do you find any validity to this hypothesis?
Response to B.A.W.:
Jesus in a Coma and Other Speculations
How can a theory have validity when there is no evidence available to evaluate it? Such theories offer speculative suggestions as to how the Gospel presentation of the death and resurrection could be explained in a non-spiritual way. But if other evidence exists to regard the Gospel account as entirely a fabrication (including the fact that it is supported in virtually none of its ‘historical’ details by Paul and all other early epistle writers), then such theories can have little force.
A parallel might be made with modern scientific attempts to explain the Star of Bethlehem. Since no one in the entire ancient world outside of a single Christian evangelist, Matthew, mentions such a phenomenon (Luke, in his Nativity story, has no star and no wise men following it), and since all heroic figures in the ancient world, legendary and otherwise, tended to have heavenly prodigies attached to their births or deaths—none of which, of course, anyone accepts as having really occurred—all the theorizing in the world about what natural astronomical phenomenon could have produced the Star of Bethlehem is surely a pointless exercise.
I, too, am not convinced of the historical fact of Jesus.
There are two questions I would like your comments on:
Firstly, I have been told that “Jesus of Nazareth” is
quite an impossibility due to the fact that the town of
Nazareth did not exist at the “time of Jesus” and in fact
not for some centuries thereafter. Is this a fact that can
be established?
Secondly, Rev. 11:8 reads: “And their bodies shall lie
in the streets of the great city, which spiritually is called
Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.”
I have long been fascinated with the similarities between
Jesus and Horus and I have never been able to get any
theologian to explain the last part of this verse.
Response to Bob:
Did Nazareth Exist? / Revelation 11:8
It is impossible to “establish” that Nazareth did not exist in the early first century, since no one tells us this fact. And unlike the question of Jesus’ own existence, no one makes statements or offers other evidence which would lead us to draw such a conclusion. What we do have is the failure of the Hebrew bible, Josephus or the talmudic literature to mention such a place. The New Bible Dictionary (p.819) says that “the earliest Jewish reference to it is in a Hebrew inscription excavated at Caesarea in 1962, which mentions it as one of the places in Galilee to which members of the twenty-four priestly courses emigrated after the foundation of Aelia Capitolina [the Roman colony Hadrian set up over a ruined Jerusalem] in AD 135.” However, this does not prevent most commentators from simply assuming that such a town as Nazareth did exist in the time of Jesus, because of the New Testament ‘witness’ to it. E. P. Sanders (The Historical Figure of Jesus, p.104) opines that “it must have been a minor village,” because of its lack of mention.
As to Revelation, I have now completed Supplementary Article No. 11: Revelation: The Gospel According to the Prophet John, which addresses the absence of an historical Jesus in that document, and I will quote from it. [The following has been revised and expanded from the draft passage initially quoted here.]
It is often claimed that Revelation does contain one reference to a circumstance of Jesus’ historical life. In 11:1-13 the author incorporates what are probably two earlier Jewish oracles originally spoken during the tribulations of the Jewish War. The first relates to the Temple and the abandonment of its outer court to the invading gentile. In the second, two prophets shall prophecy in the Holy City and then be slain. “Their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city, which is allegorically called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified.” (11:8, RSV translation.)
Is John using these oracles literally, or only as a symbolic representation (in a piece of writing saturated with symbolism) of the people of God being rejected and attacked by the godless world? As for verse 8’s “great city,” many commentators regard this as symbolic, and not a literal reference to Jerusalem. For example, John Sweet (op cit, p.187) suggests that it represents the social and political embodiment of rebellion against God; “its present location is Rome.” P. E. Hughes (Revelation: A Commentary, p.127) takes it as denoting “the worldwide structure of unbelief and defiance against God.” G. A. Kroedel (Augsberg Commentary on Revelation, p. 226), while regarding the city on one level as Jerusalem, sees it “not as a geographical location but a symbolic place,” representing the immoral, idolatrous, oppressive world. It is, then, a symbol of the corruption personified by great cities in general, the godless world “where their Lord was crucified.” This says no more than that the sacrifice of Christ was the responsibility of the forces of evil and those who reject the gospel, a mystical concept which may have had no more historical substance than this in the mind of the writer.
We might also note that the clause “where their Lord was crucified” could be taken as tied primarily to the “allegorically called Sodom and Egypt” (the Greek phrase is literally “spiritually called”), and would thus be a step removed from any literal material “city”, even were the latter to be understood as Jerusalem.
O. S. Wintermute, in a study of the Apocalypse of Elijah, observes (The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1, p.748, note ‘w’) that the term “great city” is frequently a pejorative expression, and was most often applied to the metropolis of a detested enemy. Comparing Revelation, he admits that its author always uses the term to refer to Rome. However, he insists that the one exception is here in 11:8, “where it is used to describe the city in which the Lord was crucified.” This is a good example of the practice of denying the acknowledged evidence on the basis of preconception. Wintermute would no doubt follow his argument full circle and declare that because the reference is to Jerusalem, this proves the writer is referring to the historical Jesus.
Please! It is always easier to destroy than to create.
Response to Glenn:
The History of Ideas and the Nature of Progress
The history of ideas, and humanity’s progress in general, have always proceeded through a process of change, of the old giving way to the new. In a sense, both destruction and creation are continually involved. Yet would we say that Copernicus simply “destroyed” when he disproved the old Ptolemaic system which placed the earth at the center of the universe? Do enlightened forces in society “destroy” when they abandon things like human sacrifice, beliefs that demons cause sickness, convictions that women are inferior to men or one race to another?
The existence of Jesus is an historical question and merits examination no less than any other, especially when so much has been based upon it which defines our Western society. This includes the values and actions we have followed, some of which (though not all) have been of questionable validity or worthiness. If Jesus in fact never existed, and this were to be demonstrated and widely accepted, it is probably the case that Christianity would never be the same. The world would then be free not only of a “monumental misconception”, as I have called it, but of much of the moral and political force which the Christian power structure has wielded for two millennia—often with devastating results.
Burton Mack, though he has not openly subscribed to the theory that an historical Jesus never lived, has said (quoted by Charlotte Allen in Atlantic Monthly, December 1996) that: “Christianity has had a 2000 year run, and it’s over.” 2000 years is a long time for any philosophical/religious concept to maintain a stranglehold on an entire society’s—indeed half the world’s—thought and behavior, and modern science and social enlightenment is only reinforcing that outdatedness. But if, in fact, the stranglehold has all along been based on a misunderstanding, on a myth that spiralled into fantasy and fabrication on a scale unprecedented in its scope and consequences, then it is indeed time to let the whole thing go, and get on with the business of new creation.
I tremendously appreciate your quest for the truth and I’ll be indebted to you if you can provide me with some resources on christology, physis and the like. I would like to have a critical account depicting your personal view on the questions of monophysitism, the dual nature of the Christ, the Council of Chalcedon, transubstantiation and the question of the true substance of the Christ as well as the Theological Christ vs. the Historical Christ.
Response to Mohamed:
Later Church Theology
Is there a time limit on this?
Actually, I’m flattered, and I thank Mohamed for his interest. He identifies himself as an “M.D., Professor of Cardiovascular Diseases in Cairo, Egypt, a Philosophy Scholar and author of a Philosophy Encyclopedia currently in the phase of preparation.” But if I had the time and sufficient knowledge to supply all this information in comprehensive and “critical” form, I would write an encyclopedia myself. Besides, these subjects lie almost entirely outside the formative period of Christianity and belong to post-Constantine Church development. Maybe in another lifetime.
RFSet8
Max writes:
Interesting . . . and the first believable explanation I’ve read yet of the New Testament.
Darrell writes:
I have read much of your web site this evening and have enjoyed it very much. I had never heard a good explanation for the shorter Josephus quote until now. I had thought that the idea that Jesus never existed was too radical and not defensible, but you have demonstrated otherwise. Thank you for such thorough and scholarly work.
Andres writes:
I cannot begin to describe the great help your site has
been to me. I come from a (Central American) country
where stating that Jesus is not a historic figure would
create a lynch mob, complete with hanging rope, guns and
a big bonfire. . . .
I have to agree totally with your point on Paul. I have
always believed that he is the author of Christianity as we
know it, with all of its Hellenic references. I remember
reading Plato and some of the Pythagorean beliefs in College,
and I could not get over how Christian they sounded. To me
the connection between the two was obvious, and a proof that
Christianity had to have earlier sources. The Mithraic
mysteries and some of the other pre-Christianity movements
just confirmed that belief. Your site has helped me in
making sense of all of the scattered information I had.
I admire your scholarship and zeal and I do think that
you have made a strong case for your contention that the
Jesus of history can hardly be found in the 1st century
writings available to us from within and from outside the
Church. This conclusion, of course, always premises that
we eliminate the Gospels from the historical evidentiary base.
Those are the two parts to the Jesus Myth hypothesis:
outside the Gospels, silence; inside the Gospels, fiction.
But are they more credible than other theories, or do they
themselves create new problems that they don’t answer? . . .
Response to John:
New Scenarios for the Gospels
John wrote a long letter, some of whose arguments following on the above opening I will quote in the process of responding to them. In commenting that the Jesus Myth theory requires the Gospels to be regarded as entirely fiction (which I would maintain), John notes that some of the puzzling statements of Jesus in the Gospels could fit into scenarios which a novelist might find it possible to envision. “Sometimes it is simply a lack of being able to envisage how something may have happened that shuts us up to one hypothesis or another.” John does not offer examples of such scenarios, but I would use his statement to support my own contention, that to accept the Gospels as having nothing to do with historical accounts, even in their basics, is possible when one abandons old preconceptions and considers new scenarios which are not dependent on those preconceptions.
My basic scenario is to see the original Gospel story, presumably invented by the author or authors of Mark (since there is no conclusive evidence for a pre-Markan story), as not originally intended to represent history. This is not too difficult a concept. Even some of the Old Testament stories are now regarded as originally written to offer ‘morality tales’, such as the Book of Esther (whose characters have no counterpart in history), or some of the tales attached to David. So many of the incidents in Mark’s Gospel, such as the denial by Peter or the Gethsemane episode, can be seen as fictional lessons meant for the guidance of the community, not as actual historical events. Elements like the Nativity stories, and even the Passion account, are now being seen (such as by Robert Funk) as literary fabrication from start to finish. The first Gospel would have been a piece of metaphorical midrash, representative of the sectarian community’s own beliefs and experiences (and perhaps to some extent, an allegory on the redemptive role of the cultic spiritual Christ). In the main, Mark’s Jesus of Nazareth stands for the sectarian community itself, its teachings, its controversies with the hostile establishment around it, its role as an elect group awaiting the arrival of the Kingdom, etc.
Thus the oft-raised “problem” of how such an entirely fictional tale could have been introduced and accepted as history almost overnight does not arise. It would have resided, as a piece of midrashic symbolism, in a community for a generation or more before gradually coming to be regarded as representing historical events which happened to an historical figure. It is possible that there was a division of opinion within that community or circle of communities as to the significance of such a document, and certain ‘political’ motives eventually led one group to regard it as historical. (We see division in 1 John 4:1f as to whether “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh,” though this seems not to be based on interpreting a document, since the writer talks of competing revelatory “spirits”). This delay of historicization is supported by the fact that knowledge of the Gospels cannot be found in the wider Christian record until several decades into the 2nd century.
Another factor is that Christianity, if we set aside the orthodox preconception of things, was a widely diffused and uncoordinated philosophical movement, with no central authority and often little communication (let alone common doctrine) between the various groups. When one group came into contact with another, or with a document they had previously not known, they may have interpreted such a document (or reworked it) quite differently than its previous possessors. Over time, these differences got ironed out as everything interacted and started to assume a common level of interpretation. This was the process which took place throughout the course of the 2nd century.
I have often pointed out that there is a natural tendency in sectarian behavior to invent and glorify the sect’s past and the figures involved in that past. The political advantages as the 2nd century progressed (and particularly in the context of the struggle with Gnosticism) to having a real human founder at the beginning of the movement to which one could trace (read: invent) a chain of authority, would be more than enough to impel the acceptance of an originally allegorical Gospel story as actual history.
John goes on to discuss the silence in Paul on the historical Jesus. “If Luke is the author of a two-part document known as Luke-Acts, then that author, at least, had no problem with developing a picture of the kind of Paul that we know from the epistles as a follow-through on the Jesus movement that he [Luke] presented in his Gospel. He saw no contradiction.”
It’s quite possible that the final redactor of Luke was indeed the man who wrote Acts, but critical scholarship is increasingly pushing Acts well into the 2nd century, perhaps as late as the 140s, and to say that this writer “saw no contradiction” is to impute an undeniable blindness to him. The contradictions between the Paul of Acts and the Paul of the epistles are glaring and insurmountable, and lead us to consider either that the writer of Acts had no access to Paul’s letters (which he never shows any sign of being familiar with, not even in principle), or that he simply ignored them in the face of his overriding need to create a new ‘politically correct’ picture of Paul and his relationship to the Jerusalem apostles, now regarded as followers of an historical Jesus. Neither alternative inspires confidence in the reliability of Acts’ account of the beginnings of the Christian apostolic movement.
John says: “When I say that Paul may have assumed that his readers knew the Gospel story, I am not arguing that they knew the full-blown Gospel story as the evangelists would one day put it together. I assume a Jesus figure that would have struck his contemporaries as a very human figure on the level of Honi or Hanina ben Dosa. Even the great Scottish theologian Denney could not find in the Synoptics a presentation of Jesus as Son of God in the style of Paul’s mythological figure. We would therefore be dealing with a young Jewish prophet who fit the pattern of the peripatetic exorcist, healer, and teacher. At least that is a plausible theory.”
Plausible? I don’t think so. If that kind of quantum gap existed between Paul’s view of Jesus as a “mythological figure” of cosmic proportions, fully God, and that of his readers as a wandering “exorcist, healer and teacher,” on what basis did they communicate? On what basis did they share a common attachment to, or worship of, this man? If Paul ignores, is ignorant of, has no interest in a human Jesus, while his audience rejects his mythologization of a human being, where is their common ground? And, most important, how can this quantum gap be ignored in Paul’s letters, where there is not a hint of any such differences?
John also questions whether it is possible for someone (in this case, the author of Mark), knowing no story whatever of an historical Jesus, could have “picked through” scattered passages of the Jewish prophetic writings and created the compelling account which the Gospels clearly constitute. Would this not spell a literary genius, especially within a movement “made up of traders, housewives and petit bourgeois”?
I think John does not appreciate the extent of scriptural exegesis which went on during that time, and the constant scouring of those sacred writings by rabbis and scholars in an attempt to understand the world, the future, God’s plans and wishes, spiritual truths, etc. Besides, as I have pointed out, a writer like Mark had a template, a type of story quite common in Jewish tradition, now styled as The Suffering and Vindication of the Innocent Righteous One. He also had another template, as I suggested above: the life of his own community and others like it, sectarian experiences at the hands of a hostile outside world. I find no difficulty in envisioning a writer well versed in the scriptures and impelled by his community’s sectarian beliefs and needs, coming up with a story such as we find in Mark. And while the early Christian movement no doubt included in its ranks “traders, housewives and petit bourgeois,” it also included teachers and preachers such as Act’s portrayal of Apollos, “a learned man, powerful in his use of the scriptures,” as indeed was Paul himself.
John scoffs at the idea that some genius or committee of geniuses (represented by Mark) put together this marvellous figure, the historical Jesus, finding this more incredible than that the Gospels represent an account of an actual man, Jesus of Nazareth, who was himself a genius. He compares it to denying the existence of Shakespeare, or Homer, and then being forced to postulate a different Shakespeare or Homer who actually did compose the works under their fictional names. “If Jesus didn’t create Jesus, someone created those marvellous sayings and parables and stories.”
There are a number of observations to be made here which should temper some of John’s enthusiasm and the strain on his credulity. First of all, I only wish that the Gospels approached anything near the literary genius of Shakespeare, or even Homer. Much of the Gospel account is pretty crude, in thought, sophistication, and literary expression. Much of it reflects the primitive superstition of the day, abysmally unscientific and uncritical. At its worst, it is prejudiced, racist, misogynist. In Jesus’ mouth are to be found more than a few embarrassing and reprehensible sentiments, not the least in regard to the Jews. Did a “genius” say (Jn. 8:44, one of several New Testament passages responsible for the misery the Jews underwent at Christian hands for 2000 years): “Your father is the devil and you choose to carry out your father’s desires”? Was it a genius (let alone the Son of an all-knowing God) who failed to rise above the ignorance of his day and imputed many forms of sickness to possession by evil spirits? In reality, of course, elements like these were not the product of any one individual (much less the Son of God), but reflect the prejudices and ignorance of the Gospel fabricators and their time.
In the same way, the other, more commendable side of the coin was also a product, not of some individual genius, but of the more progressive expressions of the period. John should know that laudable concepts like the Golden Rule and the “brotherhood of man”, loving one’s neighbor, giving up riches, even turning the other cheek and loving one’s enemies, are to be found in several places on the 1st and 2nd century map, and even earlier. Teaching in parables was a prominent feature of the day, and not all of the Gospel Jesus’ parables are of the same quality. The bedrock of the Q compilation bears strong resemblance to Cynic teachings of the time, leading scholars like Burton Mack to identify the “authentic Jesus” as a Cynic-style sage. Does it not make better sense to see the earliest layer of Q as in fact an originally Cynic product, adopted by the early Q community and adapted over time to an artificial Jesus figure, in the same way that so much (as can be seen by a dispassionate study of the record) was collected from sources all and sundry and placed in the Gospel Jesus’ mouth? In other words, the best and worst of the day, especially that found in the sectarian type communities we see throughout the early Christian record, became subsumed into the artificial figure which came to life in the Gospels, Gospels which originally represented the communities themselves, their good and their bad, their struggles as sects, their mythology past and future. I see no strain on the credulity in a scenario like this.
I re-read your site a lot and it continues to fascinate me. I almost feel like it’s been an evolution for me. Raised Southern Baptist . . . I evolved from blind faith, to believing like Crossan and others that Jesus was not divine, that the Gospel stories are just that - stories. Now I find myself confronted with your arguments about Jesus’ existence at all as an historical person. And I must tell you, you make a compelling argument. Just one quick question: What do you find as the most credible argument against your position? In other words, where do you see any holes in your own theories?
Response to Barry:
Credible Arguments: ‘Human’ References and a Gospel from Scripture
A loaded question. From my own point of view, I don’t see any “holes” in my overall argument, in the sense that I have provided, to my own satisfaction, explanations for each feature of the early Christian picture. However, this is not to say that my “answers” are to everyone’s satisfaction, no matter how strongly I try to impress these upon them. So let me highlight a couple of areas in which I sometimes find difficulty in getting others to acknowledge the force of my arguments.
I am often pointed to a handful of passages in the epistles which seem on the surface to be speaking of a human being. Most notable are the references to Jesus being “of David’s stock according to the flesh” in Romans 1:3, and “born of woman” in Galatians 4:4. I relate such passages, along with a few references to Jesus’ “blood” and “flesh”, to the Platonic philosophy of the day, in which the upper, spiritual world was seen to contain higher, ideal counterparts to elements of the material world, and that certain human-like features were taken on by gods who descended into the lower levels of the spirit realm. Such features given to the spiritual Christ were also necessitated by scriptural passages which men like Paul had to relate in some way to their heavenly figure, in the above cases those relating to the Messiah’s descent from David and the child born of a young woman in Isaiah 7:14. These ideas are thoroughly examined in my Supplementary Article No. 8: Christ As “Man”: Does Paul Speak of Jesus as an Historical Person?
Another area of difficulty is the proposition that apostles like Paul could invent, and successfully preach, a crucified Messiah (entirely spiritual) who was derived solely out of their interpretation of the scriptures, especially as this was hardly a universal interpretation by Jews. The latter is admittedly so, but Christianity was a minor sectarian phenomenon for most if not all of the 1st century, a fringe expression heavily influenced by Hellenistic ideas. That it was not part of the mainstream of Jewish ideas and interpretation of scripture does not preclude an existence on its own basis.
But a spiritual, crucified Messiah and Son of God based on readings out of scripture? Some find it hard to believe that this concept could have excited anyone without some relation to an historical event, that it could have spread across the empire carried by Bible interpreters like Paul unless linked to a flesh and blood person associated with historical words and deeds.
Well, how did proselytizers spread the cult of Attis? They had no appeal to an historical event lying in the background of the mythic story. When people in Tarsus around the end of the 2nd century BCE formulated a new Mithras cult based on Hipparchus’ recent discovery about the precession of the equinoxes (see David Ulansey’s persuasive The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, 1989), was this not a process entirely lacking in an historical event?
Such objectors fail to take into account the pervasive nature of scripture usage in Jewish practice of the time. It may be only a bit of an exaggeration to say that educated Jews tended to find meaning and motivation for practically every breath they drew in life from something in the scriptures. The idea of personal “salvation” was rampant in Hellenistic times, along with those basic elements found in the mystery cults: their sacramentalism, their mystic communion with and sharing in the nature of a paradigmatic saving deity, the idea of divine suffering and sacrifice, perhaps even myths about descending gods—not to mention, in Jewish circles, philosophical speculation about an expected Messiah figure. In an atmosphere like this, it should not be difficult to envision certain circles of scriptural exegetes going to the sacred writings to try to formulate a “truth” along their own Jewish cultural lines, while borrowing heavily from Hellenistic ideas.
Is Philo that distinct from Paul, in his formulation of a view of the universe and its working, salvific parts, based largely on scripture when read through Platonic glasses? He may not have come up with a sacrificial Son, but he certainly had, in his “first-born of God” Logos (which he also called a “High Priest”, as does the epistle to the Hebrews), a general counterpart, if along more abstract lines, to Paul’s dying-for-sin Christ. Philo wasn’t motivated to produce his “myth” by the influence of any recent historical figure or event.
Those who can’t conceive of a faith movement not linked to an historical man and his words and deeds are nevertheless confronted with an early record which completely ignores that historical man and his deeds, and fails to attribute any teaching to him, whereas one can hardly turn a page of the epistolary corpus without encountering an appeal to scripture as the basis on which the writer is making his statements. Hebrews is saturated with scripture (including in its so-called “historical” references), presenting its heavenly High Priestly sacrifice as entirely based on Exodus’s Sinai cult. Every sentiment of the Odes of Solomon is a product of the Odist’s immersion in scripture, with no sign of any recent historical event in Judea. Paul is constantly appealing to the sacred writings as the source of his gospel and information concerning the Son (see Supplementary Article No. 6: The Source of Paul’s Gospel), and they lie in the background of just about everything the epistle writers have to say about him.
As to that scriptural source: Paul regularly says or implies that he got his gospel “from no man”, but from revelation, from the Spirit, most notably in Galatians 1:11-12. Where did the content of that “revelation” come from, if not from scripture? There are several passages in the Old Testament which speak of piercing and nailing, etc. Psalm 119:120 (LXX 118): “Nail my flesh.” Psalm 22:16 (LXX 21:17): “They have pierced my hands and my feet.” Zechariah 12:10: “They shall look upon him whom they have pierced,” a passage drawn on by the author of Revelation in a way which shows that it is indeed scripture which is the source of his idea and not the story of Jesus of Nazareth (see my Supplementary Article No. 11: Revelation). Isaiah 53:5: “He was pierced for our transgressions, tortured for our iniquities . . . by his scourging we are healed (NEB).” Do we really need anything else to understand Paul’s “gospel” of “Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures,” or perhaps the vivid description of “Christ crucified” he gave to the Galatians (3:1)—not to mention, of course, an important inspiration for the evangelist's Passion story?
This is what Paul reveals in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4. Not that Christ’s dying and rising are “in fulfilment of the scriptures,” which has always been the accepted interpretation. Rather, the kata tas graphas can be taken in the sense of “corresponding to” or “following the scriptures,” entailing the meaning of “as we learn from the scriptures,” scripture being the window onto the higher spiritual world. Everything Paul and the other epistle writers say in regard to the scriptures and the role of the Spirit bears out this meaning. Paul nowhere discusses the concept of an historical Jesus “fulfilling” the scriptures in the events of his earthly life and death, and the epistles regularly talk of the message of the apostles being the product of the Spirit. In any kind of Jewish milieu, on what did that Spirit act to produce the “revealed” gospel they carry about the Son/Messiah if not scripture and its interpretation? Passages like Romans 1:2-3 and Romans 16:25-7 spell it out (see that Article No. 8).
Is Jesus the only famous person whose existence is now being doubted, or are there others? Until I read the arguments on your website, I considered the belief that Jesus never existed to be just as ridiculous as the belief that he was born of a virgin. It would help if you gave examples of other famous persons besides Jesus whose existence is also being doubted by modern scholars.
Response to Adam:
“Historical Persons” Who May Never Have Existed
The existence of the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu, one of the reputed fountainheads of Taoism but about whom nothing is known, has been seriously questioned, as has that of Lycurgus, the Spartan statesman to whom the Spartan social and political system was traditionally attributed. A famous example is William Tell, reputed founder of the Swiss Federation, who is now known not to have existed. The historicity of Moses is far from certain, and even moreso that of older patriarchs like Abraham. The ancient world was full of local and national traditions about gods or semi-divine figures being involved in the beginnings of communities and nations, none of whom would seriously be regarded as historical today. Whether a famous legendary figure like the Greek Heracles could be said to have existed in any form resembling the later mythology about him is highly unlikely, and even if based on a type of hero or warrior in prehistoric times, this hardly qualifies him as an “historical figure”.
Religions tend to split and to proliferate into subgroups (sects) rather than coalesce. Is there any historical example in which convergence, rather than division, took place in religion?
Response to Wolf:
Syncreticism vs. Division
I would say that both patterns tend to be found, convergence usually preceding proliferation. The latter occurs after singularity has been achieved, and the religion has reached a state where its own weight tends to promote the splitting process. Christianity first had to coalesce into a unified Church out of independently forming circles and sects. (This is even the view of scholars who believe in an historical Jesus, one who caused various “responses” to himself to arise at different times and places, largely independently.)
History is full of examples of religious syncreticism, often the result of the god or gods of a conquered nation merging with those of its conqueror. A good example would be early Israel. Two major gods, El and Yahweh, the former the chief god of the Canaanite region that was to become Israel (and no doubt of “Abraham”), the latter the god of whatever tribes came in from Sinai (under “Moses”?), were eventually merged into one. Both expressions and traditions about them survive in the composite book of Genesis.
I have been reading your “Top 20” list. . . . Paul never
knew the man Jesus, so why bother using his writings for
your search for the historical Jesus? Paul’s epistles are
much more mature than the Gospels, theologically. And
Paul had his own style. There is no reason to make repeated
notes on Paul’s ignorance of the story of Jesus.
In your Sounds of Silence, you used a personal interpretation
of many of them to say that the writer was not talking about
Jesus. Understand that the writings clearly teach that Jesus
was Messiah, and as such must needs be God. This means that
all references to God can be valid references to Jesus as a
member of the Trinity.
Response to Billy:
Rationalizing the Epistolary Silence
For all that commentators, and even laypersons, love to disparage the argument from silence, they consistently feel the need to come up with explantions for the great void on the Gospel Jesus to be found in the New Testament epistles. My Sound of Silence feature (still ongoing, though unfortunately at a slower pace than I had hoped) is designed to bring home the pervasiveness and perplexity of all that silence, and to show that the “explanations” offered to dismiss it are almost universally inadequate, far-fetched and even fallacious.
If Paul was silent on the man Jesus because he never knew him, how did anyone keep the memory of Jesus alive outside the circles of his earthly followers, or when the latter had passed on? How did the evangelists, who it is now acknowledged by critical scholar were unknown latter-1st century writers who never knew Jesus either, write his ‘biography’? How were thousands across the empire converted to Christianity by apostles (such as Apollos) who likewise never knew him? If oral transmission was supposed to be the engine of such knowledge, why would Paul not have shared in it and made use of it, since the very mechanism of preaching the figure of Jesus would inevitably require such knowledge?
Billy, like so many others, argues for specific reasons of style, interest, lack of knowledge, to explain why Paul made no reference to the historical Jesus, but here he fails to take into account that all the epistle writers show the same void. Did they all share Paul’s style, motivation, lack of knowledge? How feasible is this? It is the very universality of such silences which discredits this kind of explanation. And why should mature theological writings which have converted a human man into a cosmic redeemer and Son of God require that the human side of the equation be completely buried or ignored?
Billy’s last ‘explanation’ above is reminiscent of J. P. Holding, who argues that since Jesus is a part of God, one can call his teachings those of God—as Paul does, for example, in 1 Thessalonians 4:9, “You are taught by God to love one another.” It is absurd to think that 1st century Christian letter writers would collectively reason in this strained, esoteric fashion and universally refuse to impute any ethical or prophetic sayings to the charismatic teacher and Messiah who had recently walked the earth and given rise to their own faith and apostolic movement. These would have included presumably, his own brother and the followers who had accompanied their Master and been appointed apostles by him.
You apparently would date the Gospels “late” relative to the
time of Jesus. However, it seems to me that the Gospel accounts
do not reflect the world at that time, and the problems within
the churches would seem to mitigate a great deal against that
position. It is thus more likely that they were written fairly
early: Matthew (first) by about the mid 30s when the persecution
of the Christians in Jerusalem began; Luke about the late 40s
(Paul may have a passing reference to his Gospel); and Mark by
about the mid 60s, though I have seen a number of scholars push
it 20 years earlier than that!
You should be aware of the studies by Marxsen, Dodd, Reicke,
Beasley-Murray, Hengel, Pederson, and others that show that a
position of vaticina ex eventu for the fall of Jerusalem in the
Synoptics is not possible.
Response to David:
Uncritical Theories
One of the reasons scholars have long tended to date the Gospels post 70 CE is that their picture does in fact reflect various elements of the later 1st century period, and not that of the c.30 CE period. That said, one of the lines I have drawn for myself in responding to readers’ comments is that I will not take the trouble to offer arguments against claims that are radically—or even outlandishly—uncritical or apologetic, and which enjoy not the slightest support from even moderately liberal scholarship. Dating Matthew in the 30s as the first Gospel, suggesting that Paul knew Luke's Gospel, and claiming that the apocalypses of the Synoptics are “prophecies (of the fall of Jerusalem) before the event”—and well before the event—fall into that category. And I rather doubt (without checking) that all the scholars David mentions do in fact go so far as to declare that ‘prophecy after the fact’ for the fall of Jerusalem “is not possible”.
Please go ahead with your novel. Your work has been more instructive and important than anything I have read. Thank you.
Response to Jules:
The Jesus Puzzle Novel
The complete Jesus Puzzle novel is now posted on the site. See the “What’s New” file and the final section of the Home Page.
RFSet9
Mark writes:
I just want to say thank you for posting your ideas on the Internet. I am glad I found them. The theory that there was no historical Jesus has a greater explanatory power than all other views I have heard regarding who Jesus was.
Peter writes:
I'd like to send you a note of thanks for making your work public on the web. It's been nothing short of a "revelation" to me to see what a serious and questioning mind can do with the Jesus Puzzle. . . . Your work goes so much further than [other Internet pages] in providing a complete analysis of what so many people have felt for much of their lives. It's great to read an intellectual justification for this.
David writes:
Bravo. . . . Your imaginary conversation between Paul and a group of recent converts [Book and Article Reviews: Gregory C. Jenks' What Did Paul Know About Jesus?] was wonderful. It beautifully makes your point about the absurdity of the idea that in his writings Paul could simply ignore all aspects of the earthly life of the man he is preaching simply because he had "lost interest" in such details. The reactions of Paul's listeners to such a situation as you paint the scene were very believable. You have found a powerful tool to make your points.
Fernando writes:
Your web site provides a great wealth of information. I am
quite familiar with the contents of the bible, and I would
argue that it takes no genius to come up with a story to bring
a metaphysical being into the mortal realm. The level of detail
and character development included in the story in no way
represents evidence of an historical being.
Let the American born "Book of Mormon" serve as an example.
In a relatively very short time (from 1830 to the present), an
extensive story filled with hundreds of characters, anecdotes
and religious teachings was created, presented as "history" as
well as "another testament of Jesus Christ" and accepted by over
ten million individuals around the globe as true. All it needed
was a climate of religious diversity, compilations of scripture
from previous sources and enough imagination to create the story
of several groups of people migrating from ancient Palestine to
the American continent, guided by prophets.
The parallel is clear: some people in America were in need of
a spiritual "genesis" to call their own so they created a complex
mythology borrowing from existing material and creating some new.
Early Christian sects needed a real figure to attribute their
teachings to, and were quick to adopt the gospels as historical
documents. I commend your benevolent disposition to believe
that accepting midrash as fact was some sort of innocent mistake.
I, for one tend to believe otherwise: that the gospel tales served
the political purposes of early Christian bishops who, according
to Paul, were already arguing about doctrinal authority, supremacy,
etc.
Earl writes:
I am giving you a report on my experience with your novel. Let me say that I am enjoying it and think that you have done a very good job creating interest, suspense and human interest. I will be giving it to others. I find it fascinating and being an ex-Presbyterian clergyman people are a bit shocked to say the least.
Allan writes:
[On the Jesus Puzzle novel] Not bad; not bad at all. . . . A damn fine read.
Your new section on "The Sound of Silence" is an excellent
addition to an already impressive body of work and I'm looking
forward to further installments.
You say that modern scholars have come to believe that Paul
mostly worked in Christian communities that already existed, as
opposed to founding such communities. What is the basis for
such a belief? The existence of a far-flung Christian community
prior to Paul's missionary work would be hard to reconcile with
the idea that Christianity did not exist at all until the mid-30s.
How confident can we be about the dating of the "absolutely,
positively genuine" letters of Paul? Isn't it true that other
Christian writers do not attest to their existence until well
into the second century? A few scholars have suggested that
all of Paul's letters, even Romans, Corinthians, etc. are late
forgeries; do you think this idea is even worth taking seriously?
Response to Mike:
Did Paul Found Any Christian Communities? / Is Any of Paul Genuine?
In my earlier response to Victor [rfset3], I pointed out that Paul's own letters show that he did not bring the earliest expression of the faith to Damascus, Antioch, Ephesus and Rome. (This view has been expressed by a range of scholars, from Ernst Haenchen to Burton Mack.) If Christianity could be in Rome no later than the mid-40s (in Romans 15:23, Paul speaks of a congregation there "for many years" and Suetonius speaks of a sizeable number of Jews following "Chrestus" who were expelled by Claudius) this speaks of a movement which covered half the empire within little more than a decade after Jesus' presumed death, something that could not possibly have been accomplished by a few "dusty disciples" from Judea. The pre-Pauline hymns imbedded in Paul's letters (eg, Phil. 2:6-11) are sophisticated expressions of a very subtle belief system surrounding the figure of a divine Jesus; they are clearly the product of well-established communities. Such a state of affairs could hardly have been reached within a mere handful of years.
As for the question of the authenticity of the "genuine" Pauline letters, that is perhaps the biggest can of worms in New Testament research today, and most shy away from addressing it. In that, I would almost have to include myself. For without a core of relatively genuine Paul, we would have virtually nothing in which to anchor any firm deductions about the nature of earliest Christianity. The ground is insecure enough as it is. My main objection to theories which advocate that all the Pauline letters are 2nd century products, with perhaps a few traces of authentic material imbedded in them, is that such 2nd century products—at least some of them—would surely show a few features of the developing historical Jesus. Yet there are virtually none. The picture throughout Paul and pseudo-Paul is of a movement which worships a divine, heavenly Son and is driven entirely by revelation and the Spirit, with no sign of an historical Jesus of Nazareth. I find it difficult to envision a 2nd century scenario in which such a picture would be consistently created by several 'forgers' in several places over a period of decades. (The possibility that the entire corpus is the product of one source would contradict the very features of variety and incompatibility which lead to the theory of 'inauthenticity' in the first place). Those rejecting a genuine Paul—and their tradition of criticism is a long and honorable one going back into the 19th century—have presented some very telling arguments against the standard picture of Pauline authenticity, but overall their position seems to create as many problems as it solves. On this subject, however, I am keeping an open mind, and I am quite willing to accept a certain amount of interpolation and reworking by later editors.
There are indications within 1 Clement and Ignatius of Antioch that these writers are familiar with the most prominent letters of Paul, namely 1 Corinthians and Romans. Consequently, the theory against Pauline authenticity requires that these writings, too, are to be dated later than they usually are (1 Clement around 96, Ignatius around 110). That, too, is a thorny affair, and I have difficulty in pushing some of the content of both those writers into the mid-2nd century, as is sometimes proposed.
[I’ll give you an idea of the abyss that yawns beneath our feet if we lose an authentic Paul. Galatians is probably our most valuable document for providing a picture of the initial phase of Christianity in the early part of the first century. Chapters 1 and 2 reveal a group of apostles and “brothers” in Jerusalem around the figures of James and Peter. We see the issues of table fellowship and circumcision, within the whole question of the applicability of the Jewish Law to gentile converts, as crucial to the new movement, and we get a glimpse of the so-called Jerusalem conference which tried to settle these matters. We also get a sense of the relationship between the independent-minded Paul and the Jerusalem group, and how they have divided up—under God’s direction—the preaching market of Jew and gentile.
Galatians portrays a Jerusalem community with an influential James at its head. Later (and thus less than reliable) tradition made James a key figure in the post-Easter birth of the faith, even if in Acts his role is somewhat reduced in order to bring Peter and Paul into the spotlight. Acts as an historical document is highly unreliable, and is increasingly being dated in the 2nd century, a tendentious document written to serve the interests of the growing church at Rome; its unsolvable contradictions with the so-called genuine Pauline letters are notorious. Still, Acts seems to corroborate, in general principle, the picture in Galatians of the prominent position and influence of James the Just, giving us a Christian movement—whether it had an historical Jesus or not—which began some time around the third or fourth decade of the first century, with James as its leader.
But what of James in the Gospels? He is a bare name in Mark 6:3, in the list of Jesus’ brothers. There isn’t a hint anywhere in the Gospels that James was to have a role in the post-Easter faith. If we lose Galatians, along with 1 Corinthians 15 (and the rest of the Pauline corpus), as authentic to the mid-first century, we lose any primary evidence not only for James in a Christian role but even the existence of a seminal Christian community in Jerusalem in the early part of the century. The Gospels cannot safely witness even to the latter point, since their picture of a movement centered on Jesus’ life and death is a midrashic creation that is reflective of their own time and needs, with scarcely a scrap of historically reliable content. Since the Gospels do not show up in the wider record until the time of Justin Martyr in the 150s (pointing to later dates of composition than are usually given them), any firm “witness” to a Christianity as early as the 30s of the first century is highly problematic.
But the real crunch comes with Josephus. The famous Antiquities 20 passage about James’ death has been put under a microscope in regard to its reference to “the brother of Jesus, him called (the) Christ.” I have shown good reason (see Article No. 10: Josephus Unbound) to suspect that phrase as a later Christian addition, but about James himself, consider what Josephus does and does not say. He makes no identification of James with a Christian movement, much less as its head. If James had been operating in Jerusalem in that capacity for three decades, how could Josephus not know and remark on this (rather than identify him by his brother)? How could James, as Christian leader, be so well regarded by highly placed Jews that they were incensed at his murder and agitated—successfully—for the very removal of the High Priest? Why, if the report by Hegesippus in Eusebius is accurate (though Crossan calls it “overenthusiastic”), would James be allowed into the very sanctuary of the Temple? These things hardly support any view of James as the most prominent Christian of his time. With Galatians and the rest of Paul relegated to the second century, the picture in Josephus would come close to spelling the death knell (as far as firm evidence goes) of James as head of the church, along with perhaps the entire existence of early first century Christianity!
However, we must always be courageous enough to go wherever the evidence leads us.]
How does the fact that Josephus and other early Jewish and Roman historians ignore or seem to be oblivious of Paul and his ministry fit into the puzzle? Since they fail to mention Jesus (to any reliable depth that would confirm his existence) it would follow that their failure to mention Paul would be categorically of the same value. No confirmation of the historical Paul. In this sense, Paul becomes more mysterious than Jesus.
Response to John:
Silence on Paul = No Paul?
There are a number of key differences here. We have no writings from Jesus whereas we do from Paul. (That is, ostensibly, in view of the previous response!) Second, Paul was only one of many apostles tramping the empire preaching one form of savior or another, even one form of Jesus or another. Though he looms large to later Christianity, he might at the time have cut no sharper a figure to an outsider's eye than did Apollos of Alexandria, and we wouldn't think to remark on Josephus' silence on him. Even the movement Paul was a part of, since it fitted generally into the Logos-style philosophy which constituted part of the background noise of the period, may not have struck someone like Josephus as worth mentioning. To him Christianity (if he were even aware of it) would have been a bit of a lunatic fringe and hardly to be ranked with the "sects of the Jews." Finally, even though Paul is now thought not to have had the widespread influence that used to be accorded him, he is witnessed to in the early Christian record (assuming we have one) almost immediately after he worked and at regular intervals from then on.
It's probably true to say that the impulse to invent an historical Paul would not be as strong as the one which produced an historical Jesus. However, even at the best of times, the record is mercurial. I would probably want to hedge my bet on an historical Paul, or at least on the one who is portrayed in the "genuine" epistles. It will be interesting to see what the Jesus Seminar comes up with in their new focus on Paul and his letters.
Once again I want to compliment you on your website.
Every time I look, I find more interesting material there. The
"no historical Jesus" theory explains a lot of things that are
otherwise mysterious. It seems that many New Testament scholars
have come to the same conclusion, but are still too afraid to
come right out and say so. I admire your courage.
I have a question about the Gospel of John. Because of what
traditional scholars call its "fully-developed Christology," the
fourth gospel is usually thought of as a later writing, the
product of decades of solemn reflection on the salvific meaning
of Christ. Yet as you and others have shown, the spiritual,
"cosmic" conception of Christ actually preceded the more human
representations we see in the Synoptic Gospels. Could it be
that John was composed before the other three? You seem to
accept the traditional view that the final version of John was
written after (and perhaps in response to) Mark. But what if
John's gospel represents an intermediate stage in the
historicization process? Although Jesus is a flesh and blood
human in John, as you say he does little more than make cryptic
pronouncements about himself. Even the miracles have a dreamy,
symbolic quality about them. In the transition from the purely
spiritual Jesus of Paul to the more human Jesus of Mark, wouldn't
we expect to see a stage where Jesus is human but lacks a human
personality? To make a bad pun, could John's gospel represent
a stage where the complete details had yet to be fleshed out?
Response to John A.:
Positioning the Gospel of John
Helmut Koester [Ancient Christian Gospels, p.267, and his remark in History and Development of Mark's Gospel, p.63], seconded by others, has suggested that John as we have it is the product of three to five layers of redaction, spread over a considerable period of time. Agreement as to the sequence of those layers is nowhere near being achieved. As I say in my Book Review of John Dominic Crossan's The Birth of Christianity, something approaching consensus is only now being reached in regard to John's Passion story as ultimately dependent on Mark or some Synoptic source. So it would be a little difficult to speak in terms of "John" as located at a single given position in the overall development of the Gospels.
I would still tend to regard all of the 'historical Jesus' aspects of John's Gospel as post-Synoptic, and thus one could not speak of John being composed before the others. I see much of the material in the Discourses and those "cryptic pronouncements" Jesus makes about himself, as representing a pre-historical Jesus stage of thinking, ideas which were probably in the form of a written document of some sort. (How this relates to, or is derived from, an earlier phase of the Johannine circle, as represented by the first and second epistles of John, is not clearly definable: see the final section of my Supplementary Article No. 2: A Solution to the First Epistle of John.) This material represents how the community viewed the spiritual "Revealer" Son it believed in. Only when it encountered the historical Jesus embodied in the Synoptic Gospels did it adopt such a figure and adapt the earlier material to him within John's heavily revised Synoptic story. (Somewhere in there, an existing set of miracle stories was adapted and linked to Jesus' 'teaching' about himself, miracles rather different, for the most part, from those found in the Synoptics.)
This adaptation put declarations about a spiritual Son who was an object of faith, into the mouth of his preaching incarnation on earth, which is why they sound so bizarre in that latter context. I would say that it is this very artificial melding of incompatible elements which creates the "lack of a human personality" for Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, together with the evangelist's determination not to give Jesus any human weaknesses, especially in regard to his version of the Passion. Jesus is in control throughout, scarcely suffers, and is certainly not allowed to express any doubts about his mission—which is why Gethsemane and Mark's cry from the cross ended up on the cutting room floor.
Robert Fortna (The Fourth Gospel and Its Predecessor, p.216) does not agree with the view that John is loosely derived from a Synoptic source, since this fails to explain John's distinctive theology, and so he postulates separate sources. But my view of the distinctive material in John as the earliest layer—a pre-human Jesus one—would get around this, and in any case, Fortna represents an older tendency to regard distinctive material as always having to come from outside "sources" rather than seeing it as the original product of the author or community which introduces it.
Just when the Prologue was fitted into the mix is difficult to say. This "Logos hymn," as some have called it, may even have had a previous existence in a non-Jesus context, and got adapted and tacked on at a late stage. It's pretty clear that the references to John the Baptist (1:6-9 and 15) have been crudely inserted into an already existing Logos piece, and perhaps the final part of verse 14, which speaks of an incarnation in flesh. (See Howard M. Teeple's analysis of the Prologue in The Literary Origins of John's Gospel, in which he surveys other scholars' views on the subject.)
I agree in part with what you are saying, but tend to think that Jesus did exist as a person, but not in the form we are taught through the Gospels. It is a fact that Caiaphas lived, there are his writings in existence, and his tomb was also found not so long ago. Also there are Pilate's letters. This proves that at least two people mentioned in the Gospels did actually exist, so why then not Jesus?
Response to Helen:
Letters by Caiaphas and Pilate / Historical Fallacies
It is surprising how many make an appeal to this kind of fallacious argument. (By the way, I am not sure what writings of Caiaphas still exist, and the only letters of Pilate I've ever seen are the blatant forgeries mentioned by Tertullian at the end of the 2nd century: see my earlier Response to Jeff.)
To illustrate my point about fallacious argument, I will quote from a debate I engaged in last year on the "Crosstalk" listserver with a member of the Jesus Seminar, whom I will refer to as "M":
M. enumerates 4 points as an "argument for the historicity
of Jesus' crucifixion under Pilate." These are the first three:
1. Pontius Pilate was really governor of Roman occupied Judea.
2. He had a reputation for swift violent action to prevent insurrections.
3. Crucifixion was a Roman means of torture and execution designed to terrify
subject peoples and punish insurrections.
I fail to see how this historical data contributes to the argument for the veracity of the Gospel crucifixion. It may argue for "crucifixions" per se by Pilate. It does not prove that one took place involving an historical Jesus. Here and elsewhere, M. seems to be claiming that because the Gospels have incorporated these background features which can be shown to be accurate, this makes the story line in all its respects automatically true.
Every good historical novelist provides, as much as possible, an accurate and realistic setting for his story. This accuracy and realism prove nothing other than the novelist's competence. If I set a novel with fictitious characters during WW2 and have the hero executed by an historically accurate Adolf Hitler, should someone come along later and declare my hero to have been historical? Mark and the other evangelists may very well have drawn on Josephus for some of their historical settings and the features they gave to their characters, but this proves nothing about the historicity of the interrogation and crucifixion of Jesus. And all of the Gospel writers adopting the same attitude toward Pilate, trying to absolve him of responsibility for the crucifixion, signifies nothing if they are all copying the one who first devised that plot line.
M.'s 4th point states: All the gospels try to obscure
these facts (nos. 1 to 3) by:
(a) reporting that Jews demanded Jesus' crucifixion &
(b) reporting that Pilate tried to release Jesus but crucified him to pacify
the Jews.
I assume that M.'s point here is that the evangelists are portraying Pilate in a manner which runs counter to his known behavior, but what does this prove? First of all, his No. 4 is readily explainable as a plot device which serves the evangelists' own agendas, especially their desire to demonize the Jews. It cannot be used as evidence that the story line is true. In fact, M. has set up another contradiction here, in that he has offered certain historical data about Pilate (Nos. 1 to 3) as a means of proving the historicity of the Gospels, and then turned around and argued (No. 4) for that historicity on the grounds that the Gospels do NOT conform to that very data.
Indeed, the very fact that the evangelists' portrayal runs so counter to what we know about Pilate very much argues against the historicity of that portrayal (M. seems willing to admit this), placing the fundamental reliability of the evangelists under the deepest suspicion. Such a state of affairs hardly encourages one to rely on the historicity of the crucifixion of Jesus under Pilate, when these writers are the sole "witnesses" to such an event for almost a century after it supposedly took place.
I find you to be an extraordinarily gifted writer with great talent for polemics. Like Erik Fromm, in the domain of psychoanalysis, you will win the day with skillful argument; and I do believe that you exercise an honest mind. It is tragic that so many great scholars lose their way when entering the misty, gray arena of intellectualism. And religious philosophy is surely the most seductive of all disciplines, charming pride with ineffable ease. When humility is lost, so goes the truth. Thomas Payne and Voltaire, while on their deathbed, are examples of the victim this folly makes. I pray you will find time to look at your marvelous writing, as a child would, and see beneath your awesome learning the fatal error of not recognizing the paradox: Josephus' human frailty with its imperfection so clearly supports an historical Jesus.
Response to Gerard:
Josephus and Punch Lines
Hmmm. . .this is a remarkably crafted transition from praise to condemnation, its progression almost imperceptible. The punch line strikes me, however, as failing to do justice to the quality of the build-up. In any case, I would deny that Josephus, frail or otherwise, clearly supports an historical Jesus, and I would refer Gerard to my Supplementary Article No. 10: Josephus Unbound: Reopening the Josephus Question.
Paul writes:
I can't thank you enough for the clarity, incisiveness, and originality of your writings. You have wonderfully articulated the doubts many of us have developed over the years. [Note: Paul had some interesting observations to make about the Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus, but as I could not get needed clarification from him on an important point, I am unable to comment on them.]
Great site. I have always questioned the concept of the
mythological Jesus. . . . It is very refreshing to realize I am
not alone, and my doubts are not evil.
P.S. I remember a reference to a character named "oblio",
a round head surrounded by pointed heads. I didn't think this
was related to your name [in the URL] but had to ask.
Response to Rebecca:
Round and Pointed Heads
Yes, "oblio" (which I inherited from a like-minded colleague) does indeed refer to the character in a very long and amusing 'song' by Harry Nilsson, called "The Point." It was recorded some time in the 1970s, if I recall correctly. Oblio, with his round head, was expelled from a community of pointed ones. An allegory, no doubt.
RFSet10
Tony writes:
Thank you so much for your site, and the intense research
you must have put into this work. I came to the same
conclusion, just from reading the Bible. I never knew that
this information was out there to support my views. Again,
I salute you for your great work.
Tom writes:
I somehow stumbled upon your “The Jesus Puzzle” site.
This is mind boggling. The research appears exhaustive
and systematic. This is the first I have been aware of
credible-appearing scholarship from the angle of a possibly
non-existent historical Jesus.
Scott writes:
Thanks for putting your paper on the net. I think you
are absolutely right. I was raised Christian and something
always struck me as strange about the way Paul said stuff,
but I could never put my finger on it.
Etinger writes:
I believe that your whole website has been inspired by
Satan. The scholarship isn’t even accurate. There are many
logical flaws. For example you said that the Gospel writers
had Jesus teach on the Old Testament Law, however there
are so many things that Jesus did not teach on which were
far more important than the things he did speak on, such as
circumcision. Anyway, I won’t waste my time.
In one of the Gospels Jesus is quoted as telling some
of his followers that they would still be alive at the time
of his glorious return on the clouds. If this Gospel was
written in the second century, wouldn’t that have appeared
to all who read it as a false prophecy, since nobody from
c.33 CE would have been alive at that time? Could this
indicate that the Synoptics had to be written within 40 to
50 years after the supposed time of the crucifixion?
Response to Abe:
“The present generation will live to see it all. . .”
My view of the Gospel of Mark is that it was written as a piece of symbolism and midrash. The pre-passion ministry of Jesus represented the beliefs and activities of the preaching community of which Mark was a part, while the passion story, constructed in midrashic fashion out of passages from scripture, gave a new significance to the traditional tale of the Suffering Righteous One. Mark and his initial audience would have known that the Gospel was symbolic and that its central character Jesus of Nazareth served partly as an allegory of the life of the community itself. Consequently, Jesus’ ‘prediction’ represented the predictions that were being made at the time the Gospel was written, and thus the problem of fulfilment would only have arisen a generation or two after the writing of Mark.
One might ask how those who started to view the Gospel story as historical (sometime in the first half of the second century) felt about the inordinate lapse of time following Jesus’ supposed prediction. No doubt they found ways to rationalize it, just as believers over the centuries since then have been forced to do so. Papias, by the way, a bishop of Hierapolis some time in the 130s or 140s, is reported to have claimed that those raised from the dead by Jesus survived into the reign of the emperor Hadrian (117-138), so perhaps the Gospel of Mark could safely have been written even well into the second century!
However, I do not date Mark in the second century, but prefer a date around 85-90. (My new book, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin With a Mythical Christ? discusses these matters at length, including the question of the dating of Mark.)
I think your research is remarkable, but there seems
to be two questions that ought to be resolved:
(1) Why would the first gospel (Mark) portray Jesus only
as a great prophet, and the last canonical gospel (John)
portray him in line with the supposedly original, cosmic
savior-god concept? Isn’t this the reverse of what we
would expect from your theory?
(2) Why didn’t pagan and Jewish opponents of Christianity
dispute Jesus’ historicity?
Response to Robert:
Mark’s Jesus as merely a Prophet / No Pagan Mythicists
The previous response to Abe goes part way toward answering Robert’s first question. This has always seemed a perplexing point, in that the cultic Christ’s line of development begins at the highest point of divinity (in the epistles) and moves toward an earthly figure, whereas the Gospel Jesus begins near the opposite end of the spectrum and moves in a reverse direction, toward the Jesus-as-God declarations of Councils like Nicaea.
The explanation is that these two expressions began from distinct phenomena—in fact, from the two separate elements which went into the composite entity which Christianity became. The epistles represent belief in an intermediary, redeeming divinity who had nothing to do with an earthly career, whereas the Gospel of Mark grew out of the Galilean kingdom-preaching movement, also represented by the Q document.
Mark’s Jesus of Nazareth, in the pre-passion part of the Gospel, was essentially a representation of the Markan community’s own activities: prophetic, teaching, miracle-working. Any divinity for Mark’s Jesus is muted, depending on how one interprets such features as God’s reference to Jesus as his “Son” (Mk. 1:11), the demons’ reference to Jesus as the “Son of God” (3:11), or the centurion’s faith statement in 15:39 (“this man truly was [a] Son of God”). Thus, the human dimensions of the Gospel Jesus predominate in the picture Mark has created.
On the other hand, the death and resurrection, and the intimations of an atonement doctrine (10:45) seem to suggest that Mark is also allegorizing the cultic figure of Paul’s “Christ Jesus” who underwent a redeeming death and rising in the supernatural world. That Mark subscribes to some concept of a spiritual, intermediary “Son” seems evident from 13:32: “But about that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, not even the Son; only the Father.” And identifying Jesus with the End-time Son of Man (although just how this apocalyptic figure was viewed by the Markan and Q communities in regard to a divine nature is not sure) renders the character of Jesus of Nazareth more than a simple human prophet.
Jesus in the Gospel of John gives the impression of being a ‘progression’ on the Synoptic Jesus for two reasons. One is the Logos hymn which was attached to the beginning of the Gospel, probably at a late stage of redaction in the middle of the second century. This Prologue reflects the pervasive philosophical thinking in that period about “the Logos/Son,” as encountered in the apologists. The other is the fact that the Johannine community seems originally to have been based on a heavenly, mystical “Revealer Son” (the ‘teachings’ placed in Jesus’ mouth about himself as found in the Gospel) who was regarded as the spiritual channel to saving knowledge of the Father. The Johannine community was a sectarian entity (located in Syria) which was distinct from the Galilean kingdom movement. When the Synoptic story of Jesus of Nazareth was grafted onto the Johannine faith in this Revealer Son, sometime in the first half of the second century, it was not allowed to submerge the characteristics of that spiritual figure, and thus the Jesus of John seems more ‘cosmic’ and divine than the Markan one.
The simple answer to Robert’s second question is that no pagan or Jewish opponents of Christianity, by the time Christians were declaring their belief in an historical founding figure, would have been in a position to disprove his historicity. This would have been close to a century after the ‘fact,’ following a particularly disruptive period of Palestinian history, including one and eventually two catastrophic Jewish Wars. What records or memories would have existed to be drawn upon to make such a case? And if such a disputation was put forward, it would simply have been ignored and would not have survived in any written record. What does survive is the record within Christianity itself that some disagreed with the declaration that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” (See also next response.) 1 John 4 labels such views “Antichrist,” and Ignatius of Antioch fulminates against those who do not preach a Jesus born of Mary who died under Pontius Pilate, calling them “beasts in the form of men.” If Christians, excited about a new founder figure who was said to have undergone the experiences told of in the Gospels, rejected even opposing views by fellow-Christians, how much attention would they have given to objections voiced by pagans or Jews?
Congratulations on your site which I appreciate for its
scholarship and your clear and courteous replies. After
following the historical quest and reading Crossan, Mack
and Spong I consider your conclusions to be more plausible.
Could you answer some queries. . . .
Response to John:
Docetists in 1 John and Ignatius / Gnostic vs. Orthodox / Rival Apostles / en sarki
1. You mention the references in 1 John and Ignatius to those who disbelieve the incarnated Jesus are not references to docetists. What are the arguments?
In 1 John 4:1-3 (paralleled by 2 John 7-8), reference is made to those who do not confess that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” The spirit that motivates these “false prophets” is not from God, says the writer, but rather from the predicted “antichrist.” In other words, these competing claims are the product of perceived inspiration, a concept that usually relates to the interpretation of scripture. Docetic positions are not generally presented as justified by scripture, they are philosophical positions about the inability of true divinity to enter the world of matter and human flesh.
The discussion in 1 John 4 is not conducted along anti-docetic lines; no arguments of that sort are found anywhere in the epistle. Perhaps recognizing this, few commentators actually interpret this issue as a docetic one. J. H. Houlden (First Epistle of John, p.107) says that “the view being refuted is that because Jesus was human, he could not have been wholly one with the Messiah, for man’s ‘Savior’ must be a purely spiritual, quasi-angelic being.” What part of the epistle’s text Houlden draws this interpretation from is not immediately clear. Kenneth Grayston (The Johannine Epistles, p.121) openly denies any docetic content: “The implied contrast [between the two spirits] is not between a Christ who came in the flesh and a Christ who was present in appearance only, but between accepting Jesus as both Christ and Son of God and discarding Jesus for the benefits of the Spirit.” This, again, seems more a personal interpretation by Grayston than anything said by the epistle writer. R. E. Brown (The Epistles of John, Anchor Bible 30, p.492-4), after analyzing three possible ways of translating the key phrase, concludes: “The import of that [his preferred] translation is to put emphasis on the person modally understood: there is no separation between “Jesus” and “Christ,” and the individual involved must be understood in terms of his career in “flesh.”
All of these analyses seem to owe more to 20th century theological creativity than to the actual content of the passage, which appears on the surface to refer to a dispute over whether Christ actually entered the material world of flesh. Admittedly, there is little to go on even for the latter interpretation other than the words themselves, but at least it is recognized by most scholars that the issue is not about docetism.
With Ignatius, the matter is a little different, since the bishop of Antioch deals in his series of letters with two separate issues: one (represented by passages like Trallians 9), that Jesus was a man of David’s line, born of Mary, crucified by Pilate, a biography some are said to be denying; the other (in passages like Trallians 10), that “his sufferings were genuine” and that “he had a real human body.” The latter is, of course, a docetic issue. This was a time when Cerinthus and other early gnostics were said to be operating, although the docetic position Ignatius is countering is not of the reputed Cerinthus variety.
I deal with the question of Ignatius and docetism at length in Appendix 3 of my new book, but I will quote here a couple of paragraphs from that discussion:
“But there are problems with such an interpretation [a docetic one] of passages like Trallians 9. First of all, the net is cast too broadly. William R. Schoedel (Ignatius of Antioch, p.124-5), while deciding that Ignatius’ opponents are docetists, recognizes that such passages suggest that ‘Ignatius had in mind a denial of the passion more thoroughgoing than our argument has so far indicated.’ He acknowledges that what some seem to deny ‘is the very reality of Christ’s death,’ and thus of the incarnation. The opposing view offers not simply a docetic Christ, it offers something which gives Christ ‘no place in our lives’ (Epistle to the Magnesians 9:2). . . .
“This [Magnesians 11:1] is not an exhortation to reject a docetic interpretation of things. Schoedel admits it is ‘relatively anemic as an anti-docetic statement.’ Rather, Ignatius is making a firm declaration that such events did indeed happen. In the Trallians passage earlier, the bishop of Antioch wants Christians to ‘close their ears’ to anyone who has no historical Jesus to preach, not just to the one who preaches that Jesus of Nazareth did not genuinely suffer. And why are Mary and Pilate so prominently included as part of this ‘anti-docetic’ net? Such figures would be accepted even by docetists. . . .
“On the other hand, we do find passages in Ignatius which specifically address a docetic position, but they are separate from the more sweeping arguments about the historicity of Jesus. . . . The milieu in which Jesus of Nazareth was emerging into history included many who resisted it, some with outright denial. (See 1 John 4:1f, where certain ‘spirits’ labeled Antichrist deny that ‘Jesus Christ has come in the flesh,’ while 2 John 7 condemns a similar denial.) But that milieu also included some who preferred an incarnated Jesus who had not been a true human being. This latter view was the direction followed by the gnostics. . . .”
2. You state “. . . a form of Christian faith . . . gnosticism clearly preceded the establishment of orthodox beliefs.” It is my understanding that gnosticism, like Christianity, resulted from the melding of Greek thought and Jewish religion (specifically Platonic philosophy and Genesis) and was a separate strand from the sacrifice story of the Christ cult of Paul. What reference is there to it clearly preceding orthodox Christianity?
I don’t know the context of the statement you quote (which shows that even I need an Index to my site!) but I would not have made such a sweeping, unqualified claim. Rather, such a situation would apply only in certain areas, like Egypt and parts of Syria. That is, the record shows that gnostic forms of belief were in evidence in such locations before those which later became “orthodox.” The classic and groundbreaking presentation of such evidence is, of course, Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity.
3. Do you have any thoughts on who are the adversaries that Paul, etc., are referring to in polemics as follows: super apostles (2 Cor. 11), devoted to myths and genealogies (1 Tim. 1:3-4), deny Jesus Christ, dreamers . . . slander celestial beings (Jude 1:8)?
Judgments as to who the various unnamed apostles referred to by Paul in his letters, as well as those condemned by other epistle writers, usually revolves around what relationship they may have had to the Jerusalem apostles around Peter and James, and how they would best fit in with the orthodox picture of an apostolic Christian movement proceeding out of Jerusalem in response to Jesus’ death and resurrection. My position is that there was no such centralized apostolic movement, and that the apostles Paul encounters in the field (usually rivals) are much like himself, men who are convinced they have been called by God through the Spirit to go out and preach salvation through belief in a redeeming Son and Christ. Where they actually come from is anyone’s guess. The “super-apostles” of 2 Corinthians 11:5, whom Paul goes on to call “sham-apostles, crooked in all their practices, masquerading as apostles of Christ” (11:13), cannot be equated with the Jerusalem apostles, since Paul would never vilify or reject the latter to that extent. Other references in the epistles, such as John itemizes, are probably to groups within believing communities who have been exposed to different doctrines and traditions. Commentators often speculate as to their identity, but usually end up simply labeling them according to the quoted doctrines or practices they hold. This does not go very far toward answering the question, or providing us with a proper picture of the whole Christian phenomenon. For my own view of the apostolic movement of which Paul was a part, see my Supplementary Article No. 1: Apollos of Alexandria and the Early Christian Apostolate.
4. Are there any other references in ancient literature for the phrase ‘en sarki’ similar to Paul’s use of it (ie, ‘in the realm of flesh, first heaven’)?
Unfortunately, none I am aware of. Julian the Apostate speaks of the god approaching “matter” or operating within certain layers of the universe which occupy an intermediate level between the changing and the unchanging (Appendix 6 in my new book discusses at some length the question of the location of the myths of the savior gods), but he does not employ the word “flesh” (sarx) in this connection. Contemporary with the beginnings of Christianity, writings about the savior gods are virtually non-existent, as the devotees were sworn to secrecy about the rites and their significance. In any case, such writings would probably not have survived once Christianity became predominant and the mysteries were driven into extinction.
I would like to congratulate you on your “The Jesus Puzzle”
homepage. I had always taken for granted that there had to be
an historical Jesus of some sort, and that the church and the
Roman state had managed to suppress unpleasant historical
evidence. I must say that your version is more convincing.
I read Paul’s letters and the one to the Hebrews again, and
it really became quite clear.
Could you tell me whether later non-Christians who analyzed
Gospel Christianity deeply could also be aware of what you
described? For instance, the emperor Julian, who was well
versed in Neoplatonism and the New Testament, could have
reached the same conclusions by reading Paul’s letters. Is
there any evidence of that?
Response to Peter:
Julian the Apostate as New Testament Exegete?
How much of the New Testament Julian had studied I don’t know, and whether from reading Paul’s letters he could have reached the conclusion that no Jesus had existed is difficult to say. The mythicist conclusion is to a great extent dependent on modern exegetical techniques and on such things as an understanding of Q. One might argue that Paul’s silences on the Gospel Jesus and his portrayal of Christ as an entirely spiritual being could have led to a suspicion in the mind of someone like Julian that he was speaking of an exclusively heavenly figure, but there is no evidence, as far as I know, that Julian attempted that kind of critical analysis of the New Testament record.
Doesn’t it seem surprising that Christians of today argue
that the apostle Paul had no need or desire to mention the
acts or words of Jesus? I have no knowledge of any preacher
of any Christian faith today that dismisses the deeds of their
savior to the level Paul did. Since modern Christians accept
the Gospel narrations as true, they refer to them often as the
canon of the teachings of their master. It would be almost
unthinkable for a preacher / pastor / bishop / elder, etc. not
to mention Jesus’ life and teachings while explaining their
faith, especially to non-Christians. Indeed, there seems to be
a debate as to which is the “most Christian” among Christian
churches, with the deciding factor being how much their
respective doctrines rely on the Gospels, or “Jesus’ own words,”
as opposed to other sources. Paul would do poorly today as a
Christian preacher.
To use the founder of Mormonism as an example, Joseph
Smith’s conversion story was told and retold by all his
successors. Church members tell it to each other over and
over again, even though they all know it very well. They
visit and honor the places where he prayed or taught. If you
ask any Mormon about their faith, you will be told about
Joseph as a young boy wanting to know the truth, how he
prayed in the spring of 1830, how he organized the church,
what he taught, what he wrote, his persecutions and his
death at the hands of an angry mob. His public life was very
short, with very few followers at first, and yet, there is a
vast amount of data available about him. There are portraits
and engravings painted by peers, manuscripts with his original
writings, transcripts of his teachings, biographies, anecdotes,
etc., etc. All this information was produced by both apologists
and detractors, as well as by impartial observers.
How much more should early Christians have told and retold
the doings and sayings of the Son of God come to earth? It
defies reason that they would only mention sporadically that he
was “crucified for us.” If Paul’s readers thought he was talking
about a recently living person they would have wanted more
information about that all-important event. If Jesus did so
many things that “the world could not contain all the books that
should be written” (John 21:25), how come the books that there
are amount to so little?
Obviously my intent with this letter is not to preach to
the choir, and your brilliant articles do a much better job
than my passing comments at defending your theory. I guess it
just feels good to add my opinion to the pot. Thanks and keep
up the good work.
Response to John:
The Silence on Jesus the Man in Early Christianity
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Observations like yours show that the argument from silence is indeed a compelling one. It cannot be dismissed with the disdain usually accorded it by those unwilling or unable to face the overwhelming implications of the void on the human Jesus found in the early Christian record.
After reading Crossan and your review [of Crossan’s recent
The Birth of Christianity], and being amazed at the
speed with which Crucifixion-and-Resurrection Christianity
expanded, I’ve been wondering if Pauline sect(s) could have
existed in Jerusalem prior to 30 CE, perhaps as early as 10-20.
I know of no evidence of such early beginnings, but will the
idea stand up as an hypothesis? Do we have any information
which would contradict it?
Response to Tom:
When did Christianity Start?
If Galatians is basically a reliable document, we can date Paul’s ‘conversion’ to the early 30s CE. Everything Paul says leads us to assume that he was converted to a faith movement which already held the beliefs he adopted. In other words, Paul did not invent the Christ cult, though he no doubt brought some of his own thinking to it. How long was “Christ belief” in existence before that? The sectarian community around Peter and James existed in Jerusalem, though the cult seems to have been more widespread. Paul refers to it as “the churches of Judea in Christ” (Gal. 1:22) and he is later active in places like Antioch (Gal. 2:11) which already have established congregations, though we don’t know for how long. The same is true of Damascus (Gal. 1:17, 2 Cor. 13:32), which had a persecuted Christian community—if Acts can be relied upon here—before Paul’s conversion.
Persecution by the religious authorities implies a community well-established and widespread, which could well indicate that the cultic Christ movement was at least a couple of decades old. But we have no firm evidence. A pre-Pauline ‘hymn’ like that quoted in Philippians 2:6-11 contains sophisticated theological concepts, again implying a movement that has been around long enough to develop such things. But there is no way of knowing how long before the writing of Philippians (presumably in the 50s) such a piece of liturgy was in circulation. That it goes back to pre-30 CE days is impossible to say.
One final observation: The “seeings” of the spiritual Christ recounted in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7 preceded Paul’s own vision (15:8), which may or may not be equated with his conversion experience. (I would tend to regard it as a post-conversion event.) But Paul’s comments do not suggest that the experiences of the others marked the inauguration of the sect or its belief in a spiritual Son (unlike my reading of Hebrews 2:3-4 or 1 John 1:1-4, which I see as prompting the beginning of these sects’ beliefs). Just when the group around Peter and James did form, and what were its original purposes and beliefs (“brethren in the Lord” may have referred to God and not to the Son/Christ) cannot now be uncovered. The development of a doctrine about the Son, within a group or groups formed to prepare for the Day of the Lord or to study the question of God’s salvation plans, may have taken place over time, to climax in a series of revelatory experiences, traditions about which ended up in 1 Corinthians 15. (See my Supplementary Article No. 7: Transfigured on the Holy Mountain: The Beginnings of Christianity for a fuller discussion of these questions.)
Where does the name [Jesus] come from? Philippians 2:9
says: “Therefore has God exalted him, and given him the name
that is above all names.” In the next verse (10) this name
seems to be the name Jesus. It seems to me that from this
text we may conclude that the name Jesus was given to him
after his death and exaltation. If this is correct, the myth
that Paul is quoting gives the name “Jesus” to Christ after
he had returned to heaven, meaning that it does not refer
to an historical person.
Response to Arne:
Philippians 2:6-11: Naming Jesus
You may be right. Literally, “Jesus” means “Yahweh Saves,” an ideal name for a savior god who was the Son of Yahweh and his agent of redemption. If the name “Jesus” was the name of a human man who came to be regarded as the pre-existent Son of God, it does not seem natural that the writer of this hymn would have declared it to be given to him only after death and to be “the name above all names.” However, if we regard the Son’s death and exaltation as the saving acts of a spiritual being who has just, by those acts, fulfilled his destiny and role in God’s plan, then that is the moment when the hymn writer might well conceive that such a name was bestowed upon him, the moment when he took on his full powers and received the obeisance of all the “knees and tongues” in the universe.
On the other hand, there is a way out of this problematic interpretation, and some scholars have taken it. The “Name” given to the one who died and was exalted may not be “Jesus,” but rather “Lord,” which appears in the final verse (2:11) of the hymn: “And every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” The point is at best ambiguous, although the repetition of the word “name” in verse 10 would suggest that “Jesus” is the name in mind in verse 9: “(9). . . and gave him the name that is above every name, (10)that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow.”
F. W. Beare (Epistle to the Philippians, p.83) regards the name in mind as “Lord,” as do others. Kenneth Grayston, if I understand him correctly (Letters of Paul to the Philippians and the Thessalonians, p.29), regards the name as “Jesus” but sees this as being a name of God; or, Grayston may be referring to the unspoken Name of God, the tetragrammaton, which is “the name above names,” implying that the hymn writer was saying that Jesus became fully associated with God only after his resurrection, a form of adoptionist christology. Such thinking, however, could have been applied to an entirely spiritual Son, an idea borne out by the opening verse, which says that this unnamed divine figure “did not seek to snatch at equality with God,” but rather achieved that equality through the process of descent/humiliation, death and exaltation.
Unfortunately, we know so little—which is to say, nothing—about the provenance of this hymn, who wrote it, where or when, the nature of the originating community and its thought, that almost any interpretation of any of its parts is possible.
To swing the argument back in Arne’s direction, I’ll quote from an article by Robert M. Price, Jesus Seminar member and co-editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism. In his “Was Jesus = John the Baptist Raised from the Dead?” he says:
“Now look at Philippians 2:6-11, where the redeemer figure is named only at the end, where we learn that he received the honorific name “Jesus” only upon his postmortem exaltation, something which Paul-Louis Couchoud pointed out long ago (“The Historicity of Jesus: A Reply to Alfred Loisy,” The Hibbert Journal, XXXVI, 2, 205-206). Note that according to the synthetic parallelism, “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow” matches “and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,” implying that “bowing the knee to” equals “confessing the lordship of.” The object of both is “Jesus.” This may seem to belabor the obvious except that it requires that the great name God gave him at the exaltation was not “Kyrios” [Lord] as harmonizing exegesis tells us, but rather “Jesus.” The hymn means to say not that a man already named Jesus was then given the title Lord, but that a hitherto-unnamed hero was then given the honorific name Jesus. Couchoud remarks, “The God-man does not receive the name Jesus until after his crucifixion. That alone, in my judgment, is fatal to the historicity of Jesus.”
PLEASE NOTE: I cannot reply to readers who do not supply at least a first name. Nor can I make use of an e-mail address which does not contain an identifiable name. I realize that sometimes leaving off a name may be an oversight, but if comments and objections are to be given the courtesy of a reply, that courtesy should also be extended by the reader in identifying him or herself.
RFSet11
Phil writes:
Having browsed your Jesus Puzzle site for a week or so now,
I feel compelled to send a mail congratulating you on your
excellent work. I especially enjoyed the novel which I have just
finished reading, finding it a pleasing mixture of scholarship
and action, with a little love interest thrown in for good measure. . . .
I think that the methods used in fundamentalist organizations
to convert people at such a young age are a terrible form of abuse.
While I feel that people have the right to follow the religion of
their choice, it is clearly wrong to indoctrinate children at an age
when they cannot make an informed choice for themselves.
The prospect of these extremists gaining political power in the
USA fills me with foreboding. However, the efforts of people such
as yourself to stimulate a logical and rational debate on the subject
of Christianity give me great hope.
Ron writes:
Bravo! I’ve been looking for the type of historical information
that you so well present most of my adult life. Although I was
brought up Christian, my experience is that most people of any
religion are not even willing to read historical fact for fear that
it might prove them wrong. Therefore, it’s essential that everything
be accepted on blind faith. And I’ve always been amused when told
that I would go to hell if I were not born again and accept Jesus
Christ as my personal savior.
Your research, no doubt, has taken many, many years. I thank
you for your work and I know that there must be many, many others
like me who feel the same. Unfortunately, as I’m sure you well know,
blind faith will likely prevail in our lifetimes.
David writes:
When Jesus comes to get his church you’ll find that it is no myth!!!! but so very true.
I have been reading the information on your site for a few days
now and must compliment you on the way you present your arguments
and the way you respond to readers’ objections and questions. With
such a highly controversial subject, it would be easy to insult those
who don’t agree with you. Your polite and informative responses
only strengthen your case.
One thing puzzles me, though. All these writings (which you, I
think rightly, interpret as showing no mention of Jesus of Nazareth)
have come to us through centuries of Christian censorship. Obviously
the Church doesn’t agree with your interpretation, or such writings
would not exist. Can you imagine the writings and arguments that
must have been destroyed by the Church in this time! Do you have
any evidence of such writings from sources that the Church was not
able to censor? Surely there must be some war of words between the
believers of Jesus of Nazareth and the believers of the writings of
Paul and the first century epistles. Are there no such documents
available? I would imagine the Jewish scribes would have made a
few barbed comments about these “new” religions fighting over the
existence / non-existence of their (false) prophet.
Response to Steve:
Ancient Disputes over Jesus’ Existence
The earliest record of a formal disputation over the factual nature of the Gospels (though not of Jesus’ existence itself) is Origen’s Contra Celsum, written in the early third century in answer to a lengthy work penned half a century earlier by the pagan writer Celsus, who was very antagonistic toward Christianity. About the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr, in his Dialogue with the Jew Trypho, deals with the antagonism and disputes current in his own day, as placed in the mouth of his (probably fictional) character, Trypho. A remark or two by Trypho might suggest that some views were being expressed in Justin’s time that the Christ of the Christians was an invention. A Christian apology written around the same time, Minucius Felix, rejects in no uncertain terms—when one is willing to accept the words for what they say—any belief that a crucified man was the origin of the faith (see “The Second Century Apologists” in my Main Articles).
Even earlier, probably in the last decade of the first century, the epistle 1 John (4:1f) gives evidence of a schism which seems to have arisen in this epistle’s community over whether “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” These, too, are words which are regularly made to say other than what they seem to be saying, namely that the dispute involved the question of whether or not the heavenly Christ had come to earth as a human man. And the letters of Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, early in the second century contain this writer’s condemnation of those who preach a Jesus who does not possess the ‘biography’ Ignatius himself puts forward: that Jesus was a man born of Mary, baptized by John the Baptist and executed by Pilate. However, we have no surviving record from those who might have made such challenges to the historicity of a human Jesus, whether Christian or non-Christian, pagan or Jewish.
Should this be surprising? As Steve suggests, there would have been little incentive to preserve such a writing. Almost everything which has come down to us from the ancient world passed through centuries of Christian scribal hands. (Celsus did not survive except as imbedded in Origen’s rebuttal.) Besides, by the time the idea of an historical Jesus was coming into vogue, perhaps a couple of decades or so into the second century (and that only in some circles), who would have been in a position to offer evidence or argument to the contrary? If some spoke up simply on the basis that this belief was not widespread at the time, or that they themselves had grown up in a faith which lacked traditions about such a founder, what would have been the response to them? We see it in that epistle 1 John and those letters of Ignatius: condemnation and ostracism. The bishop called them “beasts in the form of men.”
Once the Gospel picture was widely established, few if any pagans or Jews would have been in a position to discredit it, and any such lone voices would have gone unheeded. Not even Celsus possessed the tools or capacity to question the Gospel figure’s existence. As for Jewish writers, one has to remember that for the most part, they still lived within a Christian milieu, and not only were they subject like everyone else as time went on to the force of Christian beliefs about Christian origins, amendments are known to have been made during the Middle Ages by the Jews themselves to their own Talmuds, to ‘censor’ and adapt them under the threat of Christian persecution. It would have been unwise to preserve any “barbed comments” which early rabbis might have made over disputes concerning Jesus’ existence.
While it is clear to me that the “Jesus never lived” thesis is a hopeless cause from a modern secular historian’s perspective, I do think you raise some very interesting point regarding the pagan and “savior cult” influences into Christianity. . . .
Response to Greg:
Christianity: Jewish or Pagan? / Thallus & Phlegon / The Christian Record
Greg writes a long and somewhat complex letter, supplemented by further remarks in answer to a query I put to him, and I will have to select and paraphrase from its content as I make my own rather lengthy reply. He represents a type of respondent and interested Christian who is not particularly knowledgeable (I say this without implied disparagement) in the field of New Testament scholarship, especially its ‘liberal’ branch, and not a little reliant for his defense of Christian orthodoxy on dubious arguments and claims emanating from what can most courteously be described as the “conservative” side of things.
He raises the question of the fundamental nature of Christian concepts, alluding in the opening quote above to pagan and savior god influences. He goes on to allow that “the incorporation of pagan and mystical concepts into Christianity was pivotal in getting the gospel to peoples that espoused those beliefs,” as though this was a conscious ‘strategy’ on the part of early Christianity to spread the message. He goes on to say: “Do any fundamental doctrines of Christianity come from the pagan tradition? . . . Taken as a whole, Christianity is fundamentally a branch of Judaism . . . Is Christ a pagan ‘deification’ of a Jewish prophet? That is a troubling consideration and you address the issue in an interesting set of passages.”
Is this really a genuine assessment? There are two ways (or perhaps, degrees) of disputing this: one moderate, one more radical. The fully orthodox picture has always been to regard Christian beginnings in terms of a variety of Jews in Palestine responding to “a Jewish prophet,” casting him in patterns of traditional Jewish thinking (eg, Messiah expectation), with some innovative reworking, including rendering him divine. They then carried the message about him to both Jews and gentiles, meeting greater success with the latter. The assumption is that all the earliest apostles, including Paul, were Jews, that the Gospels grew out of their reminiscences, and that very little pagan/hellenistic influences were initially involved.
A few considerations disturb the serenity of this traditional picture. It is hard to support the idea that Greek influences were a later—perhaps deliberate—overlay on an essentially Jewish phenomenon, because the earliest record in the epistles presents a faith which is characterized by two things. First, a set of attitudes and beliefs toward the Jesus figure they preach which severely clashes with anything one could reasonably expect to find in a Jewish milieu of the time—certainly in any milieu resembling what could remotely be called “mainstream.” Elevating a rabbi and crucified criminal to the status of full Godhead, bestowing on him all the divine titles, making him the creative and sustaining force of the universe, etc., could hardly be further from the Jewish mentality and would hardly take root at the very center of Judaism, let alone rapidly convert Jews in places all over the empire as far as Rome within a handful of years.
Second, the nature of the faith in Jesus as Savior, as a mystical force with which the believer can be united, as an object of sacramental rituals, including the ceremonial eating of his flesh and drinking his blood, is in all its detail not only blatantly and blasphemously non-Jewish, it is cut from exactly the same cloth as the Greco-Roman mystery cults with their savior gods who also had death myths and sacred meals, who offered salvation, and to whom the initiates could be united in mystical ways. This is not an overlay; this is the very essence of the faith being preached in Paul’s letters and other parts of the early record. If Greg finds the idea of a “pagan deification of a Jewish prophet” troubling, what of the impossibility of such a religion arising within a Jewish milieu at all, forcing us to completely reevaluate the assumptions lying at the basis of that orthodox picture?
Which leads me to the “moderate/radical” distinction I made earlier. Since the elevation of a Jewish rabbi to the status of divine Son of the God of Abraham would have been so unprecedented and outlandish that the new faith (whoever might have first put it forward) would never have gotten off the ground, let alone spread so rapidly, and since the earliest record of the faith makes no mention of a genesis in a recent historical man, we can reinterpret Christian beginnings as the formation of a faith in yet another savior god who offered much the same basic features as its competitors—with one distinction. There were undeniably Jewish elements present in the mix. How to explain this situation?
One explanation is to regard Christianity’s originators as ‘non-mainstream’ Jews who were more open than most to pagan concepts, who could envision a “Son” of God whose nature conformed to the dominant philosophical expression of the era about intermediate heavenly forces between God and humanity, and whose saving role conformed to the dominant religious expression of the period, namely the mystery cults with their savior gods. In other words, to put it a bit colloquially, these were Jews who wanted in on the wider, hellenistic action. Paul, a Diaspora Jew presumably, would have been one such, along with members of the sect which formed in Jerusalem under Peter and James. A certain proportion of such people may have been gentiles who attached themselves to Jewish groups (a rather common occurrence at that time), but it was essentially a Jewish movement which had syncretized with pagan concepts. Some of its members may have held on to Jewish practices in varying degrees, especially in advocating the continued applicability of the Mosaic Law, but it expressed antagonism toward the Jewish establishment which rejected its faith and persecuted its members.
Such an explanation is essentially the one I myself have put forward, within a context of regarding the “genuine” letters of Paul as fairly reliable in presenting a picture of the earliest Christian movement in the middle decades of the first century. But it is possible to move in a more radical direction, to reject or at least seriously compromise the authenticity of Paul and to question Christianity as having been even a fringe movement within Judaism.
Given the highly hellenistic character of the earliest faith, was Christianity essentially a gentile phenomenon, but among gentiles who had absorbed and attached themselves to Jewish traditions and especially its scriptures? The appeal to gentiles of things Jewish seems to have been a widespread phenomenon in the early part of the CE period. At the same time, such groups had also incorporated other, more cosmopolitan concepts: Persian apocalyptic ideas, for example, such as we find in the Essene writings of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Whether this happened in the first century, or not until early in the second century, becomes a matter of debate, but the fundamentally anti-Jewish nature of the Gospels may be a pointer to this essentially gentile origin, while the apparently Jewish character of the movement is explainable as the increasing adoption (some would say theft) of Jewish elements and pseudo-Jewish heritage by those gentiles, injecting them into their self-constructed picture. Through this they sought to cast themselves as the new inheritors of the Jewish God’s promises and divine plans for the world’s salvation.
This ‘evolution’ comes to a climax in Justin Martyr and the mid-second century Roman Church, which seeks to oust the Jews from their own house (fortuitously at a time when the Jews had been expelled from their homeland and apparently out of God’s favor) and install gentile Christians as residents in a rebuilt ‘Judaism’ founded on their pirated version of the Hebrew scriptures. In this scenario, Paul as we have him now is a second century product (with any original Paul, person and writings, being an almost irrecoverable entity), as are the Gospels themselves. Both sets of writings have been formulated partly in response to a different Christian development, represented by Marcionite gnostics (who may have drafted, or at least substantially modified, the earliest versions of the Pauline letters), which sought to divorce itself entirely from things Jewish.
To what extent this more radical view of Christian origins and nature of the movement can be supported remains to be seen, but I intend to make it one of the focuses of my own future research.
But back to my response to Greg. He goes on to make this overly-enthusiastic statement: “The extreme historical accuracy of the Gospels is affirmed and supplemented each day by archeology and scholarship. Many unsympathetic sources have labeled the Gospels the most substantiated and accurate historical accounts in ancient history, according to various metrics.”
When I queried him on specific backing for this fundamentally nonsensical claim, Greg tentatively offered Will Durant and Lee Stobel in support, two scholars on whom I won’t trouble to make much comment. Durant, of course, was a ‘popularizing’ general historian who hardly made such extreme claims for the Christian record; as for Stobel’s ‘evidence,’ the quality of “documented historical and scientific fact” which those like Greg regularly draw from apologists like him is epitomized by the ‘scientific fact’ that was presented to me, namely the “multiple non-Christian attestations to darkness on the supposed day of Christ’s execution from places as far away as Athens.”
No matter how often these flimsy pieces of ‘evidence’ for the historical Jesus are toppled, they are consistently hauled to their tottering feet again and pushed back into the front lines for more punishment. Poor Thallus and Phlegon! Two minor pagan historians who would otherwise have slept peacefully in oblivion, have over the centuries been sent like the glassy-eyed undead back onto the battlefields of the living, carrying the tired weapons of Christian misrepresentation of some reference they made to what was obviously a solar eclipse during the reign of Tiberius (Nov. 24, 29 CE). Both of their observations, which are hardly likely to have been linked to any Jesus, come to us solely through later Christian commentators like Origen and Julius Africanus (the latter only second-hand). Such writers would have had every reason—and little critical impediment—to cast both historians’ references in terms which would support the Gospels. Indeed, we still see modern apologists doing the same thing, eg, Mr. J. P. Holding on his own very combative website: “(Thallus) is powerful evidence not only for the existence of Jesus, but for the reliability of those portions of the Gospel accounts that describe that phenomenon” (referring to the darkness covering the earth in the tale of the crucifixion).
In the interests of giving both Phlegon and Thallus a more permanent interment, let me quote at length from an article on Phlegon published in a 19th century encyclopedia. (I apologize for not having, at the moment, a record of this encyclopedia’s title.)
“. . . There is also in Phlegon’s writings a passage which is supposed to relate to the miraculous darkness which prevailed at the time of Christ’s crucifixion. In St. Jerome’s Latin version of the Chronicle of Eusebius, the passage occurs as follows: “And so writes Phlegon, an excellent compiler of the Olympiads, in his thirteenth book, saying, ‘In the fourth year of the two hundred and second Olympiad there was a great and extraordinary eclipse of the sun, distinguished among all that had happened before. At the sixth hour the day was turned into dark night, so that the stars in the heavens were seen, and there was an earthquake in Bithynia which overthrew many houses in the city of Nice.’ ” . . . This passage was the origin of a controversy in England in the early part of the last century [the 18th] between Mr. Whiston, Dr. Sykes, Mr. Chapman, and others. . . . Upon this Sykes published A Dissertation on the Eclipse mentioned by Phlegon, or an Inquiry whether that Eclipse had any Relation to the Darkness which happened at our Saviour’s Passion (1732). Sykes concludes it to be most probable that Phlegon had in view a natural eclipse, which happened Nov. 24, in the first year of the two hundred and second Olympiad, and not in the fourth year of the Olympiad in which Christ was crucified. . . . The principal objections against the authority of the passage in question are thus briefly summed up by Dr. Adam Clarke: 1. All the authors who quote Phlegon differ, and often very materially, in what they say was found in him. 2. He says nothing of “Judaea.” What he says is that in such an Olympiad (some say the one hundred and second, others the two hundred and second) there was “an eclipse in Bithynia,” and “an earthquake at Nice.” 3. He does not say that the earthquake happened at the time of the eclipse. 4. He does not intimate that this “darkness” was “extraordinary,” or that the eclipse happened at the “full of the moon,” or that it lasted “three hours,” all of which circumstances could not have been omitted by him if he had known them. 5. He speaks merely of an ordinary though perhaps total eclipse of the sun, and cannot mean the darkness mentioned by the evangelists. And, 6, he speaks of an eclipse that happened in some year of the one hundred and second or two hundred and second Olympiad, and therefore, upon the whole, little stress can be laid on what he says as applying to this event.”
When we consider that early Christian apologists like Tertullian could appeal for ‘proof’ of various aspects of the Gospel account to utterly spurious inventions like the letter of Pilate to Tiberius (see my Response to Jeff), nothing which any Christian commentator appeals to in the second century or later can in any way be relied upon as providing evidence for the existence of Jesus or the veracity of any other element of Christian tradition. Greg laments that I depend to a great degree on the imputation of “ancient conspiracies that corrupt public and private record,” but the quantity and quality of Christian interpolation, misrepresentation, and outright forgery and fabrication in all manner of documents, both Christian and pagan, covering the entire first few centuries of the Christian period, is by now a recognized fact on the part of many more than just myself.
Well-meaning respondents like Greg have a habit of appealing to “data” which has come to them from vague sources or from apologists who rely on those spurious inventions of ancient, and not so ancient, Christianity. For example, he offers this statement: “I believe it is Durant (who) attests to the clamor of contemporary (to Jesus) miracle workers trying to pay him to teach them how he did it and take them on as apprentices of a sort. They were trying to make a living at magic and Jesus seemed to have some trade secrets.” While it has been many years since I read Durant, I would confidently say that he said no such thing (nor would I apologize to him if he actually did). It is rarely possible to reply to unsubstantiated and often fanciful claims and reports of this nature which are frequently put forward by the unsympathetic visitor to my site (but see the response below to Brian), often because the claimant is unsure just where he got them himself.
Greg falls back on the argument that, regardless of how shaky the individual elements may be, the larger whole still possesses an integrity and a functionality which is not invalidated by the weakness of those components. The “gears mesh to create a ‘machine’ larger than any single part.” This strikes me as a little like saying that if the tires are flat, the carburetor clogged, the head gasket leaking, and the exhaust system full of holes, the automobile will still run and give its occupants a satisfying, dependable ride. Only in a fantasy universe powered by wishful thinking, where the laws of science and logic have been suspended.
Nor is the day saved by perhaps the commonest ‘argument’ directed my way, by Greg and many others. Regardless of all these flaws in the record, Christianity—proceeding, it is claimed, from Jesus himself—possesses a set of moral precepts which are not only commendable (Greg calls them “perfect morality and principles”), but have produced a ‘success record’ over the centuries which has kept civilization going, and enriched the life of societies and individuals—always with the implication, of course, that without them, such societies and individuals would have perished in some hellish descent into barbarity. I normally do not address myself to this sort of argument, but it contains logical fallacies which should occasionally be pointed out.
I need say very little about the great range of ‘teaching’ imputed to Jesus in the Gospels which includes everything from sentiments that could be labeled “enlightened” (love your enemies, etc.) to despicable (the need to hate one’s father and mother in order to follow him, the apocalyptic overthrow of the world and the curses upon Jews and others, the saying “Compel them to come in,” which fueled centuries of Inquisition, forced conversion and religious wars, and so on). When one considers that the lofty sentiments can usually be found attached to other settings and sources than Christianity and the figure of Jesus, any appeal to the exclusive validity and commendability of the Christian phenomenon must be set aside. Many non-Christian cultures throughout history have survived and created prosperous, working societies. While it is part of the human condition to possess the capacity to be moral, all societies have imperfections which belie any claim to sainthood, and Christian history is blatantly no exception. If the “success” of a belief system is a measure of its truth, Greg must also subscribe to the 3000-year career of ancient Egypt’s Amon-Re, to the 2000-year run of the Olympian gods, to the more recent vitality of Islam, to the long course of Hinduism—and countless other examples in history, and no doubt in prehistory. These are factors which cannot be taken into account in examining the scientific, historical validity of the Christian or any other religious traditions. (I will not in future address similar appeals to such arguments made in other comments to me.)
I am pleased that Greg has the integrity and courage to inform me that he will purchase my book and “read it cover to cover, (as) it would not be fair to provide a full critique without a full read.” I look forward to receiving his order and that fuller critique. But he also extends a challenge to me in asking, “Would you be willing to be proven wrong and embrace Jesus Christ, because if you are not, it makes an honest discussion of the topic pointless due to the fact that you are not seeking truth.”
But this is a misplaced requirement. My purpose on this website and in my book is not to decide whether I or anyone else should “embrace Jesus Christ.” Rather, I make a scientific examination of the question of whether a human Jesus existed or not, and arrive at the latter judgment. That is the “truth” I seek to put forward. This is an academic/historical position, not a religious one. Jesus might well be shown to have existed, without this implying that one ought to make a religious commitment to him. That would be for the individual to decide. But that individual cannot make a sensible decision of this nature if he or she refuses to take into account that the scientific, historical evidence may point to the non-existence of such a figure. Or at least, the decision would have to be cast in different terms. If the Gospel Jesus was only a symbolic construction, and if Paul was devoted to and preached a mythical and mystical Christ who was spirit only, there is nothing to prevent modern Christians from altering their thinking and embracing such a Jesus. (If it was good enough for Paul, why not for Greg?) Whether they would do so is another matter, but even religious faith should be based upon some degree of reality uncoverable in the universe we live in.
No historical Jesus? Of course not, when you place him on the
reconstructed canvas of Wrede, Bultmann, and the Jesus Seminar
(that of the world of hellenism). However, put Jesus on the canvas
of first century Judaism, as Schweitzer, Sanders, Wright, Meier,
and the great majority of New Testament scholars today do, then
there is a real person to look at.
Your website seems to imply that Crossan, Funk, Mack, and the
like are representative of most modern New Testament scholars.
Your familiarity with the debates would lead me to believe that
you know this is not true. A more fair and respectable website
might offer a diversity of views that corresponds to the present
state of Jesus scholarship. Perhaps you are more interested in
subversion than public dialogue.
A website on Christian origins is to be admired. However, you
seem to be playing the fundamentalists’ game by the lack of
diversity it contains. Perhaps you might post a broader range of
views so that real dialogue and real thinking can take place.
Response to Alan:
Lack of Diversity in The Jesus Puzzle
To enlarge on the remarks made at the end of the previous response, my purpose is not to provide a neutral forum for a discussion of Christian origins. It is to demonstrate a thesis, namely that no historical Jesus existed. As for the scholars I appeal to, I would style many of those preferred by Alan to be “apologists” and not historians. A scientific examination of this question requires investigators who do not possess confessional interests which pull them in one direction, whereas the latter characterizes Christian scholars like Wright and Meier. Of Alan’s “nay” list, I would style only Burton Mack as truly ‘secular,’ but even Crossan and many other members of the Jesus Seminar are no longer encumbered by traditional faith commitments, making the chance that they can arrive at something resembling scientific conclusions in some of their scholarship more likely. They are, of course, not “representative” of modern New Testament study in the sense of constituting a majority opinion, but only when the ranks of Jesus scholarship are filled by dispassionate historians rather than by committed believers who have a faith to defend, can strength in numbers be an acceptable factor in deciding who to appeal to in this question.
As for the nature of Christianity, it is not Wrede et al. who have placed it on a hellenistic canvas, but Christianity itself, as revealed by those who can bring an unprejudiced eye to its features.
Upon reading your novel I can come to only one conclusion. You have great knowledge, but you don’t have a clue. Let me demonstrate. You say that the earliest historical recording of Jesus is from the martyring of Ignatius. Then why have archeologists discovered a Roman birth announcement of Jesus in the correct time period of his alleged birth? Besides, anyone would agree that all of the great thinkers and philosophers in history have been ridiculed and scorned for their beliefs; plus the authorities of their time tried to keep them silent, which could also include erasing proof of their existence. Please don’t overlook all the changed hearts (miracles) that are still occurring because of one real man, Jesus.
Response to Brian:
Roman Announcement of Jesus’ Birth
Like Greg before him, Brian seems also dependent on ill-defined “evidence” of Jesus’ existence. One might wonder what reason any Roman authority would have had to make an announcement of Jesus’ birth, how they might have learned of it and what significance they could have placed upon it at the time. In this case, Brian may be making a distorted reference to a Christian appropriation of a passage in Virgil’s 4th Eclogue. I’ll quote from The Jesus Mysteries, by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy (p.30):
“In 40 BCE, drawing on Mystery myths, the Roman poet and initiate Virgil wrote a mystical ‘prophesy’ that a virgin would give birth to a divine child. In the fourth century CE Literalist Christians would claim that it foretold the coming of Jesus, but at the time this myth was interpreted as referring to Augustus, said to be the ‘Son of Apollo’, preordained to rule the Earth and bring peace and prosperity.”
As one can see, Christian motifs had their parallels, often many and strong, with mythical motifs (occasionally pressed into political service) present in the wider Greco-Roman world. Freke and Gandy’s book, published this year, is a thorough presentation of such parallels and complements my own presentation of Christianity as essentially a mystery cult like all the others, heavily dependent on hellenistic precedents. They, too, discount the existence of an historical Jesus.
I appreciate the great amount of research you have put into
your Jesus Puzzle project. I have learned much from it.
On the PBS website about Jesus there is one article that
mentions the plaque that was supposedly nailed to Jesus’ cross
and seems to claim that this has been found. There were no
references given, so I am at a loss as to where to look. As I
have never seen this mentioned in any apologetics for the
existence of Jesus, I have serious doubts about it. Do you
know anything about said artifact?
I am also curious about what role, if any, Apollonius of
Tyana plays in the development of Christianity, or if we can
even know.
Response to Darryl:
Plaque from Jesus’ Cross / Apollonius of Tyana
I am afraid that the plaque from Jesus’ cross has escaped my notice as well. No doubt it is part of that long line of fanciful ‘evidence’ marshaled for the veracity of the Gospel story which has been touched on in previous responses. Only in the face of a general body of evidence for Jesus’ existence which is so poor would any appeal be made to obviously sham elements like this. Indeed, that paucity of surviving material was what led in the first place to such wide-ranging spurious invention (literature and artifact) on the part of Christians of the second and later centuries. It seems to have continued into modern times.
As for Apollonius of Tyana, he was a neo-Pythagorean of the first century (died c.98) who was said to have preached the worship of one God, performed miracles, healed the sick, raised the dead, and ascended into heaven. After a brief and disparaging reference to him by the Roman satirist Lucian (latter 2nd century), we first learn of him through a ‘biography’ by Philostratus, a Sophist writer of the early 3rd century. In it, one can hardly distinguish fact from legend. Although later pagans, in their conflict with Christians, held up Apollonius as evidence that Jesus was not unique, we don’t know to what extent Apollonius was known and admired in earlier times, and so it is impossible to say whether traditions about him had any influence on the development of ideas about an historical Jesus.
Peter writes:
I just wanted to thank you for your feedback on my question
about Julian the Apostate, and to say that I downloaded and read
your novel, “The Jesus Puzzle.” I found it very informative and
enjoyable.
I wish you success with your new book.
[That new book, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity begin with a mythical Christ? is on sale through this website (see the How to Order page), and through Amazon.com. It will be in some bookstores in the year 2000. The book, 390 pages, with Notes, Appendices and Index, is a non-fiction examination of the question, scholarly but with an non-academic style which makes it accessible to the general reader. It has been receiving enthusiastic reviews from many readers, including several New Testament scholars.]
RFSet12
Dan writes:
Thank you for posting your articles on the Jesus Puzzle.
Finally, someone has tried to construct Christianity from the
writings of the first Christians, instead of trying to use
those writings to prove a theological position one already
believes is true.
I for once am now beginning to feel liberated from the
specter of this Jesus of Nazareth.
I came across this web page by accident, and I have readResponse to David:
it end to end. I don't know whether to damn you for destroying
my faith in Christianity or to thank you for setting my mind
free. Suffice to say that when your hypothesis answered many
questions I myself had, I found your arguments irresistible.
I was always curious about the striking similarities between
Christianity and the ancient mystery cults. I never could
understand how good, devout Jews could embrace a god-man savior.
So may I ask, who are you? What part do you play in the
Jesus Seminar and other biblical research groups?
Scratch Osiris, Attis and Jesus. . . . Allah and Buddha,
here I come!
Opening Windows
And why would one want to 'set one's mind free' in regard to Christianity, only to place it into servitude again in regard to some other, equally unsupportable philosophy of the unknown and unknowable? We have reached our present moment under the sun, not through beliefs in Osiris, Attis, Jesus or Allah, but by revealing the world we live in through the exercise of science, and understanding it through the light of reason. Faith in the unobservable—and usually irrational—has always obscured that understanding, and distracted us from focusing on and bettering the only world we can truly know and be sure of. Moreover, it has served principally to divide us, since religious belief has never been universal or united, and never will be, whereas the laws of science and reason operate everywhere and provide a solid basis for human knowledge, progress and ethics.
A sermon? Well, I get preached at myself often enough. I reproduce in the Reader Feedback only a small portion of the condemnatory and irrational mail I receive. Perhaps it would not be out of place to devote some of these thoughts to the significance of the 20th century's dismantling of the Christian myth, and indeed the myth of the mystical and supernatural in general. It is long past time that we should leave it all behind.
As in David's letter, I often get asked to supply more biographical information. There are a number of reasons why I usually decline. Partly, I am a private person, uninterested in inflicting my life history on the innocent web surfer. I have said that my 'credentials' include a degree in Ancient History and Classical Languages, but I play no part in the Jesus Seminar or any other biblical or academic research group, though many in that area are familiar with me, through my website and the occasional publication. With a few I have correspondence, while the majority pointedly ignore me. But perhaps my non-involvement in the established discipline and my relative anonymity serve to demonstrate that we are all capable of freeing ourselves (I was a Christian myself, in much younger days) from irrational and unfounded beliefs, no matter how long their history or widespread their acceptance. It shows that we are all capable—or should be—of arriving at reasoned conclusions and judgments of the evidence, regardless of how overlaid the latter has been with blind and imposed tradition.
We not only live in interesting, challenging times, we are potentially on the edge of true change. If this reader has had a window opened, it is my sincere hope that he does not simply close it again with a different lock.
Mike writes:
I appreciate your efforts to make the results of your
research, as well as the ideas of your contemporaries and
formative influences, available for laymen such as myself.
Please keep up the good work.
Well, first of all, what a nice piece of work!Response to Luis:
There is something, however, that seems not to fit.
There is no doubt that the Jews expected a Messiah, and
even that this expectation increased in the two centuries
just before the destruction of Jerusalem. And that this
Messiah was expected to be one individual man. From your
argument, however, it seems that Paul regarded "Christ"
[the Greek translation of Messiah] as a theological entity
not corresponding to a real man.
I don't mean that this is impossible, but I feel that
this strange change of meaning for such a strong and repeated
word needs more explanation. First from a man who would save
Israel and lead it to a position of hegemonic power in the
world . . . then it becomes a theological abstraction, so
complicated that perhaps not even Paul could understand it
correctly. And at last it became again a man, who would again
save Israel . . .
Jewish and Christian Messianic Ideas
As with most generalizations in historical research, the Jewish 'expectation of a Messiah who was an individual human man' is something of an oversimplification. I'll quote from the Introduction to Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters (ed. Kraft & Nickelsburg, 1983), p.19:
-
"Eschatology has always been recognized
as an important component in early Jewish religious thought, though its
importance has been emphasized more by Christian than by Jewish
scholars.
Contemporary study, fed primarily by the discovery of new texts, has
stressed
the wide diversity in Jewish eschatology.
"Messianism is a prime example. As the Qumran texts show, all Jews did not hold to the same expectation regarding a Messiah. Indeed, the term does not permeate the Jewish eschatological literature. Some Jews awaited a Davidic ruler, but for others a future anointed priest was central. Other expectations included an eschatological prophet, and a heavenly deliverer identified with Michael [the archangel] or Melchizedek or seen as a combination of the Danielic son of man, the anointed one, and the servant of the Lord described in Second Isaiah. For still other Jews, God would be the eschatological deliverer."
In the face of all this variety, especially those leanings in some circles of Jewish thought toward a divine or semi-divine messianic figure, the Pauline version of "Christ" no longer seems to be an inexplicable aberration. Moreover, we should always leave room for the truly innovative, which certain aspects of early Christian belief may have been. In any case, if we are to regard early Christianity as a Jewish (or Jewish-rooted) expression of the widespread savior-god impulse of the era, what other name might they have come up with for that Jewish version? I suggest that both "Jesus" (Yahweh Saves) and "Christ" (Messiah/Anointed One as a savior figure) would have offered themselves in a compelling way. I see no difficulty in regarding this as a good "fit." On the other hand, some 'Christian' lines of thought, as reflected in documents like the Shepherd of Hermas, failed to use either or both names, Jesus or Christ, which is one good indication that no historical figure who bore such names began the movement.
I very much enjoyed your site on the question of theResponse to Alisdair:
historical Jesus. I think you make an excellent case for the
non-historicity of Jesus.
However, I am at present skeptical of the thesis. The
essential idea is that a mythical savior god who appears in
the writings of Paul later accretes a historical narrative
and becomes identified with a religious rebel executed by the
Romans. But there are a number of objections to this idea that
I think are potentially fatal.
One is that the normal process in religion is that ordinary
people accrete more and more supernatural and god-like powers
in the course of the development of a religious myth. . . .
But if the non-existent Jesus idea is correct, this process
is reversed.
Second, execution by crucifixion was a shameful death,
reserved for slaves, rebels and criminals. Isn't it very
implausible that the Christians would attribute this mode of
execution to their savior? What is worse, as appears clearly
from the Gospels, they have to go out of their way to exculpate
the Romans. Why would they invent a shameful death that they
subsequently have to explain away? On the other hand, if Jesus
was a real person about whom certain embarrassing but undeniable
facts were known through oral tradition, then there is nothing
to be explained.
Fitting Jesus into "Normal Religious Processes"
The "normal process in religion" is to believe in gods who inhabit heaven or the world of myth, not to elevate a humble Jewish preacher to full divinity, the Son of the God of Abraham. Such gods often have spun about them elaborate myths and stories which seem to take place in an earthly setting, but in some primordial time. Even here, there is a big distinction between this and an example Alisdair puts forward of a recent Indian guru having increasingly "god-like powers" attributed to him. History is full of historical figures (some presumed) who have later been lionized, mythologized, even said to be fathered by some god or other, such as Julius Caesar, or the Greek Heracles, but this is a far cry from the supposed figure of Jesus of Nazareth, elevated to full Godhead—among Jews, no less—and rendered a cosmic power that created and controls the universe, all before his corpse had scarcely enough time to turn cold. And losing in the process all notice of his earthly career.
In any case, no matter how "normal" other examples in religion may be, the fact that the Christian process may go against such a grain is not a valid argument that it was impossible. In fact, in the case of Christianity I suggest that there were a variety of factors coming together to create a complex, and in some ways unique, picture.
As I interpret the record, a distinct and essential feature in the development of an historical Jesus, took place on a human level, in the tendency of one sectarian group—in this case, the kingdom-preaching movement centered in Galilee as represented by the Q document—to invent for itself a glorified founder figure who had first preached its ethics, worked its purported miracles, and prophesied its apocalyptic expectations. Parallel and separate to this, early Christians such as Paul preached a savior-god who pointedly did not have an earthly biography, and these two elements were brought together for the first time in the Gospel of Mark, perhaps entirely for symbolic and teaching purposes. The later "historicization" of the Gospels by subsequent Christian generations created the distorted picture that we are all trying to "fit" into the normal processes (whatever they may be) of religious expression.
As for the character of ancient world crucifixion, we should not bring these historical preconceptions to the initial Christian view of it. By such a measure, Attis' castration might be regarded as equally shameful, or Osiris' dismemberment an equally difficult embarrassment, yet both these savior gods had no shortage of followers. Christ's crucifixion, for Paul, took place in the spiritual world at the hands of the demon spirits, a 'truth' that Paul found in scripture, and it probably gave him no embarrassment (though he could admit that it was "folly" by worldly standards). Indeed, he revels in the fact that Christ "became for our sake an accursed thing" (Galatians 3:13), again based on the holy word of scripture.
We must remember that the entire system of salvation through savior gods was based on those divinities undergoing the same things that their devotees on earth did, which included the shameful and the embarrassing. One only has to consider how modern Christians also revel in all that Jesus supposedly underwent on Calvary, not only as a sharing in humanity's misfortunes, but as the necessary prelude to the great reversal of glorification and resurrection, which believers themselves look forward to undergoing. It is not at all "implausible" that the early Christians would attribute this mode of execution to their savior, either in the mythical or the 'historical' phase, especially if they found its basis in the sacred writings, as Paul tells us (1 Cor. 15:3). As for exculpating the Romans, this was not designed to "explain away" the nature of Jesus' death, it was to place the (symbolic) blame for that death on the Jews, and perhaps to avoid antagonizing the gentile readers of the first Gospel story.
As a Christian, your website upset me. I was not impressedResponse to Jaylene:
to see scriptures twisted so that they fit your needs. . . .
Taking the verses out of context does not prove a point, it
only misleads people.
You claim that the four Gospels do not back each other up.
Have you ever had four friends who try to retell a story? Each
one of them is going to notice and miss certain points. Not one
of the Gospels contradicts another. Some just have parts that
others don't. I'm sure your friends tell stories differently as
well.
I'm not saying that there was no spiritual part to Christ's
death. But if it was only a spiritual death, what is the point?
Scripture out of Context / Gospel Contradictions
On the contrary, to address Jaylene's first point, I would say that I consistently analyze a passage by considering its context, the "verses that come before and after." My book and site articles are full of instances where I argue that the traditional meaning assumed in a passage is often not borne out by the surrounding material. Romans 1:3 ("of David's seed") and Galatians 4:4 ("born of woman") are cases in point. The former is information Paul clearly says in verse 2 that he derived from scripture, not historical tradition; while the latter is compromised by, among other things, verse 6 which says that God has sent only the "spirit" of his Son. (For a fuller discussion of these key passages, see my Article No. 8: Christ as Man: Does Paul Speak of Jesus as an Historical Person?)
New Testament scholarship has a long history of forcing meanings into passages which go against what the words themselves or the context say, or which contradict other sentiments in the same or different documents. Reading the Gospels into the epistles is one of the common procedures of traditional New Testament scholarship; examples are legion, as a perusal of my site, especially the Supplementary Articles, will show.
On the question of contradictions within the Gospels themselves, it is a bit naïve, and uninformed, to continue to regard the four accounts as independent eyewitnesses to presumed historical events. Scholarship has long proven that the Gospels show clear literary dependencies: later ones copied and reworked earlier ones. If the evangelists reveal no compunction about altering their sources and creating contradictions in the process, this shows that they had no concern for historical accuracy, possibly because they did not regard their accounts as representing actual historical events. Such an interpretation came only later.
Those contradictions would fill a long list. Some exist between Matthew and Luke, who independently, and probably unknown to each other, reworked Mark for their own purposes. The most glaring are the virtual total disparity in their Nativity stories, and the incompatibility of their genealogies for Jesus and their post-resurrection appearances. The details and sequences of the latter cannot be reconciled, nor reconciled with those of John. (Mark originally had none at all.) Contradictions abound in the area of contexts for Jesus' teaching. Take the Lord's Prayer, for example. As I say in The Jesus Puzzle (p.162), "This is arguably the most important and enduring thing Jesus is ever recorded to have spoken. And yet . . . Matthew includes it in the Sermon on the Mount, delivered to vast, attentive crowds. Luke offers it during the journey to Jerusalem, a private communication at the request of the disciples who ask, 'Lord, teach us how to pray.' " Is this faulty memory on the part of the apostles? A case of certain traditions leaving something out? Hardly.
Nor is it faulty memory which caused John to excise the establishment of the Eucharist, or the episode in the Garden of Gethsemane. And if the memory of what day it was in relation to Passover on which Jesus' crucifixion took place could not be accurately preserved (John clearly contradicts the Synoptics), could any tradition be trusted? But all these 'contradictions' and many others are deliberate measures on the part of each evangelist to fashion his Gospel to fit his own agenda.
Finally, Jaylene laments that if it was only a spiritual death, "what is the point?" She fails to realize that such feelings of inadequacy would not have been shared by the ancient mind. In the Platonic universe most people imagined around them, the spiritual dimension was very real and very significant. That was where God and gods operated. That was where the salvation processes of the mystery cults took place. All the savior deities had performed their redemptive acts in the spiritual/mythical world. When Christianity eventually came to place its redeemer on earth in recent history, it was entering new territory—and ensuring its own long-term survival.
Since then, of course, our views of the universe have changed dramatically, and Christian thinking has been forced to change along with them. But the mark of a vibrant religion, or philosophy, is the ability to evolve, and the figure of Jesus is perhaps the most vibrant and adaptable invention in humanity's long history of creating for itself imaginary forces and wishful saviors.
Thank you for new ideas that have brightened my mind.Response to Andrzej:
I'd like to ask you whether Christianity as a movement
was present in Rome in the time of Claudius. As far as I
know Jews were forced to move out of Rome because of a
certain figure: Chrestos was his name. Can we identify
this movement with that one which is known from the Acts
of the Apostles and focuses around Priscilla and her
husband Aquila who had arrived from Rome?
If we prove that Christianity existed even before
Jesus is commonly thought to live, we also prove it as
nothing to do with the hypothetical figure of Jesus. Is
such a proof possible?
Chrestus, Priscilla and Aquila
Any link of the expulsion of Jews from Rome by Claudius with Christianity is entirely dependent on an obscure reference in Suetonius (Claudius 25). There it is said that Claudius "expelled from Rome the Jews who were constantly rioting at the instigation of a certain Chrestus." But who or what is "Chrestus"? Many have wished to see this as a reference to Jesus, a misspelling or misunderstanding of the word Christ, but this is simply speculation. Even if it were a reference to Christ, there is no reason why this could not be the spiritual Christ; that is, certain Jewish sects in Rome were of the cultic variety that worshiped, and probably expected the imminent arrival of, a mythical Son, somewhat like the Jerusalem group around Peter and James spoken of by Paul.
The probability, however, is that the reference is to simple Jewish messianic agitation of the apocalyptic variety, with no specific 'Christian' connotation ("Christ" being the Greek word for "Messiah"). "Chrestus" may possibly have been a local Jewish agitator, though if he were responsible for a general expulsion of the Jews from Rome, we might expect him to show up in some other historical record. Even if one could read a Christian or historical-Jesus understanding into Suetonius (which would be wishful thinking), this Roman historian was writing around 120, and he could have been influenced by the new Christian hearsay/tradition of the time about an imagined historical founder—the same hearsay which likely led Tacitus to describe Jesus as a man crucified by Pilate. Suetonius may himself have been led to believe that this "Chrestus" figure was a human person.
Acts is highly unreliable as a source of accurate information on this (or any) point. Not only was this document probably written in the second century (many modern scholars increasingly date it anywhere between 115 and 150, and there is no attestation for it before the 170s), Acts itself does nothing to clarify the reason for Priscilla and Aquila's expulsion from Rome. The author may be working with traditions about the two figures which after the better part of a century's passing were far from authentic. Or he may have been consciously reworking them for his own purposes. It is perhaps significant in regard to Acts' reliability that Paul nowhere refers to these characters in connection with his own activities. Their names appear only in lists and greetings appended to a few letters. One of these is in the final chapter (16) of Romans, which many doubt to be authentic to the original epistle. The same might be true of 1 Corinthians 16:19. And the only other epistolary reference to them is at the end of 2 Timothy (4:19), which is widely regarded as a second century piece of writing.
If Romans 15:23 can be trusted, the Christian community in Rome was in existence "for many years" prior to Paul writing this letter, which would carry Christianity in the capital of the empire back to perhaps the early 40s at least. But it is probably impossible to demonstrate that the movement existed prior to the traditional date of Jesus' death. It is true that Christian communities in Damascus and Antioch seem well established very shortly after that time, and "christological hymns" found in Paul's letters are not only presumed to predate him, they show a well-developed and sophisticated theology which is not likely to have sprung up overnight. The same is the case in regard to the Epistle to the Hebrews, which many have dated prior to the Jewish War. But to use all this to extrapolate 'Christ belief' back into the 20s of the first century, let's say, while not an unreasonable concept, cannot be supported in a conclusive way.
Could you please advise me on the age of Paul when he wroteResponse to Warwick:
his text. Would he have been a rather old man and how many years
after Jesus' death would the writing have taken place? He must
have had a rather good memory.
Paul's Age and Powers of Recollection
From indications that are at best vague, Paul's year of birth is usually placed between 1 and 10 CE. This would put him somewhere around the age of 50 during the period when he wrote most of his extant letters. This chronology, however, is dependent to a great extent on Acts, and it is probably impossible to know how far Acts can be relied upon even for basic data such as this. (Those who regard most if not all of the Pauline corpus as a second century product would say that Paul's entire career, when it took place and what it consisted of, is of the utmost uncertainty.)
As for the quality of Paul's memory, to judge by the epistles, he seems to have forgotten virtually everything there was to know about Jesus' career on earth. In that, he was part of a wider epidemic among early Christian writers who had apparently partaken of the waters of Lethe.
You speak such blasphemy about Jesus who died for your sinsPaul writes:
and the world, who rose on the third day and ascended into heaven
where he now sits at the right hand of the Father. There will
come a time when you will have to bow down to him and your tongue
will confess that He is Lord.
I say "hello" to you, spirit of antichrist. How did I knowJohn writes:
it was in you? Well, that was an easy one.
"Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits
whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone
out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every
spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh
is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ
is come in the flesh is not of God. And this is that spirit of
antichrist, whereof ye have heard that is should come; and even
now already it is in the world." [quoting 1 John 4:1-3]
It is not you but this spirit within you who is so adamant
about no historical Jesus. Someone who has studied about Yeshua
haMaschiach as much as you need to receive him as your Lord and
Savior. . . .[further mystical Jewish references and admonitions]
Repent NOW. Lest you be given up completely.
"To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the
flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus."
[quoting 1 Corinthians 5:5]
Hello. I would just like to say that in an ever quickeningResponse to Farrah, Paul, and John:
world, that we sometimes lose sight of the truth. How can we
today know the truth when it is 2000 years old? It all comes
down to faith. Do you have faith, sir?
Faith, Truth, and the Antichrist
It is probably only in the last half century that a significant portion of the population of western society has developed the capacity to recognize that, for the most part, religion and rationality are fundamentally incompatible. Just why that insight evolved in the latter half of the 20th century might be difficult to say. When I was young I read a science-fiction story—I believe it was by Poul Anderson—called "Brain Wave." One morning, everyone woke up to find that they were many times more intelligent than they had been the night before. Even animals were capable of rudimentary thinking. Astronomers presently discovered that the earth had just exited from a large swath of the galaxy that was permeated by some sort of magnetic cloud which slowed down neuronal impulses. The earth had been passing through it for several hundred thousand years. Free of it now, the human brain worked ten times faster. Unfortunately, we weren't out of the woods entirely, but I can't recall the sticky situation humanity now faced or how the story ended.
As far as I know, the earth did not emerge from a galactic cloud around the middle of the 20th century, but in a real way, western society as a collective entity found a way to free itself from a long era of credulity and subservience to irrational ideas. It does not take a majority of the members of such a society to become unbelievers for this to occur. Somehow, in the post-Second World War era, in that place inside itself where a society as a whole dwells, much of the western world adopted a more secular and skeptical outlook, and was soon no longer accepting of religious control over its institutions and expressions.
In a context of understanding (at least, for the most part) the physical nature of the universe, of understanding (again, for the most part) the long and fascinating evolution of life and human intelligence on this planet, the persistence of beliefs such as Farrah's, that deities descend from a heaven to earth to sacrifice themselves for human transgressions, then reascend to sit beside other deities, together to await a day of universal judgment and obeisance, is profoundly regrettable. To declare, as Paul does, that failure to believe in certain religious doctrines spells possession by an evil spirit and a fate of eternal damnation, shows that we still have a considerable way to go.
Paul's quotation from 1 John 4 illustrates the caliber of some of the thinking we are up against. Note that the writer of this epistle (or at least this portion of it, since the letter is a layered document, added to over time) seeks to differentiate between 'true' and 'false' spirits claimed to be from God. And what is the standard by which he judges? Those that are 'true' are those which conform to his own convictions. Those which do not are from Satan, and labeled "antichrist." Paul gives me the same label, no doubt employing the same scientific method.
What we can and should recognize from that 1 John quotation is that as long ago as the end of the first century CE, people—even Christians—were declaring that Jesus Christ had NOT been to earth. Such people, as 1 John 4:5 and 2 John 10-11 show, were listened to by some of the Christian world and even welcomed into Christian homes. That such a denial of the historical Jesus was widespread in the movement so early, and around the same time as the earliest witness to a belief in such a figure, would, by rational standards, place some legitimacy on the idea that Christianity did not begin with the Gospel Jesus, but that he was a later evolution which took some time to establish itself and become universally accepted.
John asks me if I have "faith." Faith functions in the absence of knowledge. With knowledge, one doesn't need faith. But is knowledge absent because it can't be obtained, or is it shunted aside because faith is preferred? John suggests that the "truth" has been obscured by the passage of 2000 years. If so, how is it to be ascertained? Shall we base it on our best efforts, founded in rationality and science, to examine the record and arrive at an understanding of the past, or should we throw to the winds everything our evolving minds have achieved and base it on outlandish doctrine and unexamined trust in ancient writings that were the product of a primitive age far more ignorant and superstitious and lacking in critical thinking than our own? Do we continue to echo Paul, who condemns the "wisdom of the world" while admitting (in 1 Corinthians 1:18-24) that his own message is "a folly and a stumbling-block"? The past 2000 years has not served to obscure the "truth." It has been a long and difficult rite of passage which has brought us to the point where we can now choose to abandon the unfortunate heritage of ancient world thinking that is summed up in Farrah's gospel and Paul's maledictions.
John's "quickening world" may not be an actual acceleration of humanity's brain cells on emerging from a galactic cloud, but the image may not be that far from a metaphoric 'truth.' Let's not turn our backs on our new-found capacities and plunge the planet back into the fog of unreason.
For Reader Feedback on my recently-published book The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity begin with a mythical Christ?, the reader may visit the special file below. It also contains further thoughts on contemporary attitudes and why it is often difficult for the "no-Jesus" theory to gain a proper hearing, especially in mainstream New Testament scholarship.
For information on that new book and how to purchase, see jpadvert.htm. The book is also available through www.Amazon.com.