RFSet13
Tommy writes:
I want to thank you immensely for your site. Your ideas have reinforced my repudiation of all christian and religious superstitions. Your site, and others like it, have become my oases in an intellectual desert. Sometimes I wonder how many others are in the same predicament that I am. Keep up the good work.
Brian writes:
As I read through your work, I sense the weight of my own lifetime being lifted off of my spirit; personal freedom from generations of fear-based control and oppression. For this, I thank you. My brother recently said to me, in discussing christianity, "Belief is the suspension of logic and reason." I tend to agree. A client, whom I shared this website with, asked, "Did god create man, or did man create god?" And while I cannot explain the origins of the Big Bang, I will certainly wager on the latter.
Douglas writes:
I finished your Crossan review and found it quite compelling and ultimately successful in undermining his assumed premise. I have to admit that I did not notice the flaws in his argument. I suspect that your book will require that I entirely abandon my conception of an historical Jesus as lacking any good reason to be believed. I have to admit that I'll kind of miss him.
Keith writes:
Nice analysis and synthesis. I've looked off and on for 20 years or so into the origins of Christianity as a "lay scholar" and have come away realizing that there really is a puzzle here. On an initial reading of your 12 Pieces, I like the way you have put the pieces of the puzzle together. I look forward to reading your book.
Rick writes:
My interest in your site is as one who wants the truth. As empty as the thought makes me feel, if there was no historical Jesus I want to know about it. Christianity is supposed to be different than other religions of antiquity. It is supposedly based on historical facts. It is very important whether there was an "Historical" Jesus, very important. What I need is people like yourself who go after the truth. It is courageous and I'm sure filled with much rejection and ridicule. The only thing I can say is that your research speaks for itself. It is hard to find too much criticism of your findings because most ignore it. With all their academic credentials and institutional backing they still cannot answer some basic questions. Thank you for your efforts and I will digest anything you publish. I'm not sure where it will eventually lead me but I certainly find the path exciting and challenging!
Tony writes:
There are so many things you aren't looking at in the Bible. The Bible says man is not perfect and that we will make mistakes and the few good points that you did make can easily be mistakes made by man. I think you should read some more of the Bible and try reading More Than A Carpenter by Josh McDowell and if you still feel the same way about Jesus Christ mine and your savior then may God have mercy on your soul.
Eric writes:
I found your articles fascinating. Your arguments seem well researched and carefully considered. What an interesting and perhaps ironic twist it would be for western civilization's most prominent religion to be largely based on fabrication and reformist writings of a bygone time. Thank you for introducing this lively conversation starter to the world.
I am fairly widely read on the subject of Christian origins, although by no means a scholar. But it wasn't until I read your novel [available in its entirety on the site, and not to be confused with my new book, The Jesus Puzzle, published last year. ED] that everything clicked for me. Your thesis and the way you expound it is brilliant, revolutionary even, and I certainly hope you are creating huge ripples in the biblical scholarship camp. It's not so much that your basic thesis is new (I've read some of the late 19th century mythicists) but for the first time you have brought together the evidence in a new way and solved many puzzling things about the gospels, which I am convinced only make sense in light of your theory. Bravo! I enjoyed your novel very much. What an innovative and palatable way to put across a serious, radical theory. Your characters were real and sympathetic, and it moved along well, a nice mix of action and intrigue along with the discovery of the truth about Jesus. Thank you so much for caring about truth and delivering it to the world in such a compelling and professional manner. I hope you get all the accolades and respect you deserve. Because of your work, I also have real hope now (and I'm very cynical about this, believe me!) that your work will finally be the catalyst that forces the average Christian to face the truth, and leads to the eventual abandonment of Christianity as we know it.Response to Joyce:
Ambitions and Tenacity
An ambitious, but probably unrealistic, hope. Rarely does one writer or researcher have so profound an impact, especially where religion is concerned. Moreover, it is often the case that a revolutionary idea is the product of an outsider, someone who faces great difficulty gaining credence within the mainstream discipline, not to mention the serious attention of the media or public. However, my work and my new book are not alone. A few other books with the same bottom line have recently been published, and their combined weight may well have an impact.
On the other hand, belief systems that have a long history of filling people's needs are notoriously tenacious and adaptable. I think we will have some form of Christianity and the figure of Jesus with us for some time to come.
I wonder if there might be another explanation to the question than the 'no existence' theory. In Romans 1:1[f] Paul seems to consider the resurrection of Jesus as the moment when he became Christ. In 1 Corinthians 15 [3-4] Paul starts the gospel story with the death of Jesus. In Acts 2:36 God made Jesus Lord and Messiah when he raised him from the dead. In Acts 13:27 the gospel story starts with Jesus being put to death. If Jesus became Messiah and Son of God when he was raised from death, then the life and ministry of Jesus is not Messianic and therefore of no interest for the gospel. The resurrection is the moment of incarnation and the gospel story starts with the incarnation. Before the incarnation Jesus is a common man and his words and acts are not the words and acts of Christ. In Mark, the gospel story starts with Jesus being baptised by John. Mark puts the moment of incarnation back in time [but he] is silent about Jesus before the baptism. In the [later] gospels Christ is incarnated in Jesus [even earlier] when he is conceived. As the moment of incarnation is put backwards in time, the gospels seem to 'reconstruct' the life and ministry of Jesus, explaining it in Messianic terms. Does this make sense?Response to Arne:
Backward Progression of Christology
Arne probably realizes that this 'explanation' is a standard type of scenario in New Testament scholarship, and the answer to his question is: Yes and No. As a construction of the modern scholarly mind, it makes sense within its own rules and assumptions. As an explanation which stands up to closer scrutiny, it has serious problems.
First, let's note that for Paul in Romans 1, and the writer of the earlier christological hymn he quotes in Philippians 2:6-11, as well as for the writer of 1 Peter (3:18), Christ's "resurrection" was his ascension to God, in spirit form within the heavenly world, not a reappearance on earth in the body to his former followers. The pre-Gospel epistles, the earliest record of Christianity, place their faith in Christ's activities in the spiritual part of the universe. The epistle to the Hebrews is another good example.
This immediately raises the question, why was this the first manifestation of Christian belief? Where did all these people get such ideas? If the earliest Christians were reacting to a human man and his career on earth, not to mention a physical resurrection before his very followers, why do they speak of him entirely in terms of heavenly events and ignore that earthly incarnation? Can we think of a plausible scenario, can we postulate a mindset which would explain this rather bizarre situation? I suggest that we cannot.
A man dies on a cross on a hill outside Jerusalem. He has been a teacher, a reputed miracle-worker, one who prophesied the coming Kingdom of God and the apocalyptic arrival of the Son of Man. If he did not physically emerge from his tomb a few days later (and nothing in the epistolary record says that he did) what force, what state of mind among his followers would lead them to construct this spiritual-world scenario for him, and make him the Messiah on the basis of it? If, as Arne suggests, Jesus was a "common man" with "words and acts" which seem to have made so little impact that they are ignored by the first two generations of his believers, not to mention by all commentators of the time, what drove that elevation to heavenly and messianic status? If the common rejoinder is the claim that it was the 'experience of resurrection' in the Gospel sense, why is nothing made of such a resurrection to earth? Instead it gets transformed entirely into a spirit world context. There are impossible contradictions here.
On the other hand, if the ancients believed that divine and salvific processes took place in a higher, Platonic-type world, if the current view of Deity was that the ultimate God communicated with the material world through intermediary spiritual forces, and if Jews (or gentiles adopting Judaism) searched scripture to understand God's workings, then the initial Christian construction of a divine Son who was identified as the "Messiah"—the figure who was expected to arrive at the End time and save the nation—becomes fully comprehensible. Moreover, it fits the dearth in the earliest record of any reference to an incarnated career on earth. (I find it ironic that Arne uses the term "incarnation," which usually means taking on flesh, to refer to a spiritual ascent to the sphere of God. Though this is not intended as a personal criticism of Arne himself, it is an illustration of how modern theology and apologetics often talks itself into convoluted corners and double-speak byways in the interests of rationalizing the difficulties the record presents.)
If we were presented with a little different picture, it might make some sense. That picture would have to be the gradual elevation of thinking about the "common man" who was executed on Calvary. The earliest record would logically be about the man himself, his life and achievements, such things gradually taking on a greater significance and associations of divinity. Jesus would move from earth to heaven, not vice-versa. Yet in what is possibly the earliest surviving expression of the new movement of Christ belief, the christological hymn in Philippians, Jesus is a divine being who shares his nature with God himself, takes on the likeness of flesh and descends from heaven to undergo death (no mention of an earthly crucifixion) and exaltation back to heaven. There is nothing in that hymn which speaks of a life on earth; rather it expresses the widespread Descending-Ascending Redeemer concept of the time, a myth which operates in an entirely spiritual setting. Are the followers of Jesus going to wake up the morning after his death (or even some time later, to be less hyperbolic), cast aside all interest in the career they have just taken part in and which supposedly engendered their response to him in the first place, and set about creating this great mythological construction Arne suggests was the earliest reading of Jesus' role and identity? I hardly think so.
I've been reading your material on the Jesus Puzzle with great interest. I think that the points you raise are quite valid and should form the basis of an inquiry into the origins of Christianity. However, I'm still not convinced that references to Jesus are entirely the product of "midrashic" fabrications and synthesis. For one thing, actual historical figures are often given mythic attributes. Lenin, for example, was deified in many different ways by later generations of Communists. Also, actual historical figures are often given attributes that are contradictory or self serving, eg, Kennedy the Cold War hawk and Kennedy the social liberal, and so on. Think of all the myths generated around Elvis or Jim Morrison or John Lennon. So given the dearth of information from the time when Jesus supposedly existed and given the variety of viewpoints that are generated about historical figures I simply cannot go along with the conviction that Jesus was not an actual person. As far as Paul goes, if he was writing to communities who might already be aware of who Jesus was historically, then why would he have to include biographies in his evangelizing discourses? The Star Spangled Banner, for example, is based on an historical event, but the song itself is not literal history. It expressed Francis Scott Key's emotional response to something actual. Finally, who knows what documents were destroyed during the sack of Jerusalem and who knows how many Jewish followers of Jesus could have been killed by the Romans during that time? At any rate, I think you raise many valid points which I hope inspire more serious and open-minded research.Response to John:
Standard Objections to the Jesus Myth (Jesus and Lenin)
John raises several standard objections which I have been addressing almost since the day I first posted The Jesus Puzzle on the Net. However, some things require repeating, and indeed bear repeating in the process of establishing new paradigms and exposing the deficiencies of the old ones.
None of the examples John presents fits the Jesus situation. Neither Lenin nor Lennon, Kennedy nor Elvis, were elevated to genuine divine status and certainly not to the degree which Jesus of Nazareth supposedly was. In the "mythic attributes" that may have been attached to such figures, no sight was lost of their human, earthly character or existence. Contemporaries recognized and wrote of them as historical people. Lenin's body was preserved and entombed in a place that was accessible to the public, to which 'believers' made pilgrimages. His writings were immediately published and attributed to him. John Lennon's songs continued to be performed and identified as his. And so on.
If Trotsky or Stalin had written letters about a seeming god named Lenin, who moved about the heavenly realms and created a spiritual version of communism which earthly followers received through revelation, and only some time after Stalin's death did certain communists start to declare or write stories about this god having been on earth at the time of the Russian Revolution, originating their movement, then we might have a situation like that of Jesus. If doubters of the later 20th century investigated and could find no record in the period of such a man, if Communist manifestos of the first half century did not attribute their doctrines to him, if the later story of a human Lenin was shown to draw its features from elements of the Communist movement and motifs in Russian literature, there would no doubt have been indignant Soviets (before the fall of Communism) who would have objected strenuously to the debunking of their cherished myths, and have come up with examples like that of Kennedy and John Lennon.
John's objection about Paul is similarly off the mark. We don't necessarily expect Paul or other early epistle writers to include "biographies" about Jesus in their letters. What we do expect is that where a reference to the earthly Jesus or an event in his life would be natural, even compelling in the case of an argument being made or something being discussed which was instituted or supported by Jesus himself, such a thing would at least in some cases appear. What we do expect is that the epistle writers would not describe their faith movement and its beginnings in terms which exclude all awareness of the role of a human Jesus (e.g., Titus 1:3). If Francis Scott Key had done what Paul and others did (e.g., 1 Cor. 2:8), and place the battle enshrined in The Star Spangled Banner within some higher spiritual world, with combatants described in terms of spirit forces, we might indeed have cause to doubt that the song was about an earthly event.
Finally, it is not legitimate to appeal to the "who knows?" argument, something far more objectionable than any 'argument from silence.' The latter may have its limitations, although my remarks above and elsewhere illustrate that in certain circumstances it can have a good degree of persuasiveness. But to argue that one cannot declare "Unicorns do not exist" because "who knows" if there isn't some undiscovered island somewhere in the South Seas where there might be a colony of them living, is clearly invalid. One could let anything in the door that way. We can only judge the merits of an argument by the available evidence, or that which can reasonably be postulated. We have no way of knowing if supportive Christian documents were destroyed in the sack of Jerusalem, or whether followers of Jesus who might have borne witness to him were killed by the Romans. But if no evidence can be found to suggest either of these postulations, they cannot be brought in for consideration. How would John react if I suggested, to support my contention, that there could well have been Jews in the late first century who wrote tracts in response to the Gospels which denied any occurrence of those events, but such writings were later destroyed by the Christians? Perhaps it's true, but there is no concrete evidence or deductive argument which justifies my putting such a statement on the table.
I have enjoyed your website very much. Thank you for your hard work. I have some questions for you as to the validity of the book of Acts. I found this book by Dr. Gregory A. Boyd (a conservative scholar) called "Jesus Under Siege." He makes many claims about the accuracy of Acts. I was wondering what your knowledge of these issues are? JESUS UNDER SIEGE pages 130-131: Luke's account frequently aligns with what we learn from other ancient historians. For example, his unusual account of the sudden death of Agrippa, his record of a major famine "in the days of Claudius," his identification of Ananus as the high priest in A.D. 47, and his record of a certain Egyptian revolutionary who led thousands to their death, have all been confirmed by cross-checking them with the writings of Josephus. Perhaps the most impressive feature of Luke's narrative is the way he consistently gets the titles of certain dignitaries right. This was particularly difficult to do of officials within the ancient Roman empire because the titles of dignitaries, as well as the status of the provinces they ruled, changed frequently. Yet Luke consistently gets them right, a fact that must bolster our confidence in his ability to relate reliable history. As Stephen Neill puts it, "Experience shows that nothing is more difficult than to get titles exactly right." But what we find in Luke is that "exactly the right title is used at exactly the right time and place." Archeology has confirmed Luke's accuracy on a host of other matters as well. His detailed knowledge of the ever-changing political topography of Rome, its geography, roadways, and means of travel, have all been confirmed by archeological evidence. More particularly, Luke's remarkably detailed account of Paul's sea voyage and shipwreck in Chapter 27 has been called "one of the most instructive documents for the knowledge of ancient seamanship." His accuracy in portraying the widely divergent cultures and customs of various regions throughout the Roman world has been frequently noted as well, as has his command of the complex legal processes that were employed in diverse regions of the empire. It was evidence such as this that led Dr. Sherwin-White, arguably the ablest historian of ancient Roman law in our time, to conclude that: "The confirmation of historicity [in Acts] is overwhelming... any attempts to reject its historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd."Response to James:
Accuracy and Reliability in Acts
I have reproduced all of James' quotation from Boyd to illustrate the extent to which weak arguments will be driven in order to defend a conservative apologetic position. None of the statements put forward by Boyd has anything to do with the reliability of Act's supposed historicity. Even if we were to assume (which I would not necessarily do) that all of Boyd's statements are accurate, they prove nothing about Luke's intent to be historically faithful to his core subject. It is not Luke's "ability to relate reliable history" that is at issue here. He may have had the ability: the question is, was that his purpose and did he carry it out where early Christian history was concerned? In view of the tendentious nature of Acts, and its overt contradiction of other more reliable evidence, particularly in the Pauline epistles, this is highly doubtful. In any case, the best historical novelist will attempt to set his fictional account within a setting which is as accurate as possible, and Luke may well have been similarly scrupulous. It is significant that Boyd does not offer a single example of how a detail about a specifically Christian element in Acts has been proven accurate by some independent corroboration.
In fact, Luke's "ability" is sorely wanting in the crucial matter of the circumstances of Jesus' birth. We all know that there is no evidence of a universal census under Augustus, and if Luke is simply enlarging on the Judean census of Quirinius in 6 CE, he has failed to align this with his placement of the Nativity before the death of Herod in 4 BCE. Quite a glaring flaw. I'm also a bit skeptical of Boyd's overemphasis on the matter of titles. When one has little of importance to appeal to, one must play up the relatively insignificant. (I confess I have not encountered this claim about Acts before, so I can neither dispute nor verify it.)
It's a little ironic that Boyd points to the authentic atmosphere of the sea voyage in Acts 27. Perhaps that authenticity can be explained by the fact that Luke has simply taken and reworked a common type of Hellenistic romance, putting his own characters into it. The much-discussed "we" passage phenomenon found in the latter part of Acts, which used to be taken as evidence of a 'diary' source used by Luke, has recently been shown to be a common stylistic device of Hellenistic writers when recounting sea voyages. Since corroboration anywhere in the Christian record for this episode in Paul's career is totally lacking, we can put the whole thing down (and some have) to a fictional creation on Luke's part, heavily borrowing from the 'adventure' genre of his time.
Dr. Sherwin-White may have been an able historian of ancient Roman law, but New Testament scholarship was not his specialty, and if the quote by him is accurate, it shows that he was pontificating on a subject about which he possessed little genuine understanding (or neutrality).
As a believer in Christ, my faith is more born of the Old Testament scriptures that testify of Him. Christ made a bold statement that "all the scriptures point to me." So I tested this statement by looking harder at those texts. The parallels to Christ in the Old Testament are amazing. A good place for the beginner would be the story of Joseph starting in Genesis, chapter 37. Joseph is mocked and betrayed by his brothers and is symbolically killed. Joseph then rises as the savior and ruler of the world of that day. He is a "Christ type parallel." All the books of the Old Testament follow this theme in a much more involved way. Even Flavius Josephus documents the historicity of the Old Testament with passion and fervor (in his "Antiquities of the Jews").Response to Mike:
The Old Testament as a Pointer to Christ
First of all, Mike seems to be implying that he believes in the historical accuracy of Old Testament accounts of figures like Joseph. These days it is becoming increasingly doubtful that anything to do with the patriarchs, with Moses and the Exodus, or even with the later historical period of the monarchy, is reliable as history. However, that is not a point I will get into here, except to say that even an historian of the stature of Josephus would have had no way of verifying the authenticity of any of the Hebrew scriptures' claims about the early history of Israel. His Antiquities of the Jews is largely his own paraphrase of the Hebrew bible, supplemented for the more recent periods by other historical sources. Given his "passion and fervor" for defending the Jewish heritage to his pagan readership (even if Jews themselves generally rejected him as a turncoat), he was not likely to have had much motivation for questioning its accuracy as history.
Another modern position about the Old Testament that is increasingly being adopted by biblical scholars is that little in those scriptures was intended to be prophecy as traditionally understood, beyond the general promise of some restoration and glorious future for Israel, often under a Messiah figure. But that minute details (like the famous Isaiah 7:14, about the young woman with child, or Zechariah 12:10, 'they shall look upon him whom they have pierced') were written as anything other than comments to do with their own times and circumstances, let alone as prophecies of the distant future, is no longer held by critical scholars.
Why the close correspondences in cases like Joseph, or the many other "Christ-type parallels" Mike alludes to? The best explanation is that the Christian story of Jesus is derived from those elements of the Old Testament. Not only have details of the Passion been pieced together from passages in scripture, but the overall shape and character of the story have been modeled on a common genre found throughout centuries of Jewish writing, sacred and apocryphal, a tale known by scholars today as The Suffering and Vindication of the Innocent Righteous One. Certain motifs were so ingrained in Jewish experience and tradition that they could not fail to be expressed in the story of Jesus.
By the time of Justin (in the 150s), Christian apologists had fallen into the trap. The prophecies in scripture, they claimed, were validated by the fact that Christ had fulfilled those prophecies, which fact could be ascertained by the Gospels which recounted that fulfillment. And Christ's own validity was proven by the record that he had fulfilled the prophecies. The entire validity of the Christian faith was seen as resting on that grand circularity, something which had been produced by the now obscured construction of allegorical Gospels through the process of midrashic culling from the scriptures. (See Justin, Apology 38, for example.)
You said about Paul: "But is it conceivable that he could so blithely disparage and reject the value of anything which the apostles who had accompanied Jesus in his earthly ministry might have to offer?" Apparently you did not read any further in Galatians. For Paul stated that he went to Jerusalem to bring to the other apostles the gospel Jesus had given him. But he said, "Those men added nothing to my message." Meaning, the gospel which Jesus had given the other apostles was the same gospel Paul had received from Jesus. So how could the other apostles have added anything? Paul knew that what he received from Jesus did not need man's approval. And in going to the other apostles, it was confirmed that his gospel was indeed complete, as was the other apostles' gospel. Therefore, what you say in your web page comes to false conclusions because you do not WANT to believe it.Response to Greg:
The Gospel of Paul and the Gospel of Peter
First of all, Greg is reading a lot into a rather obscure phrase at the end of the garbled and incomplete sentence in Galatians 2:6. After Paul went to Jerusalem and laid out for the "pillars" the gospel that was revealed to him, which he was preaching to the gentiles, "those men of high repute [sarcasm] added nothing," but allowed that Paul was permitted to go to the gentiles while they went to the Jews. What it was the other apostles might have "added," or to what, is unclear. (The NEB translates it: "these men . . . did not prolong the consultation," or as an alternative: "gave me no further instructions.")
In any case, my point was that Paul is disparaging those men who are presumed to have been followers of Jesus, claiming that their self-importance was of no value. We are entitled to ask how Paul could have treated them with such disdain if they had in fact enjoyed that privilege. Also, is it realistic to assume that Paul, regardless of the quality of his gospel about the "risen Christ," could have gotten along in his missionary work with little or no information about the life or character of Jesus on earth, and thus had no need to acquire such information from the very people who could have supplied him with it?
Greg claims that Paul's and Peter's gospels were the same, complete in themselves. Yet Galatians witnesses to quite a different situation. The fledgling Christian movement was currently being torn apart by the contentious issue of the continued applicability of the Jewish Law, and whether gentile converts had to conform to it. Paul and the pillars were at each others' throats over the matter. James sends men to "spy" on Paul's people and force them into certain practices; Paul condemns Peter for not being willing to eat with gentiles. Should there not have been a discussion between them over the differences in their gospels? Most important, should there not have been a discussion about what Jesus had taught on these matters, or how his example was to be followed to resolve such issues? This is one of the most devastating silences in all the epistles, one which makes it virtually impossible to conclude that either Paul or Peter knew of any preaching Jesus in their own historical past.
What I "want" to believe is what the evidence tells us, and not what confessional interest or two millennia of unfounded Christian tradition is determined to make us believe.
As a Christian, I must say I found your work quite disturbing. Many Christians have not represented themselves well in their defense of their faith. They have resorted to name calling, promises of damnation and so forth. In doing so, many have forged the mindset that Christians are judgmental and intolerant. I will not perpetuate this mindset by acting in such a manner. As far as offering any proof or refutation to your theories, I am ill equipped to do so. I'm not a scholar or researcher. Furthermore, I do not have your knowledge base nor eloquent command of the English language. There are, however, a couple of points I'd like to make. It appears to me that you went into your research with a mindset that Jesus never existed. Every time I see an article with "BCE" instead of "BC" or "CE" instead of "AD" in the expression of dates, the author in question is usually critical of Christianity—or at least disbelieving in the divine nature of Jesus Christ. In other words, it does not seem like you delved into your studies with an open mind. Have you discovered anything during your research that did support the existence of Christ as portrayed in the Gospels? If so, I'd certainly like to hear what you found. Secondly, you strike me as a most intelligent, well read and talented man. These are very powerful gifts. With power comes responsibility. By writing what you have written, consider its impact on those whose faith is all they have. I don't know if you have experienced hopelessness or not, but for those of us who have, our faith in God is priceless. Have you been responsible? Only you can answer that in good conscience.Response to Walter:
Exercising Responsibility in the Investigation of Christian Origins
First let me point out that the subject we are addressing, and the manner in which I present it, is an historical one. We are talking about Christian origins and what the historical record has to say about them. Is the 'orthodox' Christian view of those origins, and the interpretation it places on the New Testament record, borne out by scientific investigation? In my view it is not. I am not attacking religious belief, I am investigating an historical question. Naturally, the two are inseparably linked. But just because they are, this does not make the investigation of Christian origins a forbidden topic.
Christian claims about history are not sacrosanct. The question can be investigated just as we would any other historical question. If nothing were ever questioned because it might disturb or offend some people's beliefs, we would live in a very repressed society. The Church once maintained, based on the bible, that the sun went around the earth. Should we have suspended all astronomical investigation that might prove it wrong? Should we suppress the teaching of evolution today because fundamentalist Christians regard it as contradicting Genesis?
Did I have an open mind when I embarked on my own research? (Let me reiterate that I'm hardly the first to conclude that no historical Jesus existed. This is an idea which has been around for two centuries.) I went into it to resolve the question for myself. No, I did not believe in the divine nature of Jesus Christ, though I'm not sure what Walter has in mind by the phrase "critical of Christianity." Not accepting of its claims without careful investigation? Certainly. I only wish that all religious belief would be approached in that fashion. In regard to dating, CE and BCE are increasingly used even in New Testament scholarship, since AD and BC (especially the former) are essentially religious statements and highly partisan expressions which, in a multi-cultural world, should have no place in scientific, historical investigation and the presentation of history as a secular subject.
I can sympathize with Walter's emotional reaction to my views, and have often received expressions like it. But if the last two millennia of western history have indeed been founded on a misconception as monumental as this one, neither I as an individual nor society as whole would be acting "responsibly" by suppressing such knowledge. We cannot—or at least should not—found our lives on a falsity, no matter what the perceived personal or collective benefit. In the long run, it does more harm than good, and while I can appreciate that some people may obtain certain beneficial experiences through faith, such faith has also had vast consequences on individuals and societies which are not so demonstrably favorable. Much of Christian history will bear witness to that, and even today Christian doctrine continues to produce deleterious effects not only on countless individuals (I've received many a 'testimonial' in that regard), but on a wide range of social and educational issues.
Just as we cannot adhere blindly to the past, we must always strive for greater understanding of ourselves and the universe to make our future better. All of human progress has come from scientific investigation of the world around us and a seeking of the objective truth, no matter what it is. I firmly believe in that principle, and that this is where human wisdom comes from. If I ever do uncover evidence more convincing of Jesus' existence than of his non-existence, I'll not suppress it. But virtually everything I have found points in the latter direction.
The human spirit (if I may use such a term) is tremendously resilient and creative. In the absence of an historical Jesus, even in the absence of Christianity if it comes to that, it will find a way to flourish. I happen to believe that it may be time, finally, to seek that strength in other expressions than religion or beliefs in a supernatural whose entire existence is becoming more and more dubious and lacking in evidence. If that's all we have to place our hopes in, we are in danger of deluding ourselves and being vastly disappointed. I would much rather place them in our own innate abilities and evolved capacity for wisdom, as rocky a road to achievement as that may be.
RFSet14
Javier writes:
Congratulations on your excellent website. As soon as I can I'm ordering your book. I'm 23 years old and I'm a last year medical student here in Venezuela, but I have a deep interest in history, religion and philosophy. It is very difficult in my country to cast doubt on traditional fairy tales and superstitions due to the lack of an education in critical thinking. I'm sure you experience similar problems in your country. Best wishes to you!
Warwick writes:
I find your work to be absolutely brilliant. I am not a biblical scholar but have all my adult life struggled with the thought that Jesus did not exist and was a myth and quite by accident I discovered your site. Now I know I am not insane, out of step or doomed to hell and any other number of things that the "religious" would condemn me to. I thank you most sincerely.
Lisa writes:
You talk about having an open mind, but your entire stance seems biased from the beginning. I am much more convinced by Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. I have seen people raised from the dead, healed of blindness. I have seen legs grow before my eyes, and I have seen people changed. All of these things were done by the power of Jesus. I don't care if you have all the evidence in the world, my life has hope, I have seen the miracles of God, and I live in his presence. I am a missionary and have seen the angels. I have had the Lord provide for my every need. You did not convince me.
Rich and Amanda write:
What a bunch of hypothetical garbage. I apologize for sounding harsh but, really. I am a Christian, absolutely. I think that you may have done a good job of trying to convince others that Jesus never existed, but yet your reasons are all theories, and you have no substantial evidence to back up your claims. All of you scientists, researchers, and so called intellectuals, using the very gifts that God bestowed upon you to blaspheme his son. The day is coming soon where all will be known, and people like you will run to the mountains to hide when you see the Son of God appear. May God have mercy on your soul.
I have to admit, as a Christian, I hadn't really noticed the lack of specific references to the "Gospel Jesus" in Paul's epistles. I have two questions: first, though I'll not argue with the fact that Paul doesn't refer explicitly to gospel events, do you really think that Paul, as a man, didn't think there was a real, flesh-and-blood Jesus? I realize this is a question that can only elicit a subjective answer, but you seem to be saying that Paul's lack of reference to "historical" events in Jesus' life means that there was no "historical" Jesus. Maybe all it means is, Paul just didn't refer to Jesus' specific words or acts. I admit it's strange, but I don't know that it is "evidence" of anything. Paul was writing specific letters to individual churches and people, addressing certain problems; Paul's main concern seems to be outlining Jesus' divinity. The claim that Jesus was more than just a troublesome rabbi would have been what others would have found hard to swallow, not the fact that Jesus was a "real person." I imagine that first-century Romans and Jews would not be wondering (or caring) whether Jesus was really a carpenter from Judea; they would have cared a great deal about whether he was something more. I would guess that Paul's readers would tend to think that maybe Jesus was only a flesh-and-blood man, which is why Paul talks about who Jesus really was: the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, the one in whom all things hold together. Is it any wonder that Paul spends his time fleshing (no pun intended) out theology that the gospels only hint at? Also, what about all of Paul's references in Colossians to Jesus as a real person (not events or words, but as a real person with a body, i.e., "he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death," "the blood of his cross", etc). I realize this says nothing to what you say about the gospels, and is in what you call "mythological" terms (which does show your naturalistic assumptions), but it does show that Paul believed in a flesh-and-blood Jesus. But why he doesn't refer to the gospels, I cannot say, nor do I think it is particularly useful to speculate on it, since one cannot possibly know. Anyway, as a devout Christian I wasn't offended or terribly bothered (intellectually or spiritually) by your article, but it was a fascinating read. As I read the letters and your responses, I was impressed with your honesty and grace to those who didn't agree. I wish I could say the same for some who wrote in to you, both for and against: those against said you were going to hell (like they know!) and those who agreed with you took obscene relish in seeing the faith of others being dissected (being a free-thinker is one thing; being arrogant and sadistic about it is quite another).Response to Pete:
In Paul's Room: A 'Positive' Argument from Silence
If you were to walk into a room and find that all the furniture was painted bright red, or that it was sitting on the ceiling, would you simply go about your business with the thought that, yes, it's strange perhaps, but why bother speculating about what it means or why it got that way? Would you say that it is not particularly useful to try to discover the reason for the garish color, or the gravity-defying arrangement of the furniture? And would it be true that "one cannot possibly know" why the room possessed these features?
If before one entered the room, one was subjected to extensive mental conditioning that bright red was an undistinguished color, or should really be seen as brown, or that furniture on the ceiling was simply someone's idea of imaginative decor, one might perhaps be able to enter such a room and not be surprised or disturbed by it. For most people, that's the way the Christian epistolary record has been presented, and scholars have traditionally done their best to make us see red as brown, and ceiling furniture as unremarkable, or perhaps simply as an expression of Paul's offbeat taste in interior decorating.
But when we enter Paul's room from the rest of the Gospel-decorated house—and the same goes for the rooms of all the other epistle writers of the first century, not just Paul's—the features of that room, to the open and unconditioned eye, are undeniably bizarre.
In the rest of the house we see Jesus choosing men to be his disciples and appointing them as apostles to the world, and they in turn organize and direct an apostolic movement which reaches out over half an empire. But when we enter Paul's room, we find him moving in a competitive world of independent apostles, many of them apparently to be identified with the earthly followers of Jesus in the Gospels, yet no one ever mentions or appeals to a link—or anyone's lack of it—to the historical man. The word "disciple" never appears, and Peter and the pillars have received their mandate to preach from God (Gal.2:8), as has Paul. The mark of the legitimate apostle is a visionary "seeing" of the Lord.
The walls of the rest of the house are hung with Gospel pictures of a preaching, miracle-working, prophesying Jesus, who walks the land, impresses large crowds, attracts the attention of all and sundry. On the walls of Paul's room there are no pictures, for his Christ is a mystery, a "secret" hidden for long generations and only now "revealed" through scripture and the Holy Spirit to inspired apostles like himself (eg, Romans 16:25-6).
Outside Paul's room, the Gospel decor reveals a teaching Jesus who told of God's love, offered enlightened, revolutionary ethics, painted vivid pictures of the imminent end of the world. Inside Paul's room, similar great ethical maxims about love and life are urged upon the listener, but the only figure to whom these lofty sentiments are ever attributed is God (as in 1 Thess. 4:9). Paul, too, offers a picture of the coming End, but not from Jesus' preaching on earth.
The decor of Paul's room is certainly a garish color, screaming its clash with the rest of the house. But Paul's inverted furniture is even more incongruous. Pete shows himself to be well aware of the range of contrasts in attitude toward Jesus that we find in the record. To the average Roman and Jew, as the Gospels would indicate, Jesus should indeed have been a carpenter from Nazareth, a flesh and blood man. Yet Paul and other Christians speak of their Jesus in the lofty and mythological language of 1 Corinthians 8:6, Colossians 1:15-20, and Hebrews 1:1-3: the Son as the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, the one in whom all things hold together, as Pete indicates. Can one imagine any Roman or Jewish audience listening to such declarations and not reacting with astonishment, anger, sheer ridicule? Would not much of Paul's efforts need to be devoted to justifying such an outlandish elevation of a human man, a crucified criminal? Can the divine Son be talked about without mentioning his human antecedent, can Paul demonstrate that Jesus was "more than a man" without referring to the man himself? Or does Paul's ceiling furniture simply defy gravity?
Many take refuge in the argument that, well, the epistles don't need to voice the equation everyone already knows, they don't need to make attributions all Christians are familiar with. One might legitimately wonder how this lack of need could be so pervasive, where not one document by one writer in a corpus of so many breaks the silence, deliberately or accidentally, about the human founder of their faith. A companion argument is that these are "occasional" writings, and don't have occasion to speak of Jesus of Nazareth or the events of the Gospel story. Yet time and again, occasions do arise in the epistles where a reference to the Gospel figure or events would be natural, expected, compelling; at times they cry out for such a mention. My feature "The Sound of Silence: 200 Missing References to the Gospel Jesus in the New Testament Epistles" more than amply demonstrates this.
Above all, it is the manner of expression which Paul and every other epistle writer uses that is the crux of the matter. The question of the void on the Gospel Jesus goes beyond the use of a simple argument from silence. It is far from being based on mere negativity. Paul and the epistle writers speak positively about the object of their worship, about the nature of their faith movement and how it began, and their manner of expression presents a picture which pointedly leaves out any reference to a recent human man; indeed it often leaves no room for him (for example, Titus 1:2-3).
I have referred to the Pauline view of Jesus as a secret long hidden with God, of the universal way of speaking of his 'revelation' in the present time, of the focus on scripture as the source of information about him and about God's promises, of the medium of the Holy Spirit in inaugurating the faith movement and revealing the gospel. Everything proceeds from God, God the agent, God the caller, God the source of moral precepts, God the object of thanks and devotion. No set of writers could consistently speak this way if they had the image of Jesus of Nazareth, his recent words and deeds on earth, before their eyes. If oral tradition had passed on memories and legends of the great events of his death and rising, of Calvary and the empty tomb (and how could it not?), could Christian writers place the redeeming sacrifice of Jesus in a heavenly sanctuary or in the sphere of celestial demons? If they followed a man who had taught, performed miracles, lived and died and rose on the ground they themselves walked on, could they have totally ignored all those holy and momentous places?
There is one telling manner of expression that is always overlooked. I call it Paul's "starting point" in speaking of his Christ Jesus. Pete alludes to this without realizing it, but he also consciously points to the "real person" references he and others find in the epistles, those involving terms like "flesh" and "blood" and even a 'descent' from David. The two are closely linked, and I think that this may be a good time and place to briefly draw those observations together and look again at how they can be explained in terms of a spiritual Christ who operates entirely in the supernatural, mythical world.
To illustrate the idea of the 'starting point' note how Pete speaks of Paul's "claim that Jesus was more than just a troublesome rabbi," that Paul was concerned with "outlining Jesus' divinity." As a grammatical exercise, isolate the word "Jesus." In the context of how Pete uses it and how he imputes it to Paul, what does it refer to? It refers to the man Jesus. Paul, according to Pete, is concerned with showing that the man Jesus was in reality divine. The man Jesus was much more than a "troublesome rabbi." Pete demonstrates the natural and inevitable way we would expect the early Christians to speak of Jesus: by adopting a starting point in the historical man himself.
No such manner of expression appears in the epistles. Paul and the other writers speak directly of a divine Son and make faith declarations about him and his activities. "And there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came to be, and we through him" (1 Cor. 8:6). "In this final age he has spoken to us through the Son . . . who is the effulgence of God's splendor and the stamp of God's very being" (Heb.1:2-3). "For the divine nature was his (Christ Jesus') from the first; yet he did not prize his equality with God, but emptied himself . . ." (Phil. 2:6f, a pre-Pauline christological hymn). Not only is the starting point the divine Son in heaven, no equation is made with a recent, identifiable earthly man. I will repeat my oft-used phrase: Paul believes in a Son of God, not that anyone was the Son of God.
There is nothing to tell us that the Pauline Son had ever set foot on earth. Together with all that "mystery/secret" and "revelation/disclosure" language as applied to Christ, with God himself as the originator of the movement through scripture and the Holy Spirit, these are pretty strong indications that the early Christian movement knew of no historical Jesus. What, then, do we do with that small group of passages which speak of "flesh" and "blood," (an example would be Ephesians 1:7, "we have redemption through his blood"), and that other small number which seem to give him a human lineage: Romans 1:3's "of David's seed" and parallel ideas in Romans 9:5 and Hebrews 7:14, Galatians 4:4's "born of woman", and one or two others? Does the case for Jesus' historicity depend on those two handfuls (let's call them) of references? Should they tip the scales against all the other, non-human language, the exclusion of any Jesus from the picture of the movement, the overall vast silence on the Gospel figure? Or do they instead have another explanation?
The first thing to note about this double handful of passages, is that not one of them supplies us with a Gospel event or a clear statement of a life on earth. (Elsewhere, as anyone who has read even the basics of this website knows, 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16, with its "Jews who killed the Lord Jesus" is judged by most liberal scholars today to be an interpolation; the "Lord's Supper" passage of 1 Corinthians 11:23f can easily refer—particularly since Paul describes it as a revelation directly from the Lord—to a mythical scene, very similar to mystery-cult sacred meal myths like that of Mithras; and 1 Timothy 6:13, with its passing reference to Pilate, is part of a second century piece of writing, though it too gives evidence of being an interpolation.) Nowhere does a writer use a phrase like, "when he was on earth" or "lived a life." In fact, Hebrews 8:4 virtually spells it out that he had never been on earth.
Let's look at that first handful. It is curious how most of these passages use a stereotyped phrase involving the word "flesh," as in "kata sarka." According to the flesh, in relation to the flesh, in the sphere of the flesh, are only some of the attempts made by translators to pinpoint the meaning of this cryptic phrase. Its use in 2 Corinthians 5:16 (where it is not applied to Christ, but to those who know Christ) shows that it is not simply a reference to being 'in human flesh.' It can relate to worldly standards, mystical relationships. Considering that salvation in this period was looked upon as coming out of parallel actions between a god and the devotee (including in Pauline Christianity), and considering that deity in its purest spiritual form and habitat could have no contact with the world of humans, we can postulate the concept of some intermediate sphere of contact, wherein the god moved closer to the world of matter and could share in some of its human characteristics. Otherwise, salvation by a god wouldn't have been possible.
Everywhere that an epistle writer uses a phrase about Jesus' nature or redeeming acts involving the word "sarx" we can suggest that he is speaking of that point or state of contact or similarity between the spiritual and the material. In other words, the god has moved into the sphere or state of being which can react on the flesh, on humans and their salvation. Since philosophers like Julian speak very vividly of the graded higher world, whose spheres ever degrade as they descend toward, and start to affect, matter, and of gods moving down those spheres (compare the Ascension of Isaiah 9 and 10), we have a reasonable—if alien to our way of thinking—explanation for this pervasive manner of speaking among early Christian writers who never manage to place Jesus firmly on earth.
Even without such an insight, however, we need merely look at the concept of "blood" as used in the epistle to the Hebrews in speaking of Christ's sacrifice in the heavenly sanctuary, and we immediately realize that such terms may be used by the epistle writers to refer to spiritual things. We need merely look at the myths of the mystery cults, which have their own savior gods spoken of in human-sounding terms, to understand the thought world which the epistle writers moved in. The blood and other bodily fluids of the bull slain by Mithras which spill out to vitalize the earth are not regarded as historical, earthly products. The flesh of Attis' severed genitals (with the result that he bled to death) are not regarded as made of matter. These are not "real person/animal" references. Besides, all sacrificial concepts had to involve the shedding of blood—Hebrews (9:22) declares that there is no forgiveness of sin without it—and so the concept of Christ's "blood" was conceptually necessary, even if it was located in the mythical, spiritual world.
Taking into account the fundamental Platonic principle that all things in the world of matter have more perfect counterparts in the higher spiritual world from which they are derived, and that the upper realm was the "genuine" reality and the lower one the copy, no human-sounding term can be declared out of place when applied to the heavenly Christ, and that includes being "of David's seed" (Rom.1:3).
Which brings us to a consideration of that second handful of references. What almost all of them have in common is their dependence on scripture. In other words, a passage in the sacred writings which is regarded as having 'messianic' meaning has been applied to the spiritual Christ, as illustrating some aspect of his nature or activities. Thus Romans 1:3, which verse 2 says is part of the gospel about the Son found in scripture, referring to the many biblical passages foretelling a future king to be descended from David. Hebrews' similar 7:14 ("our Lord is sprung from Judah") is also seen by the context to be founded on scripture and motivated by theological necessity. It is applied to Christ the High Priest whose sacrifice is placed entirely in the heavenly sphere. Even Hebrews 5:7, "in the days (time/state?) of his flesh . . ." is governed by the need to apply scriptural passages to Christ's lower realm activities: "he offered up prayers and petitions, with loud cries and tears" is dependent on Psalm 116:1 and 22:24 LXX.
The most significant passage governed by scripture is "born of woman" in Galatians 4:4. Paul's remark was almost certainly governed by the famous Isaiah 7:14, "a young woman shall conceive and bear a son"—though not enough for him to give us the name of that woman. Paul has also added "born under the Law," probably in order to supply the necessary paradigmatic parallel with those to whom he is comparing Christ. But if Christ Jesus was a Jewish savior god, it would come as no surprise to give him a lineage which involved Jewish characteristics, and almost all of these passages involve that feature. In any case, there are enough anomalies in the Galatians passage as a whole (verse 6's sending of only the "spirit" of the Son, for example) to undermine its effect, and a Greek mythical god like Dionysos could also be said to be 'born of woman.' This verse is the one most often appealed to in the epistles to counter the mythicist position, but while it may be problematic, when taken with all the contrary evidence and its own internal inconsistencies it hardly tips the scale, and I can easily resist the temptation indulged in by others to take refuge in regarding 'born of woman, born under the Law' as an interpolation.
Finally, to deal with an odd-man-out passage, 1 Timothy 2:5's bare use of the word "anthropos" in reference to Christ carries no weight, if only because God himself could be described in gnostic mystical literature as the First Man, and the Son/Logos first emanation of God as the Son of Man. Besides, the term can be seen in parallel with the use of the word "flesh."
Most of the above passages have been addressed at greater length in various places on the site, especially Supplementary Article No. 8: Christ As "Man".
One point to be made is that all these new readings in this double handful of passages are consistent. They are not piecemeal, an ad hoc exercise in reinterpretation (something I have occasionally been accused of). They do, of course, go against traditional exegesis, but they all fit into a unified and intelligible picture of earliest Christianity as a Platonically based, mystery cult expression in keeping with the dominant ideas of the time, and they fit into the new paradigm created by all the other observations about the early Christian record I have presented.
It is also the case that all these double handful of passages fall into the same general area, the area which is most difficult for the modern mind, with its literal, scientific and historical orientation, to comprehend. We have to recognize our 20th and 21st century resistance, and be willing to put ourselves back into the first century's way of thinking, into its habitat of a multi-layered universe, into a mindset where an understanding of the mysterious workings of a god and spirit infested world is universally conveyed by myths and mystical allegories rather than scientific or historical analyses.
The historicizing of the Gospels was the first step on the path to the modern world. Now we have to turn off the Gospel radio when reading the epistles.
[Note: Another new item just posted, a review of the recent book by Alvar Allegard, Jesus — One Hundred Years Before Christ (part of my feature "The Case for the Jesus Myth"), contains an extended discussion and comparison of the two ‘camps’ within the mythicist position, (1) the one represented by G. A. Wells—followed by Ellegard in a more specific way—that Paul placed his Christ on earth in a time earlier than the first century, and (2) the one represented by myself, that Paul did not place his Christ on earth at all, but in the spiritual world of myth, similar to the way the savior gods of the mystery cults were viewed. As part of a close examination of Ellegard’s thesis, that the early Christian Christ was identified with the Essene Teacher of Righteousness, I also address Wells’ more general position. I argue for the greater likelihood of my own view. See ellegard.html.]
I am much impressed by your website, both by the quality of your scholarship and the elegance of your style. I largely agree with your position on the historicity of Jesus, but I do have some reservations on a few of the details of the picture you paint. I'll just mention one. It is whether the Q material can be traced back to an actual person. You claim that these are sayings of a community, not a single man. Burton Mack on the other hand believes that they (Q1) are indeed sayings of a founder of a movement. The way I see things, neither position is justified as a firm stance because they are both plausible, and we have no way of knowing which one of them is true. Considering that Jesus was a popular name at the time, there well may have been such an itinerant cynic-style sage in Galilee, who inherited some of the Q1 sayings and recast or invented the rest. And gained some local notoriety and admirers while tramping around. Therefore, behind the Q gospel there may lurk a real founder of a movement. We don't know for sure, but by the same token we can't rule it out either.Response to Stoil:
Was There a Q Founder 'Jesus'?
I don't dispute Stoil's statement. It is difficult to "rule out" any reasonable interpretation of evidence where historical research is concerned. (Although, I do try to "rule out" many unreasonable interpretations, such as that an itinerant sage who may have "gained some local notoriety and admirers while tramping around" the Galilean countryside could have been elevated by such as Paul within a handful of years of his death to the status of cosmic pre-existent Son who had helped create the world and was now its redeemer. However, I realize that Stoil is not claiming this.)
On my site, and especially in my new book, I examine the evidence within Q itself and come to the conclusion that there are very significant indications in the document that the "Cynic-style sage" of Burton Mack and others cannot be supported. There are good clues pointing to early stages of Q which contained no human founder or source figure at all.
I'll quote a few paragraphs from a passage in my book which summarizes arguments that have been made in much greater detail earlier:
. . . However, in reviewing the evidence, we find that the early layers of Q contain strong indications that no Jesus figure was known at that time: passages which pointedly make no mention of him [where such a mention would be expected], the lack of hero-fixation that such a founder should have generated, the void even on his name in the early strata. The extended anecdotes concerning him are demonstrably later constructions. Indeed, if the later stage of Q was amenable to recording such anecdotes embodying Jesus' name and a touch of biography, why was early Q not so inclined, especially at a time when the memory of the preaching founder would have been closer and stronger? It is in the early stages that we would expect to find such things. . . .I also put forward arguments in my discussion on Josephus that the famous Testimonium, which many scholars try to claim has an 'authentic' core, is entirely a Christian construction since Josephus makes no mention of Jesus as the founder and inspiration of the widespread Kingdom of God preaching movement evidenced by Q and the Didache. Such a role, if Mack's position rather than mine is true, is one that should have been known to Josephus.
Considering the movement as a whole, if a prominent teacher stood at its genesis, as speaker of a seminal body of sayings, that teacher should be a given in all the expressions of the movement found in the documentary record. We have seen that the Didache stands in some line with the Q community, yet the figure of a teaching, miracle-working Jesus is not to be found there. Revealingly, the Didache includes a body of ethical maxims which are often very similar to the Q1 sayings, and yet there is no attribution to a Jesus figure. This in itself indicates that their association with a Jesus in the Q document is a separate or local development, one the Didache did not share in, and that the introduction of a founder figure in Q came later than the Didache community's own tangential [in a different geographical area] development. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus' hold on the sayings is tenuous, being limited to little prefaces which could well be secondary [later] additions. In fact, Jesus made so little impact on the Thomas community that not even a primitive integration of him with the material itself, such as we find in Q3, was effected. Nor is there any trend toward biography in Thomas.
This review of the evidence provides strong indication that there was no Q founder in the initial stages of the movement, but that he was later added by some of the communities involved on the larger Kingdom [of God preaching] scene.
While it may not be possible to take a "firm stance (on) knowing which one of them is true" when contradictory alternatives are presented in historical research, it is by a process of argumentation based on the evidence, as I have done above, that one arrives at a position which can be regarded as persuasive, or as possessing a degree of 'probability.' That is all we can expect from most historical research, and it is all I have claimed for any facet of my position on the non-existence of an historical Jesus.
Peter Kirby, in his web site essay on Josephus, points out that children were being named Christ (Christou). If this is the case does this automatically mean that it is equal in term to The Christ? Like our own culture where we call a child Kristine or Christopher which does not necessarily mean THE Christ. Wouldn't it have been blasphemy, if not literally, then culturally? Again, good work.Response to Guy:
The Christ vs. Mr. Christ
First of all, I think Guy is misreading Kirby's statement. He seems to have understood him as saying that "Christ" (Christus in Latin or Christos in Greek) was being used as a proper name for ordinary people, as though parents were naming their sons "Christ." Rather, Kirby is simply pointing out that gentiles (once an historical Jesus was getting established, as I would style it, or maybe even before) tended to regard the term "Christ" as one of Jesus' names, whereas Jews would see the word as an office or title applied to a prefigured and prophesied deliverer in the scriptures.
But let me address the argument which Kirby makes in regard to this point. Since a Jew would have realized that "Christ" was not a proper name, but the title of the expected Messiah, he would not employ it as a name, whereas a Christian scribe, being a gentile and following the lead of the Gospels, might tend to do so. Kirby points to the fact that the phrase in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews 20, "tou legomenou Christou" (the one called [the] Christ), does not use the term as a name but as the title of the Messiah. From this, Kirby makes the natural suggestion that the writer must be a Jew rather than a Christian. In other words, the greater likelihood is that Josephus wrote this phrase, rather than a later Christian scribe (the latter being my suggestion, in my book and in my Supplementary Article No. 10: Josephus Unbound.)
However, there are two problems with this argument. One is that, while many later non-Jewish Christians might well have mistaken "Christ" for a proper name, and used it as such, this does not mean that every Christian was this ignorant, and especially not Christian scribes who were literate and worked with many manuscripts in the course of their work. I rather think that such a scribe would be aware both of its traditional Jewish meaning as a title, and of its more colloquial usage in Christian circles as a proper name. He could then have used it either way.
The second point is that the phrase "tou legomenou Christou" is used in both Matthew and John, and so could be said to be a common and comfortable phrase, at least among more literate Christian circles. The scribe who inserted the phrase into Antiquities 20 (or initially in the 'lost reference,' probably in Jewish War) could well have been influenced by a familiarity with the Gospel usage of such a phrase.
In regard to your response to Darryl's question on the plaque from Jesus' cross: [referring to Reader Feedback 11, in which "Darryl" asked me if I had heard of "the plaque that was supposedly nailed to Jesus' cross" as mentioned on a PBS website. Darryl had "serious doubts" about it, while I replied that I had not heard of it.] I believe I have seen the plaque Darryl means. It's in Rome, more precisely in the church of St. Helena (actually I'm not totally sure that that's the official name of the church, but the church was built out of parts of Helena's - Constantine's mother - palace). It's still in central Rome - just inside Aurelian's Wall - but somewhat off the beaten track. The plaque is still fixed on what's supposed to be the top of the cross, and it contains the phrase "Iesus Nazareum Rex Judaeorum" (forgive any misspellings) in Latin, Greek and what I take to be Aramaic. To a layman's eye it looks rather authentic; it certainly looks very old. Interestingly, in the same exhibit they have a thorn of Jesus' crown and Thomas' finger that touched Jesus (I'm not kidding). In the church they didn't seem to have any information material on the plaque. If it is part of the same cross that Helena is supposed to have found in Jerusalem and was regarded for centuries as the True Cross - the one Heraclius brought back - then it does have genuine historical value, of course, but I'm afraid it may be even the forgery of a forgery. If you'll forgive me, Rome has many such relics. Along the Appian Way there is the Quo Vadis Domine Church, very small. Inside you can see Jesus's footprints, where he is supposed to have stood while talking to Peter. But if the prints are life-size, Jesus' shoe size was around 12.Response to Peter:
More on the Plaque from Jesus' Cross, and Jesus' Footprints
You don't need to ask my forgiveness. I wonder if the recent 'apology' by the Pontiff in Rome extended to the foisting of travesties such as this on the naive mind of western society for so many hundreds of years. To these, we now have to add the Gospel story itself.
RFSet15
Pepper writes:
First let me express my gratitude for this amazing body of work. I must admit that I found your site yesterday and have been on line at least 15 hours attempting to read and assimilate all that you've provided. I was "saved" in 1980 under dubious circumstances but never truly bought it. I've looked for a "kindred spirit" for a very long time as I could no longer accept the vision of God and the universe as set forth in the bible. The Jesus Puzzle was an epiphany and I'm happy to report that I've got my MIND BACK!
Karen writes:
For the longest time I've been questioned as to why I do not believe in the existence of the character called Jesus. Now that you have published your work, I will be recommending it to whoever wants to know the reasons why. Thank you so much for doing so. It has been a blazing torch in a sea of darkness.
Ed writes:
This is the biggest pile of bolony [sic] I have ever read. I truly hope you find Jesus and let him into your heart before it is too late.
Dan writes:
Your website and writings have been a fascinating journey for me. Raised in a rural Lutheran church family, I had always found the in-group, out-group mentality of the church disturbing. The guilt and fear used to motivate people to stay, while not paramount, were certainly there as an undercurrent should you attempt to objectively criticize the faith or the converted. A personal revelation came to me a few years ago as a result of Joseph Campbell's writings regarding his work in comparative mythology. Once you realize that virgin births, catastrophic floods, etc. are mythological motifs seen in cultures pre-dating Christians by thousands of years, the facade of literal biblical interpretation crumbles. The exposure of the absence of an historical Jesus only serves as a capstone to solidify the criticism of a religion that has chained its followers to unreality for nearly two thousand years. Of course many other religions are guilty of the same crimes. Thank you for having the courage to publish your thoughts and ideas. Perhaps we are not as far away from an "Age of Reason" as previously thought.
Chris writes:
You know, Mr. Doherty, people like you need to be hung by your thumbs. I am a Believer and you can write till your bones are bare and bleeding and you will in no way take my eyes off Jesus. It is terrible when folks like you write about nothing you know nothing about, just pure speculation. You were not there, you don't know, you are just guessing and it opens the door for Satan to do his work. I know and so does every other Believer that Satan is the one that inspires your writings. I will pray for you but I can see where you will spend eternity. I feel soooooo sorry for you and for anyone that would read and believe the trash that you publish.
Ken writes:
I find your website on the historical Jesus a superb logical answer to a lot of real nagging questions. What all religions have in common is the control of the people through B---S---. I can readily see how religion got started but I can't see how in this day and age a majority of the world's people can cling to myths and superstition while enjoying the benefits of science. No God of any religion ever fed or clothed people, science and hard work did.
Ron writes:
Reading the New Testament is forever changed when applying your views. I'm certain the same can be said about the Hebrew Bible. The myths and morality plays are entertaining but to have 'faith' that ANY of the Bible is true is literally wishful thinking. I am not now nor have I ever been an atheist. But Jesus or Moses are not the answer. Keep up the good work.
Glen writes:
I have just been reading your articles on line, and I must say that I never thought I would meet a fellow searcher that dared to confront the religious establishment as you have done. I congratulate you for your knowledge and guts to cut across these cultural lines and make a stand for a new stance. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Howard writes:
I found your site some time ago and have regularly come back to it. I enjoy it immensely. I have a degree in theology but as you can imagine we were basically taught the 'party line.' I went there to get answers, I came away with even more questions. I am very grateful for the work you do. Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge with the rest of us.
Bill writes:
The results of your scholarship deserve the widest possible dissemination, and I hope against hope that your book will serve as a catalyst for opening some minds and putting truth in the spotlight. Long live rational thought!
Deane writes:
Before I came across your web site I had never seriously entertained the idea that Jesus might have been a wholly mythical being. Over the years, nevertheless, my knowledge of Jesus has shrunk continually. He was once my Lord and Savior. In my undergraduate years I gave myself over to the "New Quest" only to find that he eluded me at every turn. I remember distinctly opening my first lectures on Paul with words to my students to this effect: "Were we destitute of the Gospels, and had we to rely exclusively on Paul, we would know nothing about Jesus at all." By the time I came to your web site I could write everything I knew about Jesus the man on the back of a cigarette box. Now, even if he existed, I know nothing at all - not even that he existed. Thanks for the teaching.
I am still trying to understand the purpose of the writing of the later three canonical Gospels. Matthew indeed seems an 'improved' version of Mark's midrash, but how about 27:62-66 and 28:11-15 [the 'guard at the tomb' sequence]? The reason for writing this is to refute a Jewish explanation of the empty tomb. In order to make this necessary, a bodily resurrection idea had to exist. That would not make of Matthew a midrash, where it would not be necessary. The same with Luke 24:33-43 [Jesus' post-resurrection appearance to the Eleven] with its emphasis on touching and eating. It is puzzling. Indeed, this is why Christians point to these passages to support a physical resurrection. It is difficult to show them that it has to be understood as an allegory, since the narration in this form does not lend itself to allegorical interpretation. (On the other hand, Matthew 28:16-20 [Jesus' appearance to the Eleven on a mountain in Galilee] can easily be understood as an allegory with Jesus appearing on a mountain. The same can be said about the meeting on the road to Emmaus.)Response to Eric:
Matthew's Guard at the Tomb / Luke's Post-Resurrection Scene
In regard to Luke, I don't see a problem at all. A story declaring that a man had risen from his grave (even as allegory, or symbolic of what the believer/reader could anticipate for himself after death) could be extended in the writer's mind to including an element of demonstration as to the veracity of such a resurrection. In the case of Matthew's 'guard at the tomb' sequence, this is perhaps more difficult to see in that way, although as part of a (fictional) story about a man rising from his tomb, it is not out of place. Nor is it necessary to think that Matthew includes it because there was an actual Jewish claim that, if Jesus was said to have risen, it was because the disciples must have stolen the body. If that were the case, one would expect to find a counter to it (such as Matthew's guard at the tomb) in more than just one Gospel. If such a Jewish claim were current, we might also expect it to show up in those later Talmudic references to Jesus, or even in Justin's "Dialogue with the Jew Trypho." The fact that this story is unique to Matthew is, to me, more than a little suspicious.
I also think it is possible that this element is a later insertion. Certainly, the flanking paragraphs for both parts of the guard at the tomb story run very well into each other. Aside from the observations I've made, it's impossible to resolve the question. In my book, I leave my options open (p.193). I allow for the possibility that the later evangelists believed in the historicity of the founder figure who appears in the later layer of the Q document they used. And they may have thought that the passion story of Mark's Gospel was basically historical, although they would not have regarded the details of Mark's account as anything more than representative or symbolic. This would be the only way to explain their cavalier willingness to change anything they felt could be improved or altered in Mark's account to fit their own teaching agendas.
The same goes for John. I have said that this evangelist could hardly have regarded his picture of Jesus, and the sayings he puts in his mouth, as at all historical. His Jesus diverges too much from the Synoptic precedent (which John almost certainly used) and conforms too much to the doctrines of the evangelist's own community.
I have some questions: 1. When Talmud has been written down? My opponents deny its birth-time of 3rd century. They state that it has appeared between 2nd and 5th century and consists of the babylonian and the jewish (jerusalem) versions; they also think that Jews would support arguments for the silence about Jesus and put Jesus into the Talmud tradition at the beginning of the 2nd century.... [further questions below]Response to Jarek:
The Talmud / Sheol and an Afterlife / Acts' Attestation / Midrash / Quirinius' Census
The Talmud only came to be written down, in its earliest phase (called the "Mishnah"), starting about 200 CE, by Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi (Judah the Prince). It was a codification of centuries of earlier rabbinic oral expansions on the Mosaic Law (written in the Pentateuch). Before 200 CE, this Oral Law had been handed on only by word of mouth from generation to generation. Actually, the "Talmud" is an overall term referring to the initial Mishnah, plus the "Gemara," two branches of commentaries which accumulated on the Mishnah over the next few centuries, one in Babylon and the other in Palestine, although the latter are also referred to as the Babylonian Talmud and the Palestinian Talmud.
There is no mention of Jesus in the Mishnah (though some scholars think to interpret a couple of things as oblique references to him, none of which bear any relation to the Gospel story) despite the fact that the Mishnah records many sayings of rabbis of the first century.
Two separate collections, contemporary with the Mishnah and early Gemara, are the Tosephta and the Baraita (some of the latter are included as distinct parts of the Talmuds). There are a few references in these collections to Jesus, or to figures—with different names—interpreted as being Jesus, though they bear little or no resemblance to the Gospel character. Some are reputed to come from rabbis who lived at the end of the 1st century CE. The most famous is probably the one which states that Ben Stada, a magician who lured men to apostasy, was condemned to death by stoning in the city of Lydda, not in Jerusalem. A later Baraita contradicts this by saying that he was hung, but still in Lydda.
The references to Jesus in the later Gemara (commentaries) on the Mishnah are even further off the mark. One places him in the time of the Maccabean king Alexander Jannaeus around 100 BCE, another identifies the husband of Jesus' mother as Pappos ben Jehudah, who in the Talmud is said to have been a contemporary of rabbi Akiba, who flourished in the early second century (See J. Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, p.22, and R. Travers Herford, Christianity in the Talmud and the Mishnah, p.35-40 for a full discussion of these passages.)
Not only does the imprecision and contradictory (to the Gospels) nature of all these references point to a total lack of any reliable Jewish tradition about Jesus, we can state the principle that any such traditions are unreliable when recorded more than a century later (often much later), because they could have been influenced or altered by the intervening period in which the Christians themselves developed an historical Jesus. And in fact there are some indications that these recorded traditions are reacting to Christian claims and accusations based on the Gospel story.
For example, in the Baraita reference, it is stated that before the 'hanging' a herald went about for forty days, calling for someone to come forward to defend Jesus. This is clearly a device invented in rabbinic tradition in answer to the Gospel picture, which portrays the execution as carried out in secret haste. As Maurice Goguel (Prolegomena to the Life of Jesus, p.74) says, "In the Talmud, therefore, all we can discover are some modified reflections of the Christian tradition; it would be futile to attempt to draw from it the least hint which might be useful from the historical point of view."
Anything written down in the 3rd and 4th centuries cannot be depended upon to faithfully record traditions reputedly of the 1st or 2nd centuries. We can certainly see that this is the case with later Christian traditions about their own earlier events. Eusebius in the 4th century, for example, records all sorts of things about early Christian history which we know to be unlikely, untrue or exaggerated. In any case, the actual references to Jesus in the Talmud are so garbled and unlike the Gospel story, that we can second G. A. Wells' remark (The Jesus of the Early Christians, p.200): "This does not suggest a reminiscence of the events alleged in the gospels." Wells goes on to say: "Incidentally, Jesus is nowhere in the Talmud said to have been executed by the Romans; his death is represented as solely the work of the Jews; and nowhere is his alleged Messiahship mentioned, not even as a reason for putting him to death."
2. What can we state about the Jewish concept on human fate after death? Was the Sheol a place without return? Did Jahwe ever promise a life after death? Was it somehow related to the Christian idea of Resurrection?...Jews seem to have started to believe in a life after death only in the post-Exilic period. In writings referring to earlier periods, there is no evidence that Jews believed in a resurrection or afterlife, and in fact Old Testament scholars will usually state that they had no such belief in the earlier periods. Sheol as an abode of the dead (who are aware of their post-death existence) does not appear in Jewish writings before the Exile. It is also to be noted that when it does, Sheol is the abode of both the good and the bad, sometimes with distinct areas for each. In other words, even the post-exilic Jews had at first no concept that the Righteous would be in heaven with God. This idea did not develop until the second century BCE.
3. Who has quoted the Acts of the Apostles for the first time (around 170)?...Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, in Book III of his Against Heresies (Chapter 12) quotes Acts copiously. This was written around 180. Acts is known in the apocryphal Acts of Paul, which was written sometime before 197. There are many "allusions" claimed to be found in earlier documents, but none of them are conclusive and are generally rejected—with a possible exception allowed for Justin Martyr—by scholars such as Ernst Haenchen, an authority on Acts. The closest Justin comes to 'echoing' Acts (in the middle of the second century) is in his First Apology 50.12: ". . .and when they had seen Him ascending into heaven, and had believed, and had received power sent thence by Him upon them, and went to every race of men, they taught these things, and were called apostles." However, Justin, unlike his attribution of many Gospel quotations to "memoirs of the Apostles" (he gives no names for these Gospels), does not identify this 'echo' as being found in any specific document.
If Acts were in existence as an accepted record of church beginnings for the better part of a century, as many claim, such a lack of clear attestation before Irenaeus would seem impossible. Note also that Eusebius quotes Papias as speaking of collections of sayings and anecdotes attributed to a Jesus, allegedly compiled by "Mark" and "Matthew," but there is no mention by Eusebius of Papias speaking of any document that could be identified with the Acts of the Apostles. Here again, especially in regard to a writer who was said to have stressed his connections with and knowledge of the apostolic age and its figures (some of whom were allegedly followers of Jesus), Papias' apparent ignorance (c.130) of such a document belies any claim that it could have been written and in circulation from 50 to 80 years earlier.
Another consideration put forward, for example by John Knox (Marcion and the New Testament, p.120f), relates to Marcion's attested use of an early form of the Gospel of Luke, sometime in the 140s. Marcion was a gnostic who was adamant that Christianity should not be linked in any way with its Jewish antecedent or with the Jewish God. Had Acts been written and attached as a companion piece to the Gospel of Luke by this time, Marcion would not have been likely to adopt Luke at all, since Acts is clearly a 'catholicizing' piece of writing, with one of its principal theological positions being that the Christian movement was an outgrowth of Judaism and the inheritor of the Jewish God's promises.
4. Can you tell more about the midrash tradition. When has it started? Who was its precursor (if ever existed)? My opponents state that it was invented in Middle Ages by rabbi Rashi....It is difficult to define a "start" to midrash, since the practice goes back into the Hebrew bible. For example, the books known as 1 & 2 Chronicles are sometimes defined as later midrashes on the earlier 1 & 2 Kings. Individual episodes in later books of the bible are midrashes on episodes in earlier books, such as Joshua crossing the Jordan being a midrash on the Exodus account of Moses crossing the Red Sea. The basic purpose of this kind of midrash is to illumine the present or future by appealing to the past, casting something new in a familiar setting of the old and thus highlighting its significance or meaning. By this definition, the Gospels as a whole (at least in their original intention) were a midrash on ancient themes within a setting of contemporary activities (the Kingdom of God preaching movement), to illumine new developments in religious thought and expectation. I don't know who Jarek's "opponents" are, but to say that midrash was invented in the Middle Ages shows an ignorance of the subject, unless they are defining it quite differently.
5. Is it true that we cannot be sure that Quirinius ordered to count the number of people of the Roman Empire in 6 AD? Some state that we have records only from 20 AD and then 34 AD, 48 AD, etc.I can't itemize the complete record of Roman censuses, but the Quirinius 'census' was a local one applying only to Judea following the Roman expulsion of Herod's son Archelaus, in order that an imperial tax could be imposed on Judea. This information comes from the very reliable Jewish historian Josephus. Of course, this census (no matter what its scope) is dated ten years after the rest of Luke's setting for Jesus' birth, namely during the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BCE. Luke has to be wrong on at least one or the other.
I am fascinated by the depth and breadth of your research, the success of your web site, the courage of your convictions. But... ...Of course, there was such a man! There doubtless were dozens of such men! There have always been such men, since the days of the shaman. We had such a one just recently in Waco, but the FBI crucified him before his malignant superstition could propagate.Response to Ed:
Could Josephus have called Jesus "a wise man"?
Yes, and Josephus describes such men as the curse of the Jewish state all throughout the first century, leading to the destruction of state, temple and city. And yet the reference to Jesus in Antiquities 18 (the so-called Testimonium Flavianum), even that part claimed by scholars to be "authentic" to Josephus, is positive and even laudatory, calling him a "wise man" and a "teacher of truth." I point out in my Supplementary Article No. 10: Josephus Unbound, and in an extensive chapter in my book, that it is impossible to consider that Josephus could have referred to Jesus this way, since Jesus would have had everything in common with all those other messianic-type agitators which Josephus clearly detested.
Nor would Josephus have had any way of receiving selective information about some praiseworthy aspect of Jesus, such as his supposed ethical teachings, separating them from reports of his miracle-working (an element which in any case is included in the "authentic" Testimonium's phrase "a doer of wonderful, or startling, works"), or from his predictions about the apocalyptic end of the world, or even from reports of revolutionary antics like the Gospel cleansing of the Temple. Whether authentic or not, these sorts of things would have been inextricably associated with Jesus by the time Josephus was writing. Even some of Jesus' reputed ethical teachings would have struck Josephus, a staunch supporter of Roman rule, as radical and subversive.
Nor would Josephus have remained silent on what the entire early movement, as we see in epistles like Paul's, were supposedly doing to this human man: elevating a crucified criminal to the level of pre-existent divine Son of God and Savior of the world. All of this would have been blasphemous to any traditional Jew, including Josephus.
Thus we can safely reject any "authentic Testimonium." And if a respected historian like Josephus, with his encyclopedic knowledge of first century Palestinian history, did not mention Jesus, this turns the tables and provides strong evidence that there was no such man as Ed and so many others hypothesize.
Ignatius, in the 19th chapter of his epistle to the Ephesians, says: "Now the virginity of Mary was hidden from the prince of this world, as was also her offspring, and the death of the Lord; three mysteries of renown, which were wrought in silence by God." Can you offer any insight as to what Ignatius might have meant by "hidden from the prince of this world" or "wrought in silence"?Response to Alex:
Ignatian Mythology
I suspect that the original supernatural character of these events was developed when Jesus was purely mythological. (The identification of "Mary" as the virgin—based on Isaiah 7:14—who had given divine birth would have been a later addition.) It is difficult to imagine that Satan could have been presumed to be unaware of any of these things had they taken place in an earthly setting. What would have shielded his vision from Calvary? And Satan's own minions, the demons who possessed the sick and were expelled by Jesus' healing exorcisms, had already declared their knowledge of who he was. But once these mystical ideas were established in a mythological setting, they could more easily have had an historical dimension added to them in the time of Ignatius.
We should note the close parallels between Ignatius' idea that Jesus' identity and purpose were hidden from Satan, and similar ideas in other documents. In 1 Corinthians 2:8, Paul tells us that Jesus was crucified by "the rulers of this age" who did not know who he was. As I frequently point out, the phrase "rulers of this age" is regarded by many liberal scholars as a reference to the demon spirits, and not to earthly authorities. In the Ascension of Isaiah 9:12-13, the vision of the future descent of the Son through the layers of heaven includes similar features: "and the god of that world will stretch forth his hand against the Son and they will lay hands on him and crucify him on a tree without knowing who he is; so his descent, as you will see, is hidden from the heavens so that it remains unperceived who he is." The 'hidden' element takes place in the heavens, implying that the crucifixion does, too. In any case, there is in this passage no reference to an earthly dimension. Christ makes his descent through the heavenly spheres, ultimately to end up in the underworld where he will rescue the souls of the righteous ("he will plunder the angel of death"); but of activities on earth, there is nothing to be said. The same is true of Chapter 10, which outlines a direct commission of the Son by the Father, who speaks only of his descent through the layers of the heavens and his dealings with their various angelic inhabitants. (Chapter 11, which details a crude Gospel-like story, including a Nativity scene unlike that of Matthew or Luke, is present in only one of three manuscript lines and can be regarded as a later interpolation.)
Ignatius speaks of these elements of the salvation story as "mysteries" that were "wrought in silence by God." The Pauline and other epistles repeatedly speak of Christ and his role in salvation as a mystery (or 'secret') now revealed by God, with previous knowledge of him being hidden through long ages. Ignatius' "wrought in silence" would simply be another way of expressing the same idea.
The whole point of keeping Christ's identity hidden from Satan only makes sense in a mythological (supernatural world) setting. The death of Christ, especially in the earlier period, was regarded as a way of neutralizing or overcoming the power of Satan and the evil spirits and rescuing the dead souls under their dominion. If human rulers were the agency of the crucifixion, little interference would be caused by those evil spirits being aware of the unfolding drama and its significance. But if the spirits themselves were to be the agency of Christ's death in the spiritual world, bringing about their own consequent destruction, the Son's identity and role in salvation would need to have been kept hidden from them, so that the spirits would proceed unknowingly with the execution that would lead to their downfall.
I noticed in one of your reader feedback responses you write: "...such claims became discredited when it was seen more clearly that the myths and artistic representations of the various hellenistic cults actually contained nothing tangible about any resurrection of the god from the dead." Is it not the case that the myth of Attis states that he was resurrected by Cybele after being buried for three days? Is it merely a repeated claim that has no foundation in any ancient sources?Response to Colin:
Resurrection for Attis?
The myths and concepts of the Greco-Roman mystery cults are for modern scholars often a matter of interpretation rather than of clear knowledge, since rarely does one find a direct description in any ancient sources. On the matter of "resurrection" one first of all has to define what one means by the term. Osiris was killed and dismembered, but his parts were gathered together by Isis and (after using them to father Horus on herself) buried, to 'come to life again' in the underworld where he became Lord of the dead. Is this "resurrection"? Not by Gospel standards, of course. The Greek Dionysos was resurrected in a different form by Zeus. Again, the parallel with the Gospel Jesus is not exact. But the Greeks were not concerned with spending eternity in their own flesh—in fact, the thought was repugnant to them. Thus, they did not invent gods who underwent such a thing to guarantee a similar fate for themselves. Rather, their savior gods overcame death in a way that guaranteed a happy afterlife for the soul. In the cultural equivalent, this was as much a "resurrection" as the Christian version.
In the cult of the Great Mother Cybele from Asia Minor, a consort, Attis, was introduced, perhaps a century or two before the Common Era. The Attis myth said that he had castrated himself (to explain the practice of the priests of Cybele who in fits of ecstasy rendered themselves eunuchs), an act which brought about his death. Much interpretation has gone into the public rites of Attis and Cybele, celebrated in a spring festival spread over many days. Reminiscent of the Christian Passion week, the death of Attis was mourned on one day, followed by an interim period of fasting and self-punishment. (Compare the Christian Lent.) Then came a ceremony which might be interpreted as symbolizing the resurrection of Attis. Whatever the mythical details, later Christian commentators show that the rites symbolized a sharing in some kind of triumph of the deity over death. Firmicus Maternus, a Christian of the 4th century CE, is much quoted for his preservation of the cultic formula: "Be consoled, O initiates, for the god is delivered; therefore we too shall have deliverance from our sorrow." This may not refer to physical resurrection, but the effect for the Greek devotee was still the same.
The tendency by representatives of the so-called History of Religions School early in the 20th century (Reitzenstein, Cumont, Bousset, etc.) was to characterize all these savior gods, along with some earlier mid-east divinities like Tammuz and Baal whose myths spoke of coming to life after death, as "dying and rising" deities, conferring immortality through ritual observance and sharing in the god's nature in much the same way as Paul portrays Jesus and the believers' relationship to him through baptism. The backlash by Christian apologists which subsequently occurred attempted to downplay or entirely discredit such a grand and disturbing parallel, mostly doing so through a strained and disdainful nit-picking about differences which, where they are in any way significant, can mostly be put down to cultural distinctions. That pendulum is swinging back, with scholars today admitting that, for all pragmatic purposes, the "dying and rising god" mytheme (to use Robert Price's term) is a valid one to cover the entire range of salvation cults of the ancient world, including Christianity.
Certainly, ancient Christians did not think to discredit the mysteries on such a basis. In fact, the Fathers acknowledged that clear parallels were there, and prior to the Christian expression, so much so that they scrambled to explain such things by saying that Satan had deliberately counterfeited them ahead of time so as to undermine the coming faith of Christian believers.
(For more on this subject, see the Response to Miles in Reader Feedback Set 4.)
In reading through your website, there were several curiosities that arose. I will ask specifically regarding two: 1. I notice that the dates of authorship that you assign to many of the books of the New Testament, as well as to some of the Ante- Nicene non-canonicals, are substantially different than those given historically by the bulk of textual and patristic scholars. Upon what are you basing those assertions? . . . [another question below]Response to Gary:
Dating of New Testament Documents / Eyewitness Problems
I snipped the rest of Gary's comment on this question because the basis for his complaint is largely inaccurate. Except for the Gospels themselves, I have pretty much adhered to standard datings for the New Testament documents. By "standard" I am referring, of course, to mainstream liberal scholarship. That leaves aside more 'radical' groups like the Jesus Seminar (as Gary styles them) as well as those who would date the entire body of Christian writings to the second century; but it also excludes the Bible College 'scholar' and the broader class of conservatives who would deny, for example, that there are letters within the traditional Pauline corpus which were not written by Paul. I regard, for example, the epistles of James and to the Hebrews as probably pre-Jewish War, Colossians and Ephesians as written within a couple of decades after Paul's death, 1 Peter and the Johannine epistles as late first century, 2 Peter perhaps a decade or so into the second. Such dating is hardly radical, so there is no need to defend my observations about such writings, or the conclusions I draw from them, on the basis that I have some unique dating system, as Gary suggests. (Of course, even the mainstream dating of such documents can be speculative and uncertain, with a wide leeway often necessary.)
In the matter of the Gospels, I would simply push them perhaps two decades or so further into the first and second centuries than traditional scholarship has tended to do. And I back this up with specific arguments, particularly in regard to the first Gospel, Mark. But here again, my mythicist theories do not stand or fall on a later date for the Gospels. In fact, such later dating also serves to explain some perplexing observations, such as the late attestation of the Gospels in the wider Christian record, which even standard scholarship is forced to struggle with.
As to non-canonical writings, here again I adhere fairly closely to standard datings, such as for 1 Clement, Ignatius and Barnabas. In fact, I am criticized for such conservatism by a few friends in the field who are far more radical than I on these questions. I am not sure on what Gary thinks to base the criticism he voices here, but it is largely misplaced.
2. Most historical matters, including the existence of Christ's life and reputation, can be established from multiple witnesses. Even if none of the gospels were written until the later years of the first century, there is a bit of a problem. Though their subject is not chronology, if the setting of their story is correct, Jesus is portrayed as being crucified roughly between about 27 and 35 AD. If several people manufacture a story about a man's life that happened only a few decades ago, especially with the kind of claims the Gospels make for him, they are going to have a real problem on their hands because there will be substantial numbers of people alive who were either eyewitnesses to the matter (or lack of matter) or whose parents were. I know quite well the stories of substance told by my grandparents of their time, let alone my parents' or my own, and it would be an extremely difficult task to get me to accept as true something that I or my parents or grandparents had lived through and whose witness was substantially different. Yet Pliny the Elder and other non-Christian and secular authors leave us no witness of public rejection or doubt regarding the tale the Christians were telling. How can this be accounted for?As is often the case in questions like this—and I have answered this one before—Gary sets up assumptions which cannot be supported on closer examination. If Gary had never had the good fortune of knowing his grandparents, and his own parents had been killed in some widespread disaster a generation earlier, would he be as likely to be able to say what those previous generations had experienced or had not? If they had lived in some overseas country, would the traditions of what had happened there, perhaps concerning things his forebears had not personally taken part in, liable to be familiar to him?
The Jewish War of 66-70 laid waste much of Palestine, destroyed cities, infrastructure and records, and this at a time when record-keeping and the transmission of knowledge was on a far more primitive level than ours. Three-quarters of the population of this area was killed or dispersed by the Romans. As for "the tale the Christians were telling," this is something which even Christian records do not witness to before the early second century. There is simply no testimony to identifiable aspects of the Gospel story before the time of Ignatius, let alone evidence that anyone possessed copies of such written documents. If Mark, the first Gospel, was set down on paper much before then, there is no evidence that its ideas circulated beyond the Markan community itself—apart from being noticed by some nearby community (in Syria?) where another writer (now known as Matthew) took Mark's document and expanded on it, if this even took place before Ignatius' time. The "public," pagan or otherwise, can't reject what it has not encountered. Besides, if the earliest Gospel was not intended to represent history, and for a couple of decades was simply viewed as a piece of midrashic symbolism, no one would have taken the trouble to deny its contents.
And what do we see when someone starts declaring that the story of a Jesus born of Mary and crucified by Pilate was literally true, as Ignatius does? Those who fail to agree with him are labeled "mad dogs" and "beasts in the form of men." Those who "deny that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh" (1 John 4:2-3) are called "the Antichrist." Gary assumes that the early Christians lived in a reasonable world, where newly developing religious ideas about the beginnings of the faith would have been amenable to correction by more knowledgeable voices, if such existed. Sorry, Gary, it ain't so.
I believe you have finally got a handle on the true origin of Christianity. However, I read a book which pointed out that things written in the gospels which didn't fit the story were probably true and had to be included because they were so widely known. It suggested that there was a person that was a revolutionary with an armed following who seized the Temple briefly, was captured and executed by crucifixion by the Romans. Could such a historic person been chosen by Mark as a basis for his work of fiction? In other words, would he have felt compelled to pick some actual person who was crucified to substitute for Paul's spiritual level crucifixion? I am not suggesting that this person was forming a new religion. He would have just been one of the many Zealots of the time.Response to Kenneth:
Jesus a Zealotic Revolutionary?
That Mark modeled his Jesus on a specific revolutionary who had seized the Temple in an armed uprising is highly unlikely, simply because the historians of the time, and especially Josephus, make no mention of such a person or event.
On the other hand, it is quite possible that Mark took his cue for some of Jesus' features from the agitators and Zealots who do show up in the historical record, but they and the atmosphere of their age would simply have provided some of the background to the Gospel figure. Mark's Jesus inevitably must reflect features of his time, or the audience couldn't have related to him. This hardly constitutes, however, the existence of "an historical Jesus" per se, any more than legend basing the Greek Heracles (who was also in some circles a savior god) on a type of Mycenaean-era warrior gives us "an historical Heracles," or Ian Fleming rooting his James Bond in British MI-5 agents produces "an historical James Bond."
RFSet16
Ian writes:
Thanks very much for an excellent site - easily the best example of independent scholarship on the Web.
David writes:
My check for one copy of The Jesus Puzzle will be in today's mail. People like you help me keep my sanity.
Joe writes:
I found your work to be excellent reading, and I know that within my small circle where such 'heresy' is openly discussed, your scholarship and integrity is highly regarded. You do not play emotional games. The only counter that I have thus far observed to your weight of historical evidence is purely argumentative and emotional. Please continue your work. You have a lot of support out here and a lot of credibility.
John writes:
I am a fan of G. A. Wells, who is routinely ignored by Westar [the Jesus Seminar] and other scholars. I suppose you fall into that category as well, although it was through the Westar site that I first found your work. The Westar Fellows' presupposition, that Jesus really was an historical figure, is an obvious act of self-survival. Even folks as brave as they sometimes stop short of following the truth, wherever it may lead. Your work is very important. It's unfortunate that it's way ahead of its time. But I'm glad it's here while I'm alive, for we few, the happy few, to enjoy.
Dee writes:
Your web site is the most wonderful thing that has happened to me since I started higher criticism studies ten years ago. I like reading your writing the best of all; you are absolutely the most persuasive. Your style of writing is fine, and reminds me of Will Durant.
David writes:
What an EXCELLENT site! I only recently gained access at home to the web and it is sites like yours that make it so worth while. I sense a growing global movement aiming to make Christians think about what they really have faith in. However, we must take care. There are some fundamentalists who will oppress what they see as blasphemous teaching. Let us not forget that Christianity has probably been responsible for more death than any other human endeavor.
William writes:
I will be happy to see the day when you are judged. You will one day realize what is real and what is a myth. If you do not change then you WILL burn in a very real hell, for a very real forever. Think what you want but, you WILL, for sure, see your personal judgment. It might even be sooner than you think.
Sasha writes:
I congratulate you for providing a rather thorough critique of the Christian faith. I thank you for challenging my faith and giving me the desire to study the origin of Christianity with a more magnified perusal. Thank you for sharing your criticism with such graceful articulation. Your fellow neighbor and servant of Jesus Christ.
Glen writes:
I really do appreciate your point of view, and the way you put it forth. I do not necessarily agree with all you have to say, but it does have its value in thinking and study. For 47 years I was a Baptist Minister and must say that what you have written has caused me some serious thought.
MSM writes:
Why would you even chance condemning yourself with such a book?? Have fun with Satan.
Terry writes:
I will pray for your salvation.
I have found your work impressive and extremely interesting. After reading through your pages I cannot shake the feeling that one fundamental question is not asked or answered: if Christianity began with a completely mythical Christ, Logos projecting itself into the sphere of matter and demons to suffer his (its) martyrdom, why was the legend of a human Jesus created in app. 70 C.E. (most widely accepted dating of the gospel of Mark) or thereabouts?... [more below]Response to Miso:
Mark's Innovation / Greek Rationalism
One branch, part of an empire-wide religious expression (the mystery cults), of what became a composite Christianity "began with a completely mythical Christ." The other branch had nothing to do with a mythical Christ, or with any saving deity except the Jewish God, and it arose locally in Galilee and Syria. Whether made up largely of Jews or of gentiles we can't be sure, but this sectarian movement, modeled in part on the Greek Cynic philosophy and lifestyle and in part on Jewish biblical apocalyptism, preached a counter-culture ethic in the context of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God. The details of this preaching movement became the core of the "legend of a human Jesus."
That those two distinct elements came together in a "Gospel" whose central character served to symbolize both—the Galilean ministry the Kingdom preaching tradition, and the death and resurrection in Jerusalem as an allegory of the dying and rising savior god cult—was probably a fluke of history, an imaginative innovation by one writer or community that had a foot in both camps. I devote an entire chapter of my book to analyzing this classic yet unique example of religious syncretism.
Why in 70, or perhaps a decade or two later (which is my preferred dating for Mark)? Things happen when they happen, but I suspect that the effects of the Jewish War on the mind of Mark or his community played a role. If Mark was exposed to, or even involved in, both the Galilean movement and the Christ cult at the same time, the upheaval of the War and the emotional expectations it engendered may have caused him to see a significant connection between the two, leading him to allegorize them in one grand amalgamation. When he sat down at his writing table to compose, he could hardly have foreseen that he would single-handedly shape the future of western society.
...Christianity was primarily a Greek religion. Greeks were rationalists par excellence, and to a fault: e.g., Aristotle's claim that the brain is just spongy tissue that cools the blood was certainly contrary to common knowledge....Conclusion based on reason alone, even when contrary to experience, was the very essence of Greek intellectual thinking. I am sure you are aware of many other purely rationalistic conclusions that the Greek philosophers made, some way off the mark, and some quite close to our contemporary understanding (e.g., Demokritus' atoms or the roundness of Earth). In my view, Greeks had no need of a human Jesus to believe the divinity of Christ and the validity of the new religion. And yet, it was the Greeks that have created the human Jesus. Why?First of all, Greek rationalism, as represented by Aristotle and the Stoics and Epicureans, was not universal. Aristotle criticized Plato's central philosophical theory (of Forms) on the grounds that it wasn't rational. Platonism in general, especially at the time of Christianity, was anything but founded on rational observation. Greeks, like anyone else, were capable of unscientific and even crackpot ideas. Also, the "gentiles" who were largely responsible for the shaping of Christianity, and particularly the Gospel tradition, were those who had attached themselves to Judaism, so in a sense they were departing from their Greek roots. Christianity owes most to the mystery religions and Plato, not to the likes of Aristotle and Democritus.
I found your thesis on the Jesus Puzzle stimulating and most convincing. However I have a few questions: 1. At what point did the gospel writers (or whoever inspired them) turn the spiritual or proto-gnostic Jesus into a historical being?... [further questions below]Response to Con:
Jesus Historicized / Under Herod and Pilate / Paul's Horror / Gnostic Lemmings
My view is that Mark did not regard his Jesus character as historical, at least in his total representation in the Gospel. He may have regarded him as based, loosely and in part, on the founder figure which the Galilean Q community before him had invented for itself, one who seems to show up for the first time in the Q3 layer of that document's evolution (under what name we can't be sure). But the spiritual Jesus, whose death and rising was allegorized in the 'Jerusalem' half of the Gospel, was hardly regarded by the writer of Mark as an actual historical figure, since almost everything to do with the passion part of his story he derived from passages in the Jewish scriptures.
Whether the later evangelists viewed Mark's creation as representing history is also dubious, if only because they felt free to change anything in it to conform to their own interests. On the other hand, it is quite possible that they too thought it was loosely based on a man who lay at the roots of the Galilean movement represented (though not solely) by Q, and they may even have believed (trusting and misinterpreting Mark) that this man had died and risen in Jerusalem. Essentially, however, the Jesus of the Gospels was only historicized after the ideas in the Gospels began to be disseminated, some time into the second century. The first sign of such an historicizing influence comes with Ignatius (around 110, if tradition and authenticity can be trusted), who declared that Jesus was born of Mary and crucified by Pilate, contrary to what some others were preaching. Ignatius does not have a written Gospel in hand, since he never points or appeals to one to back up his claims, but I suspect that by his time, ideas from Mark's Gospel were beginning to spread through some of the Christian communities in the eastern Mediterranean area, and may also have reached Rome.
2. Why were the reigns of Herod and his son, and the governorship of Pontius Pilate chosen as the settings of this particular Messiah?If Mark was the equivalent of an 'historical novelist,' he would have chosen his plot settings to further the story. Pilate would have been known as a man who had persecuted the people and dispatched his share of enemies of the state by crucifixion. The period of the 20s and 30s of the first century (our reckoning, of course) were likely also known as the time when both the Kingdom of God preaching movement and the cult of the savior Christ had begun. Dim memories of legendary apostles of the latter's beginning, like Paul and the Jerusalem group around Peter that he had contact with, would have necessitated the placement of Jesus at that time, and in fact Mark makes use of some of those legendary apostles, turning them into followers of his fictional Jesus. As to the birth date of Jesus, the Q movement had linked their founder with John the Baptist, and John could probably be dated from the end of the reign of Herod the Great. Jesus' own birth date would then gravitate toward the same time, a process which came to full expression in Luke's graphic linking of the conceptions and births of the two men.
3. How responsible was Paul in encouraging the eventual belief of a historical Jesus? What would he have made of the fleshed out narratives of the Gospels?To the extent that Paul was known throughout the multifarious Christian world in the early second century (and it was by no means a universal knowledge), the assumption would have been made that he was preaching an historical figure. If the traditions reflected in 1 Corinthians 15, that certain people in Jerusalem had "seen" the risen Christ, were familiar, they would be reinterpreted as the appearances of someone who had just died—and risen—in the flesh. But Paul also was pretty clear in defining Christ as a "mystery" long hidden and now revealed, and presenting Christ as a heavenly being with a heavenly, spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:44-49). I can only think that if he had been able to look ahead and see the Gospels and what was eventually made of them, he would have been horrified.
4. Do you think that the gnostics or the proto-gnostics in their bid to encourage followers by inventing the so-called lesser mysteries sowed the seeds of their own demise at the hands of the literalists?The question implies that the evangelists were (proto) gnostics, which I don't see all that much evidence of. There is far more proto-gnosticism in the epistles than in the Gospels. The "lesser mysteries" of the cults still retained a mythical flavor. The myth of Demeter is cast in terms of gods and primordial events, not placed in identifiable earthly history with known historical characters. Attis did not castrate himself at a fixed date and location in Asia Minor. Thus, I don't think that the gnostic mind would have invented the Gospels with their recent historical settings and figures. Once these (allegorical) writings were circulating and began to be regarded in a literal fashion, they could not be ignored, and the second century Gnostics tried to accommodate them by (ironically) interpreting them allegorically, though with gnostic meaning. Others were actively promoting the literalist interpretation, especially under political circumstances which made such historicizing advantageous.
...I hope that your book will soon be available in Australia.At a retail level, that may be a while coming, but The Jesus Puzzle is, of course, available anywhere in the world through this web site. Click here for details: jpadvert.htm
Thanks for a most informative, thorough and honest web page. I think that through your research many of us have a clearer understanding now of why (at least in Europe) we didn't study Jesus in history classes in elementary school but only in Religion classes. I have a question. I have read that some "scholars" relate the writings of the Essenes and the dead sea scrolls to the life of a Jesus. What is your opinion on this subject? Is there any reference in the writings of the Essenes that are known so far (if they where really the authors of the DSS) to Jesus at all? And if not, would this not constitute another example of silence about a pretended historical figure, Jesus, that if had been truly alive and kicking should have had to be noticed by the Essenes and perhaps referenced in their writings?Response to Tomas:
Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Periodic attempts have been made to give a Christian reading to the prominent figures in the Dead Sea Scrolls (the Teacher of Righteousness, the Wicked Priest, etc.), but I think this is more fanciful than anything else. As to whether the Essenes (presumably of Qumran) were the source of the Scrolls, rather than more mainstream Jewish circles perhaps located in Jerusalem itself, is under debate, but certain of the scrolls, particularly those in which the above characters appear, are undeniably sectarian and apocalyptic, and would seem to be of Essene origin, wherever this may have been located. The whole issue (notwithstanding Golb's book) is still too contentious for me to try to pronounce on it. Whether the Essenes would have bothered to note an historical Jesus in their writings is perhaps dubious.
Hi, I've enjoyed checking out your site. One of the most interesting things I've noted is the e-mails from Christian fundamentalists saying you're trying to destroy their faith in Jesus. Obviously they have not really read the site or given any thought to what they've read, but are simply expressing a knee- jerk reaction to anything that appears to stray from "orthodoxy." Eliminating a historical Jesus doesn't mean you can't still have faith in the cosmic Christ, the crucifixion and resurrection, or even the idea that Jesus was "in the flesh" and able to comprehend our sorrows and sufferings. It obviously was no problem for Paul. If anything, your research causes problems for those liberal theologians and their New Age-therapeutic historical Jesuses. On to my questions: First, do you think all the original Gospel writers knew that what they were writing had absolutely no basis in history? Matthew 13:11 and Luke 8:10 certainly offer a hint (and probably an intentional one) that "Matthew" and "Luke" knew they were not writing actual histories but were addressing the needs of simple, uneducated, literal minded and superstitious Gentile converts, who had no concept of Jewish and Greek metaphysics. Second, there are rumors that the Vatican knows some things about Jesus that they don't want anyone to find out. The prevailing theory is that they have proof locked away that Jesus was just a human being who died on the Cross and that there was no resurrection (or that Jesus actually survived the crucifixion). Some folks believe that the Knights Templar uncovered similar evidence while digging under the Temple in Jerusalem. Do you think the opposite may be true; that the Vatican has copies of documents that clearly demonstrate that there was no historical Jesus at all? I don't want to sound like a Catholic basher or a paranoid conspiracy theorist here, but I cannot put it past religious leaders to suppress explosive information like this. Third, I remember reading somewhere that certain Christian groups claimed that it was not Jesus but a simulacrum that perished on the Cross. Were these groups contemporary with Paul and the Jerusalem group, and if so, were they too talking about a heavenly crucifixion rather than an earthly one? Were they people Paul was arguing with who claimed there was "no" crucifixion? Or did these groups emerge after the idea of a historical Jesus began to take hold?Response to Gregg:
Matthew & Luke Fiction? / Vatican Conspiracies / Counterfeit Crucifixion
As I said in the previous response, I can allow for all the Synoptics, including Mark, to have in mind the idea of a founder figure who was supposed to lie at the beginnings of the Kingdom preaching movement (an entirely invented founder by the circles which produced the Q document, not an actual one, as G. A. Wells has now apparently accepted). However, in Mark's mind, the details of his ministry of Jesus would simply have been representative of that figure, and the passion story entirely allegorical of something quite separate, joined artificially to the ministry. As to what may have been in the later evangelists' minds, this is more difficult to determine precisely.
In regard to the passages Gregg mentions, he may be reading more subtlety into them than is necessary. Jesus tells his disciples that he speaks to the people in parables since it has not been granted to them to know the secrets they contain. Rather than this indicating that the evangelists were being metaphorical about the entire story (although they may well have been), the sort of 'reasoning' in these passages is a reflection of a defensive mechanism common to sectarian groups. When the outside world does not accept the sect's teaching, ridiculing or misunderstanding it, it's a nice fallback position to say that the deity did not intend them to understand it in the first place. From a little different perspective, it's also a not unwelcome response from that outside world, since it sets the sect apart as a privileged, wiser group. In the Gospels, the disciples represent that inner privileged circle. All of the Gospels present this characteristic sectarian picture of Jesus' activity, a ministry which aims ostensibly at 'converting' society as a whole (unsuccessfully, which is the fate of virtually all sects, at least in their initial phase), yet operates within its own fortress mentality. This atmosphere is strongest in the Gospel of John, with a 'love' ethic aimed exclusively at the sect's own members, and an attitude toward the outside world ("the Jews") which is openly hostile and clearly uninterested in total conversion of that society.
As for Vatican conspiracies, these 'rumors' regularly recur—with little basis, it seems to me. Any documents (let's say, of pagan or Jewish origin) which made a good case for the non-existence of Jesus would likely be of great antiquity, and the chances of them surviving and remaining concealed for centuries seems low. Like many such rumors, they may be based on something which is far less significant than the rumor mill makes of them.
The simulacrum idea was one of the mainstays of a certain type of gnosticism, that Jesus was only a phantom or a "seeming" human being (docetism), so that he didn't really suffer and die in a material sense. I see little evidence for regarding this idea as being current in Paul's time, but rather, as Gregg suggests, it would have arisen only after an historical Jesus took shape, among those who could not countenance the idea of a deity actually undergoing human experiences.
What would you say about the following, written by Manson: "Also reading between the lines of the Gospels we find clues suggesting the historicity of Jesus. For example, it is unlikely that Matthew and Luke would have invented the Jewish claim that Jesus was a Galilean (born in Galilee). They went to great lengths to prove to their readers that he was from Bethlehem even though he lived in Galilee (in the town of Nazareth). Had they invented Jesus, they would not have invented stories to convince their readers that he was born in Bethlehem."Response to Even:
Jesus' Birthplace
For Matthew and Luke, Jesus' birthplace had to be Bethlehem because that is where a famous prophet said the future king of Israel would be born (Micah 5:2). Mark originally placed him in Galilee because his character was representative of that area's Kingdom of God preaching movement. Neither Mark nor any of the epistle writers breathe a word about Bethlehem.
How can the apostle Peter be a fictional character if he is also prominently mentioned in Paul's writings? Doesn't Paul's mention of "Peter" which can be translated as "rock" suggest that Jesus' quote about Peter, "the rock" of the church," is true? [see below]Bill writes:
Allegedly, the Catholic Church in Rome was founded by Paul and Peter. Did early church founders just refer to Paul's writings (which mentioned Peter) and use their names to give authentication to their church? Or were Peter and Paul actual people who were starting a movement that was NOT based on a historical Jesus?Response to Chris and Bill:
Historicity of Peter and the Petrine Tradition / 1 Clement and Peter & Paul
As suggested earlier, I am not saying that Peter was a fictional character, though I would say that the entire picture created of him by Mark was fictional. Paul witnesses (presumably) to a "Peter" who was part of a Jerusalem-based brotherhood headed by James. The extent of this man's apostolic activities is not securely known. Paul's letters provide little evidence that he was widely traveled, and certainly none that he went to Rome, although Galatians 2:8 states that Peter was "an apostle to the Jews," a role to which he was appointed by God, says Paul, not by Jesus.
The authenticity of Jesus' appointment of Peter as "the rock" on which he will build his church would be highly dubious under any circumstances. It appears only in Matthew (16:18) and is clearly intended to support an apostolic tradition supposedly going back to Peter, one adopted in the second century by the church of Rome. Did Peter in fact go to Rome, and how early was this Petrine tradition adopted by Rome? A good indicator lies in the epistle known as 1 Clement, ostensibly sent by the congregation in Rome to the one in Corinth, by tradition written in the 90s of the first century. (There is a line of radical thought which places this epistle no earlier than the mid second century, as a tendentious 'forgery.' But while the tradition about 1 Clement is by no means reliable, there are problems with such a late date, some of which I will suggest below. I would place it perhaps as early as the beginning of the second century.)
This is the key passage in 1 Clement, chapter 5:
"Through jealousy and envy the greatest and most righteous pillars [of the Church] were persecuted and contended unto death. Let us set before our eyes the good apostles: Peter, who because of unrighteous jealousy suffered not one or two but many trials, and having thus given his testimony went to the glorious place which was his due. Through jealousy and strife Paul showed the way to the prize of endurance; seven times he was in bonds, he was exiled, he was stoned, he was a herald both in the East and in the West, he gained the noble fame of his faith, he taught righteousness to all the world, and when he had reached the limits of the West he gave his testimony before the rulers, and thus passed from the world and was taken up to the Holy Place, the greatest example of endurance." [trans. by K. Lake, The Apostolic Fathers, Loeb Classical Library. The phrase in square brackets is not in the Greek, though a certain sense of it lies in the word "pillars."]This passage is significant for what it does not contain. If the epistle were a later creation by the church of Rome at a time after the establishment of the Petrine tradition (that Peter had gone to Rome and founded its church and line of bishops, giving Rome a special authority), we should expect that the letter would make mention of Peter's presence in Rome, as well as play up the authority such a presence would have conferred. In light of his silence on such matters, it is difficult to imagine that the writer was at all familiar with a Petrine tradition in regard to Rome. (Giving this epistle a provenance other than a Roman one has too many difficulties to accept.)
We should note that not even Paul is mentioned by the writer as having gone to Rome, or that he was martyred there. What we know of such things, of course, comes entirely from Acts and the later traditions of the Roman church. Not even the pseudo-Pauline epistles, such as Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, all dated over several decades after Paul's passing from the scene, show any knowledge or suggestion of his eventual fate. The absence of such mention in 1 Clement supports the view that Paul's martyrdom specifically in Rome was a later legend or refinement of a general tradition that he had ended his life somewhere in the west, or perhaps it was an outright invention for Roman political purposes. Certainly, the latter seems to have been the reason for the writing of Acts sometime in the mid second century. The far more 'primitive' quality of 1 Clement, together with its lack of focus on Roman authority, would be further reason for not placing it within the same venue as Acts. (1 Clement can also be shown to contain no knowledge of an historical Jesus, which would again tend to preclude a date in the mid second century, but that's a story for another time.)
When the church of Rome was seeking to 'reclaim' Paul from gnostics like Marcion (who had included most of the Pauline epistles in a canon of his own), the tendency would have been, not only to unify the activities of Paul and the Jerusalem apostles (which Acts served to portray in its subordination of Paul to Peter) but to make Paul a 'founder' figure of the Roman church. Thus it was necessary to bring Paul to Rome and have him influential in the Christian community there. It would also be necessary to have him teach 'orthodox' (that is, literalist/non-gnostic) doctrine, and thus the speeches placed in his mouth in Acts that are of the same character as those given to Peter.
Thus, Paul and Peter, apostles of the spiritual Christ cult, were co-opted as founders of the literalist movement, when it took shape around the allegorical Gospels and history was rewritten, or perhaps better put, created.
Paul seems to prefer the name "Christ Jesus" to identify his new god. Wouldn't an etymology of this name mean something like "Anointed Savior"? Does the Pauline writing style permit the possibility that "Christ Jesus" is a title that does not refer to a person's name at all? Or have you discussed this and I just forgot it? Ever since I learned that "Yeshua" meant "savior" I have wondered about this.Response to Anthony:
Meaning of "Christ Jesus"
Precisely. (I deal with Anthony's observations toward the end of "Part Two" of the Main Articles, and at greater length in my book.)
To say your work is challenging brings understatement to a new low. The uniqueness and irreproducibility of the major parables suggests a unique source that by any other name could pray be Jesus. I see nowhere in the ancient world, or even modern, where similarly unique material is assembled without an author, or evidence for the viability of any alternative in your presentation. Can you explain it? The thing speaks for himself.Response to Hugo:
Teaching in Parables / Cynic Teachings
I will take Hugo's somewhat cryptic opening sentence as non-complimentary. The rest of his comment suffers from unwarranted assumptions. I trust that no one thinks that Jesus invented the parable, or even that he would have brought something totally unique to it. The brief narrative story that contains a metaphoric 'double meaning' meant to provide insight into moral and religious truths (though the term "parable" can be extended to cover all sorts of metaphorical material) can be found in both classical pagan tradition and the Old Testament.
Aristotle discusses the genre in The Art of Rhetoric. In Isaiah 5:1-7, we have the very parabolic "Song of the Vineyard" which is clearly a precursor to the style of parable placed in Jesus' mouth in the Gospels, as in Mark's Parable of the Wicked Tenants (12:1-9). Burton Mack (A Myth of Innocence, p.159) quotes a passage from Seneca: "Words should be scattered like seed; no matter how small the seed may be, if it once has found favorable ground, it unfolds its strength and from an insignificant thing spreads to its greatest growth." While not quite like the Gospel parables, in that the explanation is already contained within the metaphor itself, the commonality of expression is obvious.
Within the surviving ancient record, there is probably no question that the "art of the parable" reaches its greatest expression in the Gospel Jesus' mouth. But that is no guarantee, logical or otherwise, that this imputation to a single individual is historically accurate. If such a genre of teaching, of imparting moral and religious instruction, was a part of the ancient world manner, there is nothing to preclude us from regarding this 'high point' of parable expression as the product of one particular group at one particular time. It may well be that the so-called Kingdom of God preaching movement which arose in the early to mid first century, centered in Galilee, adopted the parable as a favorite form of expression and brought it to new heights. If there is other evidence that the Gospel figure, or even the figure which emerges late in the evolution of the Q document, cannot be securely shown to have existed, then we can fall back on one of those fundamental observations to be made about human tendencies, especially where sects are concerned: that beliefs and practices, laws and teachings, all manner of traditions, will eventually be traced back and imputed to a glorified precursor or founder figure, oftentimes one that is wholly invented. There is nothing in the Q or Gospel record to preclude this, and much to support it. Even in biblical tradition it has long been a legitimate question as to whether the vast catalogue of "Mosaic Laws" in the Pentateuch can reasonably be attributed to Moses—or indeed any of it, since his actual historical existence is easily questionable. And on the wider world scene, seminal 'teaching' figures like Lao-Tzu and Confucius are increasingly being challenged as genuine historical figures.
Hugo asks if there is any example in the ancient world of a collection of material being put together without imputation to a specific individual. Let's stay for a moment with the Old Testament. There are three collections of "wisdom teaching" in the Jewish scriptures. Proverbs is traditionally attributed to Solomon, but no scholar accepts this as accurate, and we must assume that the collection or collections which make up the finished biblical book existed and circulated for a time without such an attribution, no doubt anonymously. The book known as "Ecclesiastes" (authored by "the Preacher") offers its own 'counter-culture' philosophy of life, an often negative one in opposition to the more common "wisdom" of the time, but it is not likely to be the product of a single man's thinking. In its finished version, probably given to it some time after its writing, there is an attribution to "the son of David" (meaning Solomon), but this is half-hearted at best. In the Wisdom of Jesus ben-Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus, one scribe of the early second century BCE has put together a set of instructions and proverbs for the young, but here again, he was hardly the originator of such "wisdom." It was the product of a larger segment of society, probably unattributed to any individual. And much of this tradition of Jewish wisdom teaching (which also includes the Book of Job) has been shown to be derived and adapted from wider wisdom traditions of the ancient Near East, especially Egypt and Mesopotamia.
As for the Gospel teachings, we have direct evidence that they are based wholly or in part on a pagan precursor, namely that of the Greek Cynics, an itinerant preaching movement in many respects like that of the Kingdom of God sect we see in Q and the Galilean element of the Synoptics. In my book, The Jesus Puzzle (p.159-161), I make a close comparison of the Q1 sayings with the teachings of the Cynic movement. Robert Price, in his Deconstructing Jesus (p.150-162) provides an exhaustive catalogue of the close correspondences between the sayings placed in Jesus' mouth and those of the Cynics. Since Cynicism long predated the Christian movement, or even the Kingdom preachers of Q, the direction of borrowing is evident. But to whom were those Cynic sayings attributed? I can do no better than to quote from Price's wide-ranging and fascinating book (p.150):
"First, do we receive from the Q1 sayings and anecdotes a striking and consistent picture of a historical individual? Mack thinks we do. There is a sly sense of humor coupled with common sense and prophetic anger. There is a definite outlook on life. And thus, one might think, a definite personality, a real character! But no. The problem is that once we discern the pronounced Cynic character of the sayings, we have an alternate explanation for the salty, striking, and controversial "personality" of the material. It conveys not the personality of an individual but that of a movement, the sharp and humorous Cynic outlook on life. What we detect so strongly in the texts is their Cynicism. The fact that so many Q1 sayings so strongly parallel so many Cynic maxims and anecdotes proves the point for the simple reason that the Cynic materials used for comparison stem from many different Cynic philosophers over several centuries! If they do not need to have come from a single person, neither do those now attributed to Jesus which parallel them."(For more on Robert Price's Deconstructing Jesus, see my book review under "The Case For the Jesus Myth": BkrvPric.htm.)
It was with great joy that I read your wonderful website. I am curious: since the epistles predate the Gospels, and there is such a close relationship between the unattributed sayings in them and those of Jesus, why does causation not run the other way: why isn't it argued that Mark et al drew on the epistles when writing the Gospels?Response to Michael:
Did Mark Read Paul?
I think it is highly unlikely that any of the evangelists were familiar with the writings of Paul. While commentators for centuries have seen the Pauline letters as containing "echoes" of Jesus' Gospel teachings, I would think it equally invalid to regard the Gospel teachings as direct "echoes" of the moral teachings in the epistles. Rather, both are derived from external sources, namely the ethical precedents of the day, both Jewish and Greek.
Few if any scholars regard the Gospels as dependent upon the epistles. Mark contains virtually nothing of Pauline theology. And while I maintain that Mark's passion element is an allegory for the dying and rising savior god cult manifestations of the time, its derivation from anything specifically Pauline is dubious. Mark's soteriology of Jesus' death (10:45) is anemic compared to Paul's highly sophisticated (if rather convoluted) analysis of the redemptive Christ Jesus. The only exception may be the ultimate derivation of the Gospel Last Supper from the Pauline myth of the Lord's Supper, though the borrowing is probably indirect.
In some of your material you stated that Paul was not the author of all the epistles attributed to him. How do we know this and which epistles would that be? I think that I have now read everything you have written, and I must say I would tend to agree totally with you.Response to Warwick:
What Did Paul Write?
That deceptively simple question would require a book to answer. Basically, an analysis of content and writing style, use of vocabulary, the degree of evolution of certain doctrines and the social picture the epistle presents, such things have determined going opinions as to authenticity. This has been supplemented in some cases by computer analysis. Traditionally (I have listed these in my "Part One" article), Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon have been regarded as authentic by such standards. Within these "genuine" letters there are unquestionably edits, insertions, reworkings, compilations from discrete originals, etc.
However, it's probably true to say that the whole question of Pauline authenticity is up for grabs. Problems within even the basic content of the epistles are considerable, and some scholars regard little if any of it truly authentic. Perhaps it is all a second century construction based on an irretrievable figure. The Jesus Seminar has embarked on a close examination of Paul, and I hope in future to address myself to this fundamental question which may turn out to be almost as radical as the denial of the existence of an historical Jesus.
i am fascinated by your writings, as well as much of the scholarship concerning early christianity and judeo-roman history. i have read everything on your site (it took two months). i have a fundamental problem with your thesis. one, even if we remove the historical, objective, factual, actual, etc., isn't it blatantly obvious that the metaphoric, mythic, and imagined is what really matters? isn't it capable of doing more as myth? I mean, don't we all live by our own illusions? and thus, the MESSAGE not the messenger matters. two, the message of unconditional love and its pillars social equality, forgiveness and humility, are easily the most transforming, powerful and revolutionary idea/system/practice in the history of mankind. it is the soul's deepest voice.... i...would like to believe that the experience of love (the dissolution of the ego) is transcendental and impossibly put together by a group of 'informed' or 'great' men. it is just not human. it need not be a misplaced and misunderstood word like 'divine', but it deserves recognition as being truly above all other 'creations' in the recorded history of time....Response to Mark:
Myths and Illusions of Mind and Soul
I could not disagree more.
This is one of those questions I usually pass up—lying in areas of personal disposition outside the study of Christian origins—but occasionally feel compelled to address. There are many things about the workings of the human body and mind that have traditionally lacked understanding, but more and more of them have come to be unveiled by the only dependable form of knowledge there is, that derived from science and reason. (One of the most recent and important has been the explanation of religious and mystical experiences solely within the brain's behavior.) Relegating anything to a realm—inside or outside the human body—that is unobservable and objectively unknowable, cannot be logically supported and robs us of our greatest achievements. Predicating any part of our human development on the existence of a "soul" which is "not human" falls into such a category.
If "unconditional love" is our "deepest voice," why should we wish to place such an achievement outside ourselves? Mark rejects the word "divine" but he is simply substituting a different (New Age?) equivalent. If "dissolution of the ego" is a goal to be aspired to (and I don't necessarily assume that it is), why can achieving it not be seen as an aspect of our human potential, presumably admirable? Are we not allowed to pat our own backs? Why must all "good" within ourselves be extrapolated onto some super-natural force or plane? Is there in fact any evidence for such things? Why should living by myths and metaphors be more efficient and commendable than living by reasonable judgments about ourselves and the known observable world around us? In fact, history has shown that it is not, that more misery has been caused by myth and "illusion" (Mark's word) than just about anything else. We need to be freed from those things, not embrace them.
We should arrive at "unconditional love, social equality, forgiveness and humility" simply because we recognize with our rational and compassionate natures (which are fully human things) that these can make for the best and happiest society in this world. If they have been 'created' it is not by some transcendent force lying outside ourselves, but in our own innate capacities, developed through time and evolution. What could lead to greater pride than such a concept and such a perception of our own human natures?
As for "informed or great men," few of those who have promulgated some form of love have not also accompanied it with doctrines of intolerance, superstition, this-world denial and other things destructive to human happiness and progress. The Jesus figure is only the most prominent example of these. The words imputed to him have sown as much hate as love (in this he is not unique), and those same Gospels which gave us "love one another" (again not unique and virtually self-evident) also reinforced the ancients' picture of a world dominated by devils and demons, which Christians capped with a place of eternal horrific punishment. This picture has given us centuries of misery and superstition which we are still not free of. The words of too many "great men" have led to divisiveness and ethnic hatred which still plague much of the world. The problem with such men—whether they be real or imagined—is that they become icons, whose words and example cannot be set aside when scientific and social progress overtake them. We live in an era when just about everything distinctively Christian has been rejected, discredited, or simply rendered superfluous. Just about the same can be said for all religions. I prefer a standard based on our ever-developing human wisdom, represented by the best that our evolving minds and devices can currently achieve.
In light of the above, I append one more reader message, without further comment.
Zak writes:
My faith is in Jesus, the one who was and is and is to come again! He loves you just as he loves all!...Remember, knowledge without wisdom is very harmful! "Why do you [Jesus addressing the Jews] not understand my speech? Because you are not able to listen to my word. You are of your father the Devil, and the desires of your father you want to do....He who is of God hears God's words; therefore you do not hear, because you are not of God." (John 8:43-47) It just amazes me how what Jesus said is so true even today!...My prayers are with you. Love in Christ.
RFSet17
Colin writes:
I can only say that I think you have done a brilliant job. Your explanations are always crystal clear. You have an excellent style for the intelligent layman to read.
Guy writes:
I am truly grateful for your work, what you have accomplished and for what you must endure to get this information out. Please keep it up.
Michael writes:
What else can I say? Thanks. I have been trying to tell my family and friends for years that Jesus is astrology, not historical fact. They all act like I am nuts. I am printing your works for them, and will try to distribute this to as many people as I can.
Donal writes:
Thanks for your web site. I'm in the process of asking a lot of questions at the moment, and I find your material revolutionary.
Peter writes:
I was referred to your web site and have been enjoying it immensely. What a treasure trove! Our view of the past is so fragmentary—a few paltry fossils. I feel like you have just dumped a wheelbarrow load of new fossils on my doorstep. Thank you!
Bob writes:
I am nearly finished THE JESUS PUZZLE. As a former Christian, who accepted the silly rationalities to explain contextual contra- dictions (God allowed Cain to mate with his sister) and scientific inaccuracies (Satan planted dinosaur bones to test our faith), I am amazed at your ability to actually think about "sacred" scripture to point out the problems. Scripture that I once read with a mind of stone, merely to memorize and spout without understanding to impress others, now as you have pointed out seems loaded with superstition gleaned from the mix of Greek philosophy, myth and various ancient religions. Your tests of silence collectively are a dramatic strike against the Jesus presented in the later midrashic creations. What reasonable, mentally-well person cannot imagine that if Paul had knowledge about a suffering savior who rose from the dead in Jerusalem, every letter would contain heaping amounts of details to strengthen his position and teach the masses? It makes me very upset to realize that for so many years I was told that the four gospels proved the existence of Jesus because they were written by eyewitnesses. No one said when they were written. Can you imagine my amazement to realize than Mark may have been written from 65 to 100 and that the others were written much later? When does propa- ganda become a downright lie? Did my college-educated minister know this to deceive me, or did they want to protect my fragile mind from the truth—or did they know? I realize scholarship continues and we may discover much more to change our present ideas, but at least you are being instrumental in helping to cure the mental infections that have kept some of us sick for so long.
Bill writes:
I am much impressed by your workmanship job in deconstructing the origins of Christian theology. And I laud you in that it is done in a gentlemanly fashion without cheap rancor. The scriptures now appear quite alien to me. All cathedral-like structures of theology are null and void no matter how brilliantly architectured. Built on quicksand, both outhouse and Eiffel tower meet the same eventual fate: a resounding plop in the muck!
William writes:
I have just finished your book and I intend to read it again soon. For over 20 years I have been unable to swallow the gospel stories but was at a loss as to how the legends began. Your explanations seem to be the most plausible I have had the opportunity to read. It makes infinitely more sense than the version I learned in Sunday School in the United Methodist Church in southeastern Alabama. Thank you very much for your hard work.
Denis writes:
I hope that your work brings some light and sanity to a world polluted by inhumane systems, and that a new more pro-life system of ethics can rise from the ashes.
"ShowteL" writes:
You are a fool! This is not said out of only anger. You are really what the Bible classifies as a fool. Forever learning but never coming to the knowledge of the truth. All of your wisdom is only foolishness to God. When you bow before Jesus and confess that He is Lord, as every being must do, then you will know that there really was a man called Jesus Christ. Only then, it will be too late for you to change from the work of Satan you are engaged in. Therefore, the true God and historical Jesus Christ will say, "Depart from me you worker of evil to a place prepared for Satan and his angels." You've heard of that place and you may not find it in your historical research, but you will find yourself there if you don't change and come to know Jesus Christ, the only one who can save you.
Jason writes:
I have no idea how you can write an entire web site of such utter nonsense! How can anyone read so deeply into scripture and yet not even have their eyes open? Just make it up as you go along! How can you read so much of a man and a God who has done so much and then just dismiss him? Please I beg of you, tell me what your true stance is on the matter. I cannot believe anyone could conclude something so far from the truth.
Carter writes:
God knew what he was doing. If he would have made it that easy for you and me to figger [sic] out, there would be no need for faith. Do you really think GOD would let us figger him out? Now we have to have faith. Trust in him. Ask him to 'prove' to you. Know what? He will.
Jef writes:
May God forgive u.
I enjoy your web site and have a question. In the course of discussion of the Jesus myth with a Unitarian Minister (who referred to Crossan's book, "The Birth of Christianity") mention was made in favor of the existence of a historical Jesus by way of Roman records of this crucifixion. I've never heard of it.Response to Doug:
Roman Record of the Crucifixion
As far as a Roman record of the crucifixion, there is no evidence that there was any such thing. Some would like to claim that Tacitus' reference to Jesus as a man crucified by Pilate indicates such a record, but Tacitus' information could as easily have come from Christian hearsay of the time (around 115 CE). A scholar such as Norman Perrin (The New Testament, An Introduction, p.405) admits that his information probably came from police interrogation of Christians.
Later in the 2nd century, there appeared several gross forgeries on the subject, including letters or reports from Pilate to the emperor Tiberius, in which Pilate describes Jesus' career and crucifixion and acknowledges the validity of Christian faith, including the resurrection. (See Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol.VIII, p. 459f.) No one today, and certainly not a scholar of Crossan's caliber, takes these naïve inventions as authentic.
For more on this, see my response to Jeff in Reader Feedback No. 2
I am an ex-Christian atheist, who retains an interest in the bible. There is one issue which leads me to continue to give credence to the notion of an historical Jesus. In 1 Corinthians 15:8, Paul lists himself as "abnormally born." I have generally taken this to suggest that Paul was a late arrival on the scene, and that he was defending his apostolic status despite his not having the direct association with the historical Jesus that was claimed by others. Hence I have generally understood Paul to de-emphasize the historical Jesus so as to validate his own preaching, but with indications that he was in competition with an earlier group which did claim a historical connection. How do you understand this phrase "abnormally born"?Response to Chris:
"He appeared to me, as one abnormally born"
What are these "indications" that Paul was in competition with those who claimed an historical connection to Jesus? 1 Corinthians 15:8, the statement that Christ appeared lastly to Paul, follows on the "seeings" of the rest with no discernible distinction, either in the quality of the vision or the nature of the respective apostolic qualifications of the men who had received those visions. Reading such distinctions into "abnormally born" would be a stretch. Paul may well be describing himself as a latecomer to the original Jerusalem church, though Bauer's Lexicon suggests that "Paul may here have been taking up an insult that had been hurled at him by his opponents." Such an insult ("you abortion!") might have been prompted by the reason why Paul was a 'johnny-come-lately': he had been spending his time persecuting the church, only to undergo conversion and seek belatedly to join its ranks.
On the matter of apostolic qualification, I point again to 1 Corinthians 9:5, in which Paul asks plaintively, "Have I not seen Jesus Our Lord?" as a way of proving his own legitimacy. This is a clear reference to a vision, probably the one referred to in 15:8. But if Paul is claiming a vision of Christ as the standard by which his apostleship can be legitimized, the implication is that all the other apostles, whose ranks he is seeking to join, have similarly been legitimized by visions. Thus, this would be a counter-indication of the idea that he was in competition with a group which claimed an historical connection to an earthly Jesus. There are many of these in the epistles (e.g., 1 Corinthians 12:28, 2 Corinthians 11:4, Galatians 2:8), with no statement anywhere that Jesus had appointed apostles himself while on earth.
I have noticed that you consider ACTS was written in the 2nd century CE. Can you clarify two points: Firstly, why is there no mention of the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE? Secondly, why does ACTS not relate what happened to Paul following his trial in Rome?Response to Tony:
The Ending and Dating of the Acts of the Apostles
I cannot recall any scholarly comment on the silence in Acts on the destruction of the Temple. Perhaps because Acts purports to be a history of the early apostolic movement up to about the year 62, it wouldn't be surprising to find no mention of an event of the year 70. On the other hand, if the author is writing in the post-70 period, and he mentions the apostles' activities in the Temple several times, one might think there would have been no special reason for him to avoid referring in passing to its later destruction. Perhaps he just didn't happen to do so.
However, it is always possible that the author was deliberately avoiding it in order to convey the idea that he was writing pre-70. I and certain other scholars (Knox, Townsend, Mack, O'Neil, etc.) judge that Acts is a second century composition to create an artificial picture of the early faith movement, and that the so-called "preface" to the Gospel of Luke, whose theme is continued at the beginning of Acts, was added at the final stage—after a revision of Luke as well—to link the two works as the product of one author.
Note, incidentally, that in this preface, the writer intrudes in a way that offered an ideal opportunity to state who the presumed author of the Gospel and Acts was. If at whatever time Luke-Acts was written or finalized, the tradition existed that this Gospel had been authored by Luke, the physician-companion of Paul, there seems little reason why such a tradition would not have been incorporated into the Gospel preface. This consideration would indicate that the attribution of this Gospel to Luke was a later development, and if Luke-Acts was indeed written/finalized in the middle of the 2nd century, such an attribution must be pushed back into the latter 2nd century. This, of course, is in keeping with the fact that Justin refers to his sources only as "memoirs of the apostles" and that Irenaeus, around 180, is the first to offer the four Gospels by name, as well as the first to mention "Luke".
Might it indeed be the case that the final redactor wanted to convey that both Gospel and Acts were written pre-70? Modern critical scholarship on the four Gospels has pushed them all past the 70 date, and demonstrated that Luke drew only on Mark and the Q document, almost certainly knowing neither Matthew nor John. But the redactor of Luke-Acts would likely not have realized this, and thus his statement in the preface is really quite erroneous. He says that "many writers have undertaken to draw up an account of the events that have happened among us, following the traditions handed down to us by the original eyewitnesses and servants of the Gospel." But the Gospel itself does not draw on "many" writers who had contributed accounts about Jesus and his deeds, as it demonstrably uses only Mark and Q (with a smattering of extra elements such as a couple of parables unique to itself and Jesus' hearing before Herod, probably the product of the author). Yet the redactor seems to be aware of a mass of material (even if he doesn't use it), and this, together with his comment about "traditions handed down" which implies the passage of a fair amount of time involving a long process of oral and written tradition, fits better the second century period when many Gospels, more than the canonical four, were in circulation.
On the question of the ending of Acts, there have been many explanations offered for the fact that Paul arrives in Rome, but there the work stops, and no information is given about his fate, his trial and execution by beheading—or so the later tradition goes. Some of these explanations are based on Luke's apparent purpose, on the structural and symbolic pattern of his plot. The story of Acts is, on the overall scale, the story of the breaking out of the Christian movement from its initial Jewish setting into a gentile one ("the disengagement of Christianity from Judaism" as Norman R. Peterson puts it, in Literary Criticism for New Testament Critics, p.87). The climax of that story is the movement of Paul to Rome, after having left Judea and abandoned his preaching to the Jews. The execution of Paul in Rome was not only unnecessary to that pattern, it might have been seen as casting a pall over it, as ending on a negative note.
J. C. O'Neill devotes several pages (in his The Theology of Acts in its Historical Setting, p. 60-63) to a discussion of Luke's intention, both in the Gospel and Acts, which I will briefly paraphrase. He argues against Harnack's famous contention (still repeated today by conservative scholars) that Luke ended—and thus wrote—his story before the martyrdom of Paul because he didn't know about it; it hadn't happened yet. O'Neill suggests that in fact Luke puts a prophecy of Paul's death into Paul's mouth at Acts 20:25 and 38. What is significant for Luke in his plotting of Acts' ending is the fact "that he [Paul] has arrived and preached in Rome." Luke takes special pains to end his Gospel in Jerusalem, with Jesus appearing to his disciples there, a deliberate change to the angel's direction in Mark 16:7 that the disciples should await him in Galilee, and in contradiction to Matthew who follows Mark's lead and places his resurrection appearance to the disciples back in Galilee. O'Neill suggests that, in parallel to the Gospel's Jerusalem ending, where Jesus triumphs, Acts ends in gentile Rome, where Paul—and with him the Christian apostolic movement—triumphs. Thus Acts must end on that positive note.
This "endowing of geographical data with theological meaning" (as O'Neill puts it) is clear indication that the evangelists are not writing history. They are constructing careful and elaborate pieces of symbolism, and story lines will be crafted, details invented, sources altered, to create that theological or educational statement. It is important to make ourselves aware of this, and to counter the naivete that is regularly brought to these documents which appeals to an analysis of their content as though they represent a log of actual happenings, down to the smallest detail. Justification for a belief in the resurrection, for example, is often dependent on minute examination of the movements of a rolling tomb stone.
It is also difficult to believe that Acts was written at a time when Paul was still alive and could be consulted on the accuracy of its details. Indeed, we would have to assume that the author would have had to rely on Paul for much of its content, for a date as early as 62 would hardly allow time enough for all the traditions about Paul's movements, his words and deeds, to have circulated throughout the Christian world, or for such information to be written down in any way, and thus the author could not simply know all this material from other sources. Nor is he likely to have traveled the length and breadth of the eastern empire to gather his information from a host of witnesses if the subject of his book were alive and accessible. The details of the sea voyage alone would have had to come straight from Paul's mouth. That is, of course, unless the author were simply playing fast and loose with history.
The problem is, if he were indeed the companion of Paul and were concerned with providing an accurate picture of Paul's career, he would hardly have falsified so much or gotten so much wrong (presuming we should choose the information in the epistles over that of Acts). It is a well known fact that Acts' picture of Paul and his activities is regularly contradicted by Paul's own letters. All things considered, dating Acts around the year 62 faces immense problems which those who blithely do so seem never to have taken into account. Finally, there is the startling situation that Acts has no attestation before the 170s (apart from a possible general allusion in Justin, writing in the 150s), which raises the stunning question of how such a work could have been written so early and yet surface nowhere in Christian records for almost a century. Other arguments (which I won't go into here) relating to Marcion's use of an early form of Luke in the 140s add more weight to the 2nd century dating position for Acts.
I would like to add once again some observations (I made them in the previous Reader Feedback file) about the whole question of Paul's martyrdom in Rome. It is curious that in chapter 5 the author of 1 Clement refers to Paul and Peter encountering persecution and finally ending their lives in the service of the gospel, but neither one of them is specifically stated as going to Rome, or of being martyred there. Now this letter, even if inauthentic and written at a later date sometime in the 2nd century, is almost certainly of Roman provenance. (I would regard it as likely a turn of the century writing in Rome, though not by 'Clement'.) And yet a writer in Rome fails to mention that Paul and Peter ended their days there, let alone that they had been executed for the faith?! He doesn't even say that Paul (or Peter, for that matter, which belies the entire 'papal' Petrine tradition) actually went to Rome. The best way to explain this is that he knew of no such traditions.
Also, none of the pseudo-Pauline epistles make any suggestion or show any knowledge of Paul going to Rome and being martyred there. Justin, who worked in Rome in the middle of the 2nd century, does not so much as mention Paul's name. This would all be wondrously strange if the Pauline (and Petrine) Roman traditions (all, if memory serves me correctly, being witnessed to not earlier than the latter 2nd century) were true. It would make the entire ending of Acts, the dramatic sea voyage (which no early epistle writer gives even a hint of either), sheer fabrication, and in fact there are indications that it is simply a literary device copied from hellenistic romances. So one explanation for why the writer of Acts (120 to 150, though I would date it in the latter part of that period) failed to provide information about Paul's fate in Rome, is that such legendary features were as yet poorly developed, or not at all.
If there is archaeological evidence that Caiaphas (high priest of Jerusalem) and Pontius Pilate (Prefect of Judea) were real people of history, why are some atheists so dogmatic in their belief that Jesus of Nazareth never existed?Response to David:
Bringing Jesus in on Caiaphas' Coattails / No Archaeological Christian Record
David quotes from a web site on an archaeological find in Jerusalem. "Workers building a water park two miles south of the Temple Mount in 1990 inadvertently broke through the ceiling of a hidden burial chamber dating to the first century AD. Inside, archaeologists found 12 limestone ossuaries. One contained the bones of a 60-year-old man and bore the inscription _Yehosef bar Qayafa_ 'Joseph, son of Caiaphas.' Experts believe these remains are probably those of Caiaphas the high priest of Jerusalem, who according to the Gospels ordered the arrest of Jesus, interrogated him, and handed him over to Pontius Pilate for execution."
Whether these are the bones of the High Priest Caiaphas, testifying to his existence, has nothing to do with the question of Jesus of Nazareth's existence. What we rather need are archaeological remains attesting to the existence of the Gospel figure, which is something that we don't have. In fact, it is startling to realize that there are no archaeological Christian remains of any kind to be found, either in Palestine or anywhere else in the Roman empire, for the entire first century and well into the second. No art, no artifacts, no inscriptions.
Symbols found on Roman sites, such as the Chi-Rho crosses, are likely to be Mithraic, an abbreviation for Chronos, the god of time, which was a popular embodiment of Mithras. This symbol was later appropriated by Christians and claimed to stand for Christ. The idea that the catacombs were early hiding places from persecution is probably pure fiction, much of it the result of 18th century romantic literature. Murals and frescoes depicting biblical scenes and figures are no earlier than the 3rd century. Funerary art is equally late. A common 'apologetic' on this situation has it that there are no early recognizably Christian symbols because Christians for a long time used pagan symbols before developing ones of their own, an explanation which hardly commends itself. If Christian tradition reflecting the Gospel story was circulating early, there is no reason why art and artifact would not have followed in its wake almost immediately, even if some of it had to be surreptitious. Pagan art found in crypts and other sites were in later centuries appropriated by Christians, who claimed that such things were Christian motifs. Funerary banquets became the celebration of the Eucharist, the "Good Shepherd" image of the god Hermes was taken to be Christ, and so on.
As for the demonstrated existence of historical characters within the setting of a story, I shouldn't need to reiterate the obvious fallacy of declaring that because the background is true or accurate, the central story elements must be so as well. Pointing to evidence for Pilate and the fact that he crucified rebels does not guarantee the Gospel depiction of his execution of Jesus, especially when there is no corroborating evidence for that depiction. Accuracy and realism of setting prove nothing other than the fiction writer's competence. And four accounts boil down to one, if they are all copying the one who first devised the plot line.
So what are we going to do now?Response to Dan:
In a Post-Christian World
I can't tell from Dan's brief query whether there is a touch of sadness or apprehension in it. There need be neither. I think only good can come from establishing the strong likelihood that the last 1900 years of western history have been based on a myth, on things which never happened. When Christianity became literalist sometime in the 2nd century, that is, treating the figure of the divine Christ and his symbolic placement in the Gospel story as historical reality, the faith now stood or fell on the basis of the accuracy of that reality.
Pagan salvation religion in the ancient world, and certainly in the minds of its extant 'philosophers' (including Cicero, Plutarch, Sallustius, Julian), never locked itself into a literal understanding of its mythology. Tales of the savior gods were largely a matter of symbolism, of allegorical embodiment of deeper truths. Understanding of the "mysteries" and the accompanying hope of salvation lay in poetic, symbolic expression. For the most part, myth and its meaning were malleable, accommodating, universalist.
Christian literalism was the opposite. When 'biographies' of Jesus became literal, requiring a belief in the man himself, in the historical performance of each miracle, the utterance of each saying, this degraded people's critical and poetic faculties into uncritical credulity, it reduced mythic universal truths to mere superstition. It turned the Christian believer—unlike his pagan predecessor—into a parochial, intolerant fanatic, often capable of atrocity and murder in the name of correct faith. It perpetuated belief in devils which could possess people, since Jesus himself was portrayed as having expelled and conversed with them. It ensured the continuing expectation of an apocalyptic end to the world, even to our own time when it has affected how millions conduct their lives, including in the political arena. It condemned the race of the Jews to prejudice and slaughter because the passion tale with its Jewish involvement was taken literally. And it ensured the descent of a curtain of darkness over the mind and social progress, which has not yet been entirely lifted.
When the heavenly Christ became human, that humanity clashed with the divinity he had previously dwelt in. Those conflicting natures had to be accommodated in one historical entity. Religious minds throughout Christian history found themselves exercised over the nature of Jesus, leading frequently to strife, division, war. When Jesus became an actual teacher, the Son on earth speaking words and admonitions which had originally proceeded from far less hallowed mouths, those words were cast in stone and became inviolable; they were used as weapons against those who did not follow them. "Compel them to come in" justified intolerance, forced conversion, religious wars and slaughter. Whole societies were forced to live under fossilized directives. Scientific and social progress were hamstrung by the sacred record of Jesus' words and deeds, and what was interpreted from them.
The very idea of a god coming to earth, taking human form and flesh, undergoing murder and sacrifice at the hands of the very beings who were granted salvation by that act, has served to lay a guilt trip on western humanity of staggering weight. The idea that this god had been on earth to begin a process, to establish an institution, meant that many would claim exclusive authority through alleged channels proceeding from that founder, leading to the condemnation of all those who claimed a different channel, a different heritage of tradition. When 'truth' came to lie in the story itself, in the literal interpretation of the 'record' rather than a flexible understanding of its underlying meaning, people abdicated the option of applying their own wisdom to a set of words, and adopted blind adherence to the fixed words themselves. That enslavement to 'sacred writings' is still with us today.
From reason to revelation. This is the essence of the ancient world's passage from the pagan to the Christian era, and I know of no writer who has better captured the spirit of that retrogressive metamorphosis than the novelist George Faludy in his 1966 historical novel City of Splintered Gods. Set just before the so-called conversion of Constantine, at a time when Christianity was not only divided in its own views of Jesus but was making influential inroads into pagan society (else Constantine, consummate politician that he was, would never have 'converted' to the faith), Faludy's story focuses on that fateful transition. I will quote here from a review I wrote of this novel a number of years ago:
. . . Karoton, son of a pagan rhetorician and recent convert to Christianity, moves within the uneasy mix of Egyptian Alexandria's pagan and Christian elements. In the spirit of the time, he vacillates between Arius and Athanasius, with their conflicting views on the nature of the divine Trinity and Jesus, serving first one, then the other. He is torn as well between sexual freedom and denial, for this too is a mark of the great shift between ancient and medieval outlook. Christianity brought what can only be described as a neurosis to the ancient world's attitude toward sex. Fornication became the great sin, and in order to suppress sex, much in society's way of life had to be suppressed as well. Karoton tells himself that "the body is the devil's snare" to lure him to damnation. Between his compulsive sexual flings he agonizes over whether he should follow the example of some of his fellow believers and have himself castrated—although a fresh temptation always manages to foil his resolve in time. Yet the words of Origen, a Christian apologist who had inflicted this ultimate sacrifice upon himself, continue to haunt him: that God's purpose is "the liberation of the spirit from the unnatural union with the flesh." In the psychological history of the western world, this alienation from the body was a profound development, whose neurotic effects have continued to this day.And so it turned out. Many centuries later, we have only begun to emerge from that self-imposed, claustrophobic regression. Conservative elements in western society, especially in North America, are still caught in it, and doing their best to reverse the process. If the fundamental falsity of the Christian myth of the Gospels has finally been exposed (it started almost two centuries ago, and is furthered as well by modern critical scholarship on the New Testament even if it has not entirely rejected an historical figure), there may be enough light cast upon the scene to ensure that this will not happen.
The pagan perspective lies in the sad musings of the poet Alexias, who watches the inexorable advance of the new times. He sees his world passing from a diversity of ideas to an imposed oneness. He and his kind are doomed to defeat because, unlike their new enemies, "we do not believe in the exclusive rightness of our opinions." At a dinner party, witnessing a theological debate between Catholics and Arians, he laments that "at Plato's banquets, proof was based on intellectual arguments, not quotations from the Scriptures." The derivation of knowledge has passed from reason to revelation. Where has the perfume of life gone? he asks himself: its twin pillars of Eros and Socrates, the flesh and the intellect, are crumbling beneath him. These two aspects of a human, world-based view are giving way to a God- and heaven-based one, and he fears that his own poems, along with the bulk of the intellectual and artistic output of Greece and Rome, will pass into oblivion, destroyed or allowed to die by the Christians. . . .
The immediate answer to Dan's question is to do what one always does when emerging from a long ordeal: to rejoice, to celebrate the new freedom. Without the Christian myth, the mind is freed from the necessity of surrendering to a 'personal savior' and can begin to look for 'salvation' in its own individual and collective efforts and wisdom. That mind is freed from having to condemn the majority of its fellow human beings for not embracing the same savior deity. It is freed from enslavement to a set of ancient writings which embody all the primitive and prejudicial trappings of its time, many of which in the real world of scientific and social progress have been left far behind. It is freed from the superstition and cosmology of the biblical world view. It can abandon belief in crucified and resurrected gods, angels and demons, places of eternal horrific punishment or pie-in-the-sky bliss, and focus instead on the present world, undoubtedly the only one we have. It is free to reverse the denial of human rights based on biblical prejudice and divine fiat, to heal the fracture of the human being into spirit and flesh. It is free to apply the principles of critical thinking, to achieve scientific literacy and a proper understanding of the nature and evolution of the universe we live in and our own place within it. And it is free to design an ethical system based on our best judgments and current needs. The possibilities under this new freedom are limitless.
I'll close this homily by quoting the final words of the Postscript to my book, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ?
But there is no going back. Fundamentalism, still thriving in North America and parts of the third world, will no doubt keep the Gospel Son of God alive for a time, but once the dissolution of the Christian record as a reliable and historical set of documents makes its way fully into public consciousness, it is hard to see how Christianity as a vital force in society will be able to continue.
What will replace it is difficult to say. Many people who have abandoned traditional religion style themselves "spiritual." If by "spiritualism" we speak not of some supernatural dimension and inscrutable link to divine or philosophical entities whose existence cannot be shown, but rather of the deep and fascinating potential which lies within the human organism itself and its links with the living, knowable world, if we speak of it as the product of natural evolution in an observable and understandable universe, the outlook for the future may be bright. Whether this is to be defined by the term "spiritualism" or by a word such as "humanism" should not matter, so long as we cease to search for meaning in the sphere of fantasy, or extrapolate the best in ourselves onto an idealized, larger-than-life individual or heavenly force (which the Jesus Seminar is still trying to do). Instead, we need only find it in the earth-based capacity of every human individual.
RFSet18
Michael writes:
I am thankful and relieved to have found you & your articles!
I'm shamelessly excited!! It seems my search for more information
is complete. Many, many questions have finally been answered!!
Buzz writes:
The Jesus Puzzle is a superb book! Well-researched, extremely
well-written.
Sammi Ruth writes:
Your book is the one I have been looking for for many years.
I have been an atheist all my life. I am 80 years old. Congratulations
for a job so well done I am thrilled with it.
Chris writes:
I was informed about your website by the Happy Heretic and have
found it fascinating. I have been an atheist for about 25 years now,
I used to be on the fence regarding the historical Jesus but not any
longer. Although I have read both sides of this argument on the net
before, no one has put the mythical case as thoroughly as you do and
now I am convinced.
I must disagree however when you say that this information has
any implications for orthodox Christianity. Thomas Paine's book the
Age of Reason systematically demolished the credibility of the Bible
and Christianity over two hundred years ago, Christians all over the
world simply ignored it and carried on as if nothing had happened.
You can see from the responses that you see on your feedback pages,
these people aren't truth seekers, their brains have been completely
ossified by indoctrination. Something that I found to be incredibly
profound and poignant was in RF Set 16 under the heading Myths and
Illusions of Mind and Soul, the last paragraph brilliantly hammered
home by the inclusion of the message from Zak. I am working my way
through your feedback pages now and I am continually struck by the
fact that your detractors have simply no ammunition with which to
shoot you down.
Luke writes:
I will be praying for you to see the Light. Otherwise you are
doomed to hell.
George writes:
In looking at your web sites and your so-called studies it is
obvious that you have never met the living Jesus. Yes, He is alive.
He is as he claimed to be. The test is this, If you will believe
that Jesus Christ died for our sins, was buried, and raised from
the dead and that he ascended to the father then He will forgive
your sins and make you a new spiritual creature. He is returning
soon and all of you disbelieving will desolve [sic] away, but
then it will be too late. If you want faith then ask God for it.
Otherwise, you join those who do not accept the work that God has
done and go to your doom with most of the wicked and unbelieving
world.
Chet writes:
As a confirmed atheist, I have thoroughly enjoyed all the
hours that I have spent re-reading the Jesus Puzzle on the Internet.
I just would like to convince the "believers" that our 21st Century
scientific knowledge of our universe is much more amazing, wonderful,
and "spiritual" than anything ever found in the "Holy Bible"!
Biological evolution of species and galaxies and solar systems
completely eliminates any "god".
Stephen writes:
I have finished reading your first installment of "Challenging
the Verdict" [Part one of my book review of Lee Strobel's The Case
For Christ]. My congratulations on a superb piece of criticism—
readable, intelligent, thorough, good-humoredly colloquial yet
argued with passion, patience and precision (a feat of balancing!).
I am eagerly looking forward to your next installment. [Part Two is
now on the site.]
Steve writes:
Once again you are proving that you are one of the best
authorities when it comes to debating fundamentalist Christians.
I can't thank you enough for all the clear unbiased information
on your site, and I look forward to part 2 and 3 of your latest
venture.
P.S. I gave my friend your website address, but he refuses
to even look at it. The minister at his church told him you were
THE spawn of the devil, and that you have destroyed the faith of
many in his congregation. (It must be nice to be so famous all
the way here in Australia.) Personally, I would have thought that
any intelligent person would listen to both sides of the "story"
and make a judgment for themselves. Then again, the God of the
Christian bible never seems to reward free thinking.
Brian writes:
I have been reading and relishing your 'cross-examination' of
Strobel's The Case For Christ. Kudos! I read that book a while back,
at the behest of a local minister. I found the book to be one-sided,
overzealous, clumsy. Strobel and his band of merry literalists seemed,
even to my novice NT education, to be playing fast and (very) loose
with their 'facts'. Your deconstruction of the author's tenets and
supporting cast are spot on.
Your work continues to shine the light on a much more plausible
reality. Many thanks.
Kevin writes:
I am enjoying your 'cross-examination' of Lee Strobel's book
immensely. I purchased and read your book some time and ago and I
continue to use it as a reference.
Brett writes:
Well, whether you believe in Christ or not, that is your decision.
I put money that if you asked any of the people in hell they'd tell
you that he is real. There isn't a single person in hell that doesn't
believe in God. God says that every head shall bow and every body
shall kneel before the Lord God. So whether you know now or not you'll
be finding out when you die because as you burn I hope you remember
the book you wrote and told everyone God wasn't real. You might need
to write a sequel after you die telling everyone how hell feels.
Joe writes:
You write: "...And yet, as in the case of any other Deity's work—
to our misfortune—the end result has been less than ideal. That great
syncretistic synthesis, the creation of a new religion around Jesus
which seems to embody all the ancient world's prior manifestations,
has not given us a product which subsequent history can be entirely
proud of: philosophically open, politically tolerant, scientifically
innovative, or socially enlightened." [from the book review of Robert
M. Price's Deconstructing Jesus]
This is so true. Many of us on the "inside" feel this way as you
do. It is our hope that Christianity's legacy will be to work through
the triumphalisms that have led to our predicament. It would be the
ultimate irony but Christianity may be the sacrificial lamb for Western
(now world?) culture, cleansing us of the oppressive institutional
demons that plague us.
I feel very strongly that we (especially devotional Christians)
need to look at Christian origins openly and honestly as you have
done. While I feel that we really have only scratched the surface in
considering the many possibilities as to what the true historical
core(s) might look like, I admire and greatly respect the work you
and others have done. I am ready to go where the truth would lead us
just as any historiographical enterprise where we have little or no
personal stake.
Julianne writes:
If God was small enough for our minds He wouldn't be big enough
for our needs.
Not everything makes sense. Not everything is true. GOD, is true.
I do not believe this because of the Bible, or because of what a
pastor says. I believe it because of how Jesus Christ has worked in
my heart and how the Holy Spirit has transformed my life once I
accepted Jesus Christ into my life and devoted my life to Him. The
Bible backs up my faith and is a tool God gave us to grow closer to
Him.
I pray that He will soften your heart to the truth.
Gary writes:
I have been going through your website for the last two months
and have found it totally fascinating and ever so freeing. I quite
agree with your theory as I feel it answers a lot more questions
than it raises.
I especially enjoyed your novel [The Jesus Puzzle, posted on the
site, not to be confused with my published book The Jesus Puzzle: Did
Christianity begin with a Mythical Christ?]. I think where the main
character explains his research to David and Phyllis is an excellent
pattern I can use for putting forth your ideas to others. I can
certainly identify with his and their reactions as this new way of
viewing the whole Christian story certainly does leave somewhat of
a void upon first hearing. However, for my own development, it has
deepened my spirituality.
Ethan writes:
It is such a relief to finally read a book about Jesus that
makes sense of the available evidence. I have no doubt that further
investigations will clarify some points, but "The Jesus Puzzle" is a
huge step in the right direction. It is refreshing to see conclusions
based on a straightforward interpretation of the early Christian
writings.
Abe writes:
As a former history student and current history buff I would have
to say that your attempt to piece together the truth about Jesus from
the existing fragments is one of the most fascinating examples of
historical research I have encountered. It's interesting how many
people love fiction in which a detective of some sort sifts through
clues. Here you are doing the same thing in real life, and about an
important subject to boot, and relatively few people take notice. If
there were any justice your book should sell as many copies as the
latest Mary Higgins Clark!
I am at Birmingham University in the UK and am currently doing aResponse to Phillip:
degree in Theology. However, I believe I am in the minority among my
fellows in that I more or less agree with you and your appraisal of
Jesus' historicity.
As you may know, the Biblical studies faculty here are notorious
for their refusal to believe in the hypothetical Q document. I have
to say that I agree with them in this regard. I was wondering how far
you consider this position to be a live one and also to what extent
do you think a removal of Q from theoretical consideration would alter
the 'mythicist' position, as all those people who agree with us seem
to take Q's existence for granted.
The Existence of Q and the Mythicist Position
I find Phillip's choice of language telling. The Birmingham University Biblical studies faculty "refuses" to "believe" in the "hypothetical" Q document. I, along with a majority of New Testament scholars today, have come to the conclusion that a sayings document which modern scholars have designated "Q" (for the German word Quelle, meaning "source") did exist in the first and early second centuries, and that it was independently used by Matthew and Luke, though they may not have used precisely the same version. This is not a "belief" or taken for granted. It is a deduction based on evidence and logical grounds. A "refusal to believe" suggests an adamant unwillingness to consider that evidence, for whatever reasons. As for Q being an "hypothesis," this is correct. But I have usually found that the word, in the mouths of those who resist the idea of Q, is used in a derogatory fashion, as though Q were entirely conjecture with insufficient evidence to support it. Which is, of course, not the case.
This is not to say that there are not alternative positions being put forward which argue for a Gospel world without Q. But when these are measured against the Q option, they are found wanting to a far greater degree. They contain many more problems than does the Q hypothesis, and Q's minor problems have relatively easier solutions. The usual alternative to Q involves the proposal that Luke used Matthew, but this faces so many difficulties it should be rejected. (Some of those difficulties are noted in the next Response.)
I am not going to argue the case here (I devote an Appendix in my book to the question). In regard to Phillip's query, I would say that the mythicist's case would be easier without Q. If everything in the Gospels could be seen as proceeding from the pen of the evangelists, one would have even less Gospel material that might be traceable back to an historical figure. (Those elements in common between Matthew and Luke are generally identified by the non-Q position as deriving from Matthew himself; otherwise one is simply reinventing Q.) The Jesus Seminar, for example, base their picture of the "genuine" Jesus almost entirely on the roots of Q as they have excavated them, with some corroboration claimed to come from the Gospel of Thomas. (Without a Q, Thomas has to be seen as derived from the Synoptics, and this too is a difficult position to support.)
The beauty of Q is that it gives us a glimpse into the background out of which the Gospels arose, the kinds of sectarian and reform activity going on in places like Galilee, its evolution throughout the mid to late first century, and the roots of some of those ideas in non-Jewish antecedents like the Cynics. To understand how the Q content arose out of diverse sources, how it evolved in typical sectarian fashion to be eventually placed at the feet of a glorified founder figure—who seems, according to indications within Q itself, not to have actually existed even as a non-divine sage in Galilee—is an exhilarating process. The appeal of an alternative without Q (apart from certain 'confessional' advantages for some) is one I have always found difficult to understand.
One of the arguments you put forward for the existence of Q isResponse to Colin:
the fact that the Q sayings occur in Matthew and Luke respectively
in different contexts. One example you give is the Lord's Prayer.
Can you give me, say, 10 more examples.
Q Sayings in Different Contexts in Matthew and Luke
I could give a few dozen, since every stand-alone saying of Jesus identified as coming from Q is placed in a different context within their Gospels by Matthew and Luke. This excludes three extended anecdotes which Matthew and Luke share, which can be seen as having stood in that developed form in the Q used by the two evangelists: the dialogue between Jesus and John (Lk./Q 7:18-35), the Healing of the Centurion's Servant (Lk./Q 7:1-10), and the Beelzebub Controversy (Lk./Q 11:14-22). The Temptation Story was probably also fully developed in Q, though it was in a class by itself and the latest addition to it.
All other sayings in Q can be deduced as having stood on their own, without contexts or even the name of Jesus attached to them, since the common material in Matthew and Luke is restricted to the sayings themselves. The contexts, the set-up lines, the 'filler' bits which sometimes serve to link more than one saying together to create a larger unit, are always totally different between the two evangelists.
(The one exception is the set of three chreiai in 9:57-62, in which Jesus responds to three successive questions. However, considering that in the Gospel of Thomas only one of these sayings is present and without any chreic set-up, one can deduce that this composite set has been put together some time during Q's development, at a later stage of redaction. An editor formed the three-chreia exchange out of earlier separate sayings. The same process seems to have created the 'Jesus and John dialogue' since it too contains an individual saying which stands alone in Thomas, indicating that the dialogue is an artificial creation and never took place.)
But let's look at a few examples. I'll briefly mention the Lord's Prayer which Colin noted. In Matthew it is part of the Sermon on the Mount before a large crowd (6:9-13). In Luke, it is given privately to the disciples while on the way to Jerusalem, in answer to their query: "Lord, teach us how to pray" (11:1-4). Both the general context and the lead-in material is totally different. In the Q document, it is likely that this "prayer" simply stood alone.
The so-called mission instructions in Matthew 10:1-15 and Luke 10:1-12 contain sayings about what those appointed by Jesus are to do in their itinerant preaching. The two Gospel writers have heavily redacted these instructions, so that it is impossible to ascertain what their original wording might have been in Q. But their settings are also quite different. In Matthew, these instructions are given to the twelve disciples, which Matthew names, and the event takes place during the ministry in Galilee. In Luke, Jesus is appointing seventy-two apostles to precede him, in pairs, through the towns and villages on the way to Jerusalem. It would seem that no context within Jesus' ministry, or set-up lines introducing these sayings, was present in Q. It follows that in the original traditions on which Q is based, it is very possible that they were not attached to a Jesus figure at all, but simply represented the standing directives which the Q missionaries followed—a kind of instruction manual.
A complex of linked sayings appears in Matthew 10:26-33 and Luke 12:2-9: "There is nothing covered up that will not be uncovered . . . Do not fear those who kill the body . . . Are not two sparrows sold for next to nothing?" and so on. In Matthew, Jesus is reassuring the disciples during his mission instructions. Luke has led into these sayings by warning of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, while Jesus is on the journey to Jerusalem. Again, the deduction is that only the bare sayings stood in Q, with no context relating to Jesus or his ministry.
The parable of the lost sheep is found in Luke 15:1-7, in Matthew 18:12-14. Matthew's lead-in comes a few verses earlier, in 18:1, "At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, 'Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?' " Jesus answers with several sayings, including the lost sheep parable. Luke leads into it this way: "The tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear him, at which the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, 'This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.' He answered them with this parable . . ."
Compare these two little passages: "The apostles said to the Lord, 'Increase our faith'; and the Lord replied, 'If you had faith no bigger even than a mustard-seed, you could say to this sycamore-tree, "Be rooted up and replanted in the sea"; and it would obey you.' " (Luke 17:5-6); and, "Afterwards [following the apostles' failure to drive a devil out of an epileptic boy] the disciples came to Jesus and asked him privately, 'Why could not we cast it out?' He answered, 'Your faith is too weak. I tell you this: if you have faith no bigger even than a mustard-seed, you will say to this mountain, "Move from here to there!", and it will move; nothing will prove impossible for you.' " (Matthew 17:19-20). One or the other evangelist has altered the content, but the basis of the saying is the same. The set-up lines and context are completely different.
In every case where we are dealing with individual sayings or chains of loosely linked sayings (again, this excludes those three or four extended and structured anecdotes which are redactive constructions out of earlier material—see above), there is no instance where the placement of those sayings is in a common setting within Jesus' ministry, or where the lead-in or filler lines are the same. If we were looking at one or a few isolated cases, it could perhaps be argued that one or both of the evangelists had simply changed the context they found in Q. But when the same diversity of context between Matthew and Luke is present in the case of every stand-alone saying in Q, we can assume that this is because Q, in its early stages, was simply a list of sayings with no associations made to a Jesus or a ministry. In the course of Q's evolution, when a Jesus was added to the background of the document and a few extended anecdotes were formed around him, no contexts were added to the great bulk of the stand-alone sayings, though these may have been rearranged into new blocks.
If that great bulk had from the beginning arisen out of oral traditions attached to Jesus, what are the chances that no contexts would have been supplied or preserved? If the Q community had indeed been founded by a charismatic sage whose memory was the impetus to the movement's continuation, what are the chances that almost no traditions about Jesus the man, his character and deeds, would form part of the content of the Q document? It has become a maxim to say (as does J. D. Crossan, for example) that the focus in the community was entirely on Jesus' sayings and not on his person. A better explanation than to suggest such a bizarre development would be that most of Q's history was as a collection of sayings per se, the teachings and directives of the Q community (perhaps regarded as the product of personified Wisdom) and only at a late stage was a Jesus figure introduced as the originator of the sayings, as the personification of the Son of Man, and as the superior to John the Baptist. (Though not as the "Messiah" which is a term never used in Q.)
Another conclusion that can be drawn from the lack of common contexts is that Luke is not likely to have copied Matthew, thus invalidating the non-Q position. The chances that Luke would have borrowed so many sayings from Matthew and yet never have taken over any of their settings or set-up lines (whereas he often does when he is taking from Mark—for example, Lk. 6:1-5 = Mk. 2:23-28, or Lk. 18:15-17 = Mk. 10:13-15) is almost impossible to conceive. When one adds the fact that Luke never preserves Matthew's order of this 'Q' material, that some of those common sayings are more primitive in the Lukan versions, that Luke fails to reproduce key material from Matthew such as elements of the latter's Nativity story, and so on, the claim that Luke used Matthew becomes untenable. Such a claim is usually reduced to an exercise in trying to explain why Luke shows no sign of copying Matthew.
Your book is so superb. I have known that true physical evidenceResponse to Ivan:
of a 'real' person was non-existent, but it's fabulous how you get
into the psyche of the people of the first and second centuries.
I do have a question: what are the earliest extant copies of
early documents - such as Paul's letters?
Earliest Extant Copies of the New Testament
Manuscripts which contain the entire New Testament, such as the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus, are datable to the 300s. Earlier fragments of Gospel texts date from the 200s; parts of several letters of the Pauline corpus, Hebrews and Revelation come from the 200s as well.
Prior to 200, we have a single scrap, the famous Rylands P52 fragment containing a few verses from John 18. Most date this fragment to the period 125 to 160 (see Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus, p.94). The miniscule amount of text it contains is of no value in knowing how much of John at this stage agreed with the canonical version, or to whom the writing was attributed. Justin Martyr, writing in the 150s, shows no knowledge of John, though he quotes from Gospels later attributed to Matthew and Luke.
As for more recent claims that certain fragments of Mark and Matthew can be dated to the mid-first century, such claims have been discredited by more sober scholars as fanciful and unsupported by careful examination of the evidence. For more on these points, see my Response to Glenn in Reader Feedback No. 5.
At least twice in Acts, Jesus is said to have been hanged on aResponse to Carl:
tree. Does this suggest a connection with Jehoshua of the Babylonian
Gemara, the son of Pandira and Stada, who was stoned to death as a
wizard and hanged on a tree? Did the writer of Acts know nothing
about the crucifixion? Or is 'hanged on a tree' just another way of
saying 'crucified'?
Hanged on a Tree
Personally, I suspect that Acts has preserved an early form of expression, in which the Christ myth characterized Jesus' death as a 'hanging on a tree.' 1 Peter 2:24 refers to the "tree" on which Christ's body "bore our sins." The writer of this epistle shows no sign of being familiar with any Gospel traditions about the crucifixion; he describes Jesus' suffering and humility (2:22-23) by paraphrasing Isaiah 53. In the pre-Pauline hymn of Philippians 2:6-11, it has been suggested that the words "even death on a cross" are Paul's addition to a reference to Jesus' death which contained no specifics. In the Ascension of Isaiah 9:13, a late first century Jewish sectarian work, the Son who descends through the layers of heaven is "hung on a tree by the god of that world," meaning Satan. This seems to be part of the myth of a Christ slain in the spirit world by the evil demons. (For more, see Supplementary Article No. 3: Who Crucified Jesus?)
All of it may have been determined by Deuteronomy 21:23, something Paul refers to in Galatians 3:13: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: 'Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.' " Since scripture was the source of information about the divine Christ, the mythical savior god of earliest Christianity, this verse may have supplied some ideas about how he had died.
Whether the reference in the Talmud to Jesus being "hanged" is picking up on that early viewpoint is difficult to say. The Talmud also says he was stoned, and in the city of Lydda, not in Jerusalem. Other references place him around 100 BCE, and the early second century CE. Clearly, the rabbinic 'traditions' of Jesus were very hazy, if not even his crucifixion, let alone the time and place it occurred, was a universally established memory. One might think that the Gospel story was not widely known among the Jews, since not a single Talmudic reference to Jesus takes cognizance of the role of the Romans in the crucifixion, something they might be expected to appeal to, rather than simply assume Jewish responsibility.
I'd firstly like to thank and congratulate you for yourResponse to William:
tremendous works, The Jesus Puzzle and your website. A friend
from Chicago brought me a signed copy of your book and I'm proud
to own such a superbly authoritative work on the subject - and
one extremely sober and even-handed in its analysis.
I am now quite intrigued by the rather shadowy figure of
John the Baptist in the New Testament. From The Jesus Puzzle
you seem not to doubt his existence as a historical figure but
other books (e.g., The Jesus Mysteries) seem to place him in an
allegorical role - as that of Jesus himself.
Existence of John the Baptist / Did Salome Dance?
I think this is a misinterpretation of The Jesus Mysteries. The authors don't reject John as a mythical figure, only his role in the Gospels. In my view, John entered the Gospels through Mark, who drew on traditions of the Q preaching movement of which he was a part, even though he seems not to have possessed a copy of the Q document used by Matthew and Luke. Even in Q, if one examines the early-strata traditions about John, one finds that he has no connection to a Jesus figure. Rather, he is prophesying the imminent arrival of one who will baptize with fire and separate the wheat from the chaff (Lk./Q 3:16-17). This is clearly not a prophesy about a teacher of wisdom contemporary to himself, but about the coming Son of Man, an End-time apocalyptic figure (derived from Daniel 7:13) which the early Q sect was expecting. Only at a later stage of Q's development, once a founding figure was introduced, was an artificial connection made between John and this new Jesus (if that was the name originally given to him). As I pointed out to Colin above, the dialogue between Jesus and John, as found in Q, shows signs of being a redactive construction out of earlier distinct pieces.
The epistle writers show no knowledge of John the Baptist, never referring to him. Nor do they refer to any baptism of their Jesus, despite the attention Paul pays to Christian baptism and its meaning. I have no doubt that John the Baptist had nothing to do with the early cult of Christ, and that even the Q community adopted him as a mentor and predecessor only a couple of decades after his death. The preaching about the Son of Man put into his mouth in Q may well have been a misrepresentation of John's preaching, which was probably about the arrival of God himself on the Day of the Lord.
The fact that Josephus describes John the Baptist in his Antiquities of the Jews (18.5.2) is probably sufficient evidence that John existed. However, Josephus does not connect John to a Christian movement, much less to a Jesus. He also makes no mention of the manner or circumstances of John's execution by Herod, neither the beheading nor as the consequence of Salome's dance. In fact, in giving the reasons for that execution, Josephus states that it was because of John's influence over the people and the fear that he might incline them to rebellion. Josephus recounts many colorful incidents in his histories, and there is no reason to think that he would have been unaware of, or would have chosen to be silent on, the lurid aspects of the affair, if Salome's dance were historical. Mark may have been incorporating a popular legend about John's death, or exercising his own creative imagination.
One point might be noted in passing. Josephus' account of John's fate makes it clear that even the Jewish authorities had the power to arrest perceived troublemakers and dispatch them with not much recourse to due process. If Jesus were going about doing anything like the things the Gospels attribute to him, the miracles, the preaching to huge crowds, the subversive teachings that society was about to be overthrown with the meek inheriting the kingdom, there can be little doubt that he, too, would have been very quickly seized and disposed of. This sort of consideration alone calls into question the historical reliability of the Gospel account.
Is there any other reference to Herod's killing of the baby boysResponse to Fay:
under two, to be found outside the New Testament? Or is this just
another later interpolation to give the savior the same status as
Moses?
Did Herod's Slaughter of the Innocents Take Place?
No, there is no reference in any historian of the time, including Josephus. And yes, the close parallel with the birth story of Moses in Exodus, which features a slaughter of Hebrew babies by Pharaoh (later enlarged on in Jewish tradition to interpret as Pharoah's desire to kill a newborn infant who was prophesied as the Hebrew deliverer), would indicate that Matthew was simply giving his character the type of birth circumstances that were associated with great figures. Similar birth stories were attached to the patriarch Abraham, Sargon the Great of Assyria, and the Roman emperor Augustus.
Josephus chronicled Herod's bloodthirsty reign quite faithfully, and there can be little doubt that if such an event happened at Bethlehem, only five miles from Jerusalem, he would have known of it and mentioned its occurrence.
Odysseus and Hercules had several centuries to grow theirResponse to Michael:
stories. How did Jesus become so real in only three or four short
decades? Particularly if you claim that Paul had no awareness of
such a tradition. This would essentially mean that the entire Jesus
legend was created between c. 55-75 AD. Besides, your argument seems
to date the invention of the mythical [fictional] Jesus of the Q
community prior to the creation of the first Gospel narrative (Mark
is commonly held to have been written not long after 70.) Wouldn't
there have been some actual recollection of what events actually
took place 40 years earlier?
If you are correct, where did such Gospel stories come from?
Who was telling those first stories, and why? I am also wondering
why the Q community chose "Jesus" as the name for their founder.
One more thing, what of Romans 15:8-9: "For I say that Christ
became a minister of the circumcised to show God's truthfulness,
to confirm the promises to the patriarchs, but so that the Gentiles
might glorify God for his mercy." If Jesus is a purely spiritual
being, to whom was he ministering?
Growth of the Jesus Legend / Name of the Q Jesus / Jesus 'Ministering' to Jews
There are a number of unfounded assumptions here. The key point is not when the first Gospel was written, with its first recorded version of a Jesus story. It is when that story came to be regarded as an historical account of an historical person. Although I tend to date Mark late in the first century, perhaps around 85-90, the same argument would apply even if the first Gospel were written soon after 70. I would maintain that Mark did not regard his story as history, that it was basically an allegory with a symbolic Jesus character who represented both the Kingdom-preaching community of which Mark was a part and the death and rising of the savior god Christ Jesus (as preached by the likes of Paul), set in an earthly story in recent history.
The record would indicate that the wider Christian world throughout the rest of the first century, and many parts of it well into the second century, had no knowledge of this Gospel story. Thus, the "legend" of Jesus of Nazareth did in fact take quite a long time to develop over the purely spiritual Christ of the earliest Christians like Paul. There is also a distinctive feature here, in that Mark and his successors provided the raw formulation of that legend, drawing mostly on Old Testament precedents through the process of midrash. This was something that was relatively sudden and a literary event, not a long-term evolution of oral traditions.
There is one limited qualification to that. There was a certain amount of 'development' before Mark's time, in that the Q community, over the course of a few decades, turned a record of their own teachings and practice into the record of one who had originated those things, a presumed historical founder of the sect. Mark drew on that evolved tradition. The development of a Q founder, however, probably took place following the Jewish War, and such a great upheaval would have masked the different historical reality of the previous period. Moreover, that tradition of a Galilean sage was as yet quite limited.
As to why the Q sect called its founder "Jesus," the better question is, did they in fact do so? We can't tell from the record. If the Q document contained a different name, Matthew and Luke would have changed it to Jesus, in conformity with Mark's character, and Mark's name would have been determined by the Christ-cult side of things which he artificially joined to the Galilean Kingdom tradition. There is also the possibility that by the time Luke and Matthew got their hands on Q, the name of its founder had been changed to Jesus, under the influence of the Gospel of Mark. I consider it a strong possibility that Mark's community, in the meantime, had come into possession of a copy of Q, equated it with the character in their Gospel, and brought the names, if they were different, into alignment. Both documents would then have arrived together in the communities of the later Synoptic evangelists.
Why did Mark write his allegory? This sort of literary device was common in the ancient world, and especially among the Jews. Some books of the Old Testament (such as Esther), and parts of many others, such as episodes in the story of David, were designed to convey lessons, to create a mythology for Israel, and may not have been initially presented as actual history. Much in Mark's story can be best understood as intended to convey lessons to the community, to demonstrate that it fulfilled the themes of Jewish history and promise.
Finally, Michael points to Romans 15:8-9. But standard translations tend to read more into these verses than is evidently there. Is Paul saying that Christ ministered to the Jews? Literally, the wording is: "Christ has become a servant of the Jews on behalf of God's truth, to confirm the promises made to the patriarchs." Is this a reference to an earthly ministry? Who knows, with such a cryptic statement? In fact, the verb/participle is in the perfect tense, has become, which has a 'present' ongoing implication. Paul could simply be saying that the spiritual Christ, operating in heaven, is now servant to the Jews, working on their behalf and for the conversion of the gentile. This is pretty weak stuff to support an historical Jesus.
I've been praying over this letter for a couple of weeks now.Response to Peter:
I have visited your site several times and have actually downloaded
it onto my laptop for review and analysis. I am not the scholar that
you are but I have studied my faith in comparison to many others for
well over twenty years and am convinced of its truth and that its
truth will stand in spite of all opposition.
I have read some criticism by those you have angered and I do
not wish to be grouped in that camp. I have also read some comments
by those who believe you have helped them or who hold the same views
as you. I was struck by the realization that most of them praise you
because you have proved something to their satisfaction which they
had already believed, or proved there was no reason for them to
believe what they didn't wish to believe anyway. This brings me to
the one question I wish to ask you: "What if you are wrong?"
I do not believe that to be a Christian is to turn off all
intellectual inquiry. I recall a time long ago in elementary school
that one of my classmates who noticed my great interest in science
told me, "If you are a Christian you can't believe in science, it
teaches evolution." I have never agreed with that sentiment. I do
not believe in evolution not because it is a powerful enemy but
because upon closer examination it has proven to be utterly
ridiculous. For me, being a Christian has enhanced my enjoyment of
this world and all the wonder within it, wonders for which I daily
praise my God. I look forward to an eternity with Him being able to
praise Him more completely than I ever could here in this life.
But this innocent statement by a long ago child did cause me to
begin to walk the path of open and honest inquiry. I have always
been willing to evaluate, from as unbiased a stance as possible,
philosophies that contradicted that of my own faith and have yet to
find any that are unified with reality or as consistent, fulfilling,
and rewarding if followed in daily living. I have seriously
considered, as did Paul, the value of the Christian life if Jesus
never lived as the Bible says He did. For me, as for Paul, it would
mean that life would have no ultimate meaning, that this minute is
important only because I am here now to live it, my hope in eternity
would be false and I would in Paul's words, be the most to be pitied
among men. But I would have lost nothing since my hope in eternal
life would never truly have existed, and if I continue to hold this
nonexistent hope I gain satisfaction in this life and lose nothing
in the long term for there never would have been a reward to be lost.
If what I believe to be true is actually false I have lost
nothing of value for it never was there in the first place. If,
however, what you believe to be true is actually false you have
lost everything worth living for, all that I hope for. All I am
asking is this: Can you accept what would happen to you if you are
wrong? Maybe more importantly, can you accept what would happen to
your students if you are wrong?
Fearing the Fear Itself
This is a powerful letter. It more than illustrates the strength, the appeal, the grip, which religious belief has always had on the minds of human beings. I have no doubt that the impulse to belief in gods and the supernatural, and especially in a personal afterlife, has served an important purpose in the evolution of the mind and its ability to cope with the world. I also have no doubt that this situation is changing, and that we may be starting to emerge from that long need and enthrallment.
It may well be that many of those who accept my position on the historical Jesus, or on any expression of an 'atheistic' stance, do so because they have already arrived at a similar viewpoint, or do not wish to continue to feel obligated to believe in something they can no longer accept. We all look for justifications to support personal judgments and preferences, or from which to derive those things. The important thing is to do the looking. Peter says he has openly and honestly examined the tenets of his faith, and I take him at his word. Many others who write to me, including some that I've quoted in this Reader Feedback, clearly have done no such thing. But I question his reasoning on making the choices he presents.
If someone came to my door and told me that if I didn't wear black for the rest of my life I would be doomed to some horrible fate, or if some influential body in society maintained that in order to reap a reward all of us ought never to open more than one eye at a time, what should be my reaction if I spoke out against such views and someone came to me and asked, What if you're wrong?
The finest quality of the human mind is its ability to reason, to evaluate, to judge. Far better that in exercising those abilities we arrive at radical new views ( temporarily so) than that we blindly follow what others tell us, or previous generations have handed down. Herd mentalities have never produced social or intellectual progress. Unfortunately, religion is a system that almost always entails a set of rewards and punishments. They are part of the mechanism it has developed for its own survival, to ward off the threat of reason. An open, scientific examination of its doctrines is almost always fatal, and thus the danger presented by those who exercise the mind's ability to question or reject religion's tenets is more often than not countered by threats or appeals to that set of rewards and punishments.
But if our questioning leads to the rational rejection of the entire system, such considerations lose their effect. The carrot and the stick are robbed of their appeal and their threat when it is perceived that they are simply a part of the package. The belief that faith in one historical set of doctrines is the sole avenue to eternal salvation, or that rejection of them will result in eternal horrific punishment, will hardly survive the reasoning mind any more than would the proposition to wear black and keep one eye closed. The prospect of being wrong holds no terrors.
That fellow-child's voice may have prompted Peter toward honest inquiry, but it also reveals the reason why we need this inquiry. Already, indoctrination had told that child that because a religious dogma was in conflict with science, science had to be rejected. The basis to our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in had to be cast aside in favor of ancient words in an ancient set of writings and belief systems rooted in primitive times and modes of thinking. How far along the path to intellectual suicide had that child already traveled? If today the vast majority of scientists have arrived at the principle of evolution as the most compelling explanation for the nature and diversity of life on earth, for the physical record one finds in the earth itself, one wonders on what basis Peter finds it "ridiculous." Perhaps his attitude toward evolution as a "powerful enemy," if I have interpreted him correctly, supplies an insight.
Peter suggests that if he chooses to hold to a belief which turns out to be untrue, he may be pitied but he will have lost nothing. I think he will have lost a great deal. He will have lost the opportunity to focus on the life he lives in the present, on the world into which he was born and which constitutes our sole guarantee. He will have lost the chance to regard all of his fellow human beings as of equal status, regardless of what they do or don’t believe in, rather than be forced, as many have expressed it in this feedback file, to consign the bulk of the race to some unspeakable fate. He will have lost the exhilaration of understanding the world around him, its amazing history, the processes which have led to his own formation. He will have lost the chance to exercise his own powers of rationality and judgment, to turn to his own wisdom for moral guidance instead of the words of a long-dead culture and more primitive time, to join the world of modern scientific discovery. He will have lost the chance to cast off the heavy mantle of sinfulness and fear, of the necessity to pacify and prostrate oneself before an insatiable Deity, which religion always seems to lay on poor humanity’s shoulders. Such losses are not to be lightly dismissed.
Is there indeed no meaning to life without religion, as Peter suggests? Those admonitions to wear black and keep one eye closed may be preventing us from enjoying all the colors of the world, from perceiving everything there is to perceive, in its true depth. Perhaps there is a better eternity to spend than one praising a God. What if another meaning, a meaning more satisfying and rewarding, involving a deeper understanding of our own nature and that of the universe, were being masked by the perpetuation of that ancient system, no matter what purpose it may hitherto have served?
Whether there is such a meaning, we may not know yet. But we'll never find out as long as we try to suppress those abilities of the human mind or succumb to the indoctrinated fear of being wrong.
N. M. writes:
I read your book and several others on the subject. needless to
say i feel bad if it's true, but what I'm after is truth no matter
where it leads. So, do you believe in a mystical jesus like a gnostic
religion? Can you tell me whom you pray to if you do? And what do you
think about the after life if christianity is a myth? I can't ask
anyone i know because they would say i was going to hell for asking.
Is there any proof at all that Jesus and mary and Joseph are real?
How did it get so out of hand?
Sincerely appreciate any insight on the subject.