RFSet19
Cindy writes:
It is good to hear the quiet voice of reason amid the clamor of faith. Your site is an excellent source of scholarly debate and open-minded discussion. I am enjoying it immensely.
Vadil writes:
I have read almost everything on your Jesus Puzzle web site. I join with others in recognizing the merit of the work you have presented and the scholarly acclaim that it deserves. It has been a great eye opener for me.
Robert writes:
I just wanted to say thank you for your hard work. I have been studying history informally for about twenty years and it never ceases to amaze me what some people believe and why they believe it. I am glad to see that information that has been around for centuries is finally getting to the public. I recommend your site to as many people as I can. Historical honesty is refreshing and a continuous challenge.
David writes:
I can't help but agree with your assessment. We as humans could proceed onward to our real problems of social behavior and environment, to better us all and to provide a better life for our offspring, if only we could see beyond our baggage. It is my humble opinion that individuals such as yourself embark on such journeys to give us a guide, to help us shed the baggage. Keep up the good work.
Adam writes:
After reading everything on your web site, I decided to buy your book. I was not disappointed. The research is impeccable and the conclusions you make are amazing. After spending most of my life drowning in fundamentalist Christianity, I now feel that a great burden has been lifted from my shoulders. I wish that research like yours could free the world from the superstition of Christianity. However, old habits and beliefs die hard. This is why your beacon in the darkness is so important. Hopefully, common sense will prevail someday.
Mark writes:
I've been a devoted Christian for 20 odd years and only recently have realized that I've been deluded. I've read the first part of your book "Challenging the Verdict." I'm not a scholar and don't fully appreciate all of the points you make, but it did strike me as a well researched and nicely written book. Rarely if ever, does one get such a balanced and well argued refutation of such a work [Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ]—leastwise none that I've happened across—as yours. Perhaps if I'd have come across it earlier I might have saved some time "seeing the light" but as it is, your book serves to boost my confidence that deconverting and becoming a freethinker was probably my wisest decision in years.
Dean writes:
I finally ordered The Jesus Puzzle book. I wish this book was available sooner in life, it's just what every person of faith needs to read, explore and search through before entering any religious order. I knew the secrets to the truth were in the history, what happened back there some 1900 years ago, but to access this history I did not know how to start a search. But now I don't have to, it's all in The Jesus Puzzle, and that makes it a fun book to seriously read, and study all at once.
Jay writes:
I have mailed an order for one copy of The Jesus Puzzle. I've been visiting your web site and am eagerly awaiting the opportunity to read your book. It was an article by Robert Price in "Free Inquiry" that led me to it. Mr. Price referred to it as "masterful." A convincing endorsement, to say the least. [Dr. Robert Price is a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar.]
Mark writes:
I have just read some of your site, mostly the counter argument to The Case for Christ. Well done. Whereas other sites that deal with this topic quickly become difficult to follow through the complicated logic, yours is straightforward and easy to follow. Thanks for putting to words with research many things which I had already begun wondering about.
George writes:
Santa Claus didn't really exist? Well then Mr. Smart guy, who put all the presents under the tree? Hmmm? Oh, and don't even try to say that it was my parents. They always went to bed early and said they never had any money!
Barry writes:
I think you make a good observation [in Challenging the Verdict: A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ] concerning Luke's description of Jesus' sweat becoming "as drops of blood." Not only is this a possible metaphor, you point out the obvious in many places in the Gospels where the writers seem to know things that happened to Jesus when he was alone. I love to read fiction, and one of the most wonderful liberties a fiction writer has, when writing in the third person, is he/she can portray a character, his thoughts, his deeds, when no one else is around. I don't find the Gospels any different. They sound and read exactly like a writer, writing in the third person, showing the "whole" character.
I just finished reading your novel [The Jesus Puzzle: A Novel About the Greatest Question of Our Time, reproduced on this web site, not to be confused with my published book The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ?]. It was amazing. I had gathered your basic message from the web site, but your presentation within the novel was riveting. The plot was woven smoothly, threads connecting throughout. I also loved your plot twists. You really seemed very experienced with the novel form. I cannot find copies of the Testament of Man anywhere. And, thanks to your wonderful book, I very much want to read them. Do you know of any place that I might buy the whole set? I cannot find The Muratorian Project anywhere, I assumed you made that up, but is there something similar? Is there something similar to the Age of Reason Foundation?Response to Keith:
Vardis Fisher's The Testament of Man / Novel Inventions
For the benefit of those who have not read my novel, "The Testament of Man" is a series of eleven historical novels by the American author Vardis Fisher (1895-1969), tracing the development of humanity's religious ideas from the dawn of intelligence two million years ago to the Christian Middle Ages. I refer to Fisher and his Testament as a recurring motif through the course of my novel, finding his naturalistic and rational portrayal of history and evolution, as well as the scope of his vision, an inspiration. And he is a great storyteller. His moving novel on Jesus (eighth in the series, Jesus Came Again: A Parable) does not attempt to portray the presumed historical figure of the Gospels, but simply one who symbolized for Fisher what the Jesus idea was, and how it might have given rise to Christianity. Fisher drew on the best biblical scholarship of his day (1940s and 50s), and he allowed for the possibility that Jesus never existed, although he made no personal commitment one way or the other.
The books in The Testament of Man are extremely difficult to find these days. The best source is through Internet booksellers who specialize in acquiring rare and hard-to-find books. Because they are rare, sets of the Testament tend to be expensive. Other sources are larger public libraries and library archives, from which copies may be available through local inter-library loan programs. The titles of the novels are: Darkness and the Deep, The Golden Rooms, Intimations of Eve, Adam and the Serpent, The Divine Passion, The Valley of Vision, The Island of the Innocent, Jesus Came Again: A Parable, A Goat for Azazel, Peace Like a River, My Holy Satan.
The magazine "American Atheist" is currently publishing a series of six articles on Vardis Fisher written by myself, reviewing in detail all eleven novels of the Testament of Man.
Keith asks about The Muratorian Project, which in my novel is a very elaborate online resource for biblical texts and scholarship. It does not exist in reality, unfortunately, though material of this nature, detailing the Christian and other ancient-world literature, can be found in many places on the Internet, perhaps with not quite the dramatic or colorful trappings I have created for it in the novel. (For one of these, an ever-growing resource on all the Christian documents of the first two centuries, see the link to Peter Kirby's Early Christian Writings site, at the end of my Home Page.)
As for The Age of Reason Foundation in my novel, I suppose one might compare it to an organization like the Council for Secular Humanism in Buffalo, although the latter's emphases are somewhat different, and its organizational features entirely different. Out of that idea in the novel came the name for my own publishing venture for Challenging the Verdict. Perhaps one day Age of Reason Publications will expand to the status of an activist organization promoting science and rationality. I have launched a humble web site on that theme which may over time take on a life of its own: <Age Of Reason>
Your web site is a great find. With the number of new churches being built in this state, I can only hope that we are not returning to the mentality of the Middle Ages. Please, for the sake of humanity, continue to write and publish your thoughts. For a long time I thought I was quite alone in my thoughts. I am very happy to discover that I am not. While perusing your web site, I could not pass the J. P. Holding discussion without being compulsively driven to inject my assessment. I think the most obvious point of this whole discussion has yet to be touched. There is today not one Christian minister, pastor, evangelist or whatever claimant, that is not pumping out monstrously elaborated passion narratives to whet the appetite of followers and entice new converts. There is a passion narrative war going on out there. My church has more passion than yours. Follow me, good soldiers. Sermons on the birth, apocalypse, crucifixion, resurrection, parables, beatitudes, life after death, etc., etc., are raining down on the Christians of today. These passions are the glue of Christianity. It is what holds Christians to their faith! It is the most powerful weapon in their arsenal. It is preached relentlessly and repetitively in their mantra of prayer. One cannot walk into a modern day church without being visually bombarded by passion images. In most cases, you don't have to go inside. The Easter story is repeated and acted out year after year. The same story is told over and over even though (according to J. P.) "there is no need for these details to be revisited. They are already known. There is absolutely no need for repetition." How absurd to think and imply that Paul and other epistle writers in their efforts of conversion would not use these weapons if they were available in THEIR arsenal. You cannot drive a car or fly an airplane until they are invented, which by the way would be quite minuscule inventions compared to the Jesus invention. But, once they are invented, you will drive and fly forever. Unfortunately, reason once again must ride the back seat in the bus of faith as witnessed by J. P.'s enlightening response, "they already knew." By the way, you seem to be carrying the flag of reason quite well.
Response to William:
J. P. Holding's "No Need" Explanation for the Silence in the Epistles
My thanks to William for a powerful refutation of the "no need to mention" argument put forward by J. P. Holding. I could hardly have put it better. One point Holding and others completely ignore is the factor of human nature. Whether there exists a need or not, the compulsion to speak of Jesus' words and deeds, especially in a context where there would have been an obvious advantage to offering them, such as providing divine support for the writer's argument and point of view, would have made a mention of such things natural and indeed inevitable—at least some of the time.
I have also made the point that it is quite unfounded to assume that in fact all these details were so thoroughly known that Paul and others did not need to mention them. There were no written Gospels at this time. What kind of aural exposure can we assume the Galatians, the Corinthians, the Thessalonians, had had to all the features of the story of Jesus, that Paul and others could say to themselves, Oh, no need to tell them that Jesus said this, or did that—they've heard it a hundred times before, I'm just wasting my breath (or ink). What traveling missionaries prior to Paul had taken the time or had the opportunity to expound on all the details of Jesus' teachings and miracles, all the events of his ministry and passion? Was there such universal agreement on all these things within the sphere of oral tradition, that each apostle in the field could feel confident that others had given the correct picture of the teachings, the prophecies, the passion and resurrection (such as the agreement we can see in every detail of the post-resurrection appearances in the Gospels, along with Paul himself in 1 Corinthians 15), that there would be no need for individual preachers to repeat any of this thoroughly-known information?
Was there no need for the inspiration that comes from repetition of the familiar? No need for the preacher to demonstrate his own knowledge, his own authority? No need or desire on the part of the reader or audience to be bathed in the images and warmth of contact arising from hearing about Jesus' words and deeds—the "glue of faith" even today, as William points out?
The whole idea is beyond ludicrous.
I do remain curious about what precisely Paul's vision of Jesus was. I guess I'm just still not sold on the idea that Paul's vision must necessarily have taken place entirely in some part of the heavens. I agree that figures such as Dionysos were taken to be heavenly, but I'm not sure I agree that Dionysos' Greek believers assumed that his "human" birth was nevertheless completely "unearthly," if you see what I mean. It's always been my understanding that Dionysos (and other semi-human children of the gods) was assumed to be, in fact, somehow actually of human parentage, e.g., born in an actual earthly cave. I'm likewise unsure that other deities such as Attis, Adonis, Osiris, et al, can all be compared directly with one another. Perhaps no one would go about Asia Minor looking for Attis' genitals, but I'm not sure most Hellenistic Greeks assumed that Attis was at all human—or if he was, that he lived during any time near the present (the real past often being a convenient and faraway place to locate myths). Your writings are indubitably fascinating, and at the very least make a valuable contribution to New Testament studies.Response to Mike:
Placing Paul's Christ "in the Heavens"
I have no doubt that, within the mythical Jesus theory and mine in particular, this is the single most difficult concept for the modern mind to grasp. In our literal, scientific universe it is almost impossible for us to "think mythically." We also suffer under a number of disadvantages in interpreting the ancient mind, particularly in this area. I cannot get inside Paul's head. I can only read his words, try to apply them within the philosophy of the time, hopefully compare them with other writers who deal with or touch on this subject, and try to come to a feasible conclusion that makes sense of the evidence as a whole.
One of those disadvantages is that we have almost no writings on the mystery myths and their meanings. The few that we do have are by philosophers, such as Plutarch in the first century, and Sallustius and Julian in the fourth. Those philosophers tended to regard the myths as allegorical or symbolic, not literal. Sallustius calls the story of Attis "an eternal cosmic process, not an isolated event of the past" (On Gods and the World, 9). Julian places Attis, who symbolizes certain spiritual processes which have an effect on the physical world, within the heavenly layers of the universe, but he does not present this as the 'acting out' of the Attis myth in those spheres in any literal fashion. For Julian, Attis did not literally castrate himself in the sphere above the moon.
We don't know what the average devotee of the cults believed, how he or she viewed the myths of the savior gods. The problem here is that, as Michael expresses it, the myths of the savior gods do sound earthly, because for the most part they were formed at a time when those activities were envisioned as having taken place on earth, in a "faraway" primordial past—a "sacred time" as the anthropologists call it. I'm pretty sure the original Mithra was regarded as born in a literal cave, that the original Dionysos was declared to be born of an actual, human woman. As the Hellenistic age advanced, however, and Platonic views of the universe took hold, such myths and primordial processes tended to be transplanted to other dimensions of reality. The gods no longer dwelt on Mount Olympus. They moved to loftier planes of existence. The ultimate God dwelled in a realm of pure spirit, the highest level of the heavens. Lesser gods or forces, especially as these were required to serve as the ultimate God's intermediaries with the lower material realm, operated in intermediate spheres. Even in Jewish thought, toward the period of Christianity's inception, the heavens were seen as graded in this way. The higher realms constituted the more "primary" and "genuine" parts of reality; the material realm was inferior and secondary.
To what extent the mystery cult initiates made such a transfer is difficult to say. I suspect most of them went along, more or less, for the ride. Which is not to say that they had fully worked out in their own minds (if anyone did) exactly how the myths functioned in the new universe. In early Christianity's case, scripture was regarded as a window onto those higher spiritual dimensions. The New Testament epistle to the Hebrews is fascinating evidence of this kind of thinking. From scripture, the writer has drawn all sorts of features given to his savior Christ, whose salvation activities are placed in the spiritual realm (chapters 8 and 9). Christ's sacrifice is performed in a "heavenly sanctuary." The opening part of the epistle gives us a glimpse onto some great heavenly scene, the Son compared to the angels on the basis of scriptural passages which have nothing to do with any setting or activities on earth. The author's presentation throughout the epistle has Alexandrian Platonism written all over it. And he is writing to an audience that is expected to understand these things, without him having to provide any painstaking explanations.
Did the cultic devotee regard Attis as literally bleeding to death in some heavenly realm? Was Mithras seen as using an actual heavenly knife to stab an actual heavenly bull? Quite frankly, I don't know. Not only am I separated from that kind of thinking by two thousand years, my mind is too conditioned by modern knowledge and attitudes toward the realities of the universe I live in. When Paul created his myth of the Lord's Supper (deriving his picture "from the Lord" as he says in 1 Corinthians 11:23), did he envision a table laid out above the clouds, with Jesus breaking heavenly bread? A mind like Plutarch's would say, No, Clea, it is all allegory. Unfortunately, Paul doesn't give us an insight into his thinking in this regard.
Paradoxically, while the myths of the cults continued to present earthly sounding features even though they were scarcely regarded any longer as 'historical,' the earliest Christian record, supposedly based on a recent man and recent events that should have been vividly alive in people's memories, makes no mention of such things. Since Christianity was of recent vintage, it did not have a heritage going back to a time when its savior god might have been given an earthly pedigree in some primordial time. Christ is an entirely spiritual, Platonic-style entity. He has a mystical body, joined to the devotee in mystical ways. He is God's agent of creation, unifying and sustaining the universe. His relationship to the Father is in Platonic terms, and no explicit reference to incarnation, let alone a life of teaching and miracle working, is made.
The bottom line is that, however they may have understood it, millions of devotees of the mysteries were quite capable of belief in savior gods whose myths spoke of human and earthly features that were no longer regarded in literal fashion. This ability to "think mythically" is something we have every reason to impute to earliest Christianity, which in so many ways indicates its derivation from the thought-world of the mysteries, and in so many ways indicates its lack of knowledge about any historical Gospel Jesus.
Several times in your review of 'The Case for Christ' you say that the Synoptics disagree with John on the actual day of the crucifixion. I've been looking in the NIV, and the Synoptics as well as John say that Jesus was crucified on the Day of Preparation: In Matthew: 27:62: "...The next day, the one after Preparation Day..." In Mark: 15:42: "...It was Preparation Day (that is, the day before the Sabbath)..." In Luke: 23:54: "...Now it was the day of Preparation..." In John: 19:31: "...Now it was the day of Preparation..." Where is the discrepancy? Could you please explain your reasoning?Response to Brent:
Jesus' Crucifixion on "Preparation Day" in the Synoptics and John
Brent's confusion proceeds from the fact that the term "Preparation Day" was applied to both the day before the Sabbath and the day before the first day of Passover, or Passover Eve. (In fact, it was used of the eve of any festival day.) The synoptics are referring to the Sabbath, whereas in John it could be to either, although earlier in 19:14, John clearly refers to the Preparation Day of Passover, not of the Sabbath. Since this means that the Passover meal would not be celebrated until that evening, after Jesus' death, John is definitely out of sync with the synoptic evangelists, who have Jesus celebrating that meal with his disciples the evening before his trial and crucifixion.
To clarify this question, let me quote a few paragraphs from Challenging the Verdict. This is from my cross-examination of Dr. Alexander Metherell and the medical evidence of Jesus' death on the cross.
Dr. Metherell, you said earlier that the Jewish leaders wanted to get this over before sundown, because the Passover and Sabbath were coming. Which was it? Passover or Sabbath? Or was it both? In the Gospel of John, this is the case. You see, John has the crucifixion take place on Passover Eve. 76 While Jesus is being led out to be crucified, the paschal lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple in preparation for Passover which begins that evening. John, at the start of his Gospel, has the Baptist declare Jesus the "Lamb of God," a term never used of Jesus in the synoptics. That symbolic equation of Jesus with the lamb comes from the mind of John. 77 Sundown, after Jesus' death, will therefore see the start of both the first day of Passover and the Sabbath.
But that is not the case with the synoptic Gospels. While their crucifixion, as in John, takes place on the eve of the Sabbath, it is already the first day of Passover. For them, Passover Eve has fallen the day before, prior to sundown and the Last Supper. That Supper shared between Jesus and his disciples was the Passover meal, celebrated on the festival's first night. John's supper, on the other hand, is not labeled the Passover meal. Such a meal, as John schedules the crucifixion, could only have taken place after Jesus was dead.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, these are blatant and significant contradictions, which Dr. Metherell has quietly tiptoed around. They provide strong evidence that the Gospel stories are controlled not by tradition but by their authors. John's arrangement of events cannot be reconciled with that of the synoptics. Not only is there a contradiction in the Gospels themselves, which would preclude inerrancy, we have to ask how Christian traditions about such key events of the faith could have become so confused. Since John's placement of the crucifixion conforms to the paschal theology evident in his Gospel, our conclusion must be that his chronology is determined by his own design, and not by some conflicting tradition to that of the others. We are finding this sort of conclusion at every turn. The tale of Jesus is the product of its authors, not of history.
As I sit here at the hour of 3 PM on Good Friday, I chose to look on the Internet for the historical Jesus Christ and came across your work. By the end of Part One [of the Main Articles], you seem perplexed that Paul has not referenced from the man Jesus, but speaks from the spirit or from revelation or directly from the Old Testament. Could it be that he may not have read any of the Gospels? And that his conversion seeds from his witness of Stephen's martyrdom who spoke simply of Christ, in contrast with Paul's own extensive learnings of the Old Testament?Response to Bill:
Paul's Silence and Stephen's Existence
There is scarcely any question that Paul did not read the Gospels, since none of them would have been written at the time he was proselytizing and writing letters. Dates before the 60s of the first century for any of the Gospels cannot be reasonably supported, and most critical scholars place them all after 70. But on what were the Gospels based if not on oral traditions about the events they describe, traditions which surely would have reached Paul, at least in part? Could Paul have been so fixated on personal revelation that even amid a presumably vibrant environment of oral tradition he could simply ignore all of this circulating information about the Jesus he preached?
And if he had such a fixation, why did he not turn to revelation as his personal source of information about Jesus' words and deeds on earth? Such information would certainly have been eagerly sought by his listeners and converts, who would scarcely have shared Paul's alleged disinterest in the earthly career of the man who was claimed to be God. In fact, one might even suggest that Paul shows one example of such a direct personal source, when he declares that his information about Jesus' words at the Lord's Supper came to him "from the Lord himself" (1 Corinthians 11:23). One wonders how the Corinthians would have reacted to such a claim of personal revelation on the matter, considering that traditions about the Last Supper should have been circulating across the Christian world through oral channels.
Enjoying such a pipeline, Paul could have elaborated on the oral traditions circulated by Jesus' disciples who had merely known him in the flesh. Not only could Paul have helped solve some of the problems and disagreements which beset the early Christian movement, he could have enriched the stories of Jesus' words and deeds. But then, perhaps it was Paul's personal revelation that was the source of Jesus' words in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane when all the disciples were sleeping.
In any case, and to return to seriousness, the argument is moot. It is not only Paul that speaks of Jesus in terms of revelation and scripture, but the entire record of early writings in Christianity outside the Gospels. Nearly a dozen writers, from Paul to Revelation to several non-canonical documents extending through almost the first hundred years of the movement and across a wide geography, make no mention of Gospel events and speak of their faith movement as proceeding from revelation and scripture. The 'perplexity' extends far beyond Paul, and well past the time when some of the Gospels are presumed to have been written.
On the matter of Stephen, Paul makes no mention of such a figure, nor does anyone else in the documentary record of the first hundred years outside Acts, and Acts is probably the product of the mid second century, as I have argued elsewhere. Regardless of Acts' date, the stoning of Stephen is the most dramatic death of a Christian attributed to the early period, yet no one else mentions it, not even Paul at whose feet Acts says this stoning took place. When Paul speaks of the fate suffered by apostles of the Christ, could he possibly leave out this vivid and personally experienced example? In fact, Paul never speaks of the death of any apostle preaching the Christ. He mentions rough treatment, scourging, persecution, "many a time face to face with death" (2 Corinthians 11:23), but never does he detail an actual death, including that of James, son of Zebedee, as outlined in Acts 12, something that would have been of recent memory at the time Paul was writing.
As I say in Challenging the Verdict, the author of Acts, in creating a likely fictional Stephen, and an equally fictional "Hellenist" community in Jerusalem, is representing the largely gentile nature of the faith in his own time (early second century) as having had an archetypal existence within the group in Jerusalem in the earliest days of the movement. As for the traditions about the deaths of apostles ranging from James to Paul himself, Burton Mack points out (Who Wrote the New Testament?, p.227) that as Christian legend developed the apostles took on features of Jesus, performing miracles, teaching and dying as he did. The lore about the martyrdom of Peter, Paul, James, Andrew, Thomas, Philip, Matthew, Bartholomew, and so on are all later developments, a "model of following or imitating an example."
I have enjoyed your little courtroom drama regarding Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ." I do have one question that you might be able to answer for me. One of the "prophecies" contained in the Isaiah "virgin" section [7:14] is that the child's name "will be called Immanuel." Is there any reason not to point this out as an obvious failure, as Mary named her child "Yeshua." Or is this a fair approximation, kind of like naming him "Gorgeous" instead of "Beautiful"?Response to Scott:
Isaiah 7:14 - Immanuel or Jesus?
I see no reason not to point it out. If this was a prophecy of Jesus, it was cryptic in the extreme. Immanuel means "God with us." Yeshua means "Yahweh saves." Not only do the two names involve different divine appellations (El and Yah, probably originally two different gods in the Hebrew/Canaanite pantheon, brought later into association when the Pentateuch was set down), the meanings could only be said to be in the same ballpark. There is no question they are two different names, and no commentary I've come across, even conservative ones, tries to reconcile the contradiction. Not even Matthew (1:21-25).
Even moderately liberal commentaries no longer regard this passage as a prophecy of Jesus. Typical is the Harper's Bible Dictionary (p.419): "It is clear, however, that in its own eighth-century B.C. context, Isaiah 7:14 did not speak of the miraculous birth of Jesus centuries later. Neither the virginity of the woman, nor the miraculous birth of the child received any special emphasis. The sign of Immanuel offered by the prophet to Ahaz had to do with the imminent birth of a child, of a mother known to Ahaz and Isaiah, and signified God's presence with his people and the royal Davidic line during the turbulent years of the Assyrian invasions that were soon to engulf the kingdom of Judah."
Isaiah's name was chosen because it symbolized the message, in that perilous time, that "God is with us." For the earliest Christians developing the idea of their spiritual Son, the name Jesus, "Yahweh Saves," was equally suitable for its context, a name for God's agent of salvation, a part of himself.
Very interesting page. But why do you think there was this need to imbed non-Jewish savior gods with the Jewish nation-god Jehova? Why are the Pauline epistles the first documents in their kind who talk suddenly with no reason about this Jewish savior god? There is no actual pinpointing in Tanakh [the Hebrew bible] about a savior god. It is only by chance that a thread can be found to create some "prophecies" about a future Messiah. How did the Q movement start to form, and how did Paul come in contact with them? Was a Christ a ready package for Paul to develop or did he just have this kind of teacher of righteousness revelation that this Christ exists? This must be the first man who tried to create a Jewish Hellenistic deity and for what good? Why did Mark and the others continue to create a human basis for this story and where did they get the details, like the baptism (which would be stupid to mention at all, having John baptize a sin-free man).Response to Martin:
Jewish and Greek Syncretism in the Ancient World
Somewhat like our own time (and perhaps most times), the ancient world around the turn of the era was a melting pot of ideas and cultures. Personal salvation was the buzzword, and philosophers (pagan and Jewish) were busy analyzing God and breaking him up into his component parts. They were doing the same to the universe, creating layers of otherworldly dimensions, fitting deities and salvation systems into the whole chaotic mess. Apocalyptic expectation was in the air, humanity wasn't long for this world, and the earth's population was divided into true believers, those with pipelines to heaven and an eternal afterlife, and those who were doomed to a terrible judgment. (Sound familiar?)
In a cauldron like this, syncretism is a common chemical reaction. A crossover of ideas occurs among people exposed to different beliefs and viewpoints, especially in areas not located at specific mainstream cores. In the cosmopolitan cities of the eastern empire, in areas of the Jewish Diaspora, Greeks and Jews rubbed shoulders. Thinkers and mystics like Philo of Alexandria absorbed Middle Platonism and created Hellenistic Judaism. Eastern deities were imported into the Roman empire and became Hellenistic mystery cults, absorbed into the milieu of older Greek mystery traditions like that of Eleusis and of Dionysos. Jews, as resistant to assimilation as they might have been collectively, found themselves, especially in the Diaspora, absorbing by osmosis religious and cosmological ideas of the Persians and Greeks.
Nobody, much less Paul, sat down one day and decided to invent a Jewish savior god. In any case, much of Christianity's "Jewishness" is the product of later mythology about the beginnings of the movement. Paul speaks more to a widespread faith movement stretching from Judea to Damascus to Antioch to Rome, and a lot of points in between, with probably all of these congregations existing before he got there. Greek, the lingua franca of the day, seems to have been the sole language of the movement, and certainly of its surviving writings. Paul's talk of rival apostles and the preaching of different Jesuses, shows that not only was it a widespread phenomenon, with no obvious single point of origin or central organization, its doctrines were another chaotic mess. Some Jews were no doubt involved, but if many of the people mentioned by Paul from outside Palestine were actually Jews (and that includes himself), they had Greek names and were highly hellenized. The movement probably had as high a complement of gentiles as Jews, and the Gospels, while witnessing to close contact with Jewish ideas and environments, seem to be gentile oriented and 'set against' Jewish society. Christianity emerges in the second century as a gentile movement that has hijacked much of the Jewish theological heritage and its sacred scripture.
What that movement did, arising from a syncretistic environment on the disparate and fluid border between Jew and Greek, was to create yet another savior god in the mystery cult line, this one imbedded within, or wedded to, specifically Jewish contexts: the Jewish God, the expectation of a Messiah/Savior figure, the Jewish scriptures as a window onto the secrets of the universe and salvation. The appeal to some gentiles of things Jewish is known to have been a phenomenon of the time. How long before Paul hit the missionary road did that syncretistic expression of Greek and Jew take identifiable shape? It's impossible to tell, but I suspect it was not all that long. Perhaps a few decades at most. Although if Philippians 2:6-11 is a pre-Pauline hymn, as most scholars judge, this new savior "Jesus" (who received his name only on being exalted after death, the hymn says) had already undergone some sophisticated development. Paul is simply the earliest surviving record of a new salvation religion that emerged out of a longstanding environment, and was 'new' only by virtue of its Jewish oriented component.
Martin asks how Paul came in contact with the Q-movement. The simple answer is that he did not. There were common elements between those two distinct religious expressions. Both expected an imminent establishment of God's Kingdom, both expected the arrival of a heavenly judge, Paul the heavenly Christ, the Q community the Son of Man. But there is no evidence that Paul knew anything of the teachings and miracle working embodied in the Q traditions, whether the product of a Galilean sage or simply of the sect itself. And there is nothing in the Q record about a kerygma of death and resurrection, about cultic meals and ritual sacramentalism, or salvation through a Jesus figure. The contact between those two worlds came only later, emerging into the light in the Gospel of Mark.
The source of that inspired composition was the Jewish scriptures, and especially their recurring story of the suffering righteous individual who entered the lion's den and who would eventually triumph through death and resurrection. "Mark" may have written his composite story, using the process of midrash, as a symbolic rendition of his own community and the significance of its faith. That is why he had his Jesus baptized, not because this 'sin-free' man required it, but because in many respects Jesus represented the 'everyman' believer who also became God's son and took on the Holy Spirit through baptism.
The evangelists, set in motion by Mark, continued to develop their new creation of a "human basis" for the cultic Jesus, probably because of its inherent appeal and usefulness. Allegory thrives on being able to bring diffuse and esoteric concepts to a more accessible understanding and a broader public audience, focusing on settings and characters which fire the imagination and illuminate the faith and practices of the movement. Allegory conveys lessons, inspires commitment, through an identification by the audience with the actions and figures of the story. A prime example is Mark's Gethsemane scene: the agony of every persecuted believer, the need—and the glory—of loyalty, obedience to God, of willingness to suffer for the faith. The Gospels show the power and necessity of myth in the context of religious belief and devotion.
However, Christians like Ignatius were soon to discover that one thing greater than allegory brought that devotion to an even higher pitch: historical reality. So the myths became history, and amid the diversity of the early Christian movement, Jesus of Nazareth became a unifying force and a political advantage. It became an idea no one could resist. Western society has been riding that bandwagon for 1900 years.
In one of your appendices [in The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ?], you claim that the "words of the Lord" in 1 Thessalonians 4 have no equivalent in the Gospels. Actually, Paul is clearly quoting from Jesus' "apocalypse speech," variants of which occur in all three synoptic Gospels. 4:16 in particular, seems to be a paraphrase of Matthew 24:31. The "trumpet call" of the angels is missing from Mark and Luke. The fact that you didn't even recognize this obvious connection between Paul and the Gospels suggests that you are quite ignorant of the contents of the latter. Also, your attempt to dispute the passage about the Jews killing Jesus fails miserably. I can't remember the exact verses at the moment, but there are passages in Romans which speak of the Jews with comparable harshness. Frankly, the only puzzle your book raises is whether you reached your conclusions because of extreme ignorance or a highly specialized form of insanity.Response to David:
Apocalyptic Parlance / 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 / Committing the Author to an Asylum
David is confused between expressing common elements in the thought and parlance of the time, and paraphrasing or quoting a specific source. A comparison with Paul's scene (1 Thessalonians 4:15-18) of Christ arriving from heaven at the imminent End shows only the most general elements in common with the apocalyptic prophecies of Jesus in the synoptics, based on Mark 13. Consider what is missing in Paul. There is no mention of Jesus as the Son of Man, which is a fixation of the Gospels and of their precursor in this matter, Q; no epistle writer ever refers to the Son of Man. Jesus is not spoken of as coming on the clouds; rather, Paul's clouds are associated with the movement of the believers. (The cloud motif itself was born in Daniel 7, the source of the Son of Man concept.)
The gathering of the faithful at the coming of the Lord is a motif that goes back into the prophets, as is the trumpet motif: from Isaiah 27:13, to Joel 2:1, to Zechariah 9:14. The trumpet and the rising of the dead is found in Jewish and Jewish-Christian apocalypses with no association to Jesus, let alone a derivation from his words, such as the Apocalypse of Ezra (4:36), and the Apocalypse of Abraham (31:1), where it will signal the sending of a "chosen one." There is no indication that Paul has borrowed or paraphrased these elements from Jesus traditions. If we can judge by other "words of the Lord" offered by Paul, they seem to be declarations he believes he has received directly from Christ in heaven, no doubt under the influence of scripture and perceived revelation, employing motifs that were in wide circulation.
When Paul goes on in the immediately following verses (5:1-2) to say: "Now, brothers, about times and dates we do not need to write to you, for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night," he makes no attribution of such a sentiment to Jesus, as Matthew and Luke do (from Q), indicating that he is not working in a milieu of knowledge about what a Jesus on earth had said and done.
David, I hope, realizes that there are many critical scholars, not just myself, who regard those other verses in 1 Thessalonians (2:15-16) as an interpolation. One of the arguments they use, though secondary to the rather obvious reference in verse 16 to the destruction of Jerusalem, which happened after Paul's death, is the contrast these verses convey when measured against Paul's usual sentiments toward his fellow Jews. I, too, don't know the exact verses in Romans that David has in mind in which Paul supposedly speaks of the Jews "with comparable harshness," but they can't include 11:1, "Again I ask: Did they [the Jews] stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all!" Or 11:25, "This partial blindness has come upon Israel only until the Gentiles have been admitted in full strength; when that has happened, the whole of Israel will be saved." Quite a contrast from 1 Thessalonians 2:16, wherein the Jews have now suffered the full measure of God's wrath, with no thought of salvation, to the apparent glee of the interpolator. One might also point out Paul's silence on any killing of the Lord by Jews in Romans 11, where he raises the specter of the Jews killing the prophets without mentioning their vastly greater crime of deicide.
David went on to declare that "professional theologians overwhelmingly rejected a strong connection between Paul and Plato decades ago." Not only are professional theologians to be distinguished from critical scholars, other studies, including my own, have demonstrated sufficiently evident Platonism (and Jewish equivalents) in the thought of Paul and other epistle writers to make that blanket "rejection" unjustified. This doesn't mean that those writers had necessarily studied Plato and Greek philosophy and consciously modeled their theology on such antecedents. What it does mean is that they lived and moved in a cultural atmosphere which was permeated with those philosophical concepts, absorbed through the air they breathed, and that their own convictions and innovations were filtered through such thinking.
As for sanity, it is measurable by a lot of things. Rational outlooks on the world, logical considerations of evidence in a field of scientific or historical research, might be said to be marks of a sane mind, while proving difficult propositions for the mentally disordered. The mark of insanity, on the other hand, is often a fixation on some conviction or outlook on the world that runs counter to the observable evidence, at odds with considerations of reasoned enlightenment, whether such things relate to the existence and behavior of an omnipotent God, the dependence of universal salvation on a single man, or the reliability and value of an ancient set of primitive writings shot through with contradictions and outdated ideas. In such cases, of course, insanity may be distinguished from wishful thinking or indoctrination. The bottom line for the well-ordered mind is surely an openness to evidence, a willingness to consider new ideas, and the ability to accept the possibility that what people have thought and believed in the past, no matter how many or for how long, is not necessarily true.
I won't be committing myself to an asylum anytime soon.
Jose writes:
I am convinced that there is a God and it matters if we get His favor or not. And believe me, the only way you'll have God smiling down on you is through this man Jesus. God has handed down all the power of judgment to his Son. Christ was and is the Messiah, and He's coming back pretty soon. All the great men of all the world's religions have their graves someplace. Jesus Christ alone rose up from the dead. So if science or history can't prove the truth, that's their downfall.
Melissa writes:
I came across your site from some blabbering idiot on a message board. I'm sad that I added to your counter, and I am sad for your soul. There is a Jesus my friend, and someday probably too late you will realize that. All of you scientist types have been trying for years to rationalize why there is no Jesus. Are you scared? Do you just have to believe in nothing because it's easier? It's not easy to have faith. That's not the point. If it were easy to believe there's a Jesus, everyone would believe. And there would be no need for faith. God wants us to have faith, that's the point. You cannot see the air, but it is there. That is all I wanted to say. I am not perfect but I am forgiven.
John writes:
I appreciate an informed view. I have been struggling with my belief. Let's be honest, it is getting harder and harder to believe. But, one question that perturbs me is, If God wanted us to believe, why would he make it so hard to believe???
RFSet20: March 2002
Jeremy writes:
Love your
web site - very exciting and intelligent work. Thank you!
John writes:
Thank you
for an amazing website. You are doing a great service for many people.
Bob writes:
Your book
is great. It’s nice to learn that I’m not alone in the world. Being in
rural Kentucky it can be dangerous to express skepticism, at least socially
dangerous, if not engendering the outright hatred of some loving christians.
Koji writes:
I would
say that your work reflects one of the five most rewarding and pivotal
books I have ever read.
Robert writes:
Just want
to say that your stuff kicks ass. I’ve read The Jesus Puzzle, and your
commentary on Strobel’s book [Challenging the Verdict], and found them
fascinating. I deconverted about 2 years ago after 20 years as a fundamentalist,
evangelical Christian, and have been reading everything I can get my hands
on. You rate up there with Dan Barker and [Robert] Ingersoll.
There are some traces of brainwashing that still need to be
dealt with, but the lion’s share is behind me now. This stuff runs deep,
like a cancer, and doesn’t die easily. The best cure is guys like you who
tell it like it is. Thanks. Keep up the good work.
Andrew writes:
I have read your excellent book. Congratulations on an unsurpassed work of study.
Lowell writes:
I am writing
to thank you for the book, The Jesus Puzzle. I found it on Amazon before
I heard of your web site. You put a spin on this subject matter and opened
my eyes to something profoundly non-obvious: that the Epistles aren’t talking
about the same Jesus that the Gospels are. It is so obvious now that you
pointed it out.
I am currently reading your novel [on the web site] on the
same subject and am enjoying it greatly. Like your fictional character
Kevin, I grew up in a very religious family but the religion gene did not
seem to pass down to me. I am respectful of my family, despite the fact
that they live in an entirely different world than I do. I appreciated
your professional tone in your book. One of the things that amused me most
was how your protagonist began to pester his girlfriend with this stuff.
I had the same desire to talk about my own research with my wife, who very
patiently listened to it until I decided to give her respite.
Thank you for reading this, and for your great book!
Susan writes:
I've been
reading your novel, and I must say that I was a bit taken aback in a story
about biblical research and the struggle against creation science with
all the rather graphic love scenes. They're quite effective. Did you ever
consider writing Harlequin romances?
Dean writes:
I received
my copy of Challenging the Verdict and have read through portions and just
had to write. The size of the book is just right, at first I thought it
might be a large book, but this size one can take with them without any
problem, Today, with long lines everywhere when traveling, this is the
right size book! What I read already, the style is great, the format great,
the type is just right. Trying to pick things apart but am having trouble
doing that, maybe because the contents keep the eye glued to the message
at hand. I wanted to pass along my congratulations on a job well done on
this new book and hope for more books from you in the future.
I have spread the word about your book The Jesus Puzzle, and
there is quite a list of people who have purchased it. Will spread the
word now about Challenging the Verdict.
Guy writes:
I love reading
the letters from the zealots, they are humorous. Your responses in the
letters section keep bringing me back, thank you for the good work.
I always found it bizarre how many "holy" people look forward
to "judgement day" just so the non-believer will roast. Isn’t that like
really anti-christian??? [ED: I assume Guy is using irony here.]
Rich writes:
May God
have mercy on you. The Christian faith is just that, faith. None the less,
historically, the life of Jesus Christ is better documented, studied, and
proven to have occurred than your own life. [ED: Perhaps I’d better
start worrying about whether I exist or not.] Something evil has influenced
you in your life and is still at work in you. I will pray for you even
though I think it is a waste of time.
Robert writes:
I will pray
for the salvation of your soul thru Jesus Christ the Son of God. I feel
sorry for you, my friend, for one day every knee shall bow (including yours).
Dennis writes:
You spend
all of your time and effort trying to disprove this truth. What are you
trying to gain by taking others down with you (literally)? You think you
have it all figured out.
Sooner
or later, you will know who is greater!!!!! I hope you realize sooner.
[Following
a long quotation from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans:] May you come to
know the truth, and may it set you free from the blindness of the wisdom
of man.
Response to Rev. Cliff et al.:
"The Blindness of the Wisdom of Man"
If we are to believe Rev. Cliff, our intellect, our rational faculties, our understanding of the world through science and reason, painfully achieved and perilously nurtured through eons of evolution and centuries of history, is to be tossed onto the scrap heap, repudiated, demeaned and unloved. The scorning of our own acquired wisdom as some sort of curse we need to be free of, the light of knowledge rejected as "blindness," has condemned us to dark ages in the past, and if the Rev. Cliff has his way, will continue to do so.
"To shame the wise, God has chosen what the world counts as folly." 1 Corinthians 1:27. "God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish." 1 Corinthians 1:20…
In my novel, The Jesus Puzzle: A Novel About the Greatest Question of Our Time [published on this web site], one of the main characters, a charismatic attorney engaged in opposing an attempted insinuation of "creation science" into the classrooms of the nation, makes the following comment during a woodland hike with a group of colleagues, prompted by someone’s ironic quoting of those 1 Corinthians verses:
Several
kids in our youth group believe magic is good, after all look how nice
Harry Potter is. In fact, it must have been magic the way God created everything.
I need a little help with this line of thinking. I’ve pointed out John
1 and Galatians 5. They can’t get past that magic can be good, even though
I’ve pointed out Satan is presented as an angel of light (pleasing to the
eye, but deadly to the soul). Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Response to Pam:
Magic, Harry Potter, and Satan
Pam might start by pointing out that Satan does not exist, that he is a superstitious idea left over from a more primitive time. That there are no such things as devils and angels, witches and magic, and no doubt gods as well. This ought to go a long way toward making children, and adults, adopt a little more rational attitude toward the world.
The more irrationalities one rejects, the easier it is to get rid of the rest of them.
Esa writes:
I have read
many books about Jesus to find out if there ever was one. The only rational
conclusion is: there never existed a man named Jesus, and as you have shown,
the New Testament is the strongest evidence to prove it.
I have wondered some profound questions for a long time: If
it really was God’s original plan to save mankind by sending Jesus, His
Son, to earth, who saves the millions of people who lived and died before
Him? Who saves the millions of people who have lived since and are still
living without knowing anything about him? Who saves the millions of people
who can’t believe without doubt? If it was God who gave us the ability
to think, are we not free to use it? If we are, is it a merciful God who
condemns us to the everlasting fire of hell for using it? If we are not,
why give it to us?
Linden writes:
Your book
ought to be mandatory reading for all Christian fundamentalists. However,
it has been my experience that it is next to impossible to get them to
read anything that challenges their beliefs. They do feel that you should
read their material and accept it without question. I know, because I am
married to a fundamentalist.
I will be recommending your book to all of my friends.
Tomas writes:
I’ve been
an avid reader of your web site, your book, and some of the books that
you review, since I first discovered your web site several years ago. On
a scale of 1 to 10, I give you a 712.
Your research and conclusions are well ahead of your time,
but it kills me every time I read you to think how much ignorance is out
there regarding these issues. I am not naïve enough so as to think
that people would change their minds just like that or even develop a more
critical view about their faiths because they read about this in a popular
magazine or they see it on TV, but at least I would love to see what you
present in your web site reaching mainstream mass media. This would at
least counteract all the bunches and bunches of highly biased pseudo-scientific
information that channels like the History Channel and others pour into
people’s minds every now and then. I must say that recently I have seen
programs that presented somehow controversial material about early Christianity,
but nothing compared with what scholars like yourself can argue.
I just hope that one day, in a few hundreds or thousands of
years, mankind will not be harnessed and anchored anymore by myths invented
in times of ignorance and superstition and that perhaps had a purpose back
then, but definitely not today.
Tonight
I was watching a PBS program called "The Roman Empire in the First Century."
It was very good...until, of course, they started talking about a certain
fictional character from Nazareth. Suddenly they were quoting the Gospels
as if they were history texts, and earnest scholars were holding forth
on how Jesus’ radical message rocked the foundations of the Empire.
I mean, there was no effort whatsoever to distinguish this
portion of the program from the well-documented history that preceded and
followed it. The events of Jesus’ life were presented just as matter-of-factly
as the events in the lives of Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula. Did Joseph
return to his hometown for the Census of Augustus? Yup. Did Jesus become
a carpenter like his father? Yup. Was he baptized in the River Jordan?
Yup. Did he attract audiences of thousands? Yup. Did he say everything
attributed to him? Yup. Not a word was breathed about the contradictory
nature of the Gospel accounts, the fact that the events they portray are
attested to nowhere else, etc.
I did note that none of the historians who had been discussing
Augustus, Tiberius, etc. were given an opportunity to talk about Jesus.
For that segment, they went with a New Testament scholar and a professor
of Christian history, both of whom, I believe, were from seminaries or
theological schools or Christian universities. Neither one appeared particularly
objective. What had been a pretty good documentary turned, "in the twinkling
of an eye," to a travesty. I was literally smacking my forehead in dismay.
Response to Gregg:
A PBS "Travesty"
Gregg’s observations on this PBS program have put in a nutshell the sorry state—from a scientific and historical point of view—of the field of New Testament research. First of all, the media in general are afraid to rock the boat, and usually shy away from airing anything which would subject Christian ‘history’ and doctrine to the same rigorous examination that other fields of research enjoy. Second, the scholarly "authorities" appealed to are almost exclusively from the field of religious study, not history per se. The vast majority of New Testament scholars have always brought confessional interests to their work, and as a consequence cannot be relied upon to reach objective and scientifically-based conclusions.
This situation makes a special travesty of the "appeal to authority" argument which is always thrown at the mythicist position, that the "great majority" of biblical scholars accept the historicity of Jesus. Of course they do. But when the most obvious contradictions and improbabilities in the Christian record are simply passed over as though they do not exist, accepted without question, as was clear to Gregg in this PBS program, we know we are witnessing not unbiased historical research, but special pleading in support of traditional religious beliefs.
I marvel that it occurred to no one in the production stage of that program to wonder if there was a firm historical record of the census under Augustus; there isn’t, and the whole idea is fraught with those contradictions and improbabilities. Or to consider why the epistolary record outside the Gospels makes no mention of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan, or the figure of John the Baptist. Or to wonder how Jesus could have walked the length and breadth of Palestine, attracting huge multitudes, working reputedly fabulous miracles, preaching "radical" and subversive ideas (that the rich would be brought down and the poor exalted, for example), when the entire picture of first century of Palestinian history, as revealed by Josephus, indicates that public agitators of this nature were invariably seized by the Romans at their earliest notice and summarily dispatched, usually with a slaughter of followers. Not only does Jesus seem to have gone on without hindrance for some time, no commentators of the period record the person or activities of this man who was "rocking the foundations of the Empire."
I would urge Gregg, or anyone like him, to write to stations like PBS when they witness a "travesty" like this, and complain about the failure of rational thought and objective comment. We deserve better.
I can’t
believe what I’m reading. It sounds like Atheism. Beware of those who add
to or take away from the WORD OF GOD! Isn’t it miraculous that the Word
of God himself has lasted throughout the centuries? Ask forgiveness and
He is just to forgive you of your sins.
Response to Derrick:
Hearing the Divine Word
The word of Zeus, among both Greeks and Romans, lasted some two thousand years. The word of Amon-Re was ‘miraculously’ preserved among the Egyptians for three millennia. Yet neither of these gods is believed now to ever have existed. There are a host of deities who have enjoyed long and fervent followings (including many other savior gods very like Jesus during the late Empire) who are rejected by modern Christians. Atheism is simply the rejection of one more god than most believers already reject. If everyone else, no matter how strong the conviction of their beliefs, can be dismissed as mistaken, it follows that one’s own religious beliefs are also subject to the same possibility of error.
Atheism is not simply the rejection of traditional belief in supernatural entities. The ‘void’ so frightening to some people is filled with positive beliefs in the value of human evolution and its accomplishments and potential. Life lived on the basis of a demonstrable reality and a pride in our own developed wisdom and intelligence can be immensely more satisfying than one lived by faith in the undemonstrable and the irrational, counting on some pie-in-the-sky utopia after death. Division among peoples, alienation from our own natures, ignorance and superstition, the fear of vengeful gods and horrendous eternal fates, not to mention the scorning and neglect of the life and world we do know exist—these things are a huge price to pay for holding on to such wishful thinking, one lacking in any reasonable and scientific foundation.
As children, we are prey to many fears of the unknown and the uncomprehended. When we grow up, understanding helps us to abandon those fears. "Atheism" and the outlook it entails is one sign of that acquired maturity.
I have found
your views entirely unconvincing. Although I am a Christian and have a
certain bias, I am also well educated in history. I must note that much
of this [my web site] reads as almost a text-book for how to write
revisionist history. Attack the generally accepted theory, question the
validity of the documentation contrary to your thesis, and reinterpret
the meanings of the documentary evidence with incontrovertible validity.
In my studies, I have usually found that the longer the re-interpretation
takes to express, the more likely this new thesis is flawed. No doubt this
is why your explanation of the "Gospel of Paul" is so lengthy. This is
a fairly standard technique used by 20th century historians, yet very rarely
with such vigor.
What I raise particular objection to, however, is your online
challenge of the authors listed in "The Case for Christ." Your critics
rightly objected to your use of a "cross-examination" format in your discussion
of these works. To defend yourself you issued this challenge, with the
ridiculous expectation that these scholars automatically read your web
site. Bruce Metzger is an old man, who I doubt (I could be wrong) goes
web-surfing to see what kind of criticisms are out there regarding his
works. This challenge to them is disingenuous and borderline insulting.
If you cared to hear their views, contact them directly or possibly try
to arrange a meeting with some or all of them.
I do appreciate your providing an email address to voice criticism.
As one who continues to seek the truth with as open a mind as possible,
I hope you will do the same.
Response to Robert:
Historical Revisionism and Making Challenges
The term "historical revisionism" is often used with a derogatory meaning, as though the practice can only be dishonest (it was tainted by its misuse under communism). But Robert’s description reveals it simply for what it is: revising history, advocating revision of traditional views. History undergoes revision all the time, especially of ancient and pre-historic periods. So do established dogmas and received wisdom, in any field of study. This is how evolution of the human intellect proceeds, how we gain greater understanding of the universe and our own development. We make progress in these areas precisely by ‘attacking’ generally accepted theories, by questioning the validity of our past observations, our analysis of the documentary and archaeological record, and reinterpreting the meaning of that evidence. Without such things, we’d still be in the Stone Age.
I also question Robert’s view that the longer a new theory takes to expound, the more likely it is to be false. Occam’s Razor, often appealed to in this sort of context, is a principle more attractive in theory than in practice. Historical research, especially where the genesis and evolution of ideas and movements is concerned, has always shown that such things are complex rather than simple, multi-faceted rather than monolithic. The simplistic nature of traditional views of Christian origins, as reflected in literalist attitudes toward the Gospel story, almost guarantee that this simplicity is itself erroneous. When it is compared with the mythology of other religions, that guarantee is virtually assured.
Thus the "Gospel of Paul" (as Robert calls it) does indeed require a complex explanation, if only because the detritus from two millennia of misinterpreting the early Christian record must be cleared away. Then we need to apply an understanding of the philosophies and religious expressions of the time to show how Christianity grew out of those foundations. If this is "a fairly standard technique used by 20 th century historians," it has some standing, and poses a threat only to those who have a personal interest in upholding the pre-revisionist state of affairs.
As for my critique of Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, I have argued elsewhere (as have several supportive reviewers on Amazon.com) that the format I adopted, styling the book as a courtroom cross-examination of Strobel’s interviewed scholars, is a literary device, and as such is entirely legitimate, even if it might be unrealistic from a real-life point of view. Once again, their literalism has gotten the better of the literalists. Several negative reviewers on Amazon complained that my format in Challenging the Verdict gave Strobel’s scholars no chance to respond. (As if any book could offer such a thing, regardless of the format.) Well, my "online challenge" was an honest attempt to offer them a forum in which they could respond to my ‘cross-examination,’ although I quite realistically expected no takers, and have received none. (In view of that silence, I will be removing the offer before long.) Of course, those same reviewers have implied that paying any attention to my critique would be beneath such scholars and that in any case they would have no difficulty in "burying" my criticisms. Quite characteristically, these reviewers want it both ways.
While I don’t expect someone like Bruce Metzger, or perhaps any of them, to be web surfers, I have no doubt that Challenging the Verdict, in both its website and book versions, has been called to the attention of several of Lee Strobel’s interviewees, and no doubt of Lee Strobel himself. My name and book are currently mentioned in several reviews attached to The Case for Christ on Amazon. I know for a fact that Gregory Boyd was personally invited to respond, as was William Lane Craig to my book, The Jesus Puzzle. Both have remained silent. If any of them find as much fault with my format or the counter arguments I have put forward as people like Robert do, there is nothing to prevent them from answering my cross-examination. They can accept my offer of an unmoderated forum, or they can do so in their own forums. In this and other fields where controversy is present, it is quite reasonable to expect that responding to challenges against one’s views is done through publication, either in books or on the Net, as I myself have done. Robert is being disingenuous himself, as well as naïve, in suggesting that anything would come of trying to make personal contact with these scholars and inviting myself to some kind of meeting to discuss their views with them.
The only "insult" involved in this whole affair is the one to the reader, in Lee Strobel’s claim to present a ‘scientific’ and reasoned case for the complete reliability of the Gospel accounts and associated traditions, a "tough-minded quest for the truth," and for those non-evangelical scholars who have a reasonable claim to respect, such as Bruce Metzger, to have gone along with it.
I have a
question about the observance of the Law. St. Paul’s letters are quite
clear about the Law. Jesus has abolished it by his death. Q seems less
sure. It even says that Jesus hasn’t come to abolish the Law...and whoever
teaches anyone to disobey any commandment is condemned...not one jot or
tittle shall pass from the Law until ALL is fulfilled.
How could the Galilee Tradition’s views on the Law be reconciled
with those of the Jerusalem Tradition? Or is it all much more complicated?
Response to Colin:
Jesus and the Law
More complicated, yet basically much simpler. Let’s first establish the fact that the first century period was one of concern for reform, on many fronts. Reforms to society and class differences, reforms to the Temple cult and its animal sacrifice, reforms to the relevance and applicability of the Mosaic Law, both among Jews and among gentiles attached to Judaism. All of it in a period rife with political unrest and apocalyptic expectation about the arrival of the Kingdom of God, expected shortly. Thus "observance of the Law" was an issue common to many groups and settings, and it is a mistake to assume that they were necessarily all connected.
Thus the concern over whether the Law should be retained, modified or discarded was one aspect of the Q community’s reform stance, as reflected in Matthew and to a lesser extent in Luke. Those Gospels (along with Mark), and the Q document they used, show a nitty-gritty attention to issues relating to the Law, such as the observance of the Sabbath, and the question of dietary rules and circumcision. When the Q document evolved over time to include a perceived historical founder and teacher, such teachings were attributed to that figure. The essence of the evolved Q was the anchoring of the community’s teachings and practices in an idealized founder, who at the same time was identified with the apocalyptic Son of Man the community preached and had originally expected only at the End-time.
When we turn to Paul, we also find a concern over the continued applicability of the Law, but there are essential differences from the Galilean teaching tradition—and no demonstrable connection between the two. They are different expressions of a common underlying focus in the first century. Paul shows none of the ambiguity of the Galilean Tradition. For him, the Law is chucked, pure and simple. With the arrival of "faith" (not of Christ himself: see Galatians 3:23-25) in the present time, the Law’s period of usefulness is over. His is a much more mystical approach. Christ’s death has abolished the Law, a death that has also reunified a sundered universe and brought Jew and gentile together. Colossians 2:15 has Christ (or God, depending on how one reads it grammatically) nailing the Law to the cross and triumphing over the evil spirit powers, a scene hardly envisioned as literal or taking place on earth.
Consider the fundamental differences between those two Traditions. Q has nothing to say about the death of Jesus, let alone the role of any such death in relation to the Law. (Q, in fact, gives no soteriological role to Jesus at all.) Paul has nothing to say about any teachings of Jesus on the critical question of the Law’s expiration, and his death scenario is never related to earthly history. These positions, these Traditions, are worlds apart, with nothing to connect them. If Q’s attribution to a founding Jesus of teachings on the Law and its details, like circumcision and dietary laws or the applicability of the Law in general, had any basis in reality, it is impossible to consider that Paul would either be unaware of such things on a subject of so great importance to him, or that he would fail to address them. And if an extensive preaching movement (covering Galilee and Syria) like that seen in Q, spanning several decades in the first century, had been coexistent with the Pauline type of faith and both were dependent on the same historical figure, it is equally impossible that Q and its communities (also reflected in the Didache and the Gospel of Thomas) would show no knowledge of or interest in the death and reputed resurrection of its own native son and founder.
I came across
your site some time ago and read many of your articles which are quite
excellent. I find one of the most remarkable objections to the story of
the great drama in Jerusalem to be Clement’s praising the God-approved
work of the high priest (and by implication all his successors!) down in
Jerusalem [1 Clement 41] - as if the whole drama involving Jesus, Annas
and Caiaphas had never happened. He even decrees that if anyone does anything
"contrary" to the will of the high priest he should suffer the penalty
of death.
Response to Gary:
1 Clement: A Blameless High Priest
This type of "silence" as observed by Gary is a good example of silences which are more than that. By expressing oneself in a manner like this, a writer betrays the absence of knowledge that we would have every right to expect should have been present in his mind and prevented him from expressing himself the way he does. Another good example is Paul’s statement in Romans 13:3-4: "Rulers hold no terrors to those who do right…If you wish not to fear the authorities, then do what is good and you will have their approval, for they are God’s agents working for your good." It is inconceivable that Paul could have made such a statement if he had any knowledge of an innocent Jesus who had been tried and executed by the Roman authorities with the connivance of the Jewish elders.
I noticed
that in roughly half of your interpretations of verses you used the New
English Bible. In what little research of it I’ve done, it seems that Christians
dislike the translation of it. I’m assuming because it didn’t paint as
good a picture as others. How would you defend the NEB as a "legitimate"
translation of the New Testament?
Response to Joshua:
The New English Bible Translation
I don’t know that I would defend any translation of the New Testament as entirely "legitimate." They are all guilty of transferring Gospel associations into the epistles, and that includes the New English Bible. The latter shows many blatant cases of this sort, such as in Hebrews 2:3, "For this deliverance was first announced through the lips of the Lord himself," where no reference to lips, or indeed to a Jesus on earth, is to be found in the Greek; or 1 John 4:21, where "And indeed this command comes to us from Christ himself" is gratuitous, since no attribution to Christ exists in the original, and only God appears in the preceding verses. But that is part of the NEB’s attempt to render some of the more obscure passages in understandable language, and I find that it often gets to the meaning of such passages where other translations skim over them in more literal fashion.
I find your
arguments to be quite compelling, rational, logical, in good order, well
conceived - but lacking in real positive proof and clearly prejudiced because
of your self-proclaimed atheism and critical attitude regarding Christianity.
Your atheism, as I see it, is where you start with your inquiry before
anything else. And that is interesting because Jesus has always been an
interpreted figure in accordance to people’s own prejudices - so it would
make sense that to an atheist Jesus never existed at all. In other words,
you are not being as "objective" as you claim. Rather, you take "negative
evidence" — meaning the silence regarding the historical figure in the
epistles and particularly the letters of Paul — and come to the conclusion
that Jesus never walked the earth.
The most "objective" statement that could be made regarding
the historicity of Jesus is that we simply don’t have enough evidence from
the time Jesus was supposedly on earth to say. First Century Christianity
was an obscure sect that began in a backwater region of the Roman Empire
within an obscure Mediterranean religion. Paul’s "stellar" Jesus can be
seen as the product of a man with apocalyptic aspirations and visions who
is looking forward to the coming kingdom and NOT backwards in some sentimental
sort of way. Paul doesn't strike me as a sentimental sort of figure at
all who would go looking for the place where "his Lord" died — rather he’s
a man transformed or might even have been mentally unstable.
Response to John:
Bias in New Testament Research / Was Judea or Christianity "obscure"?
There is almost no one studying in this field who does not have some kind of ‘bias’ one way or another. The defender of Jesus’ historicity is more often than not someone who has confessional interests at stake, and this has been the tradition in the field of New Testament studies, including academic circles. On the other hand, it is self-evident that only a "non-believer" could come to the conclusion that Jesus did not exist. "Atheism" is not a starting point, but a mindset which makes possible a confessionally unbiased investigation of the question. However, an atheist is quite capable of believing that Jesus existed (and many do), but not accepting that he was divine or that he had anything more than one man’s message.
Consequently, the observer is left to evaluate the arguments made on both sides to come to his or her own conclusion—or rather, to decide on a balance of probability. In this field, we don’t expect "proof" in the mathematical or laboratory science sense. It doesn’t matter what my background is, or my personal belief stance. If my arguments are good and reflect the evidence, then I’ve achieved my purpose. It’s for the reader to decide, based (hopefully) on a neutral appraisal of the validity and force of those arguments, and backed by an investigation of the record oneself, to see if my presentation of the evidence is accurate.
In such a case, my being an atheist, or critical of religion because I am also a rationalist, should not have any bearing on the matter, and ideally should create no a priori prejudice against my arguments. The tone of John’s letter suggests that it does, which may keep him from fully appreciating or properly evaluating the conclusions they have to offer.
My overall argument is based on much more than the simple "negative" silences in the bulk of the record. (Even negative silences can, in some circumstances, be very powerful; it is not true that there is never any force or validity to the argument from silence.) But many of those "silences" are also positive in nature, in that they describe the movement and the object of its worship in terms which allow no room or interpretation for an historical Jesus in recent history. Comparisons with contemporary philosophy and religious expression also play an important part, as do other aspects of the picture.
I also question John’s evaluation of Christianity as an obscure sect in a backwater region of the Empire within an obscure Mediterranean religion. Judea stood at the most crucial crossroads of the Middle East and was in the spotlight for most of the first century; and the Jews were anything but obscure to the Romans, being present in every major city and province of the empire. They certainly came to the attention of Claudius in the 40s, leading to their expulsion en masse from Rome, (though for reasons that are obscure, since Suetonius’ oft-cited reference to ‘agitation under Chrestus’ could have several interpretations). And if the Gospels and Acts accounts have any historical value at all, the movement could hardly have escaped the notice which the silence of the record gives it.
As for John’s scenario surrounding Paul, it is not feasible, as I maintain that Paul could not base such a cosmic personal faith on any man, much less preach him around the empire, while ignoring every aspect of that man’s identity, career and personality. In any case, the argument is moot, because it is more than Paul, it is every other non-Gospel writer of the first century who is similarly silent, and similarly describes the cult’s Christ Jesus in those ways. It is not feasible to attribute Paul’s alleged idiosyncrasies to a dozen different writers over three quarters of a century and across half the empire.
I was wondering
how you were able to totally discount the shroud of Turin, the one with
the picture portrait image of a perfectly proportioned young crucified
man with the wounds as recorded in the gospels? How can you pretend that
it is somebody else?
Response to Bill:
The Shroud of Turin
And I’m wondering how Bill can believe without question that the shroud of Turin is genuine in the face of all the scientific testing which indicates that it’s a 13 th century forgery. The depiction on the shroud is not "someone else." It was deliberately fabricated to represent itself as Jesus’ burial shroud. Relics purporting to belong to Jesus, from pieces of the "true cross" to the spear that pierced his side to the plaque from the crucifixion beam, such things were created and often ‘unearthed’ to inspire congregations and crusaders, to best neighboring communities in the enviable possession of the most valuable relics.
One of the most peculiar, and telling, aspects of the relic business is that it failed to begin before the 4 th century. There is not a word in any Christian document of the first couple of hundred years about any artifact associated with Jesus.
I read your
"case against" the authenticity of Jesus and found it utterly lacking and
quite frankly pathetic. You’ve proven absolutely NOTHING and proof is all
that is important when dealing from a purely historical perspective. Your
arguments wouldn’t hold up in a court of law. You have NO proof.
Proof is needed, but you have NONE.
Here I thought I would be reading some actual proof, but all
I get is circumstantial hogwash and biased innuendo from a man with a clear-cut
agenda. Yours is a tiresome propaganda piece not worth the paper it’s printed
on. "Well, I couldn’t find Jesus mentioned in the writings of his lifetime
and therefore he couldn’t have existed" is your foundation. Have you seen
all of the writings from Jesus’ lifetime? No. Even the Roman leadership
was unaware of Jesus until they were informed of his existence by the Jewish
clergy of the day. Needless to say, the ancient Jews and followers of Jesus
were well aware indeed. Judaism has never denied that Jesus was an actual
man who walked the Earth! Moreover, if the existence of Jesus was truly
a myth, Jewish scholars would have debunked the "myth" a long, long time
ago, as they would have had every interest in doing so!
Maybe you can do something more productive with your life.
Then again, maybe you won’t.
By the way, check out the laws created by atheists in the
20th century. Enough said. Approx. 100 million people were murdered by
atheists (communists) in the 20th century as a result of subhuman laws
created by atheists (forced labor camps, reeducation camps, mass executions
of innocent people in China, the USSR, North Korea, Cambodia, imprisonment
of religious people and political dissidents by the hundreds of millions,
etc.). America better watch out for the rise of atheism in her midst, because
the history of atheism has been one of bloodlust and tyranny. The same
goes for the subhuman belief Social Darwinism.
It’s people like you who make the world a worse place to live
in.
Response to Mark:
Jesus and Darwin
This is an angry man. One defensive maneuver is to set up a standard of "proof" and declare that the opponent has not met it. I don’t know what Mark’s standard of proof is, since he doesn’t outline what he would require in order to be convinced. Clearly, I haven’t met his conditions. Another maneuver is to attack the opposition personally (and also collectively), and of course I—and non-believers in general—get a lot of that.
His counter-arguments fail to convince me. One cannot postulate non-extant writings that could have said something about Jesus. Using that kind of argument—and a surprising number of people try to do so—one could argue for the existence of anything. (Perhaps unicorns did exist; we just haven’t found the historical documents that attest to them.) In reality, we can only go on the evidence we do have. It is also a non-starter to suggest that, while the Jews were aware of Jesus’ existence, the Romans were not. Palestine was a hot spot all through the first century and a source of ongoing trouble to the Empire. The Roman presence in the area was substantial, and to think that such an occupying force could have been oblivious to a man who went about the country attracting huge crowds, performing miracles and preaching a message of societal upheaval about to take place, is ludicrous.
Jews and even Jewish scholars, from the second century on, have been in much the same position that Christians have been. The difficulty of determining that the Gospel story was in fact not history, or to interpret the true nature of early Christianity, is something that could not have been overcome until recent times and modern advances in biblical research. And until even more recently, one could sympathize with any Jewish scholar’s unwillingness to investigate such an avenue and pronounce upon it.
The extent of Mark’s phobic fury is demonstrated by the trotting out of that overworked and hyperbolic accusation against the reputed atheists of the 20 th century. I hope he is not implying that he thinks only one group of people have a monopoly on the capacity for evil. I don’t need to document the sorry history of Christian religious wars and persecution, Inquisition and Crusade, slavery and the conquest of New World societies, racial prejudice and often murderous anti-Semitism, most of it based on biblical myths and justifications. But I should point out one important distinction in regard to Mark’s scenario. Stalin and Hitler (who never declared himself or his Nazism atheistic, and whose soldiers wore "Gott mit uns" on their uniforms), as well as other fascist dictators, did not kill and persecute in the name of atheism, but in the name of communism and other political ideologies. Theirs was not a fanaticism based on beliefs in one particular version of otherworld entities and theories of salvation. The same cannot be said for the religious side, whose evils were conducted in the name of religion.
As for "Social Darwinism," if Mark knew anything about this disreputable line of thought he would know that it has nothing to do with Darwin or evolution, and is simply a case of commandeering the name of a man who did more to reveal to the human race the true story of its genesis and nature than have all the holy books that the world has yet produced.
RFSet 21: December 2002
Noel writes:
Read the book, loved it, write more, keep up the good work!
Bob writes:
Thank you for sharing your amazing and clear insight about Christianity. As one who has traveled from the camp of Roman Catholic devotion that ended in my ordination to their priesthood, to the clearer, cleaner air of humanism and rationality, I have found your writing to be inspiring. Having long doubted that Jesus was anything like believers made him out to be, it had never occurred to me that he may be fictional! The case you make for that is compelling and I admit that I am convinced you are right.
John writes:
I love your site and the work you do. I would be honored to help your struggle to bring about an age of reason. I get so frustrated, and often times depressed by the state of things. Being surrounded by a society that prides itself on its blanket of ignorance makes me want to shut myself indoors forever. I feel so alone. But your site (including comments from readers) gives me a boost. It lets me know there are others out there who agree with me. I recommend it to everyone I know who has an open mind.
Adam writes:
Allow me
to add my voice to the well-deserved accolades for your site. Your work
is a breath of fresh air in a dusty, stagnant field dominated by dogma.
When I
read your book, The Jesus Puzzle, it was an amazingly eye-opening
experience for me—I almost thought
I could hear the “click, click, click” sound of facts slotting into place
one after the other, and it’s extremely rare that I get a feeling like
that about anything. I knew at that moment I’d found the position I would
take from then on, and all the worn and threadbare pro-historicity arguments
I’ve seen advanced since have done nothing to budge me.
The
Case for Christ was one such. Strobel threw me for a loop at first,
but when I came back and read Challenging the Verdict I watched
Strobel’s case burn off like fog in the morning. As always, your writing
was refreshingly clear, incisively reasoned and undeniably persuasive,
systematically exposing the flaws in his scholars so easily I wondered
why I hadn’t noticed any of them myself. This second book only confirmed
my opinion of you as one of the most outstanding freethought writers I
know of.
David writes:
You need to do a little more soul searching. What happened to you that you would try to discredit Jesus Christ? Just remember you will have to stand before GOD and answer for this. I feel sorry for your lack of knowledge of Jesus. I suggest you read the Bible and see for yourself. Please, brother, do not go down this path. It leads to destruction, doom and eternal damnation.
Justin writes:
How dare YOU!! How dare you fill the paths of Satin [sic]! Saying there is no Jesus, is saying that we were just a mistake! I feel him when I pray!! And I hope God forgives you!! If I were you, I would reconsider.
Paul writes:
REPENT
Jim writes:
I have enjoyed your site in many respects. Anyone with a brain can see that religious thought evolves, and that the New Testament is no exception. Your responses to the negative and condescending letters are always tasteful. Does every Christian have to rely on this “human wisdom” vs. “God’s wisdom” argument? It really does get old after a while, and perpetuates a type of arrogance that really makes me cringe. How does one respond to being accused of ‘thinking like a human’? You really do put the religious bigots to shame.
Victor writes:
I can’t
even find the words to express my thanks for your excellent scholarly books.
I just finished reading both The Jesus Puzzle and Challenging
the Verdict. Both books have impacted me greatly and personally have
been revealing. After 42 years of theistic and Christian upbringing, I
feel liberated and happy to finally break free of the chains of slavery
that religion imposes on us all.
It just
takes an open mind and careful reading of your books and I am sure that
any religious persons, and specially Christians, will come to the same
conclusion. That we live in a natural world and there is no god! And that
religious beliefs do more bad than good. Just remember Sept 11 and look
at the situation in the middle east. The world would be a better place
if we can get rid of all religious beliefs that cloud our minds.
Greg writes:
You have done a great job of putting wooden stakes in the heart of a nonexistent Jesus. Why don’t I see you on Larry King live? Why do I not see Dan Barker or Dennis McKinsey on such programs? Few people are aware of the mythological school. Most people literally believe a man by the name of Jesus Christ actually existed. We need to get the message out. But how?
Marc writes:
I just finished reading your remarkable The Jesus Puzzle. I am very grateful to you for such a wonderful perspective on the foundation myth of our western civilization. I am a newcomer in this field and I deeply enjoyed every single bit of your careful and lively demonstrations. Thanks for having brought so much remarkable evidence to bear on such a wonderful hypothesis.
Rob writes:
I just finished Challenging the Verdict. Very compelling book. Loved the format. Thank you so much for your efforts. You’re a very gifted writer.
Mark writes:
Thank you for the work you have done in putting together The Jesus Puzzle and Challenging the Verdict. Both works have opened my eyes to things I had never noticed before. The Campus Crusade for Christ distributes “freshmen survival kits” (or something alone those lines) which include copies of Strobel’s book. If only there were a way to distribute your refutation right along with it! Don’t let your detractors get you down.
Mohsen writes:
Currently I am reading The Jesus Puzzle. I have been an atheist since the age of 26, and I have read many books on Islam, Atheism and Christianity; and I can tell you that The Jesus Puzzle is one of the best books I have ever read in my life. Please keep up the fight against ignorance. The world needs a lot more people like you.
Mark writes:
I ordered The Jesus Puzzle a couple of years ago. I’ve read it from cover to cover at least three times attempting to soak up as much info as I can. Now at 42 I’m taking an introduction to philosophy class, and it’s amazing the way the pieces are coming together as far as the start of Christianity is concerned. Great stuff! I look forward to reading your new book.
Jim writes:
I’ve been reading pretty much your entire website for the past few months, and I’m very impressed. I’m also a non-believer (former fundamentalist) and like some others, I’m entertained by how the staunch believers continue to bury their heads in the sand and refuse to even consider what you have to say.
Robert writes:
Just a short note to say thanks for both entertaining me and opening my eyes to the hypothesis you espouse regarding the elusive snipe of history, the man from Nazareth. I am an ex-christian but still possess a great interest in answering the query posed by Christ, “who do men say that I am?” By the way, your opening sequence in your website novel (the Jesus Seminar ‘riot’) was a hoot. Almost sounded like Paul in Acts before the Sanhedrin. Assuming, of course, that story has an iota of historical reality.
Robert writes:
I have a
signed copy of your book The Jesus Puzzle and am absolutely delighted
with it. Having read it I feel a lot more comfortable in being able to
debate with theists, and to question their theological as well as their
‘faith’ held beliefs. It is a great relief sometimes to know that in this
‘God belief’ world there are academics like yourself who can not only stand
up to the apologists of theism, but who can teach and provide people like
myself with the arguments and structured evidence required to discredit
the myth of Jesus and ‘God’.
Thanks
once again in liberating my freethought.
[E.D.: Robert lives
in Wales and ordered The Jesus Puzzle from Amazon UK, where it is now at
long last available (www.amazon.co.uk).]
Pete writes:
I read The
Case for Christ at the suggestion of a friend who wasn’t really trying
to convert me, but thought I might be interested. Of course, that book
is a load of crap. As a lawyer and a person with just a little information
on the history of Christianity, I think I can say that. I was bothered
by his book and am glad to see a rebuttal in print. I am very happy to
see your new book on my desk. I haven’t read it yet, but will start very
soon.
In the
New Oxford Bible (I think it is called), which Bruce Metzger edited, the
first or second sentence in each chapter on the gospels says something
to the effect that “the author is unknown.” I was bothered by Strobel’s
book because I presume he knew this, but never asked Metzger the key question,
hence he never printed the truth of Metzger’s view that the authors of
the gospels are unknown. That view is, of course, inconsistent with what
Strobel wants to convince his readers is the truth, and with what others
interviewed for his book said, namely, that we do know who wrote the gospels.
It was
that kind of intellectual sloppiness (or, perhaps, outright dishonesty),
that renders Strobel’s book, well, a load of crap. OK, so I’m not very
articulate. In no way am I putting Metzger down. I think his good reputation
was used by Strobel to add credibility to his book.
Tim writes:
Just read
the first 140 pages of The Jesus Puzzle and I have had a wonderful
eureka/epiphany experience. I just finished Mack’s Who Wrote the New
Testament? and was really just on the fence concerning an historical
Jesus (although I decided to choose the non-historical due to lack of any
real evidence in 1st century writings) but after reading some of your book,
I am now convinced that a Jesus never lived. Your arguments are very compelling
and although a few [passages] seem to sound like a reference to a real
man who lived on earth, the totality of your argument has to be taken as
a whole and as such, I see no real way to insert a historical Jesus into
these sets of writings and make all of the pieces fit.
I was skeptical
that your book would reveal much new or persuasive, but I was wrong.
Jody writes:
What in the world are you doing? You strive so hard to convince people that Jesus is not real and that the new testament is not foretelling of Christ, WHY? I fail to see the point of your website. What is the purpose of your life and your study? The Bible says two things: one, if you do not believe then you will be deceived; two, prophecy is not given for personal interpretation, it is given for the confirmation and glorification of the only name given under heaven. Why do you wish to take away what gives hope and purpose in people’s lives?
I have been
struggling for years in my christian faith and for the last two years have
been having doubts and have been suffering and feeling “abandonment” by
a silent God. Finally, in my search for answers and whether I have been
duped, I find your website. I hope I get answers! I am sending a check
for one copy of The Jesus Puzzle.
Do you
know of any humanist groups here in Virginia? Can you point me in a direction?
Christianity has so screwed up my brain, that I may need counseling. And
prayer does not seem to work, and well, I am not going to dump my problems
on you. But this book could be very important to me. Where can I find other
similar books?
Response to Luke:
Breaking the Ties That Bind
You are not alone, if I can judge by a certain type of response I frequently get to my web site, in feeling that Christianity has done a number on you. There is nothing wrong, either, in seeking professional help, if you can find a counselor who is at least neutral toward the Christian faith. That may not be so easy in the southern states. Perhaps someone who is Jewish (but not prejudiced against Christianity) would be one avenue.
I am not intimately familiar with humanist networks in the U.S. But you could try the Council for Secular Humanism which is based in Buffalo, New York, and I know they have chapters all over the country. Try their website at: http://secularhumanism.org.
My own books are an examination of the reliability of the Christian record and views of Christian origins, which can be very helpful for someone trying to break ties of dogma and fear (which religious organizations are very good at imposing), but they do contain some material on general issues of rationality and humanism. You could try The Jesus Puzzle first, and you might also get other things out of my second book, Challenging the Verdict, which tackles Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ and contains some discussion on the wider aspects of religious belief and rationality.
Another good book for someone in your position would be Dan Barker’s (he is an ex-Christian minister) Losing Faith in Faith. It’s available from the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin, as well as on Amazon.com.
You would also benefit from a reading of the complete book I’ve posted on my sister site, http://jesuspuzzle.com/ageofreason/index.htm, by Betty Brogaard: Dare To Think For Yourself. It’s an account of one woman’s progress from unquestioning religious faith of the fundamentalist variety, to atheism and a naturalistic view of the world. A lot of her personal anecdote and insight would be helpful to people in a position like yours.
One “middle” avenue might be investigating the Unitarian-Universalist groups. They are very humanist oriented, and their belief in a God (such as it is: it varies from group to group) is not at all traditionally oriented, and many simply reject any personal Deity. Very often, Unitarian groups are affiliated with local humanist groups. They go by different terms; some refer to themselves as a “Fellowship”, others as a “Congregation”, others a “Church”. My impression is that the “Fellowships” tend to be the least religious in the standard sense. In Virginia (looking at a list I have), there are Fellowships in Blacksburg, Fredericksburg; Congregations in Fairfax, Oakton; Churches in Reston, Richmond and Williamsburg.
Stick with it. From a rationalist’s point of view, the benefits of freeing oneself from dogmatic ties are enormous, once you’ve worked your way through it. This doesn’t mean that you have to become completely atheistic (though you may), but the freedom from excessive guilt and sense of sin, from the forced rejection of science and reason, from the fear of questioning or the need to see people of one’s own religious persuasion as possessing the sole path to salvation while everyone else lies outside the pale, will make the whole process worthwhile.
And while I did not enter this research primarily to ‘free’ people like Luke, perhaps this can serve as good a “purpose” as any and answer Jody’s (the previous writer’s) question.
I am thoroughly enjoying your book, Challenging the Verdict. I’d like to ask a question. On page 17, you write that John’s gospel does not portray Jesus’ death as an atoning sacrifice for sin, and so he leaves out the Eucharist which declares Jesus to be exactly that. I agree that I can’t recall any explicit soteriological statements in John, but what about his symbolic equation of Jesus with the “Lamb of God”? You discuss this on p.157 in chapter 11. Doesn’t this mean that John does indeed see Jesus as a sacrifice just like the Paschal lamb was?
Response to Adam:
John, Jesus and the Paschal Lamb
This suggestion would depend on what sort of sacrifice the paschal lamb was regarded as. While some of the animal sacrifices performed in the Temple were “atonement” in nature, this was not the import of the Passover ritual (though I don’t claim to be an expert on all the niceties of ancient Jewish thinking in that regard). The original paschal lamb (its blood smeared on the doorposts of Hebrew households in Egypt in the legend of the Exodus) was a source of ‘deliverance’ in that the avenging angel passed over them, but the sacrifice was not atoning in nature. So while John makes a link between Jesus’ crucifixion and the lambs’ slaughter, it does not follow that this must imply anything soteriological. Those links are rather subtle in the Gospel, with John not spelling anything out. (That John equates Jesus with the paschal lamb is a widespread interpretation among New Testament scholars. See the discussion in Robert Kysar, The Fourth Gospel, p.137f, and Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, p.61-3.)
I prefer to rely (as do others) on the things that John does more or less spell out, namely that Jesus, in a soteriological sense, is the “bread of life,” which is based on the principle of revelation of knowledge, not blood sacrifice. The Johannine Jesus was a Revealer savior, along the lines of that found in other documents such as The Odes of Solomon. I believe this was the original christology of the community before it encountered the Synoptic Gospels and their figure of a crucified human Jesus. This figure the Gospel writer amalgamated with his own (non-historical) savior, but he chose not to fully integrate all the synoptic features, including the atonement doctrine.
Even the interpolated (as it is generally regarded by critical scholars: e.g., D. Moody Smith, Johannine Christianity, p.19; H. Teeple, The Literary Origin of the Gospel of John, p.85) portion of the “bread” passage of John 6 (the part running from verse 51c to 58), while based on those sacrificial synoptic elements, is reinterpreted in keeping with the revelatory bread symbolism. All this is supported by John’s portrayal of the crucifixion, which is never in atoning terms, but a “raising up” and a glorification of Jesus into the world’s view, which is again an expression of the knowledge-conferring role of Jesus, not a sacrificial one. (I discuss this and other aspects of the Fourth Gospel in greater detail in my Supplementary Article No. 2: A Solution to the First Epistle of John.)
It is not surprising that the Gospel of John (not considered by critical scholars as a unity: see The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters, p.62 and 273/283) may contain overlapping ideas, not always in full agreement or compatibility with each other.
Currently on a Christian debate site I brought up the fact that there was not any eyewitnesses of Jesus who authored the Gospels. John was brought up as an eyewitness. What proof is there that John did NOT write the Gospel of John?
Response to Eric:
The Author of the Fourth Gospel
By “John” I presume is meant the Gospel apostle, John the son of Zebedee, to whom later church tradition assigned authorship of the Fourth Gospel. First of all, this tradition does not appear in the record until the late second century. Before that, no one speaks of such authorship, nor even connects the Gospel with Ephesus, which became the traditional place of its writing. It is significant that the quoted (by Eusebius) bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, Papias, whose lost work may have been written around 125, speaks of an “elder” and/or (there is confusion in Papias’ language) an “apostle” named John, yet he fails to mention that either of these persons was the author of an eyewitness Gospel to Jesus. In fact, Papias is reported to have said that this “elder” told him of documents—ones that seem to have been only collections of sayings and anecdotes, not narrative works—that were allegedly written by followers of Jesus, yet he is silent on any Gospel by this elder, or any other John.
It is difficult to believe that John the son of Zebedee could have been the author of the Fourth Gospel (quite apart from attributing such a sophisticated work to a rude fisherman) when he plays virtually no role in it, not even being referred to until the very end (21:2), and then not by name. There are a few incidents which loom large in the Synoptics at which the apostle John is mentioned as present, such as the Transfiguration and the raising of Jairus’ daughter, and yet these do not even appear in the Gospel of John. Ignatius writes to the church at Ephesus around the year 107 (if his letters are to be regarded as genuine), and yet makes no mention of that apostle as associated with that city, let alone a Gospel by him. Some claim that John the author is to be identified with the “Beloved Disciple” who is never named. That claim is made in 21:24, but critical scholarship (see Burton Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament?, p.218) generally regards the final chapter of John as a later addition, and this claim is seen as part of the community’s attempt to link the Gospel and Johannine traditions to Jesus. This was a common phenomenon in the second century among many Christian groups who sought to base themselves on newly-formed apostolic traditions going back to a perceived historical Jesus. It is likely that “the beloved disciple” is simply an invention of the Johannine Gospel writers.
Finally, one must apply a certain modicum of common sense, even to religious tradition. If John was an eyewitness to the ministry of Jesus, how is it that his Gospel is so divergent from the other Gospel ‘testimonies’ that are also regarded as reliable and based on eyewitness recollection? There is virtually nothing in common between the teaching of Jesus in the Synoptics and that of the Fourth Gospel. Vital synoptic scenes are missing, such as the Transfiguration, the establishment of the Eucharist, the Garden of Gethsemane. There are dramatic scenes in John, such as the raising of Lazarus, that go unmentioned by the synoptic evangelists. So much in John reflects his own theology and preference, his desire to portray the figure of Jesus in certain ways, with a christology unique to himself. He carefully excises an explicit reference to Jesus’ baptism by John. He rejects the sacrificial atoning role of the Synoptics. He (or his later editors) wed Logos concepts with the Jesus figure, tacking on the Prologue which probably began life as an independent hymn to the Logos. And so on. None of this bespeaks eyewitness or an interest in correct historical reporting. Rather, it clearly suggests an author, or set of authors, who fashion their own literary creation based on other literary sources and the Johannine community’s own thinking.
There was a recurring tradition (expressed by Philip of Side in the 5th century and a Syrian martyrology around 400) that John son of Zebedee had been martyred at a young age, which would preclude any late-century authorship of the Fourth Gospel. Against this, apologists like to set traditions around the time of Irenaeus (180-190) which have John living to old age in the city of Ephesus, where he was an influential figure. One may choose between such conflicting traditions, of course, but as noted above in the case of Ignatius, there is no reference to John to be found in the extant Christian literature of Asia Minor from the first half of the second century that would attest to this long life and influence. Papias, as noted earlier, is ambiguous about such a figure and his comments only come to us through Eusebius. More likely, the late second century traditions about the career of John were a product of the need to assign this newly-appearing Gospel, so different from the Synoptics, to an apostle who had also known Jesus. (The “beloved disciple” of the Gospel author may not originally have been identified in that writer’s mind with any specific apostolic figure.)
In the context of “mythical Jesus” thinking, of course, the figure of John, whether in later tradition or in Paul, was not based on an actual apostle of an historical Jesus. Paul mentions him only by name and is silent on any such human relationship, and legendary figures from the early apostolic movement that preached a spiritual Christ (of which Paul was a part) were only pulled into the historical Jesus orbit when he was launched into the Christian atmosphere through the Gospels.
I am reading
Challenging
the Verdict slowly so as to savor it in the same way as I would a big
piece of Devil’s food cake. It’s easy for any freethinker so see through
Strobel. He is anything but objective and honest, as you are proving.
There is
a passage in the Gospel of John which I find fascinating. It is, in my
opinion, the coup de grace for that bit of New Testament fiction
as far as any historical reliability is concerned. Among the witnesses
of the crucifixion we find none other than the virgin Mary, a.k.a. the
mother of God (John 19:25). Jesus even talks to her. Now isn’t it strange
that none of the other gospel writers found her presence worthy of mention?
Response to Louis:
Mary at the Cross
This is one of those episodes in John I referred to above which cannot be found in the other Gospels. Louis is right in regarding this as a significant omission. Its presence in John provides an example of how the various versions of the Gospel story were constructed out of each author’s desire to convey his own lessons and viewpoints.
While we cannot know the exact motivations behind John’s inclusion of this scene, there is an evident ‘moral’ here for the reader. One of John’s motifs is sectarian solidarity, the admonition to “love one another” and to take care of fellow believers, even to the point of sacrificing one’s life. (That the “love commandment” in John is not one of universal ethics, but simply a directive to the Johannine community itself to cohere—as an elect group—through mutual love among themselves, I have argued in my Supplementary Article No. 2.) The presence of Mary at the cross is not historical (she would not, in any case, be an historical person), but a ‘lesson’ embodied in a pronouncement by John’s Jesus that directs one generation to take care of another. The fate of widows and other women who had lost the support of a male caretaker was a concern in early Christian communities. Also, by linking Jesus’ mother with the beloved disciple, the author (or later editor) strengthens the ties of the alleged author to Jesus himself.
Of course, the argument is sometimes made that John, being present at the crucifixion and an eyewitness, would be in a position to know what had happened there, unlike the other evangelists who were not. Such a claim founders on more than one ground. First of all, the other Gospels (initiated by Mark, as in 14:50) clearly imply that Jesus’ disciples deserted him and were not present at the crucifixion. If one of their number had indeed been there, it is difficult to believe that the other evangelists would not know of and want to mention that saving presence. Mark even lists several women who were present (15:40-41), but notably leaves out any of the disciples and even Jesus’ mother Mary. Second, if John is claimed to be the one eyewitness at the crucifixion, then we would have to reject the historical accuracy of all the other evangelists where they differ from John, such as in the words Jesus spoke. Details reported by the synoptic Gospels should be called into question if John doesn’t mention them. Did an eyewitness on the scene happen not to notice the darkness over the land for three hours, or the earthquake that accompanied Jesus death? Was he too far out in the crowd to notice Simon of Cyrene taking Jesus’ cross on his own shoulders, even making the definite statement that Jesus carried his own cross? Did he miss the words of Jesus the other evangelists heard about, or the faith admission of the centurion who would have been standing only a few feet away? On the other hand, we might ask why, if John was present, his observations weren’t relayed to the other apostles and thus enter a more widespread Christian tradition. The dramatic spear in Jesus’ side in lieu of the breaking of the legs performed on the two thieves crucified with him seems to be unknown to the other evangelists, since John is the only one to offer this incident.
Too many apologists (as in Strobel’s book) are guilty of the misleading statement that such-and-such an incident (and there are many) is found in “the Gospels” or “the New Testament” when in fact it is confined to a single account, often in contradiction to other accounts. The Nativity story so familiar to us at Christmas time is a good example, with its features that are really a combination of two different nativity accounts in Matthew and Luke, accounts which are so widely divergent they cannot be harmonized. Matthew has no census, manger or overbooked inns, no attending shepherds and angels; Luke has no Herod, no magi, no slaughter of the innocents, no flight into Egypt. Modern creches have the magi visiting Jesus in the manger; this is an artificial combination of the two accounts, since Matthew's magi visit Jesus in a "house." Clearly, these tales are in no way historical, or probably even traditional, but the products of their individual writers. (A more primitive and probably earlier nativity scene can be found in chapter 11 of The Ascension of Isaiah.)
Such discrepancies and contradictions lead to the compelling conclusion that we are not dealing with eyewitness traditions in any of the Gospels, but simply storytelling and literary construction, an evolving tale fashioned at each step of the way by successive writers and editors. When the unique features and evolving incidents (such as the identifiable changes made to elements like the two thieves or the figure of Joseph of Arimathea from earlier to later Gospels) can be shown to be consistent with the style and agenda of each author and to reflect their own theological outlooks, we know we are witnessing not history but the creation of the Christian myth. The fact that we can see it taking shape over a relatively short time and through documents still extant does not make it any different from other myth formation in humanity’s long and colorful religious history.
Something
about the Jesus story which rings false to me, and which I haven’t seen
addressed by anyone, concerns the Friday crucifixion. I thought the purpose
of crucifying someone was to leave the body hanging in the open until well
after death and when decomposition becomes noticeable. The Romans didn’t
crucify someone for a few hours, then bring him down while he’s freshly
“dead.” Supposedly they couldn’t leave a body exposed on the Jewish sabbath,
but why would the Romans care about Jewish superstitions? They were running
the place, after all. And if they had to go along with them anyway for
political reasons, why didn’t they just keep Jesus in the dungeon over
the sabbath, then nail him up bright and early Sunday morning?
Historically,
executed criminals’ bodies were left out to rot as a warning to the rest
of the population of what happens when you defied the local authorities,
so the story about Jesus’ efficient execution and burial really makes no
historical sense. Also, the Romans usually denied the crucified criminal
the right to a burial, and frequently threw the body onto the town’s refuse
dump.
Has anyone
else to your knowledge addressed these questions?
Response to Mark:
The Timing of Jesus' Crucifixion
This is an excellent question. While many objections about the time and circumstances of the Gospel story of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion have been raised by critical scholars and skeptics (such as the feasibility of a trial by the entire Sanhedrin on Passover night), I have not seen Mark’s specific query raised. There seems no conceivable reason why the Romans would be willing to forego the ‘lesson’ to be given the population, especially in those unsettled times, by leaving Jesus’ body to rot on the cross, out in the open for several days for all to see.
Fantastic
website. Your Jesus Puzzle has stunned me with its scholarship and clear
thinking. I agree wholeheartedly with your thesis, but I have one nagging
question regarding your ideas.
C. S. Lewis
argued for the authenticity of the gospels on the grounds that the writing
is too advanced to be fiction. He gives an example of the story of the
woman caught in adultery. Jesus gives his famous line, “Let he who is without
sin cast the first stone.” Then he stoops down and scribbles in the dust
with a finger.
Lewis argues
that details like that are the least likely to be passed along in oral
tradition, since not even Christian theologians have a clue what Jesus
was doing by drawing in the dirt. That sort of “meaningless detail” did
not enter fiction until the nineteenth century, Lewis claims.
I am curious
what your opinion is on the idea that the gospel authors were incapable
of inventing their stories whole-cloth.
Response to James:
The Evangelists as Fiction Writers
Well, the evangelists were not starting entirely from scratch. They had the experiences and activities of their own communities, the teaching, the miracle-working, the apocalyptic prophecy. With those pieces of cloth readily available, stitching togther the story of a fictional or imagined founder figure would have been a fairly simple step. And the later evangelists had the advantage of building upon Mark.
Even Mark’s creation of the trial and crucifixion of his Jesus of Nazareth was modeled on biblical precedents, notably the longstanding genre of Jewish writing known as the Suffering and Vindication of the Innocent Righteous One, whose features the passion story follows closely. Naturally, the evangelists had to exercise some skill and inventiveness in putting all these elements together, but I fail to see much validity in C. S. Lewis’ contentions. In what way are the Gospels “advanced”? While they have their moments, and a certain amount of commendable ethical philosophy, they are not overly sophisticated pieces of writing, even by ancient standards, and certainly not because Jesus scribbles in the dust.
Lewis’ point is somewhat confusing. It’s probably quite true that such a detail is not likely to be passed along in oral tradition. But the only alternative is to see it as the product of the Gospel author, which puts it into the realm of “fiction”—though perhaps it is based on some practice within the community whose significance is now lost to us. This hardly supports Lewis’ position. Nor do I see that he has good grounds for claiming that it is a “meaningless detail,” or that if it is, this would put the entire work into a non-fiction category. If anything, authors don’t tend to put in things that have no meaning whatsoever, or don’t serve a literary purpose, such as atmosphere or setting. Perhaps it had a mystical significance in association with miracle-workers or prophets; such significance might even turn out to be embarrassing to modern theologians if they did understand it.
Lewis also fails to take into account that this anecdote in John (7:53-8:11) is viewed as a later insertion after the Gospel was written, since it does not appear in some manuscripts. (The New American Bible says that “there are many non-Johannine features in the language, and there are also many doubtful readings.”) Who knows with what or whom the pre-Gospel anecdote was associated, and the sentiment of the saying, a laudable one, may have originated with some other group or figure. All in all, I don’t see much support here for Lewis’ claims of “authenticity.”
While I
would agree with you that the historical Jesus, whoever and whatever he
may have been, has contributed extremely little to the origin, I find it
hard to credit that there was literally no such person at all. I agree
completely that the origins are in the marriage of Apocalyptic Messianism
and Greek Logos thought, with no emphasis at all on any historical element.
However it leaves the question unanswered, Why “Jesus”? From the beginning
Paul talks continually of the “Messiah JESUS”, not just of the “Messiah”,
and in passages like 1 Corinthians 11, even talks more directly of “the
Lord Jesus”. While agreeing that this is “Mystery” language, akin to “the
Lord Serapis” or “the Lord Osiris”, it still does not explain why he has
picked on the name “Jesus”.
Perhaps
a case could be made for the “new Joshua”, who takes over and completes
the work of Moses, but there seems to be no build-up to this in the OT
or Apocalyptic literature. I can see no other “symbolic” reason for the
name. That it means “Yahveh saves” is hardly sufficient reason. Almost
every other Jewish name has a similar meaning, and could have been seen
to fit just as well, let alone more directly “prophesied” names like “Immanuel”.
I must
admit that I tend to agree rather with Loisy that it seems more likely
that there was such a person, however shadowy a figure—perhaps
one of the many messianic insurgents of the time, that set the ball rolling,
and perhaps put the first seed of the idea of a “crucified Messiah” into
Paul’s mind—a fine spiritual and “mystery” pattern.
It is,
of course, more arresting, more “tidy” even, to be able to claim that there
was never any such person of that name. If you prefer this, then I think
your readers deserve some rationale for how from the very beginning, and
the very first letters of Paul, it is always a matter of “the Messiah JESUS”.
Response to John:
Where did the name Jesus come from?
John asks “why ‘Jesus’?” At the risk of sounding flippant, I might ask, “Why not?” If a god is to be invented, or even derived from other precedents, he has to be given some name. Just because we have no record of that initial process at the genesis of the ‘Christian’ faith does not mean that it didn’t take place, and that someone or some group did not come up with this name for reasons we can no longer know. John allows that perhaps a case could be made for the name having been derived from “Joshua” of Conquest fame who was viewed as a “deliverer” figure in Jewish thought. That, together with the meaning of the name, “Yahveh saves,” might well have made it the most inviting one for a new savior figure. Nor do I think it is valid to object that there is no perceivable “build-up” to the conscription of the name Joshua/Jesus in the preceding literature. In traditional Judaism, God alone was “Savior” in the heavenly, spiritual sense. Only when those circumstances arose in which some peripheral branch of Jewish thought, heavily influenced by Hellenistic ideas, developed a new and Jewish-flavored “Mystery” religion with a spiritual intermediary Savior-Son would the occasion have arisen to cast about for a suitable name.
John almost implies that Christianity began with Paul, and that he might have been responsible for the concept of the crucified Messiah, or even the name Jesus, but this cannot be supported. Paul persecuted the Christ sect in Judea before his conversion to it, and the Pauline letters contain more than one piece of liturgy which many scholars assign to pre-Pauline composition. How long before Paul this faith movement was in existence cannot be said (it lies back over the horizon of our extant documentation), but the christological hymn of Philippians 2:6-11 is a pretty sophisticated affair, with a well-developed mythological picture of a descending, sacrificial and exalted redeemer who is—only after death—given the name “Jesus” before which all in heaven and earth bend the knee.
This very early and highly elevated view of the heaven-sent Savior (who is never given an earthly identity or career—nor, apparently, a name before his exaltation) makes it difficult to sympathize with John’s, and Loisy’s, conviction that “it is more likely” that it all began with some shadowy figure among the many messianic insurgents of the time. How a base, obscure and cookie-cutter figure who was simply one among many suffering a bloody end for some rebellious activity or other could have served as the inspiration and impetus for the movement and philosophy embodied in Paul is impossible to understand, especially in so short a time after this figure’s presumed death. (Such insurgents, to judge by Josephus, were rather new on the scene when Paul was in the process of switching religions).
I don’t know why such a scenario would commend itself over the idea which the mythical Jesus theory puts forward: of the natural development of another spiritual savior figure out of the dominant religious and philosophical expressions of the time, this one within a semi-Jewish milieu and employing concepts from Jewish scripture and tradition. John himself acknowledges Christianity’s “origin” in Greek Logos thought and mythical savior gods like Osiris and Serapis. Throw in Jewish messianism, and you’ve got a potent mix that could ignite a new “Son/Christ Jesus” religion. It doesn’t need an ignominiously executed political agitator to get the ball rolling, one who is—astoundingly—elevated immediately to the status of divine Lord, part of the very Godhead, a force for the creation and sustaining of the universe, pre-existent with God in heaven, and yet who has scarcely a single earthly word or deed mentioned by any epistle writer of the entire first century.
If John is merely suggesting that the prevailing image of a crucified would-be “messiah” or reformer, common on the first century scene, or even earlier in the executions of religious agitators that dotted the bloody reigns of Herod the Great and Alexander Jannaeus—that this image fed into the atmosphere which triggered some of the ideas of the Christ movement, this is really saying very little. It hardly constitutes the existence of “an historical Jesus.” One might as easily say that wooden crosses did the same thing.
Lest I sound a little too hard on John here, I have simply taken his remarks as an occasion to prick the balloon, shall we say, that it is somehow meaningful in a discussion of Christian origins to suggest that since the character of some contemporary figure or figures—whether teacher, miracle-worker, prophet or executed agitator—may have fed into the literary creation of the Christian Jesus, this undercuts the force of the mythicist position and salvages, in even limited fashion, the concept of an historical Jesus. Naturally, contemporary events and stereotypes are going to influence the thinking and creativity of any age, consciously and unconsciously. John, like so many others, is guilty of overstating the case. As he said in another message, “I am not sure I would go quite so far as you in positively denying the existence of Jesus. I find it hard to see how Paul (or whoever first set that ball rolling) picked on crucifixion as the death of the Messiah without some such starting point.” But the possibility that the first Christians may have “picked” on the fact of crucifixion in the world around them as inspiration for features of their spiritual Savior (though John allows that “meditation” on Old Testament verses about “piercing” and “hanging” could have done the same thing) is not equivalent to “not going so far as to deny the existence of Jesus.” A prototype, especially of ideas, does not constitute a person.
John had some interesting things to say in that same message about Philo and Greek Logos philosophy which I won’t go into here, but even more interesting was his history as an Anglican priest following ten years as a Buddhist monk, with inspiration from Fathers like the Logos-centered Origen! We live in an age where many people range far and wide in the search for some kind of truth or reality, and that can only be for the best. The essential need is that we loosen the hold of dogma and petrified tradition, no matter where it leads. Eventually, the open-minded search, I am convinced, will lead to freedom from the transcendent and a focus on the observable, scientifically-known world we live in.
I have been
reading your work with great interest. As an atheist, I am often the only
person defending a minority view, and your efforts are of considerable
value, not only in debates with Christians, but also in satisfying myself
that I have reached the conclusions I have after consideration of all sides.
I am somewhat surprised that certain readers accuse you of bias because
you are an atheist, that is, to say you somehow cannot reach a correct
conclusion because you are only using an empirical approach. They undoubtedly
do not understand just how revealing such a statement is.
The one
question I have is: is there any argument to be constructed around the
lack of solid dates in the New Testament? Obviously, the crucifixion and
resurrection stories are presented as occurring around Passover. But if
these events were so historic, so memorable, so important to the history
of mankind, wouldn’t the witnesses have remembered the actual dates? The
Christians I ask this of usually say that people at that time did not concern
themselves with calendars as much as we do. But is that a tenable argument?
Didn’t the Jews and the Romans of the time both have very well-developed
calendars? I would have expected some witness statement to the effect of:
“Well, I’ll never forget it. 27 Aprilis, Livius Ocella Sulpicius Galba
and Cornelius Sulla Felix, consules ordinarii, a.u.c. 786.” Or whatever
its Jewish equivalent was. Am I missing something here?
Response to Erik:
Why wasn't the date of Jesus' death better recorded?
Another very good point I have never heard voiced before. The more I think of it, the more compelling it becomes. The ancients had relatively well-developed calendars, and methods of dating. As Erik points out, the Romans had a practice of dating by consular offices, or in the provinces by governors’ terms (as well as, of course, chronologically from the founding of the city). The Greeks commonly dated by Olympiads. The Jews used dating systems based on a fixed point in the past. The practice of dating since “Creation” became widespread in medieval times, but before that, the accession of the Seleucids (312 BCE) was a common starting point.
Christians spanned all these worlds, and there is no reason to think that they would not have had an interest in or a practice of using some form of measure like this to locate events in time and history. Luke shows such an orientation at the beginning of his Gospel by seeking to date Jesus birth to the reign of Herod the Great and the governorship of Quirinius (creating an anomaly—since the two do not overlap—which has exercised apologists to this day). Is it really conceivable that throughout the entire Christian world no one would have remembered or calculated a date for Jesus’ death which would pinpoint it to a specific Olympiad, the year of an emperor’s reign or a governor’s term, or some Jewish standard of calendar keeping? This omission is yet another indication of the literary nature of the Gospel story, one not rooted in actual history or chronological memory.
I have an interesting point. Did you know that 11 of the 12 died painful and murderous deaths? Did 11 men allow themselves to be painfully killed for a myth?
Response to Klif:
How did the apostles die?
This might be “interesting” if it could be supported by the evidence. What evidence do we have (other than later church tradition) that eleven out of the so-called twelve did indeed die martyr’s deaths, painful or otherwise?
Paul, presumably writing around the 50s of the 1st century, has nothing to say about such deaths in his letters. Let me expand on this by quoting a passage from Challenging the Verdict [Chapter 14, p.218]:
Hardship? Beating, ridicule, imprisonment? Yes, Paul outlines all those things. In 1 Corinthians 4:11, he says: “To this day we go hungry and thirsty in rags, we are roughly treated, we are homeless…When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly.” But where are the deaths of the apostles? Paul is writing at least two and a half decades into the faith movement, and he nowhere refers to the execution of a single apostle. In 2 Corinthians 11:23, he says, “Are they servants of Christ? So am I…More overworked than they, scourged more severely, often imprisoned, many a time face to face with death.” But there is no mention of actual death, particularly at the hands of the authorities, as a common or even an occasional occurrence in the missionary movement.It’s telling to note that Josephus has nothing to say about this vast martyrdom of followers of Jesus. He can tell us (Antiquities 5,2) such minutiae as the sons of Judas the Galilean, James and Simon by name, being crucified during the governorship of Tiberius Alexander in the 40s, but he has not a word to say about the sanguinary fate of so many apostles of Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, the dramatic and supposedly widespread activities of the early Christian apostles and faith movement as recounted in Acts go completely unmentioned by Josephus. It is much more likely that the 2nd century author of Acts modeled much of his ‘historical’ features on prototypes found in the Josephan histories.
Where can one find mention in the epistles of the execution of James, son of Zebedee, as outlined in Acts 12? Nowhere. Where, for that matter, is there any mention by Paul in his letters about the imprisonment of Peter, described in that same chapter of Acts? And what of the most dramatic death of all attributed to the early period, the trial and stoning of Stephen, as described in chapter 7 of Acts? No reference to it can be found in the entire early record of Christianity, not even in Paul at whose feet Acts says this stoning took place. When Paul speaks of the fate suffered by apostles of the Christ, could he possibly leave out such a vivid and personally-experienced example? Stephen himself is not to be found anywhere in the early record, and it is very possible that he is simply a fictional character.
As for the martyrdoms which later tradition attributed to key figures like Peter and Paul, I have already pointed out that there is very little evidence to indicate that even those deaths took place as tradition says. The writer of 1 Clement, at the end of the first century, speaks vaguely of Peter and Paul’s life and death in the service of the faith, but he fails to bring either of them to Rome, or to mention an execution for them in that city.
In any case, if some apostles were killed in the process of preaching their faith (a common occurrence in many religions), this tells us nothing about what the nature of that faith was.
I have followed
your work on the Jesus Puzzle for some time now and greatly admire your
contribution to the debunking of the God/religion myths that have captivated
so much of humanity over the millennia. It is sad that in this day and
age we still see so much ignorance and superstition passed off as the “Truth”
by the forces of those that push the opiate of God and religion on the
masses. Marx may not have gotten the economic solution to our problems
right, but he nailed God/religion right on the button. I find your work
on exposing the fraud of the Jesus myth compelling, and of course without
Jesus, Christianity has no basis for being.
In my piece
on the Secular Web, “The Story of Bob” [see link below], I take the next
step and hold up a mirror for all the Abrahamic religions to see themselves
in. I am not the scholar that you are, but my forte is creative fiction,
which was used by Voltaire among others to expose the folly of religion.
In this I hope to contribute what I can to bringing about the eventual
removal of the yolk of God and religion from around the collective necks
of humanity.
Response to David:
"The Story of Bob"
David Payne has posted his piece of satire, “The Story of Bob,” on the Secular Web, and I recommend that everyone take a look at it for an entertaining and insightful read. It’s at:
I posted my own comment on David’s piece on the Secular Web, and I quote from it here:
Parody and satire can be a most effective way of pricking the balloon of irrational doctrine. Reaching the mind of the believer is a daunting task at the best of times, but exposing absurdity is often achieved by presenting it in the context of a different kind of absurdity—one designed to force re-examination of those beliefs. Religious dogma is usually an insult to the thinking person’s intelligence, whether it be creationism, original sin through eating an apple, or the claim that the appearance of one man at a single time and place is the sole source of universal salvation. Parody and satire are themselves a form of reciprocal insult to jolt the believer into seeing his ideas in a different light and bring home the irrationality of it all. Clever pieces of parody like “The Story of Bob” (and they have to be clever, and well-written) can sometimes do more to effect that jolt than even a good academic book on the subject. The truth is, we need both.RFSet 22: November 2003
I enjoyed David’s wit and ingenious repetition of motifs, and I applaud his treatment of the “Isms”—those modern bedevilments of atheism which the believer likes to throw in our faces. Nicely neutralized and deflated in a couple of paragraphs. And yes, the “call to Bob.” Too bad it weren’t that easy, we could all go home and do something else. It would all be so funny, if it didn’t reveal the truly tragic situation the human race has managed to mire itself in as part of a process of evolution that really has no intelligent mind behind it. Rather, evolution, in its own mindless wisdom, has thrown up its own intelligence to create the needed direction. In David’s Story of Bob, that force is “the freethinkers.”
There has been a regrettable delay since the last Reader Feedback, almost a year. This was due in part to distractions and demands of other matters, but also to a computer crash a few months ago, in the course of which a number of reader e-mails were lost. While there are fewer responses here than usual, they cover important topics, including the syncretization scenario and in-depth looks at those perennial favorites, "born of woman" and "brother of the Lord" as well as Old Testament prophecy. (Minor remarks are attached in brackets to some reader comments.)
Jack writes:
Thanks! Deconstructing the New Testament in this way is such an incredible relief for my soul, I can let go of so much unnecessary and outmoded moral and intellectual baggage.You are probably familiar with more modern attempts to package fiction as religious revelation: Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, and Carlos Castaneda, all of whom demonstrate how incredibly easy it is to create a new religion and gain thousands or millions of adherents.
Luca writes:
I am
reading your book and really appreciate it. If your views are correct,
then your work marks a most important turnpoint in human culture; in
any case, your ideas are so stimulating and refreshing that I think
they will remain with us.
Roland writes:
I have
read both "The Jesus Puzzle" and "Challenging the Verdict" and I must
say that you have really opened my eyes to the truth. I think both are
brilliant.(I am a former fundamentalist, now proud agnostic.)
Mike writes:
The Jesus Puzzle arrived today in excellent condition. I dove into it right away, and it is as well written and as persuasively argued as the materials on your website. I sincerely appreciate all the effort and scholarship you've poured into your work.
Jay writes:
Your analysis of the Hebrews epistle is awesome. You are exactly right that the author has never heard of Jesus of Nazareth and hasn't the slightest idea about any earthly Jesus. More than being right, you demonstrate it quite convincingly.
Kevin writes:
Thank you for your contribution to my understanding of Christian origins. I have been most impressed by your JESUS PUZZLE web site and book of the same name. I followed up the reading of your book with Robert Price's "Deconstructing Jesus" and have since made something of a pest of myself among acquaintances with interests in biblical studies by trying to get them to take what you are saying seriously.
Mahima writes:
To make money for a short life, you are trading money for hell. You still have a chance. May this e-mail be a chance from God to bring you closer to him. Repent!
Ian writes:
Found your most interesting site today, though I've been thinking and reading over many years about the issues. As one might expect, the 'debate' from many people cannot really be dignified by that name: it's usually abuse of the "you'll go to hell" type. Sad, but perhaps indicative of certain educational lapses. What I find difficult is to keep cool and kind when attempting to argue with intelligent, reasonable people who just happen to have bought the whole Christian mythology.
Vincent writes:
I
admire your courage. You may not be recognized as you deserve during
your life, but when christianity will be vanished from the earth,
people will see you as an exceptional lucid revolutionary spirit.
As you may know, Mel Gibson is making a new movie on
Jesus' passion. When are we going to have a movie based on your book?
Can you imagine a movie on 'Jesus' without any casting for Jesus, Mary,
the 12 disciples, without any crucifixion, angels, demons nor special
effects for the miracles?
Thanks Mr. Doherty, I owe you a lot.
Bruce writes:
I have
read close to 100 books on the subject of Christianity, including Mack,
Crossan, Price, Wilson, and on and on. Your stuff is just great. Very
easy to understand for the common person who has never read anything
about the subject. This is the major problem with Crossan and the rest,
in terms of enlightening those unfamiliar with biblical criticism.
What I greatly appreciate about your work is that you
provide a very healthy mix of ordinary language and focus on very
common sense (as opposed to academic) problems that the average Joe can
understand without having taken theology classes.
I forget which critique it was on your web page that
started with the claim that you are not a Biblical scholar. There is a
logical fallacy called "appeal to authority" which apparently this guy
is unaware of. But if reading hundreds if not thousands of books and
articles on the subject, doing your own Greek translations, not to
mention the power of your arguments, don't count, I am curious as to
what does make a Biblical scholar. Last I checked, Biblical scholars
become such by reading books, learning Greek and history, and studying
various people's work of Biblical criticism.
I guess one isn't allowed to raise obvious objections to
Christian views unless one is a theologian, almost all of which are
Christian to start with (which is why they become theologians in the
first place). And while we are on the subject, what intellectual
qualification is required of Christians to believe, as opposed to not
believe, in Christianity? That they have a pulse? Apparently, anyone
can say "Jesus did this and Jesus said that" with no factual or
critical basis other than sitting in a church pew every once in a
while. Of course, to these
pronouncements of "truth" there would be
no objection at all from those who criticize your work.
Still time for the Spring Semester, Earl. Maybe someday
you'll make the grade.
Sid writes:
Please
let me add my accolades to you and your website. You and Dan Barker are
my Gurus. I am a member of FFRF [Freedom
From Religion Foundation, based in Madison, Wisconsin] and you
are a wonderful addition to free thinkers.
In my opinion all babies are born atheists. They do not
know whether there is one God, many Gods, or no God. Whether they are
born Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim, etc. From two years of age
until approximately eight years, this identification and indoctrination
process is instituted for the child in accordance with the particular
religion that its parent or surrogate is perpetuating. The earlier and
more intense this process, with the accompanying rituals, icons and
songs, this person's religion becomes set in concrete.
There are exceptions. A few people do reason through this
process and eventually think for themselves and overcome their
indoctrination, but this is very rare. That is why there are so few
atheists and why it is so difficult to change anybody's beliefs or way
of thinking.
[E.D.: Perhaps not so
rare and so few as we move into the 21st century. Thinking for oneself
is becoming more fashionable, and the unbelieving constituency is
steadily growing. It just needs to assert itself and acquire a greater
voice, a challenging task in a North American society still drenched in
irrational faith.]
Dennis writes:
I have
just finished reading "The Jesus Puzzle" and many of the other links on
your site. So many questions I have had for so long have finally been
answered. I have always had difficulty with the "facts" of Jesus'
virgin birth, miracles, death and resurrection, son of God. Finally,
you have presented a reasoned perspective which is not only
understandable, but also sensitive in its approach for some like
myself, wanting to understand, but having great difficulty in
reconciling what science tells us vs. the evangelists.
I cannot adequately convey the feeling of a weight being
lifted off my shoulders. To now know that I am not responsible to nor
owe a debt to an individual who had to die for me because of my own
human qualities is quite a relief, but beyond that, now seeing how the
Jesus story fits into the ever-evolving need for man to understand
things he cannot "see", and how that story could have evolved out of
history, well, it just answers so many questions. If I only could have
stumbled across your book many years ago: that is my only regret.
I just want to reiterate my thanks for the depth of
scholarship and your non-caustic treatment of the subject. I dare say I
have not heard from anyone who is so thoroughly acquainted with the
bible as you are. It is so refreshing in light of having seen so many
websites that take a cynical and accusatory approach to the subject.
Tim writes:
Your
work is the culmination of my search. I must say that your analysis is
so good that I think you may be right. The concepts that Paul speaks
about, the lack of historical evidence in the epistles and early
writings does lend a lot to your case. My own experience in dealing
with mystical concepts leads me to believe that your conclusions are
correct.
Since the release of your book, I am wondering how many
scholars have become "believers" in your point of view. Have there been
a number of others that have been willing to concede your points and
submit to this new theory? [E.D. Only
a handful who were already inclined in that direction, although there
may be others I am unaware of. Most will simply
not allow themselves to give any serious thought to the mythicist
position, as recently demonstrated by a well-known mainstream scholar's
reaction to the first of my website articles. I may fashion an article
for the site in
the near future which will consider a range of negative response to my
views, from Amazon reviewers to the aforementioned member of the Jesus
Seminar.]
Robert writes:
Did it
occur to
you that 99% of biblical scholars (christian and non-christian) believe
that Jesus did exist? As a well-read christian I find these Jesus myth
arguments self-serving, often deceptive, and ironically requiring a lot
of faith. In fact, i might even describe it as a form of
fundamentalism. No amount of evidence or reason could be convincing
enough for one with such strong convictions. You interpret all evidence
and aligned it with your preconception of the "Jesus myth" rather than
viewing it with some degree of objectivity. [E.D.: Hmmm...isn't this a little like the
pot calling the kettle black?]
I'm sure you automatically dismissed the recent finding of
the James
ossuary because otherwise it would surely make you question your faith.
While the finding is certainly inconclusive, an objective person would
at least consider it.
Jennifer writes:
I was
very happy to find this site a few weeks ago and have ordered your book
about Strobel's book.
Thank you for taking the time to write and publish your
thoughts. I wish books like yours were marketed more agressively. Xians
push their religion relentlessly and I wish atheists and non-believers
in general would do the same. The problem I have found is that when a
xian finds you are not only an infidel, but an infidel who has solid,
thoughtful, logical reasons for rejecting their religion, they turn on
you like a pack of wolves and will tear you to pieces. May I tell you
what I mentioned to a xian woman a few weeks ago when she said that she
was afraid of the "damage" playing with non-xians might do to her
children?
"The older I get, the more I judge religions, philosophies
and political theories not on what they teach or believe, per se, but
how they treat those who disagree with them. I do not agree with the
teachings of the buddha, but it is a peaceful religion that has a
history of toleration and acceptance of varied points of view.
Therefore, I admire and respect it. Islam and xianity, however, have
historically shown themselves to be religions of hatred, murder,
oppression, tyranny and great evil. They treat heretics and infidels
with violence and rage. So I would be more afraid of what your xian
children may do to the unbelieving playmates they have, than what the
infidels might do to your kids."
Needless to say she was not pleased, but it is the truth.
Robert writes:
I recently read your book, and found it very informative. I read Strobel's "The Case for Christ" just as I was having serious doubts about Christianity, and I found it lacking even back then. You focus a great deal on how soon/late the Gospels appeared after Jesus' supposed death. Even if the religious scholars could prove that writings were around 20 years afterwards (which I agree they can't), that means almost nothing. Elizabeth Loftus has done a great deal of work on the fallibility of memory. I would say 20 days after something happens, I wouldn't trust eyewitness testimony, as she has proved it is usually flawed. The book "Legends, Myths, and Cherished Lies of American History" documents common myths, even in this age of information and communication, that we believe about people as recent as JFK and Ronald Reagan. Such evidence gives me little hope that illiterate, uneducated people 2000 years ago would have been tenacious about sticking to the truth. We don't even do it today.
Dennis writes:
I am currently reading "Challenging the Verdict." In Chapter 12, you overlooked an argument against the "Jews bribing the Roman guards" story in Matthew [Mt. 28:11-15]. The Roman guards would have been executed if they had claimed that they went to sleep on the job and let somebody steal the body of Jesus. It is difficult to think that the Jews could have come up with a bribe large enough to get the Roman soldiers to tell such a story to their superiors. [E.D.: Excellent point. Strange how obvious considerations can be missed and yet be so obvious when someone points them out.]
Colin writes:
I have just spent a couple of days perusing your site. Great stuff.
Perhaps the central idea of your work I have encountered thus far is the paucity of references to an historical Jesus in the Epistles. Something else strikes me in addition to this. Paul is responding to information sent to him regarding conditions in the Christian groups he has created. But Paul is also responding to questions asked of him by his followers. What I never noticed before is, not one of these followers of Paul is asking about an actual Jesus who lived, taught his message, and died under Pontius Pilate. Isn't it strange, not just that Paul provides no information, but NO ONE SEEMS INTERESTED IN THE FLESH AND BLOOD JESUS? If I was a recently converted Christian who had received the Holy Spirit, I would be full of questions.
Did Paul ignore such questions? Hardly seems likely. What seems more likely is that Paul never taught a flesh and blood Jesus, so his followers had no questions concerning him. It also seems highly unlikely that such questions would have been edited out at a later date. Later Christians would have been more than happy to include such material if it had originally existed.
Bruce writes:
The non-divinity of Jesus in Q1, perhaps from the Peter & James crowd, does not match up with the same Peter & James as visited by Paul. If James is so hung up on the law, circumcision, etc., one would think Paul's representation of Jesus as divine to Peter and James would have been a major issue, to say the least. Yet, according to Paul, no such issue seems to have come up. You've pointed out previously that Mack fails to address this and it remains a big question for me too.
I could see how, if Jesus was real and followed by Peter et al that a vision by Peter (out of guilt of denying him, say) may have been the spark and one that started immediately after Jesus death (if real). However, that doesn't make sense in light of Q1, especially if the Q1 group is the very group from Galilee that ends up in Jerusalem. [E.D.: In my view, Q1 had nothing to do with "the Peter and James crowd."]
Another question regarding the real-time Jesus. If Paul was really persecuting Christians very early on, what are James and Peter doing in Jerusalem, what, 3 years later? Did the persecutors drop the subject? Secondly, if Paul was employed by the temple guard around then, how could he not have at least heard just about everything about the historical Jesus in some detail, especially since he was later to go after his followers? Wouldn't Paul, in fact, have been in a position to know more about the historical Jesus than just about anybody?
[E.D. Probably anybody outside those followers of Jesus. Again, more obvious questions that don't need fuller comment from me.]
Brian writes:
You
have done an impressive job in explaining the apparent lack of interest
on the part of Paul and the other epistle writers in the details of
Jesus' career and teachings. He never existed, and was invented later.
But I wonder whether you haven't created a new mystery:
how did it come about that two such disparate religious movements as
the "Jerusalem" movement and the "Galilean" movement could be
syncretized in the late first century by Mark, and that this
syncretization so rapidly dominated the two original movements? As you
describe them, the two movements don't seem like obvious merger
partners. What made this syncretization so compelling at the time to
the two groups that within a hundred years the syncretized faith
dominated the two original faiths?
By the traditional account, of course, the two movements
weren't so unrelated: they were different "responses" to the teaching
and death of a single historical figure. Even though the two groups
initially headed in strikingly different directions, one might suppose
under the traditional view that they would share some common traditions
and concerns. But if an historical Jesus is removed from the picture,
are we not left with a new question as to how a Marcan midrashic
fiction or scripture-based reconstruction of an earthly Christ's life
and death so rapidly and successfully effected a merger of two
initially unrelated and rather different movements?
Response to Brian:
The Crux of the Case: Syncretizing the
'Jeruselem'
and 'Galilean' Components of Christianity
Many of the doubts expressed about the mythicist
case, and The Jesus Puzzle's particular rendering of it, revolve around
questions similar to that expressed by Brian. How
and why did this seemingly peculiar syncretization come about, and why
was it so successful? Related questions often accompany these queries,
such as why the Messiah would be regarded as coming from an unlikely
place like Galilee, or why a Jewish movement would adopt a Cynic-based
philosophy of ethics. In this response, I will try to
address this range of concern.
Such objections often betray some
dubious assumptions, and let's start by addressing Brian's. First
of all, I would say that Brian is mischaracterizing the length of time
it
took for the amalgamation of the two movements by calling it something
"rapid". If
Mark composed his Gospel a decade or so before the end of the first
century (as I suggest), and apologists like Theophilus and Athenagoras
are still
describing their faith, almost a hundred years later, as basically a
Logos/Son of God
religion, with no mention of a human founder and his career, this is
hardly rapid. Also, the disputes we can detect in the Christian record
itself
(as in 1 John and the letters of Ignatius) show that
such a syncretization was, in fact, not
"so compelling" to many groups within the broader Christ movement, and
triumphed only over time with some difficulty.
I would also say that it is inaccurate to speak of a
syncretization of movements. Rather, it was a syncretization of ideas.
The Q-based movement seems to have died out by the mid-second century,
perhaps earlier, never having been more than a local one
centered in Galilee and parts of Syria (as witnessed by Q and the
Gospels—all of which are now regarded by many as coming from
this same area—and the Didache). It was not a case of the Galilean
movement as a whole joining
with the cultic Christ movement. It never came to be "dominated" by the
syncretized product. Only
in regard to the communities which produced the synoptic Gospels can we
see a process of two bodies of ideas coming together, and even this
needs qualification.
Rather, the dramatic syncretization, and the one
which
produced Christianity as we know it, was the gradual adoption by the
spiritual
Christ savior movement of the idea that their Jesus had
actually been to earth (not just the celestial sphere related to "the
flesh"), and that the Gospels, which were encountered through the
course of the second century,
constituted a
historical reflection of his life and teachings in the time of
Herod and Pontius Pilate. We see this dawning and blossoming belief in
the letters of Ignatius, in the epistle of Barnabas, in
Justin Martyr and eventually all the major writers of the late second
century
and beyond. (See my Supplementary Article No.
12 for a tracing of this
process through the Apostolic Fathers.)
To some extent, Brian is right, in that the two
components of Christianity do not seem like "obvious merger partners."
But in the view I've just expressed, the initial 'merger' was a limited
one. I have postulated that Mark's community took a rather
unusual step, in joining its Q-type background of preaching the coming
Kingdom
of God, with the concept of a savior divinity. But it is also difficult
to be
sure how much syncretization existed within the community itself, and
how much was a product of Mark's own mind and literary innovation. I
have also suggested in my book (see page 239) that Mark's dying and
rising Messiah/Son of Man figure may owe as much to its allegorical
meaning as representative of Mark's own community of believers, as it
owes to the
savior-god faith of Paul, especially as Mark's Gospel scarcely makes
its
Jesus divine or gives him a well-defined salvific role—nothing like on
the scale of the Pauline Christ. Thus we cannot be sure how much even
Mark himself syncretized the two movements.
Once that first Gospel came into existence,
and once it was enlarged upon by later evangelists who combined it with
their Q document and fed more of their own scriptural
focus into the story of Jesus—perhaps regarding Mark's plot and
protagonist as having some foundation in actual history—it became a
latent
and potent force. Over the course of a few generations, the Gospels
came to the
attention of various communities of the Son/Christ savior movement and
were
eventually adopted by them. Those Gospels were attractive for their
body of teaching and tradition and their powerful founder figure, who
already seemed linked to the cultic Jesus. By
this time, the Q-movement itself had died or was dying out,
as the non-historical expressions of Christ belief were soon to do as
well. While the merger of the two movements may appear to be
something
unlikely when viewed in the latter decades
of the first century, such a process over time can be seen to be
feasible and even logical, especially as we can trace that very process
through the various elements of the Christian record.
Brian's 'alternative' suggestion, that the
two movements were different "responses" to the teaching and death of a
single historical figure, is far more unlikely and understandable than
the syncretization scenario. Apart from a few general elements that
were shared
by virtually all the non-mainstream Jewish and Hellenistic-Jewish sects
of the time (such as a focus on social reforms, the rejection of the
Temple
cult, and the expectation of an upheaval brought about by the arrival
of a heavenly figure), the quality of 'divergence' between the two
movements is so striking as to render it difficult to regard them as
different responses to a single man and his career, especially to the
one portrayed in the Gospels. As I've demonstrated elsewhere,
fundamental elements are missing on both sides. Q shows no death and
resurrection, or even a Pauline-type soteriological role, for its
founder Jesus; nor is he ever referred to as the Messiah. The Pauline
Christ shows none of the features of Q's Jesus figure: no teachings, no
miracle working, no Son of Man, no apocalyptic prophesying, no
appointment of apostles by Jesus, no role for a recent human Messiah in
the run-up to the Parousia, and so on, not to mention a simple
identification with the Gospel
character. That
two 'responses' to the same man could diverge so thoroughly—right from
the outset—is
virtually impossible to comprehend and can simply be dismissed,
especially as the 'divergence' theory is based on perceived
necessity rather than evidence. Our need is to
understand not how they diverged, but how they came together, and a
theory of syncretization beginning with Mark's Gospel best fits that
bill. (At most, we are left only with the possibly more feasible idea
that there was a human antecedent to the Q movement, with
none at all
to the Pauline Christ faith, though even here, as I have regularly
argued, the evidence is against such a concrete, single-figure,
founding Jesus for the Galilean movement.)
When such a syncretization is more carefully
examined, certain oft-raised objections can be dealt with
rather easily. A common one is that a Messiah who comes from Galilee
would have been an unlikely scenario in Jewish circles, and thus would
hardly have been accepted—let alone
invented—in those circles. Well, first of all, there is no Messiah in
Q. We have an expected Son of Man, which is not the same thing. Such a
figure was no doubt ultimately based on a reading out of Daniel 7,
with its "son of man" evolving into a heavenly figure who would arrive
at the End-time, as in Revelation. This is evidenced even in
non-Christian documents like
4
Ezra and 1 Enoch. In the latter, and in Mark, he was syncretized with
the
Messiah and given a semi-divine cast. Christianity's Messiah
ended up in Galilee by default, courtesy of Mark. He was an enlargement
on the
figure in the later stages of Q, one who was based in the apocalyptic
preaching movement of
that
area. Second, it is difficult to define the Markan syncretization
milieu as a strictly "Jewish" one. Scholars such as J. D. Crossan
regularly
argue for a strong Hellenistic atmosphere in Galilee, and it may
be—judging by things such as Greek being the language of the entire
New Testament—that Mark's community was more gentile with Jewish
leanings than mainstream Jewish. That would help explain why a
Cynic-based philosophy of ethics and itinerant missionary practice
could be wedded to the Jewish apocalyptic tradition at the root of the
Q movement.
Brian also included the suggestion that we have "an unexplained coincidence" in that the two movements happened both to have their origins in mid-first century (or at least a documentary record beginning at that time)" and that "the historical Jesus could be plopped into the first part of the century as the initiator of both movements." But again, this is less a coincidence than a natural congruity created by the process of syncretization. As parts of the Kingdom of God movement developed the idea of a founding teacher / miracle-worker / apocalyptic prophet at the genesis of their preaching (a personification of their own activities and beliefs), such a figure was naturally placed at those beginnings, which seem to have arisen around the 20s of the first century. There was also a link made in the Q mind with John the Baptist as a forerunner, and he can be historically located during that period.
Paul's Christ, on the other hand, can be identified
with no historical
time and place, since Paul and his fellow epistle-writers of the first
century never make such an identification, not even when they speak in
those occasional human-sounding terms such as "born of woman", "of the
seed of David" or when using the phrase "kata sarka" (terms which can be
given other interpretations not related to an historical, human
individual). When the Pauline Christ became syncretized with the Q
Jesus, it would have been natural, indeed inevitable, to associate his
human life on earth with the period of Q's perceived founder, as well
as with the
period of the earliest remembered apostles whom Paul knew, namely Peter
and James, who seem to have first operated in the 20s or 30s of the
century. Since Paul never refers to such apostles as having known a
human Jesus, nor deals with the advantage such an association would
have
given them, nor seems to have been aware of any teachings,
activities or events of such a life of Jesus, there is no 'coincidence'
of
placement between the two movements. Ignatius' declaration, coming
early in the second century, that his Jesus had been crucified
by Pilate, was a faith declaration, the product of that new
syncretized belief, whose time frame was largely governed by the
Galilean side of the 'merger'.
Why did certain pockets of the Christ cult
across the eastern empire around the turn of the second century adopt
the conviction of a human life for their Jesus in recent history,
whether under the direct influence of the Gospels or not? It is
difficult to say whether the Johannine community of the period of 1
John (probably a little earlier) did so, since we don't know the exact
meaning of the dispute that "Jesus Christ has come in the flesh"
(4:1-4). But there has always been a widespread tendency among
societies, especially cultic oriented ones, to read present practice
and belief into the past and to postulate a great formulator for them.
(Originally, it was the gods themselves.) Such a tendency could well
have been in the air among Christian communities even before the
Gospels started to make their influence felt. The same tendency would
have fed into the creation of the Q Jesus, as seen in the latter stages
of that document's evolution.
The evolution of a Jesus mythology related to
"flesh" was no doubt influenced by the rich mythology of the savior-god
cults within Hellenistic society. But we can't overlook the more
nitty-gritty impulses for such innovation. These things operate more at
the personal level, and could perhaps be more responsible for the
evolution
of ideas than larger-scale factors. Paul tramped the empire pushing
his interpretation of a Jesus from scripture and revelation because
of personal drives and motives, or so his letters suggest. Did
Christians half a century later push the idea of a Christ come in the
flesh, in history, because of personal needs? The answer seems evident
from the pivotal figure of Ignatius. The bishop of Antioch's
convictions of the humanity of Christ were not those of theological
deduction, or even the product of tradition (which he never appeals
to), but arose out of his belief that only through a Christ who had
gone through human suffering in an historical context could human
salvation be accomplished. If Christ's sufferings were not physical and
historical, then his own were "in vain". Those individuals and groups
who had come to see things this way (and not everyone did, as witness
the gnostics) impelled the movement toward the historicization of the
spiritual Christ and the adoption of the Gospel story as fact. This new
brand of the faith proved to have the greatest potential, both
personally and politically, and thus the syncretization process which
produced orthodox Christianity was guaranteed success and longevity.
Rick writes:
I must confess that I ordered The Jesus Puzzle with full
intentions of writing a scathing review, and lambasting your position.
To that end I was surprised--even shocked--to discover that my review
will likely be positive, by and large. The position you advocate is at
the very least as reasonable, and often more reasonable, than more
traditional interpretations. However, I find myself left with several
questions--or perhaps more accurately caveats--regarding your work.
Why, if Mark does not understand his gospel historically,
does he create apologetics that clearly refer to "earthly" events and
understandings? Why, for example, did Mk. 15:47 develop without the
unstated polemic that they did not know where the body was lain? This
is certainly not to imply that this was an historical event, but rather
that Mark wished to convey that it was, and plausibly took it for one
himself. Further, why does he place it in such a firm historical
context, with such firm historical characters, if it is all to be
understood as myth and allegory? It seems a bit of a stretch to
conclude that Mark did not view at least parts of his gospel as
literally true... [more below]
Response to Rick:
Mark's "historical" Nature / Markan
Contradictions? / Criterion of Dissimilarity
I think Rick is adopting some unfounded assumptions
here, or rather he may be governed by too standard a mindset. There is
nothing to prevent allegory from being set within an "earthly" context,
especially when the allegory is largely meant to represent the earthly
experiences and beliefs of a sectarian group. The passion part of
Mark's Gospel may be less such a representation than the Galilean
ministry portion, but once the setting was established, as it is in the
first ten chapters, it would have been difficult and jarring to somehow
render the passion in more mythical terms. Besides, as I have said
previously, I suspect that the Markan story of Jesus' passion is also
meant to symbolize the fate of the believers as much as it does the
spiritual activities of the redeeming Christ.
Rick also tends to judge aspects of the Markan story
by old paradigms: that Gospel features were often determined by the
writer's need to deal with situations or polemics within the
Christian community, or with competing traditions and claims. Whereas,
it is often the case that we ought to look at things more simply and to
see the story as taking
shape to serve the purposes of telling the story. Verse 15:47 ("And
Mary of Magdala and Mary the mother of Joseph were watching and saw
where he was laid") does not need to serve anything more than to
explain the women's actions in the
next chapter, when they go to the tomb where Jesus was buried. If they
hadn't seen the burial, how could they have known where to go? A little
feature in the following chapter (16:3) shows something similar. Mark
feels constrained to insert that the women "were wondering among
themselves who would roll away the stone for them from the entrance to
the tomb," not because there was a tradition that they had so wondered,
but because it would have been natural for the writer—and reader—to
think of that, since the women were going in order to anoint the body
with no
expectation that the stone would not be still in place. The detail is
the
product of the storyteller, necessitated by the story itself, and
nothing else.
As Rick suggests, Mark did view parts of his Gospel as
literally true, in the sense that they represented literal activities
and teachings of the community itself. It was not all "myth and
allegory." As for setting Jesus' death and resurrection within "a firm
historical context," not only would this have been necessitated by the
overall setting of the Gospel, it would make certain elements Mark
wanted to convey more vivid, such as the responsibility of the Jewish
authorities and the role played by the Romans, factors very much
current in the Markan community's world. Besides, it made for a much
more powerful story....
...Why do so
many things in the gospels fly flagrant not only to the author's own
theology, but to the theology of the entire movement? Why does he imply
Jesus isn't Davidic (Mk. 12:35-37)? Why is Mark's Jesus, without
apology, of Galilee? Why does John the Baptist doubt Jesus (Mt.
11:2-3)?... [more below]
I'm not sure what the "so many things" are that go
against Mark's theology, and can only deal with the ones Rick offers.
In the matter of the Messiah being "of Galilee" I dealt with that
above, that it was largely by default, since some of the Q movement in
Galilee had
developed the founder figure adopted by Mark, who also made him the
Messiah. Moreover, if Jesus to some extent represented the community
itself, then he was automatically Galilean if the community was
Galilean, or traced its roots back to that area. Why isn't Jesus
embraced as Davidic by Mark? Judging by Mark's argument in those
verses, this is a case of Mark trying to adhere to his theology, not go
against it. As Mark sees it, "David" (of the Psalm) calling Jesus
"Lord" must make the latter much more than a simple human "son" of
David, as standard Jewish messianism had it. Further, if Jesus is to
some extent an allegorical representation of the community, Mark
couldn't very well adhere to a strict interpretation of Jesus as a
direct descendant of David. (Matthew and Luke after him did not feel
the same qualms, perhaps not having the same allegorical outlook as
their predecessor and, as well, perhaps regarding Mark's figure as
basically
historical.)
...As Alan F.
Segal notes: "The answer is that the criterion [of dissimilarity] was
designed not to make it possible to write a biography of Jesus, but to
answer the challenge of the cultural despiser of Christianity as to
whether anything--including Jesus himself--is historical in the
Gospels. . . Very few things pass (which is just what we would expect),
but some do. Of course, this is the most important reason for using the
criteria, for if some things pass, then we know that Jesus existed."
("Jesus in First Century Judaism," published in Jesus at 2000, ed. Marcus J. Borg,
page 57).
I suppose that is my chief caveat with your work--it not
only doesn't adequately account for the vast majority of that which
survives the criteria of dissimilarity, it ignores it entirely.
In regard to the dissimilarity criterion, I think Rick is giving it far more significance than it can bear.
Scholars came up with it to try to identify those elements of the Gospels that were unlike expressions of contemporary Jewish and outlooks and subsequent Christian ones, and could thus be assigned to an innovative figure, namely Jesus. But all this really gives them is a body of material (mainly sayings) that seems to have a certain distinctive cast. To extrapolate from that, as Segal does, and claim that such 'dissimilar' elements must then be assigned to an historical Jesus by default, proving his existence, is obviously fallacious. There could be other sources for these 'against-the-grain' features of the Gospel story and its teaching. If the group that first advocated them was a reformist sect, rejecting elements of mainstream Judaism, then that could well be the genesis of such dissimilarity. And not all of them need have originally conformed to later, 'orthodox' Christian outlook. No historical Jesus need be brought into the picture. While I didn't spell out this principle in my book (or on the site, for that matter), it is a rather obvious corrollary from the scenario I have put together.
The more standard scholarship allots a distinctive and innovative voice to the figure of Jesus, the more inexplicable it becomes that an entire dimension of the Christian movement, the soteriological "branch" as preached by Paul, could have become so uninterested in Jesus the ethical teacher, failing to attribute anything to him and failing to draw on those teachings (such as relating to the cleanness of foods) in the crucial debates that were rending the early community. And it still raises the question of how, no matter how distinctive the voice in teaching, such a figure could be elevated to the status of the cultic Christ., preexistent with God, creative agency and sustainer of the universe, sacrificial redeemer of the world.
I very
much enjoyed your site, and thank you for your thorough and reasoned
work. I have yet to form an opinion on the historicity of Jesus, and am
beginning to doubt that I ever will. For me, the matter has been
relegated to one of intellectual curiosity only, having rejected Jesus'
divinity a very long time ago.
I have one question. It concerns Galatians 1:19, wherein
Paul says he saw "James, the Lord's brother." My understanding of the
Greek behind "brother" in that verse is that it refers to an actual
brother, rather than a member of some rabbinical or apostolic group.
If, indeed, Paul claims to have seen "the Lord's brother,"
then doesn't that put to rest the matter of whether or not Paul
believed in an actual earthly Jesus? The passage to me seems critical,
but I have searched the web for an anti-historicity perspective on it,
and can't find one. Did Paul mean something other than Jesus by "the
Lord"? Did he mean something other than an actual brother?
Response to Gerry:
"James, the Brother of the Lord"—Again
I have to confess to being, by this time, somewhat
amused by all the fuss which opponents of the mythicist case (not
including Gerry here) create over this phrase in Galatians 1:19. These
five words, despite their ambiguous meaning, are regularly offered as
a secure hook on which to hang the existence position. Let's test them
to see how much weight they can bear.
1 - The word "brother" itself. As I have said in my
Sound of Silence Appendix (it bears repeating): "Paul uses the term
"brother" a total of about 30 times, and the plural form "brothers" or
"brethren" (as some translations render it) many more dozens of times.
A minority are in the context of ethical teaching, Paul admonishing his
audience about how to treat one's "brother." In most of these (if not
all), the term means a fellow believer, not a blood sibling. In all of
the other cases but one—leaving aside the passage under consideration
here—the term can only refer
to a Christian believer, usually in the
sense of one who is doing some kind of apostolic or congregational work
(Timothy, Epaphroditus, Sosthenes, Tychicus, Apollos, etc.). IN NOT A
SINGLE INSTANCE CAN THE TERM BE IDENTIFIED AS MEANING SIBLING."...And
yet so many traditionalists confidently claim that in this case,
"brother" means sibling.
2 - If Paul had meant something as informal or
off-the-cuff as "sibling of Jesus of Nazareth", we might have expected
him to use the name "Jesus" rather than the title "Lord." And yet we
are assured that the "Lord" in Galatians 1:19 can only mean Jesus of
Nazareth, sibling of James. We are similarly assured (or at least it is
unquestioningly assumed) that "Lord" must be referring to Jesus, and
not to God.
3 - It is claimed to be critical that nowhere else
does Paul use the singular phrase, "brother of the Lord." At the same
time, the plural "brothers of the Lord" in 1 Cor. 9:5 is similarly
claimed to refer to Jesus' siblings (as in Mark). However, we read in
Philippians 1:14 the phrase "brothers in the Lord." Here we have an
identical phrase, in the plural, with a change of preposition. Here,
"brothers" is acknowledged to be understandable only in the sense
of "brethren," members of a brotherhood or group of fellow believers.
Throughout the epistles, we are clearly in the presence of a group
centered in Jerusalem and devoted to a "Lord," a group
of which James seems to be the head, a group of which 500 members
underwent some "seeing" of the Christ. And yet when the word "brother"
becomes singular in Galatians 1:19, it reputedly switches to the
meaning "sibling." When the group of brethren changes its preposition
from "in" to "of", certain members of that group automatically become
relatives
of a recent human man.
4 - James in Galatians 1:19 is claimed to be the
sibling of Jesus of Nazareth. And yet the writer of the epistle
attributed to James describes the reputed author this way: "From James,
a servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ." No mention of a sibling
relationship, despite the fact that pseudonymous authorship was used
precisely to give such epistles more authority. Would the writer/forger
have passed up the opportunity to appeal to the stature and authority
of James as the Lord's very blood brother? Similarly, the writer of the
epistle attributed to
Jude describes the reputed author this way: "From Jude, servant of
Jesus Christ and brother of James." If Jude is sibling of James, he is
then sibling of Jesus, as supported by Mark. Another writer/forger
fails to appeal to the stature and authority of another brother of
Jesus. This would seem to undermine the very fact of James' Gospel
relationship to Jesus, and thus cast serious doubt on the meaning of
Paul's phrase.
Let's take a look at that related and similarly
disputed phrase "brothers of the Lord" in 1 Corinthians 9:5.
Automatically asserting that this refers to Jesus' sibling family is
not supported by Paul or any other first century epistle writer, since
they never
talk about their Jesus having a family, or indeed relate him to any
recent time, place or event on earth. (The reference to Pilate in 1
Timothy 6:13 is part of an epistle dated to the 2nd century by
virtually all critical scholarship.) In the 1 Corinthians passage, Paul
is
claiming, as an apostle, the same rights as certain others he mentions:
"as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas
(Peter)". Who are these "other apostles"? Well, the passage shows that
he means them in the same context as himself, preachers of the Christ
who have also "seen the Lord" in the visionary sense, and it is in
keeping with
his practice of never differentiating himself from any others in the
field on the basis of having been a follower, or not, of an earthly
Jesus. He never allows for such a distinction, which would belie his
having any concept of fellow apostles having known an earthly Jesus,
let alone that one of them was his sibling.
And what of the "brothers of the Lord" next mentioned? Are they not "apostles" as well? If we follow the tendencies of some who base their arguments on the nitty-gritty of extant wording, they must not be apostles, since they are mentioned separately. And yet both wording and context suggest that this can hardly be the case. They are described as having wives that accompany them, whom they 'take along.' Clearly, they too are on the road. (And they too are undifferentiated from Paul in his present arguments on the basis of any connection to an historical Jesus.) So if they are all in fact apostles who travel about preaching, on what is the distinction based? We see elsewhere—as in 2 Corinthians 10-12—that Paul is one of many apostles who go about preaching the Christ in competing missions, some of whom (including Paul) are not part of the Jerusalem brotherhood. In this great conglomeration of missionaries, some are independent operators, some are members of the Jerusalem-based "brothers of/in the Lord". They are all aware of each others' activities, they have contacts between themselves, though rivalries do exist. As a distinctive, identifiable group, whom Paul throws into the pot of his argument in the plea for equal treatment, it is likely that his "brothers of the Lord" are a sub-group of apostles located in Jerusalem, of which James is a part if not the head. My point in this discussion is to show that viewing them as something other than "siblings of Jesus" is completely feasible and supportable within the context, and thus the phrase is at best ambiguous. It cannot be used to 'disprove' the mythicist case.
The mythicist argument does not depend on conclusively
demonstrating the meaning of that phrase "brother(s) of the Lord". The
case is based on all the other material and analysis of the early
Christian
record. All one has to do is demonstrate that the phrase under debate
lends itself to equal or even
better interpretation as not
referring to a sibling of Jesus. The larger case has a power of its
own, and I am merely demonstrating that the Galatians phrase
constitutes no necessary impediment to it.
In any case, the practice of basing one's argument on the
nitty-gritty
wording of any individual passage is an extremely hazardous affair. The
1 Corinthians 9 passage discussed above is a good illustration. Since
Paul goes on to include "Cephas" in his enumeration of those he is
comparing himself to, Cephas must not be an apostle, since he is listed
separately. Naturally, few would accept this. Rather, it seems Paul is
simply singling him out for emphasis. Thus, listing him separately
doesn't necessarily mean he is not one of the "brothers of the Lord" in
the sense of the Jerusalem brotherhood, since later in the epistle he
is clearly portrayed as such. Here again, Cephas, as a star figure in
the group, is spotlighted by Paul for the sake of his argument.
Remember that these epistles are mundane, often
off-the-top-of-the-head products, and we can't expect them to have some
kind of laboratory preciseness that allows us to derive consistently
reliable meanings behind what they say. This is doubly so considering
that we have nothing close to the original texts. Which brings me back
to the Galatians 1:19 phrase. As with its 'brother' in 1 Corinthians 9,
this phrase does not appear in extant documents until at least the 3rd
century, maybe the 4th (I don't offhand know if either of them appear
in the fragmentary parts of some Pauline epistles dating to the 3rd
century). And yet I've seen whole arguments for the "sibling" meaning
of 1:19 that are based on the presence of the word "the" in Galatians'
"the brother of the Lord"! Good grief! How can we be sure that Paul
used that word? Similar "indisputable" cases are claimed because he
used "of the Lord" rather than
"in
the Lord" so that there can't be any connection or
similarity of meaning with the phrase in Philippians 1:14! How can we
be sure just what preposition
Paul may have used, especially as a common feature of manuscript
transmission is that phrases and references tend to get altered to
conform to the most commonly known expression of them. By the late 2nd
century, James the Just was known
as "the brother of the Lord" in the sense of sibling, which would have
been a compelling influence on a scribe to change whatever Paul might
have said here to the now-familiar phrase.
In fact, in view of all that we know about scribal alteration
of
documents, deliberate and accidental, how can we be sure that the whole
phrase is not an interpolation, as I've argued more than once (as has
Wells)? It would fit the characteristics of an interpolation, and there
is a logically "possible" situation available for its creation,
namely that some copyist in the latter 2nd century or later thought it
best to distinguish Paul's "James" from James the apostle, son of
Zebedee, who appears in the Gospels, and so he stuck in the phrase
(perhaps in the margin, where it later got transported into the text, a
common occurrence)
"brother of the Lord." Again, by the copyist's time this phrase had
come to mean
"sibling of Jesus."
My point is, so much may be dubious and uncertain about the
text of this
or any NT passage, that we have to be careful of what we presume to
rely on, and it is surely unwise to base an historical Jesus on a
couple
of uncertain passages in the record when so much else argues against
making such a
supposition. The mythicist case needs to be considered as a whole, and
then we can see how much weight we feel justified in according an at
best ambiguous phrase as in Galatians 1:19 or 1 Corinthians 9:5. I
would
certainly hesitate to rely for secure footing on such flimsy
foundations.
If I may indulge a little analogy I sometimes think of: A wife
is led to be suspicious of her husband because he is suddenly starting
to work late, can't be reached at his office after hours, dresses more
nattily on some days and comes home with lipstick on his shirt, etc.,
but one night he rolls over in bed, puts his arm around her and
whispers "sweetheart", so she dismisses all her misgivings by presuming
he means her, and is thus a loving and faithful husband. I would call
that wishful thinking. It reminds me of a lot of anti-mythers.
Julian writes:
I am very much enjoying your website. In the Reader Feedbacks I noted some commenting on the Isaiah prophecy [7:14]. I do not read Hebrew, but from what I understand there are translation problems with the sentence. I believe the Hebrew uses the word almah and not bethulah, and the word should therefore be translated 'young woman' and not 'virgin'. I also believe that the entire sentence is in the past tense (so that it should read) "A young woman gave birth to a son and his name was Immanuel..." I also believe that this Immanuel is of some importance a few pages later in the conflict with the Assyrians, and therefore has nothing to do with a prophecy of Christ except in the (erroneous) Greek translation on which the Gospel writers would be relying.
Response to Julian:
Isaiah 7:14 / "Born of Woman"
The noun
"almah"
used
in Isaiah 7:14 is ambiguous,
because it
need not signify a virgin, nor does it exclude such a meaning. The
Septuagint chose to render it parthenos,
which generally does mean a virgin, but some other ancient Greek
translations did not. As to the tense of the verb, it is not "past" but
is ambiguous as well. "The Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14 does not
specify the tense of the relevant verb. The most recent translation of
the Hebrew Scripture by the Jewish Publication Society reads, 'a young
woman has conceived'; the choice of the future tense, 'will conceive,'
reflects a decision that more aptly favors the NT interpretations of
this verse but is not dictated conclusively by grammar alone." (Gerald
T. Sheppard in Harper's Bible
Commentary, p. 556)
Subsequent use in Isaiah of the "child" motif is
made in
prophecies relating to the later actions of the Assyrians and others,
but
without specifying the name Immanuel. Rather than this being the same
'child,' this is considered the work of editors who have enlarged
on the
motif by employing
it for later events in a similar manner to that of 7:14. In fact, in
8:1-4, the child is
given a completely different name, one relating to the context of those
verses, which speak of the impending Assyrian conquest. In the
well-known 9:6, heavily messianic in later interpretation, the
"boy/child
(who) has been born for us" exists within the Israelite context of the
expectation of a Davidic-style return to greatness for the nation. Even
later,
Christians would turn it into a prophecy of their Christ. Sheppard
tries to suggest that the latter 'messianic' use of the child motif in
these chapters invites a messianic understanding of 7:14. But this
seems little more than an apologetic expedient to try to rescue 7:14 as
having some import for the future,
whereas it was clearly used by the original author of Isaiah as a
device relating to his own time and situation. The child is now conceived, and certain things
will come to pass before he has grown up.
But I would like to move somewhat beyond the scope
of Julian's question and address the probable use of Isaiah 7:14 as the
source of Paul's controversial phrase in Galatians 4:4, "born of
woman." It has been my
position that many, if not all, of the human-sounding
references to Christ in Paul and the epistles generally can be seen to
be dependent on scripture (placed within a Platonic higher/lower world
philosophic context), and not upon historical tradition or knowledge of
a recent human Jesus. In other
words, is Paul's "born of woman" motivated or made possible by his
reading of Isaiah 7:14 and the necessity he perceived of applying such
biblical passages to his divine, spiritual-world Christ Jesus?
Those who appeal to Galatians 4:4's "born of woman"
usually do so in conjunction with a handful of other passages, notably
Romans 1:3 with its "arising/coming from the seed of David." Without
arguing in too much detail (as such passages are dealt with more fully
elsewhere on the site), I have pointed out that here the dependence on
scripture is, or should be, clear. This Davidic statement about the
Christ is declared by Paul to be part of God's gospel about the Son
found
in the prophets (verse 2). And he immediately follows it by offering
another
feature about the Son (verse 4: declared Son of God in power after his
resurrection) which is a heavenly scene most likely determined by Psalm
2:7-8. We thus have a direct example of Paul stating a "human" feature
for
Christ based on scripture, with no indication that any of it has
anything to do with known tradition about a recent man. Similar cases
abound throughout the epistles: among them, 1 Peter 2:22-3, in which
the writer
illustrates Jesus' humility by paraphrasing verses from Isaiah 53; or
Ephesians 2:17, in which the good news Christ proclaimed "in coming" is
also derived from Isaiah; or Hebrews 5:7, in which "the days
of his flesh" are illustrated not by Gospel events but by more readings
out of scripture. The pattern is pervasive. The
epistle writers of the first century base their statements about
Christ's activities not on memory and historical tradition but on
scripture.
Should we not be
justified in viewing Galatians 4:4 in the same light?
Declarations about "born of woman" are usually made
while ignoring its surrounding context. The phrase is introduced by the
statement that "in the fullness of time, God sent his Son". Yet what,
in that context, has been "sent"? The very next sentence, using
precisely
the same verb, states that God has "sent the spirit of his Son into our hearts."
(The root verb of "sent" is the same as that regularly used for the
sending of the Holy Spirit.) In the preceding chapter, what is it that
has "arrived" in the present time? In 3:23-25, Paul states it clearly:
it is the arrival of "faith",
not of Jesus himself. (The occasional translation of verse 24, "until
Christ came" stands in contradiction to verses 23 and 25, and can be
alternately translated as "to lead us to Christ," as the NIV and NEB
recognize.) Furthermore, the subject of the verb "redeem" ("sent his
Son...in
order
that he might redeem those under the law"), while technically
ambiguous, reads best as referring to God himself doing the redeeming
in the present time and not the Son. Such contextual features ought to
cast doubt on the phrase "born of woman" as referring to the recent
birth on earth of Jesus of Nazareth.
But an even more important objection is usually
overlooked. It is often argued that the phrase "born of woman"
in Jewish writings always refers to a human being, that it was a Jewish
idiom for a human being. Comparisons are made to Job (e.g., 14:1) or
Sirach (10:18), or even with Matthew and Luke's reference (from Q) to
John the
Baptist as "born of woman" (Mt. 11:11, Lk. 7:28). Therefore, it is
claimed, Paul must be using the phrase with the same meaning. But there
is a serious problem here. Paul does not say "born of woman." Rather,
he says
something which all English translations render with those words. In
fact, the words Paul does use in Greek do not conform to the other
Greek
versions of that allegedly same phrase, either in the Septuagint or the
Gospels. Nor
can we appeal to the Hebrew versions, because this begs the question
that the phrase in Hebrew is the equivalent of Paul's own Greek phrase.
In other words, there are no instances of Paul's specific phrase to be
found with the standard meaning of being "born" (physically, humanly)
of woman. Consequently, all arguments based on this comparison collapse.
What does Paul say? He notably does not use the standard word for
"born"
(gennaō)
which appears in all the Greek passages appealed
to for comparison. (Matthew
and Luke use an adjectival relative of the verb.) Instead, Paul
uses the verb ginomai. While
the latter verb is occasionally used for "born" in Greek, it has a much
broader application, in the sense of "come into existence," "be
created," "arise, occur, come to pass," etc. We are not justified in
taking a similar phrase which nevertheless uses a different verb and
start by automatically assuming that the two phrases 'must' have the
same meaning. This ought to be compellingly obvious.
In fact, if "born (genna
ō
) of
woman" is so common to refer to a human being, and Paul is referring to
a human being, why does he not use the standard phrase? What would
impel him to change the verb? Does this very change not imply that Paul
does not intend it to have
the
same meaning?
(Paul's own verb ginomai, by
the way, is the one he uses in Romans 1:3 when declaring Jesus as
"arising from the seed of David." If he meant "born of the seed of
David" in the human sense, why did he—or the writer of this piece of
liturgy before Paul, as many scholars view it—not simply use genna
ō
?) I
have suggested that the use of the broader ginomai would fit the more mythical
context which Paul's Christ inhabits, which is not recent history.
The only
attempt I have seen to rationalize this change of verb went something
like this: Paul does not want to use "born" because this might imply
that Jesus began his life at his human birth; since Jesus pre-existed
in heaven, he only "came" to earth through the agency of a woman giving
birth to his human incarnation. This suggestion might conceivably be on
the right track, but for the wrong reason.
Ginomai usually means, as I have
said,
come into existence or be created, which is exactly what Paul is
claimed to have wanted to avoid in passing up the verb genna
ō
.
Furthermore,
what believer, subscribing to the
epistles' view of the pre-existent Son, would be led by a use of genna
ō
to
think that Christ had somehow begun his existence at his human birth?
Such a confusion would simply not arise, and thus Paul would not feel
constrained to adopt an unusual word for birth. In any case, Jesus the
man—whose arrival on earth Paul is allegedly referring to—was "born" in the genna
ō
sense,
no one would dispute that or consider it philosophically unsound in
relation to his spiritual preexistence, so there would have been no
logical reason for Paul not to have used that verb IF HE WAS REFERRING
TO A HUMAN BEING.
As for what Paul did
mean by using ginomai may be
difficult to say.
Genna
ō
was
ruled out because he was not referring to the human birth of a human
man. On the other hand, it's clear he did not mean "be created, or come
into existence" by using ginomai.
Perhaps it had some mythological connotation for him. Perhaps it
could convey the sense of "come" or "change" from one state to
another, from purely spiritual to the "likeness" of flesh, a lower
state that was "in
relation to" the flesh; and it was through the (mythological) agency of
"woman" if only because Isaiah 7:14 said so. I am sometimes criticized
for not supplying "evidence" for this argument. Who else, it is
demanded, uses a phrase like "born of woman" to refer to an entirely
mythical figure?
No one, of course. Again, Paul doesn't say "born of woman" in the
genna
ō
sense;
but even "born of woman" in the ginomai
sense is not to be found. Is this significant? I hardly think so. We
have no equivalent writings to those of someone like Paul from the
Greek savior-god cults. And if this is Paul's personal deduction from
his
reading of Isaiah 7:14—and most of what he says about the Christ is
claimed to come through his own personal revelation—then it is not
surprising that no other early writer of the Christ cult happens to use
the
same expression. (And let's not overlook that no early Christian writer
outside the Gospels ever speaks of Christ as "born of woman" even in
the
genna
ō
sense!)
Argument, rather than evidence, is all
that is available, but this does not render using argument any less
legitimate an exercise.
By extension, comparisons are often made to certain other
passages in the epistles implying birth or human descent. I've already
pointed out the most common of these, Romans 1:3, which runs into the
same problem as Galatians 4:4 in its use of ginomai. Paul is not saying here
that the Son was "born" of the seed of David. Another is Romans 9:4-5,
and let's examine this verse a little more closely. Here there is not
even a verb at all, neither genna
ō
nor
ginomai. The NIV begins by
nicely reflecting the literal structure of the passage: "Theirs [Paul's
kinsmen, the people of Israel] is the adoption as sons; theirs the
divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple
worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from
them...[here the NIV abandons the literal in favor of reading the
historical Jesus into things]...is traced the human ancestry of
Christ." Well, the last phrase is not in the Greek. Literally, it
reads: "...from whom [the Israelites] the Christ according to the flesh
(kata sarka)." I won't go into
the broad and ambiguous usage of kata
sarka which I have argued over at great length in many places
and on various discussion boards. Suffice to say, this passage when
taken as a
whole is not strong, let alone conclusive, on implying that Christ is
physically descended
from the Israelites. Rather, the enumeration Paul gives us includes
Christ, but it is in the sense of things that belong to the Israelites, part of
their identity (all we get is the genitive plural preposition
ōn)
: the law, the covenant, the temple worship, the promises.
Christ, too, belongs to the Israelites, having proceeded in some way
(again, influenced by the David prophecies) from them—ex
ōn—
in regard to the
flesh or the sphere of the flesh, which does not have to mean
physically
possessing it in the
earthly sense.
All that we can say Paul is declaring about Jesus is
that he belongs to the Israelites in regard to his redeeming
activities, which took place in a realm that related to the material
one. This conforms to my statement that Paul's savior god could be said
to have a national "lineage" that was Jewish, just as other savior gods
had their own lineage. Some, including Richard Carrier, have taken me
to task for not supporting this with direct comparisons to those other
gods of the mystery cults, but they have read too much into this. My
statement is hardly unusual. Osiris could be styled as "Egyptian" in
that he was part of Egyptian mythology and (originally) located in that
country; similarly, Adonis as Greek, Attis as Phrygian, Mithras as
Persian.
Paul's Christ Jesus has a Jewish mythology, grown out of the Jewish
scriptures and related to Jewish historical figures by those
scriptures. Thus he belongs or is related to the Israelites. The fact
that Paul and other writers, in passages like Romans 9:5, never use a
more specific phrase such as "Christ's human ancestry" (which
translators and critics of the mythicist case nevertheless insist on
inserting into their reading of such passages), would strengthen the
argument that they are not referring to anything so specific.
I have also been taken to task over another
statement relating to "born of woman": that similar things were said
about other savior gods, such as Dionysus. (Note that I don't say the
phrase itself can be found in reference to this, only the idea.) It is
regularly pointed out that such a feature for a god like Dionysus was
envisioned as having taken place on earth. That's true, but with two
qualifications. This type of mythology tended to be placed in a
primordial past; it originated at a time when there was no concept of
distinct spiritual and physical worlds. Nevertheless, this primordial
(or sacred) past was the earlier equivalent to more Platonic views of
the universe, and I have argued that the latter came to largely replace
the former
by the time of Christianity's beginnings. Things worked in similar ways
in the relationship between primordial and historical times as they did
between higher and lower worlds in the Platonic system, and so such an
evolution would not have been too difficult conceptually. In ways we
cannot define too
exactly (we don't have enough extant writings), such concepts as
Dionysus being "born of woman" should have been able to undergo a
transfer to the new
Platonic setting. The Christ cult, as preached by Paul, arose at a time
when the Platonic view was established, and thus there was no
'primordial past' phase for Christian mythology. It took up residence
directly in the higher/lower-world milieu of the mystery cults in
general—which is why it had such a paucity of the earth-based style of
features until the Gospels came along.
But where it lacked earth-based primordial-past features, it compensated by plumbing an equally rich source, the Jewish scriptures. As I've pointed out above, everything that is said about Christ, his nature and activities, can be shown to have a scriptural precedent or impulse. A few like Romans 1:3 are spelled out for us. Paul's Christ is an evolution out of scripture, particularly the latter's messianic passages, and thus all these references had to be applied to the new savior god. The traditional Messiah had become the divine Son and Logos. Therefore, all the references to a descendant of David restoring the nation had to be applied to the new Christ Jesus; he had to be "of the seed of David." In the confused messianic reading of Isaiah 7:14, he had to be "conceived and borne by a woman." Some difficulty may well have been present in getting the mind around this concept, but there it was, in scripture. Perhaps, as suggested above, this was why Paul chose to change the verb in his Galatians 4:4 phrase and elsewhere. It was too much to style this as a literal, historical birth; and so some nuance, perhaps, entailed in the word ginomai got around the application of Isaiah 7:14. It was too jarringly infeasible to speak of Jesus' "human ancestry" in describing his relationship to the Jews, as in Romans 9:5, and so such a connection was subsumed under the more general "in relation to the flesh": kata sarka.
We must also keep
in mind that in this era, the dominant philosophical outlook of the
day, Platonism, influenced those who interpreted the meaning of sacred
scripture to do so in terms of higher world
realities—as witness Philo. Although we have no way of knowing whether
Paul had read
philosophers like Philo or was simply breathing the atmosphere of his
time, Pauline passages like 1 Corinthians 8:6 and Colossians 1:15-20
(as well as yet another writer's very Platonic opening chapter of
Hebrews) show that the early Christian epistles inhabited this thought
world. (Regardless of whether Paul himself may have been a "Pharisee":
Paul was an innovative thinker and not straitjacketed by mainstream
paradigms.) Thus it is not a stretch to see statements like Galatians
4:4 and Romans 1:3 and 9:5 as relating to those spiritual world
realities and their relationships with the material world, and not to
recent history—just as the mystery cult myths were being viewed in the
same period.
As for the follow-up phrase, "born under the law," this need be little more than an expansion on the "born of woman." It's a different way of referring to Jesus' relationship to the Jews, as belonging to them. However, there is no necessity to think that Jesus was regarded as personally subject to the law. In fact, the whole of chapter 3 suggests otherwise: Christ supersedes the law, and by belonging to him and sharing in his nature as the "seed" of Abraham, the believer inherits God's promise and emerges in a state free of the law. Both phrases also serve to connect Christ and his believers within that paradigmatic relationship at the foundation of the Hellenistic salvation system: both undergo the same experiences and share elements of nature (a "like" form which the god takes on, suffering and death, etc.), so that humans will receive the benefits and guarantees generated by the god's actions. This is a concept going back into the dim past, long before Paul and his predecessors formulated their redeeming Messiah-Son.
Malcolm writes:
In Daniel 9:24-27 is a prophecy that explicitly gives the amount of time between when Jerusalem was "rebuilt" and when "the Anointed One" will come. If one dates the timing of the decree to rebuild Jersualem as in Nehemiah 2:1 [444 or 445 BCE], uses known dates for the reign of King Artaxerxes, and counts the number of days according to the different calendar systems, one gets a date for the Messiah's coming around 30 CE. How do you explain this? This seems unlikely to just be a coincidence, as it is just about the only prophecy of the Messiah that gives a specific date for his return. The fact that Daniel was written in the second century BCE would not affect the validity of this prophesy, although it would discredit just about all the other ones in this book.
Response to Malcolm:
The Prophecy in Daniel 9 / Old Testament Prophecy
Old Testament prophecy: one of the most frustrating
subjects in the entire field of biblical research.
Actually, "research" is almost the wrong word. This subject has little
to do
with critical research and everything to do with apologetics. Inherent
in questions like Malcolm's is not the
issue of Jesus' existence or anything to do with understanding the
historical development of the bible. Nor is it so much a question of
understanding the mechanisms of prophecy and their interpretation.
Rather, the apologists who put forward
such things as the prophecy in Daniel 9 are claiming that this is
evidence of the bible's sacred nature and Jesus' divine role. If
Daniel's 'prophecy' can be shown to point to Jesus,
this would make Jesus the object of some divine code
placed in scripture and boost the claim for his divinity.
Let's approach this from a number of angles, and
common sense is going to figure in all of them. Critical scholarship
has adequately demonstrated that the
writer of the book of Daniel is heavily embroiled in the crisis Israel
went through (167-164
BCE) during the
reign of its Hellenistic overlord Antiochus IV, a crisis that resulted
in the Maccabean uprising. Conforming to one of the features of
apocalyptic writing (in fact it was a major trendsetter in that genre),
the writer has 'dated' his work to the 6th century BCE and assigned it
to the legendary figure of Daniel in order to provide an assortment of
'prophecies'
that had already come to pass prior to his own time. By presenting
the 6th century Daniel as successfully predicting the future in those
cases, the writer strengthens the reader's willingness to believe in
the prophecies he is actually making in regard to his own future. But
that future is an immediate one, not one almost two centuries hence.
The writer's focus is entirely on the Antiochian crisis, and there is
no reason to think that in this passage he chooses to step outside
his subject and supply a prophecy for the 1st century CE or beyond.
(Such an
"atomistic" use of scripture—divorcing a given passage from its
context—is the mark of conservative apologetics, not critical
research.) Even more ludicrous would be the claim that a divine mind
behind the author of Daniel took control of his pen at that point and
inserted one of the Deity's many cryptic indications of the coming
of a Savior-Son the immediate writer had no inkling of.
With that in mind, let's take a look at the prophecy
itself and how some interpret it. I'm not sure what Malcolm is
referring to by "different calendar systems" or counting by days, but
standard approaches to interpreting this 'prophecy' do so in simple
terms of years, arriving at 490 years for the so-called "70 weeks of
years". First, one must realize that this prophecy is an interpretation
of an earlier prophecy of Jeremiah (as in Jer. 25:11-12)
which forecast the period of the exile (587-538) as 70 years. Chapter 9
begins with a
perplexed Daniel musing about this prophecy.
(It
was inaccurate, as the exilic period did not last for 70 years,
which may explain Daniel's perplexity.)
The angel Gabriel arrives to provide an explanation; he gives it an
interpretation which is an expansion of the original Jeremiah prophecy,
applying it to (Daniel's)
future. The Deity apparently has to revise an
earlier prophecy which turned out to be inaccurate in its plain
interpretation—Jer. 25:11-12 clearly relates the 70 years to the period
of the Babylonian subjection—by letting a later prophet know that it
was
really more cryptic than that, and was meant to apply to a period in
the further future. That later prophet, whether Daniel himself or the
2nd century BCE
author writing in his name, in turn misunderstood the explanation,
since the
context of the book of Daniel makes use of the revised prophecy
to forecast the time of Antiochus IV. It was left to a yet future
clarification by Christians to apply this evolving prophecy to Jesus
and their view of the impending end of the world. Subsequent
generations, right into the 20th century, have been forced to
manipulate the prophecy's features even further in order to solve the
1st century inaccuracy (the end did not arrive when they expected) and
to rescue its continuing relevance.
Several scholarly interpretations of the writer's
application of the 70 weeks of years have been offered. But first,
let's see how it is claimed to apply in the apologetic sense, as
relating to Jesus. If the reference in 9:25 is to the order to rebuild
Jerusalem's wall in 445 BCE (and this is not as clear-cut a case as it
seems), add 490
years and you come up with a date of 45 CE, not 30 or 33, or whatever
date is claimed to apply to Jesus' death or the beginning of his
ministry. (I confess I am not familiar with all the ins and outs
of the apologetic manoeuvering that attempts to get the dates to
properly coincide.) Then there are problems with the prophecy itself.
If
this is a divine indicator of the future coming of the Son and Savior
of the world, it's pretty trivial. Verse 26's reference to "an anointed
one" being "removed" (NEB) or "cut off" (RSV, KJ) is all that is said
about him, with no indication of any particular importance for this
figure, certainly no more than for the earlier "anointed one" mentioned
in verse 25 who came centuries earlier. Consequently, to style this
passage as a prophecy of "the Messiah" is a little misplaced, since
there is no focus on one individual, no single
"anointed one". Far more attention, in
fact, is given to
the "prince" (v. 26-27) who will come immediately afterward
to destroy the city and temple, and there is no suggestion that this
prince is acting as a consequence of the "cutting off" of the previous
anointed one. To interpret Jesus out of all
this is an exercise in maddening obscurity.
As far as numbers go, linking the prophecy to the
crisis in the time of Antiochus (167-164 BCE) is not so
straightforward either. If we take verse 24 to refer to the rebuilding
of the city walls in 445 BCE, then 490 years far overshoots the time of
Daniel's author. But there are a number of other considerations. First
of all, the angel
Gabriel is expanding on the Jeremiah prophecy. And as W. S. Towner (Harper's Bible Commentary, p.704)
points
out, the first seven weeks of the 70 weeks of years exactly fits the
period of the
Babylonian exile that Jeremiah was forecasting, that is, the 49 years
from 587
to
538 BCE. Towner, and John J. Collins (The
Apocalyptic Imagination,
p.86-7), suggest that the first "anointed one" of verse 25 could be
Zerubbabel, styled "governor" in Haggai 1:1 and 2:2; or possibly
Joshua,
the first post-exilic high priest at the same time. In Haggai,
Zerubbabel and Joshua are
charged with rebuilding the temple when the exiles first came back to
Jerusalem, so perhaps the reference by the angel to the onset of the
prophecy's period is intended as the time of the return, rather than a
century later under Nehemiah. This doesn't solve the math, however,
since 490 years from c.538 is still too far, even if one deducts 49
years as applying to the pre-538 exile period. (62 weeks until the
cutting off
of the later anointed one, or 434 years, carries us to 104 BCE.)
The details of the latter part of the prophecy,
on the other hand, fit very well
the circumstances in the Antiochian crisis of 167-164. The later
"anointed one" many seek to identify with Jesus is better fitted to
Onias III, the
last 'legitimate' high priest who was deposed in favor of his brother
in 175 and then murdered some time later (2 Maccabees 4). The 62-week
period up to Onias is
followed by a final week in which the temple is desecrated and other
horrors befall. This carries us into the pivotal time of the years
following 167 when
Daniel's author was writing, and the details of the crisis are mirrored
in the details of the prophecy, although the writer goes out on a limb
and forecasts an ending to the final week which was not in fact
fulfilled in history. (Which leads scholars to deduce that he was
writing in the midst
of the crisis and before its resolution.) Some try to link the final
stages of the prophecy with the Jewish War (66-70 CE), but this doesn't
fit the details, which place the arrival of the "prince" and the
outbreak of war immediately after the fall of the "anointed one," not
35 to 40 years later.
These discrepancies are much more critical on the
apologist side. If this is a divine prophecy, it should be accurate,
with no margin of error. If, on the other hand, it is simply a
human writing by a mind saturated with the primitive traditions and
superstitions of his time, then we need not expect it to conform
to our modern sense of accuracy and rationality. In much the
same way that the New Testament book of Revelation's inconsistencies
and
contradictions are not resolvable by rational standards (which doesn't
prevent many from trying to make them so, since this document is
presumably God's word, too), we need to look elsewhere than strict
mathematics for the
explanation of the 70 weeks of years prophecy.
John J. Collins (Ibid.,
p.87) follows this line of reasoning. "The angel explains that the
seventy weeks [sic: Collins must mean
"years" making this a typo] of Jeremiah are really seventy weeks
of years. It is
assumed that the biblical number can be regarded as a symbol and
interpreted allegorically. The seventy weeks of years, 490 years, are
not the product of any chronological calculation. Rather they reflect a
traditional schema, ultimately inspired by the idea of the jubilee year
(Leviticus 25) and may be taken as an instance of 'sabbatical
eschatology.' We have seen similar schemata in connection with the
Apocalypse of Weeks, the seventy generations in 1 Enoch 10, and the
seventy shepherds in the Animal Apocalypse. At least some of the
Enochic passages are older than Daniel and show that Daniel drew on
traditions that were shared by other apocalyptic writings."
In other words, counting weeks, days or years is an
exercise in futility. The writer of Daniel was governed by "traditional
schema" and fitted these into his pattern, regardless of whether the
numbers worked accurately or not. But while Collins is following the
right track, I think his focus is a bit off the mark. Seventy may
be a traditional figure in apocalyptic usage, but the writer of Daniel
is setting out not so much to conform to that pattern as to deal
directly with the Jeremiah prophecy and its 70 years. That prophecy
blithely predicted the establishment of some kind of paradise for
Israel at the fulfilment of the period. Such a paradise or
transformation of the world, of course,
never comes about, and so later generations—continuing into our own
day—feel impelled to explain
why it didn't come, and to substitute a reinterpreted or new prophecy.
It wasn't 70 years that Jeremiah meant before Israel would be restored
in all its glory, says the angel, but 70 weeks of years. The writer of
Daniel is stuck with the 70 figure and makes do as best he can, without
worrying too much about whether it's an exact fit for his purposes.
Despite what he says about the rebuilding of the
city, or what specific date he may have had in mind, Jeremiah's 70
years began at the start of the Exile, which supports the theory that
the first seven weeks (49 years) of the prophetic span in Daniel refers
to the 49 years of the exilic period. Otherwise, we would have quite a
striking coincidence. As for the rest of the time span, we should not,
as I say,
expect the creator of this expanded prophecy to be scientifically
accurate. His subsequent 62 weeks are not broken down or identified
with any particular events; they are simply the remainder when the
outer edges were cut off. (He may not even have bothered to calculate
whether they fitted exactly.) It is the final week of his 70 weeks of
years that he is
most concerned with, and that week is employed quite accurately since
they
refer to the events of his own time.
We might note in passing that the vagueness and
inaccuracy of such 'prophecy' is characteristic of apocalyptic writing
generally. This is why scholars and apologists often have difficulty in
matching what these prophecies or visions say with actual history.
(Revelation's conglomeration of apocalyptic and mythological figures
and motifs is notably frustrating in its inconsistency and obscurity.)
We have to remember that the genre as a whole is fantastical, crude,
and primitive in its mindset, reflective of those who created it. To
regard any of it as the
pronouncement of an omnipotent God is ludicrous in the extreme.
As Collins intimates, the prophecy in Daniel (along
with its other prophetic passages), is in the same genre and possesses
the
same features and quality as prophetic expressions found throughout
Jewish writings over the course of centuries. Since we hardly grant a
necessary divine authorship and accuracy to, for example, the
Apocalypse of Weeks in 1 Enoch 93, what would lead us to do so in
Daniel 9? Certainly, the quality of the latter prophecy, in terms of
reliability and sophistication, is no greater than those of
non-canonical documents. All are an expression of the temper and modes
of thinking of the time. To arbitrarily grant divine status to select
examples, indeed to regard such ancient, primitive expressions as
continuing to have any relevance for modern beliefs and evaluations of
history or reality, is a travesty of the intellect.
Yet even segments of modern New Testament
scholarship continue to stand by these apocalypses and try to justify
their features. J. C. Whitcomb Jr., in the very conservative New Bible Dictionary (p.264),
points out that one must posit a "hiatus" before the final week of the
70, since "Christ placed the desolating sacrilege at the very end of
the present age" (according to the Little Apocalypse of the synoptics,
as in Mt. 24). Arguing that such hiatuses are common in the Old
Testament, he inserts an indefinite period between week 62 and the
final 7 days, characterizing the latter as "a 7-year period immediately
preceding the second advent of Christ, during which time antichrist
rises to world dominion and persecutes the saints." When even educated
minds can continue to subscribe to such mumbo-jumbo, we as a society
are in desperate intellectual straits.
The problem is, so is our view of God—if such an
entity
exists. All these things are reputed to be his expression, his means of
'educating' the faithful, of pointing the path to salvation. Lee
Strobel, in The Case for Christ,
devotes an entire chapter to Jesus as the fulfilment of Old Testament
prophecy, touting it as one of the justifications for Christian faith.
Conservative and not-so-conservative Christianity still appeals to the
idea of prophecy of Jesus imbedded in the Jewish scriptures, as a
'proof-text' of the validity of the New Testament and Jesus' own
divinity. Scriptural passages, such as those of the Suffering Servant
Song of Isaiah 53, are pointed to as amazing and telling forecasts of
Jesus' experiences in his passion, totally ignoring the far more
sensible idea that the passion segment of the Gospels has been
constructed
by the
evangelists, who pieced together those passages and others into a
coherent story, which makes the 'fulfilment' of those 'prophecies' part
of a
circular process.
And there is the larger question of our view of a
supposed God,
or rather our justification of him. As I say in my book Challenging
the Verdict: A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel's 'The Case for Christ',
(p.137): "Did it not occur to Mr. Lapides [the interviewee in the
chapter on prophecy, and a convert from Judaism to Christianity on the
basis of its alleged fulfilment in Jesus] to wonder why God would
operate in this manner? Was the omnipotent creator of the universe
playing with his creatures? To imbed in a motley collection of writings
little bits and pieces of data about the future life of his Son on
earth, obscured by their contexts, trivialized by their brevity, open
to contradiction by their own inconsistencies, and then to expect that
all people would divine and recognize a future Jesus figure who turned
out to be a dramatic departure from the established expectations set up
by many of those alleged prophecies? Such behavior on the part of the
Deity would seem bizarre by any standard. When it is claimed that this
procedure was God's way of providing the means by which human beings
could anticipate and believe in Jesus and thereby gain eternal
salvation, the idea becomes positively outrageous."
Look out upon this universe of a billion billion
suns,
into its fantastic microscopic makeup, its long history of evolution
and the complexity of life and the human mind, and then turn to the
bible
and read Revelation and Danielic prophecy, or Jesus talking to demon
spirits that cause illness, walking on water and out of his tomb, the
fantasies of heaven and hell, the principle of blood sacrifice of an
incarnated deity coming at one time and place as the only means of
humanity's salvation. It's time
to take stock of the long outdated foundations of western society and
bring our belief systems into line with 21st century reality and
rational thinking.
Lately there has been a noticeable shift in the nature of the comments and queries I receive. More of them are showing an interest in the broader topic of religion and rationality. Many messages, of course, continue to be negative toward my position on an historical Jesus, but there also seems to be a growing concern 'out there' with what is perceived to be a disturbing trend toward irrationality and the suppression of critical thinking in North American society where religion is concerned. Consequently, in this Reader Feedback I am prefacing the regular Queries and Responses on the Jesus question with an expanded section in which, along with the usual quoting of general remarks about the website, I discuss comments being made in regard to Religion and Rationality. As part of this, I have devoted more space to reproducing those readers' viewpoints, positive and negative, as they are inherently interesting and deserve to be heard. Replies to queries concerning the historical Jesus question will continue to follow the usual format, and are listed by name and subject heading on the Index page, while the R & R comments will be without headings and not listed in the Index.
Robert writes:
I am writing to let you know that on a recent forum a writer declared that you had denounced your own works and embraced Christianity. Feeling that I know your point of view quite well, I assured the writer that they were in error. But if they aren't in error, I would be curious to know what might have brought you to recant.
Thank you for your contribution to reason.
E.D.: Thanks for letting me know about my recent conversion. If you hear any further information, I'd be interested in knowing how it came about, and how I let the world know about it. My web site, as you can see, is still in existence, without any attached denunciations. There have been no book burnings, and there are still many cartons of both The Jesus Puzzle and Challenging the Verdict available for sale.
Ron writes:
I just wanted to say that I appreciate your clear and concise writing on the subject of religious mythology. I have struggled for many years with teachings forced on me in Christian education establishments, namely Christian Brother Colleges where I was victimised and ostracised for not being Catholic. My clarity and peace of mind has finally been established through reading the publications of yourself, Richard Dawkins, Robert Price, Irshad Manji, and last but not least Mr. Darwin's Origin of Species.
Brian writes:
I make
regular visits to the Jesus Puzzle site. Just to make sure it's still
there, still being updated, still an information source I can point
people to.
I remember reading several years back that you were 72
years of age. My parents are both 76 now, and doing well health-wise.
But I am increasingly aware of their mortality. It is with that
disclaimer that I offer my best wishes on your health, happiness, and
intellectual veracity. As I have found your thesis/work to be a
continued source of rational thought, reason, hope and inspiration, I
am also aware that none of us live forever. To that extent, it is
important to me to align myself with those ideas and philosophies that
reflect and expand on my own ever-evolving ideas. May you and your
efforts continue to thrive in this world.
E.D.: Please don't rush
me, I've got another decade to go before I hit 72! But thanks for
your good wishes for my health, although you are right: none of us will
live forever. Nothing in the observable universe suggests things are
set up that way. In fact, evolution proceeds because
we all die and make room for further development
—
hopefully of a
progressive nature. Religion is a way of avoiding and denying
that seemingly unforgiving reality of life. (I will have more to say on
this topic in further responses below.)
Bruce writes:
I
just wanted to say that the numerous responses on your website,
indicating that your readers have actually come to understand much
better what the New Testament is all about, is one of the very few
examples out there of someone actually changing people's minds about
the subject of Christianity. Your language is simple enough for much of
the ordinary readership to understand, and
keeping your comments at the level of common sense is
what makes it particularly effective. That is why I ordered 5
books from you, because I have some hope that, in passing these around,
the simple clarity of your work will persuade where more jargon-laced
material would discourage the reader after a few pages.
Most of my friends are Christian and have
absolutely no clue, for example, that the gospels are not eyewitness
testimonies, that Matthew copies Mark, and on and on. None of my
friends have ever heard even a peep about the utter lack of history in
the epistles and the devastating implication that
has regarding the historicity of the (later written) gospels. I
think you have rightly recognized that the epistles are truly the key
to understanding the ahistorical nature of the gospels. If
the
smoking gun in the New Testament is the suspicion
that the gospel "history" is nothing but Old
Testament borrowings, then the epistles are the bullet that shoots
the "oral history" origin of the gospels dead in its tracks.
Frank writes:
Thank
you for your clear and convincing research into the development of
Christianity and for a convincing demonstration that Jesus of Nazareth
never existed. For years I have had doubts and questions that no one
could answer satisfactorily. I very much enjoy your writing style and
your clear presentations.
Unfortunately, most otherwise intelligent Christian people
will likely never accept the mythicist explanation. They simply have
too much emotional investment to change, or even listen to the data. I
do hope someone will present a credible counter-argument; it would be
most interesting to read/study.
E.D.: It certainly
would,
though we are still waiting. Most mainstream scholars have a pretty
abysmal understanding of the mythicist argument and to the extent that
they respond to it at all usually appeal to old and timeworn objections
that have long been answered. It's a little like the Creationists'
constant appeal to the Second Law of Thermodynamics in 'disproving' the
possibility of evolution on earth, despite the fact that a fourth-grade
student
can offer an easy explanation for it. What's more difficult is getting
them to listen.
Robert writes:
The first reading of The Jesus Puzzle provided
a compelling case for me. It was more of an organized approach to my
eclectic dabblings and resolution to a myth-leaning view I have dubbed
the "composite" approach. As I considered discussions of your
work on message boards such as www.infidels.org
I discovered the best way to handle the opposition was to return to
your work. A more thorough reading with these critiques in mind
has made your work stronger than my first read.
One of the disappointing features of "mainstream"
scholarship is imputing altruistic motives into the Christian
literature. Frankly, this is special pleading and goes against
centuries of deception, fraud, and forgery in biblical tracts and
religious practice. I suppose you've done well in not inciting
dismissive opposition by avoiding such frank terms. But on the other
hand, this heritage is evidencial. The Bible is among other things a
set of political documents, with associated objectives of power and
control. The invention of the historical Jesus was a political
necessity in consolidating disparate "Christ" movements. This was
amplified by the eventual one state/one religion approach of the
Romans. Viewing biblical literature from the special-pleading stance of
"they wrote what they believed" is worse than naive. I suppose you are
to be congratulated for striking a diplomatic balance between calling
it like it is and not insulting the deluded.
Richard writes:
I
still love reading your essays, Mr. Doherty.
So many words are shed for such malady! Mainly
I enjoy the texture and rhythm of your ideas as they merge and fade in
and out of logic and myth. It is like reading a great music score
with all its themes and counterpoints and cadences and modulations!
It is an art form akin to a dream! No, I am
not saying what you do is not important! It is very important; but oh
how we struggle to unwrap the cloak of myth from around our sad
brows—all cast in hapless madness we are!
Dreaming of gods; saints;
miracles and heaven's relief from non-existing sins, hells, devils and
evils!
What an absurdity we humans are as we cannot
just see the face of the world as it is: Just trees, lands, skies full
of stars and planets; animals and birds! Alas, we must image
metaphysics to be real when all there is the rock hard realm of
nature-reality (blame Plato for that cursed idea I suppose).
Keep up the good work—the
gods deserved to be
buried in their mythic graves once and for all time (such mischief they
do weave amongst men)!
E.D.:
And atheism is accused of lacking poetry!
Thomas writes:
Although
I have pursued my own study of the origins of Christianity for the last
several years, it was not until just recently that I happened upon your
web site and two of your books. All I can say is: Bravo! From my own
readings and experience (I am not nearly a so-called "expert") I can
appreciate the enormity of your task. Virtually the entire academic
world and the overwhelming majority of the "religious" populace have
presumed—not proven, nor scientifically tested,
nor even considered,
for that matter—that your central hypothesis is
wrong! To even hint
that there may not have been a unique historical personality named
"Jesus" behind the creation of Christianity is automatically regarded
as intellectual blasphemy. Of course, I am sure that I do not need to
inform you of your opposition's presuppositions and biases.
Admittedly, my own first reaction to the idea that
the historical Jesus was a pure fiction was one of unwavering
dismissal. After about a year of open-minded research and study I still
accepted the "party-line" that the historical Jesus must be buried
under the words, beliefs and customs of later believers. "Jesus" had
become the "Christ" in the minds of these later disciples, but surely
the original Jesus lay buried beneath these later attributions and
accretions. After a careful, objective consideration I realized that
the prospect of creating a unique historical biography or even broad
outline of "Jesus" was a virtual impossibility. The sheer breadth and
diversity of interpretations of the central Christian writings by
so-called historical Jesus scholars—from around
the world—began to
shake my confidence that even a scientific methodology for uncovering a
historical Jesus could be formulated. Of course, I lost my confidence
because I was inadvertently making an assumption, an assumption that
all of the scholars I was studying made—that
there MUST have been a
real man named Jesus underlying the earliest Christian writings. After
more than a year of study I abandoned this assumption and started to
read the evidence under a new hypothesis: that the "Christ" of
Hellenistic-Judaic mythology had become the "Jesus" of history.
Under this new hypothesis the entire development and
growth of Christianity in the first several centuries of the Common Era
began to make much more sense to me. I can only hope that with more
time, and because of the work that individuals such as you perform,
more people will begin to question the assumptions they have made.
Jeff writes:
You
make a compelling case for the myth theory. I have a special love for
myth and legend, and enjoy watching how they develop over time. The
picture you paint dovetails nicely with how we know other legends
developed
,
King Arthur and
William
Tell, for instance. If you're right,
the last two millennia in the West have been lived under one of the
most incredible and fascinating myths ever to come into being.
E.D.: Yes, and if
somehow that realization were to pervade our society overnight, it
would produce a trauma of staggering proportions. The social organism
would probably not be capable of handling it and thus resists even
considering the idea. It will be a slow and painstaking process.
Claude writes:
Your
website brings hope that a better world can be foreseen for our kids,
though at
this tremendously slow pace taken by humans to acquire a new sense of
life.
Being myself addicted to seeking the truth, your work stands as the
best
reference in achieving that goal, along with other skeptic web sites.
Many
thanks for that. Throughout ongoing readings in the last ten years, I
practically rediscovered nature through your eyes and those of Gould,
Dawkins,
Randi and others. One thing that strikes me each time is the
apparently
unbridgeable gap in opinion and perception between religious people and
skeptics of all ascent [?].
Considering all that has been said from both
sides, one
point stands out as, I think, a big misunderstanding of human nature.
This
misunderstanding led and still leads to larger than natural
expectations about
what we really are and what we would like to be.
As a geologist, I was soon introduced to
large,
mind-boggling numbers, either in space and time. So much for
creationists! Having learned that the human race came quite late
in the
history of life on earth, it was an easy step to believe that mankind
for sure
cannot show all signs of perfection. As the wonderful story of Vardis
Fisher
unfolds, one can understand that the passage between animal instinct
and
moral-driven behavior was a slow and empirical process. My point is
that we
tend to forget that this stage is still at play nowadays. Despite the
perception that we realised major achievements in the last 50,000
years, this
lapse of time represents only the glimpse of an eye on an evolutionary
perspective (even with the meme vs gene effect). But religions made
mankind
atop of nature. With that in mind, there is no way to connect what we
are from
where we belong. Instinct and animal behavior are still very present in
our day
to day life. Recognizing that would already be something we can
cope
with. Instead, each action bearing such behavior puts ourselves in the
land of
evil. Of course, those instincts sometimes bring bad news but as
history
showed, dismissing them totally proved to be a lot worse. I like to
think that
real accomplishment has to rely on the knowledge of our very nature.
E.D.: One of
the greatest 'sins'
of religion is the disconnect it produces between human beings and
their environment. Without an understanding of what we are and how we
came about we can never realize our full potential or create a healthy
species. Currently in North America, society is approaching a state of
scientific
illiteracy through the widespread suppression of the teaching of
evolution in our schools. Racism, tribalism, religious fanaticism will
never be eradicated while we remain largely ignorant
—
or in denial
—
of
our true nature and that of the universe we live in.
Claude refers to the "Vardis Fisher story"
known as The
Testament of Man. While this series of eleven historical novels has
been out of print for decades, it still stands as western literature's
most
powerful creation in representing evolution's long process of human
self-understanding. See the Age of Reason website for a reprint of my
series of reviews of Fisher's amazing work:
http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/AORVardisFisher.htm
Bruce writes:
Ron writes:
E.D.: I wouldn't lose sleep over it. What would be most interesting about human contact with an alien species who had never heard of Jesus would be the reaction of some Christians. I wonder how many would simply appeal to various scriptural passages and dismiss the entire alien race as "unsaved" because they had never heard of the one true Savior. After all, they did the same during the phase of this-world exploration and discovery.
As for the beginning of the Christian movement, my feeling is that Christ-belief was not long in existence before Paul and the Jerusalem group around Peter and James that he witnesses to. A 'guess' would be a couple of decades or so before Paul's conversion. His words suggest that it was a relatively new phenomenon he attached himself to, though of course it grew in part out of older precedents.
Paul writes:
Thanks for your tireless research into the Jesus myth. I know, it's not truly tireless, and your work has obviously required many sacrifices on your part. Still, it looks more like the efforts of a team of dedicated scholars, rather than one person. Well done , very well done. Of course, the question remains...will Christians be convinced? And the answer, for the most part, is "No."There's a part of me that finds it funny when Christians get so worked up by mythicist research. Personally, I think myths and folklore are like poetry, and I would no more dismiss them than I would dismiss any of the arts. The problems emerge when people use every violent means at their disposal to force history to conform to a mythic worldview. But what's funny to me is that there is nothing in your critique that would prevent someone from being motivated by a purely spiritual Jesus.
Why are people so upset by your work? Why can't they just love the myth as myth?
Michael writes:
My
goodness, some of these kind folks are practically foaming at the
mouth.
Gary writes:
Your
standards are fraud, and for a very obvious reason
—
you
are trying to
destroy someone else's realities (Christians), and the easiest way to
do
that is smearing while calling it reason. Since you have no stake in
the outcome, mockery is as good as honesty. Specifically, you try to
prove points which would not be relevant if true. Rabbinical literature
shows exactly what it should be expected to show. The Jews had no
interest in Christ until Christianity became significantly developed.
By analyzing the details you claim it shows something, while it shows
nothing.
Another example (from your twelve points) is the claim
that Christ is only referred to in spiritual terms rather than as an
actual person. It's a total contrivance with no relationship to
reality. The standard is to smear the subject, and you pretend to be
creating some higher standard of reason. It's nothing but degeneracy.
All you are proving is that atheists operate at the level of
degenerates.
E.D.:
The writer
identifies himself as a "moral philosopher".
Landon writes:
Well, your website is an interesting one.
I'm currently writing a paper for a class on the impact of Jesus upon
American culture. Your books and website are great material for me,
because they prove just how important Jesus is to this culture.
Let's face it, for one reason or another you
feel compelled to attempt to rip people away from their faith. Why does
it matter if people believe in Jesus Christ to you? I mean does it do
you any specific harms? It must do something, because you are not
content to merely just sit with your unbelief, but you have to work
hard at convincing others to believe the same thing you do. You embrace
faith, then, just a different kind. The intriguing thing is that
without Jesus you wouldn't have a job. What would a man like yourself
do? I'm also curious to know why you seem to lack a hatred of Mohammed,
Joseph Smith, Confucious, etc. They, too, attempted to get the world to
believe in something. Is there something about Jesus Christ that
personally bothers you? I'm just curious here. I don't want to call you
bad names and insult you, but I am interested in why you hate the
notion of Jesus Christ. If one were to follow his teachings, would they
be worse off? I mean you call yourself a humanist, and to me the
teachings of Christ are indeed very humane. What makes life better
without Christ as opposed to those who actually do indeed believe in
Him? I'll grant you that there is a lot of mystery and strangeness
surrounding the character of Jesus Christ. I do not know everything,
and I will claim that. However, to claim he does not exist and to try
and prove that everything about Christianity is a great big lie seems a
bit extreme on your part. Can't you just rest comfortably in your own
un-belief? I guess not. Well I do believe that absolute Truth exists,
and when I read stuff by you and others who hate the notion of Christ,
it does not anger me so much as make me hurt for you. There is a loving
God, Mr. Doherty, who went through hell for you. You have made the
choice to reject him and even go so far as to spend your life trying to
dis-prove him. He loves you anyway. This will not mean a thing to you,
but I will be praying for you. My God says that the prayer of a
righteous man is powerful and effective, and I am righteous because of
Christ's sacrifice. My prayers will be heard. Ultimately it is your
choice still....
E.D.: What
Landon and many other Christians cannot understand is that it is
possible for a non-believer to hold as passionately to the principle
that we ought to conduct our lives and construct our philosophies
according to our best efforts to understand reality, and to use
evidence
and reason to arrive at such an understanding. Rather than "faith" this
is a commitment to knowledge, to a rejection of superstition, of
fantasies which have
no reliable basis, and the idea that a privileged group can be party
to divine revelation, dividing them from all those who do not share the
same illusions. Landon asks rather naively what can be the "harm" in
these things (see next message). I will also assure him that one can
work for the
alleviation of such harm without being motivated by "hatred." In a
debate a few years ago between a theist and Eddie Tabash, the
well-known American
atheist debater, Tabash answered a question about his motivations with
something like this: "Eddie 3:16 - The atheist so loved the world that
he devoted his life to trying to save it from irrationality." I may not
have remembered it exactly, so let's just say I offer this as my
own paraphrase.
Matt writes:
I am
not surprised as to why you have gone to this length to try and prove
some point. Men love themselves and believe that they can get to heaven
on their own, if they even believe in a heaven....It is the hardest
thing in the world to have to admit that you are a sinner and you are
guilty before God....[We think] we just have to do good and be gracious
to others and we will be accepted....[This] has become the biggest
deceit that the Devil has used to lure men into his lies. He has
convinced society that God won't throw anyone in hell or judge a
righteous man. The Devil has taken that
guilty feeling totally out of our minds. God won't find me guilty, I am
just....This is the Devil's lie....Guilt is the feeling of being guilty
of an offense....That feeling is the same feeling that Daniel had in
his prayers in Daniel Chapter 9. Isaiah had the same conviction in
Isaiah 6. Men are dirty and we need God's help. No man is justified
without an atonement or shedding of blood. In Leviticus you see that no
man can come to God in his temple without the shedding of blood. No man
could come to God except through a priest....Jesus, my friend,
fulfilled
God's objectives and by his shedding of blood we are found righteous in
God's eyes....Jesus is so real that the proof is insurmountable....God
wants us to know his love. Satan has deceived mankind and made us think
that we can't have a relationship with the Almighty....Islam and no
other religion has the power that Christ has. Christ is real, and I
know it more than a shadow of a doubt....[about a quarter of Matt's
message]
E.D.:
There have been few
letters to me that can better answer Landon's question in the previous
message about the "harm" of irrational belief. For the religious mind,
being "righteous" and doing good is clearly not enough, if it is not
accompanied by a pervading sense of guilt based on the principle that
human beings are inherently "dirty" and of no intrinsic worth. What
demons haunt Matt's mind and the minds of so many like him! They live
their lives under the specter of an horrific eternal punishment,
created by their "Righteous God." They cower before a powerful king of
evil whom God allows free rein, who has cast his spell over the world
and its people, deceiving them into believing that simply being good is
insufficient, that one can live without a crushing sense of guilt and
degeneracy, that a loving deity would never consign them to the fate of
Hell. They are enslaved, chapter and verse, to a set of ancient
writings whose ideas are often primitive and destructive to the human
spirit. They owe allegiance to the concept of a God who demands the
blood of torture and murder,
even of his own Son at the hands of men, to forgive those same human
beings their sins and allow them into heaven. They hold the conviction
that other groups of humans on this planet who follow different sets of
dogmas (or none at all) are inferior or even evil, and doomed to
destruction. Many subscribe to the fantasy that believers will be taken
up in "rapture" while everyone else "left behind" will endure the
horrors of an apocalyptic End-time. Can such beliefs held by a
significant portion of the population produce a healthy society? Can
they create healthy minds? Can a nation be governed wisely by
executives and legislators who subscribe to such tenets, who believe
in the literal existence of Satan, that Armageddon is around the corner
and the anti-Christ is coming to wreak havoc on the world, that the
Jews need to return to Israel in order to be destroyed in a great
conflagration in fulfillment of some fantastic imagined prophecy
—
indeed,
that
their Deity has communicated these and many other important things
critical to salvation through cryptic passages buried in millennia-old
'prophetic' writings? A visiting alien
observer might be forgiven for thinking that such a mad and
debilitating set of beliefs could never be found outside a lunatic
asylum. When one adds to this litany the fact that the faith community
is regularly engaged in trying to impose their dogmas on the law of the
land, threatening social order, education and human rights, one may
come to understand why many in the non-believing community devote so
much time and energy in the effort to save themselves and society from
such irrationality.
Bob writes:
You approach God's providence as though you are in the same dimension
as God. You will never understand God from this perspective.
E.D.: These two
seemingly simple sentences contain a wealth of fallacy, and illustrate
the morass of woolly thinking that often encompasses religious claims.
The most common "out" for the religious debater is that we cannot
understand the mind of God. This 'explanation' is only introduced, of
course, when the believer encounters a situation in which difficult
problems have been presented by
the non-believer. In such cases, God is claimed to operate according to
principles which our merely human brains cannot comprehend, that our
rules of
logic, science, fairness and compassion are inadequate and don't apply
to the divine mind. But on what basis does the believer claim such a
thing? If no one can comprehend God or his principles of behavior, how
do we know that he indeed does have a set of his own, that they are
'beyond' ours or operate according to some superior law? To know this
would require that we have some knowledge and understanding of the
divine dimension, which is the very thing Bob claims we do not enjoy
from the vantage point of our human perspective.
And yet the believer has no hesitation in claiming that
we can know that such a dimension does exist and that the Deity does
operate under principles not in conformity to our own. In other
situations, he has no hesitation in claiming that God thinks and acts
in such-and-such a fashion. On what basis
does he know this if he has already acknowledged that the human mind is
incapable of such an understanding? We are caught in a circular bind
here. I do not accept that our avenue of such 'knowledge' is through
revelation or scripture, as there is no objective evidence that such
sources are anything more than the statements of earlier men who
claimed
that they were a party to divine understanding or had received divine
direction. This is simply the blind leading the blind, the deluded
the continuingly deluded.
I am reminded of a debate I attended involving Dan
Barker of
the Freedom From Religion Foundation on the existence of God. A
questioner afterwards asked: "What if God is a Being who is 'above' all
these things?" This was in reference to the principle of causality, in
that if all things require a cause, how can God be uncaused. Barker
rightly asked: "But what does that MEAN?" What meaning can it
have to say that God is "above" such principles? How can we know that
it is possible for anything to be "above" them? Logically, we cannot
know, because everything that we "know" comes from our presence within
and understanding of the universe we inhabit. How do we even comprehend
the very principle of "being above" this universe and its laws? If we
have no knowable referent for such a state, then it is a meaningless
phrase to
us. What it constitutes, in point of fact, is simply an attempt to
escape the dilemma of the uncaused God. It is an attempt to define the
thing you want to defend in such a way as to circumvent the valid and
otherwise insurmountable objections to it. But as Barker pointed out,
the questioner has no idea what his question means, he doesn't
understand it logically or have any independent example to point to as
an illustration of being "above" the laws of the universe.
Consequently, such an 'explanation' has no force whatsoever.
Bob, here, is in the same fix. He has no way of
"understanding" his God because he does not inhabit the divine
dimension, and he has already admitted that from our perspective we do
not have such an understanding. Yet he confidently declares not only
that such a
dimension exists, but that believers like himself can pronounce upon it
and upon God's workings,
even though they have no accessible reference point for those
pronouncements.
But Bob is right. From my perspective, I will never understand God. And
if God has given me so little capacity to understand him (short of
surrendering my reason and experience to embrace wishful thinking under
threat of eternal punishment), I maintain that such a deity is more
than deserving of
being ignored and rejected, and that the thinking, rational person can
do no less.
"Just Looking" writes:
Is Hell a punishment from God or the simple result of a Free Will choice made by non-believers? What other punishment allows the one being punished to freely choose the punishment or not to be punished? Perhaps not an infinite number of choices (2), but choices none the less.
E.D.: Rather than face the
reprehensible nature of the
concept of hell, with all its implications for claims of a loving God,
and
reject that concept as untenable, this reader has recourse to a
rather dubious piece of logic. By nature, all punishments are
consequences
of
supposedly "free will choices" so I am not sure how he views
this one as different or why he feels that it solves the problem. (Note
that he
also subscribes to the opinion that non-believers are fated for eternal
punishment.) In general, on what do we base our usual "free will"
decisions as to how to act or not act, including how to believe or not
believe?
We do so on the basis of their consequences, for ourselves and others,
on their
'morality' and acceptability within society, on the exercise of our
personal
judgments. Our education, our ability to think critically, our
sensitivity to
the well-being of others, and so on, are ideally the basis on which we
develop
as human beings to a position of being able to make good choices.
Supposedly,
society does its best to train its members to give them that capacity.
While it
does not threaten a hellish eternal punishment to those who in its view
make
the wrong choices, it does set consequences which will hopefully be a
deterrent
to them.
What has God done in that regard, especially in the
matter
of correct belief? Has he personally revealed himself to all so that
there can
be no doubt of his existence? Has he ensured that we have clear means
for
understanding his wishes and that his commandments are reasonable? Has
he seen to it that there are not many conflicting pictures of him, many
incompatible
claims about the best means of approaching him, receiving his approval,
enjoying "salvation"? Has he established objective and rational
standards for arriving at all the right conclusions, so that we have a
reliable
basis on which to make those "free will choices"?
Apparently
not, for objectivity and rationality are anything but the basis on
which
religions make their claims. No government on earth would set up a
system of
requirements and punishments which have as little grounding in
verifiable
reality as God apparently has. No parent would impose regulations on
their
child while never giving them direct personal contact (in an objective
sense,
not an allegedly intuitive or mystical one), communicating with them
through
obscure and unreliable channels, and failing to make their relationship
compatible with the standards of reason and morality which our own
human nature
has struggled to achieve.
No, definitely he has not, and God himself has
admitted it.
Paul in 1 Corinthians (allegedly the divine word) puts it quite
blatantly: "This doctrine of the cross is sheer folly to those on their
way to ruin, but to us who are on the way to salvation it is the power
of
God....Scripture says, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and
bring to
nothing the cleverness of the clever.'....God has made the wisdom of
this world
look foolish....He chose to save those who have faith by the folly of
the
Gospel....Divine folly is wiser than the wisdom of man, and divine
weakness stronger
than man's strength....To shame the wise, God has chosen what the world
counts
folly, and to shame what is strong, God has chosen what the world
counts
weakness....There is no place for human pride in the presence of God."
Clearly, the thinking man and woman have the dice loaded
against
them. All the principles of rationality and fairness are meaningless in
the
face of the divine system God has revealed to believers like Paul, and
our free
will choices had better not be based on such principles, or we are
eternally
doomed. Paul has defined the Christian gospel as "folly," he has
condemned the world's efforts to achieve the "wisdom of the wise" as
leading only to ruin. Any attempt to gain such wisdom, to acquire a
pride in
ourselves, will be beaten down. God has created us into a world that is
anathema to us, whose principles of order and logic, beauty and
pleasure,
equality and freedom, are nothing less than our undoing, the path to
our
damnation. And in the face of that cosmic contradiction, we are
expected,
required, to make the "right" choice, else we suffer the most dire of
punishments. How the mind of so much of humanity came to arrive at such
a
morbid and self-destructive philosophy is one of the mysteries of our
world.
Curing it will not be an easy task.
Todd writes:
I am (or was) that quintessential fundamentalist Christian that you so accurately characterize in the various essays on your site. I am writing to you now because I have, in the months since reading (by no means a scholarly work!) The DaVinci Code, become increasingly aware of the huge inconsistencies between what I was raised to "know" and what I have come to understand are the facts. Since that fateful read, I have been insatiable in my pursuit of this "other" worldview and have read over twenty books on biblical criticism, history and theology on both sides of the issue. Needless to say, for me, this is a very significant issue.
What I wanted to ask you is this: Should the rationalist perspective prove to be the only tenable one, how do I look at death and eternity? Is it all over? What hope is there for anything other than the here and now? I know that you don't know (in the objective sense of the word) any more than I or anyone else but, I am interested to hear how you deal with that. It seems kind of hopeless, perhaps even nihilistic.
I would like to commend you on your knowledge, logic and scholarship. It is profoundly true that faith —of whatever stripe —should be consistent with reality.
E.D.: See next message.
John writes:
I have recently come across your website and your work and I must say it is quite an impressive body.
I have a couple questions for you. I'll tell you up front that I have been a believer since I was a young child. While I certainly have had my doubts in the past (anyone who says they haven't isn't being honest with himself), I'm sure that the chance of you persuading me is probably only slightly more than me persuading you. That said, I have no desire to argue with you in any way. In fact, I find the ignorance and bile spewed by many of your so-called Christian attackers repulsive.
My questions revolve around things I have not been able to find on your website. Who is Earl Doherty? What does he believe (I see lots about what you don't believe, but not much about what you do)? And, my biggest question, from what does he derive such a passion for disproving a historical Jesus?
Mr. Doherty, I'm not a pastor, I'm not an apologist, I'm not an author, I'm just a guy. Honestly, not even a terribly brilliant one at that. One thing that I've always wondered, though, is why someone would have such a passion to discredit Christianity. From my perspective, I can definitely see a goal. Under my belief system if I persuade someone, they live forever. I don't understand the goal from your perspective, though.
E.D.: The question about what I believe and why I may have my own passions have probably been answered to a great extent in previous comments. As to "who" I am, I too am simply an ordinary person, "just a guy" as John puts it of himself. Like many others in our society (even if we are in a minority), I found a way to step outside the received wisdom and indoctrination of my upbringing and environment and ask questions, to wonder, to think for myself, and to arrive at my own judgments. It happened that I had an interest and education in a related field (history and classical languages) and decided one day to apply all these things to the question of Jesus' existence. With enough perseverance and independence of mind, almost anyone could do the same. Like many others, too, I was disturbed by the negative effects religious belief has had on society and individual lives, and I decided to try to do something about it. Again, almost anyone could do the same.
John suggests that his goal, and that of his belief system, is to persuade people that they can live forever. His implication is that this is the most desirous of goals and that people should want this most of all —and at whatever cost. But there is the crux of the matter. Along with John's conviction goes another implication: that even if he's wrong, people haven't lost anything. I would beg to differ. It is the very context of that goal almost all religions seem to share which creates such problems. In responses above, I have given some idea of the "harms" that religion can produce: divisions on individual, societal and international levels, exaggerated feelings of guilt and unworthiness, a surrender of rationality and the misunderstanding of our own natures and that of the world around us, the adoption of often absurd and ruinous doctrines. (The Catholic Church's quite successful international campaign against birth control, to note one simple example, is helping to dig the grave of this planet.) If religion's ideas of an afterlife and how to reach it successfully are in fact wrong, have we truly lost nothing by adhering to them? If this life is all that we have, will its quality and enjoyment not have suffered if visions of heaven and eternal spiritual bliss are nothing but misguided and distracting fantasies?
Is it the ultimate personal or collective good that each one of us should survive for an eternity? In a universe of constant change, evolution, life and death in an often painful struggle and progression toward we know not what, should we expect the apparent anomaly that each being, each consciousness coming into existence along this long road should continue forever? The fact that the universe certainly seems to militate against such a thing has led to the adoption of religion, to the creation of a whole dubious super-natural dimension which the world we inhabit can offer no objective indication of. It seems that only in such a fantasy realm can a continued personal survival be postulated. Moreover, we must attribute such an incongruous system to a Deity, and convince ourselves that it is reasonable to believe that the Creator would set up this kind of system. But is it reasonable to suppose that an all-powerful, all-loving God would create a universe of our sort, on its vast and incomprehensible scale, simply to provide an ante-chamber, a testing ground, for a completely different kind of universe meant to house us in eternal happiness? Why not create us directly to that heavenly abode? Why is the testing required, why this complex and perilous little prelude to eternity? To ascertain whether we are "worthy" of it or not? Why would the Deity think this was necessary or reasonable to impose on his own creations, attaching it to so much at stake? Does a parent "test" his child before deciding to give it all the benefits within its power to give, to try to save the child it has created from the world's pains and problems? Does the sensible parent separate herself from her child during the trial, weigh it down with all manner of disadvantages that can lead to failure (including the ability to doubt or be unaware of her existence, itself a measure of failure), set up a horrific punishment if the child succumbs to those disadvantages, and so on? Would we call a parent rational and loving if this was their procedure? What then do we call a God who so acts? How do we judge a Deity whose historical path of events toward salvation or destruction entails serpents and apples, Original Sin, universal floods, fathering a divine son on a human virgin and having such a progeny tortured and crucified by the very people he has been sent to forgive and rescue, this being the only means by which God chooses to grant that forgiveness?
There are just too many absurdities and contradictions in such a view of reality, and so the rational person must reject it.
But what is the alternative? Is the fear of death so great that we will accept anything that offers hope of an alternate fate? Does wishful thinking win by default? What does the non-believer have to offer in the long run, after the present life —with its potential improvement once free of the impairments created by religious dogma —has run its course? Frankly, I can't tell you for certain. What I am certain of is that we can never arrive at a proper answer to that question until we free ourselves of our religious straitjacket, its distortion of our universe and what it is to be a human being within it. Until then, we cannot be sure what is the best and most desirable fate for ourselves, or how we may interpret our role and our destiny. Atheists and humanists do not have a required doctrine or philosophy on such matters. We are free to exercise our own judgment, and those judgments vary. But let's try setting up some kind of groundwork, a starting point for thinking about things, without feeling that some necessary end-result must be decided upon, or even that this is possible.
If the universe we inhabit is all about change and evolution, life and death, with no teleological certainty in view, and we are a part of that universe with no other dimension rationally on the table, then we must see ourselves as sharing in its nature. These things are as much a part of being human as anything else. We struggle, we progress, we improve (hopefully) within that context. There is no 'morality' in such a reality. It is neither good nor evil, it simply is. Admittedly, we are faced with the anomaly that our instinct, our self-awareness, seems to find the prospect undesirable, even frightening. Could this be a matter of perception? Could it be that one of the mechanisms of survival and evolution has been this sense of individuality which entails a fear of ceasing to be? Perhaps life would not have been able to lift itself to greater levels of intelligence and accomplishment without the drive of self-conviction, the need to better one's individual experience of a difficult world. If awareness can only develop and look out upon the world through isolated vantage points, simply because that's how impersonal evolution has operated, we are prey to certain disadvantages of that sense of isolation. We are forced to see ourselves simply as individuals on a limited pathway between birth and death. In the face of this, we invented souls or spirits, parts of ourselves, even if undetectable, which could survive death and carry on consciousness, which were fated for some other existence. We opened the door to all sorts of consequent paraphernalia, the supernatural, gods, demons (which always accompany gods as partners, since if gods are good we must explain the origin and continued existence of perceived evils), a whole complex system by which we achieve the afterlife —one which must, to be just and acceptable, be happy for the good people and sad for the evil people.
What happens if we chuck all of that, none of which is supported by any verifiable evidence? Might we try to abandon the fundamental idea that death is an evil, something to be avoided at all costs? Are there ways to reorient our thinking to arrive at such an outlook? Are there ways to reinterpret ourselves and the universe so that the traditional bleak picture of life and death can be circumvented, seen in a different light? I'm sure there are, and freethinkers have always sought to provide them. One of them might be based on something like this:
If our human selves/bodies have no ingredients which are anything other than those of the material universe (atoms, energy, whatever), then we are nothing other than parts of the physical universe. If that physical part possesses self-awareness, then this awareness is a property of that part. It is a function of a certain highly-developed configuration of the material ingredients of the universe, namely the human body with its sophisticated brain. In other words, each body is a particular coming-together of the universe's ingredients to produce self-awareness. It simply becomes a matter of reoriented thinking to say that this means we are the universe being aware of itself at multiple points, each an assemblage of the universe's own ingredients. Through our discovery and knowledge of evolution, we can say that evolution has been the universe's own process of developing this means of self-awareness. Thus, the awareness each of us carries is in one respect the awareness possessed by the universe. You and I are the universe being aware of itself.
There is nothing mystical in this, nothing unscientific. It is simply an interpretation of what we can observe about the physical universe and ourselves within it when freed of supernatural impositions. We can dispense with the soul, which has never been demonstrated to exist. We can do without an external agency, or God, who has allegedly placed something within us which enjoys an independent reality and destiny. We need embrace no spiritual dimension, something which has never been detected in any reliable way. Nor are we turning the universe itself into some kind of deity. The process of evolution has been impersonal, undirected by any intelligent or aware super-entity; it is simply inherent in matter itself. Why that is, we don't know, or imperfectly understand. The craving for simple answers to satisfy our minds at any given stage of our development has always led us down the garden path. But when science and rationality set aside religion and its trappings, its subjective and unverifiable intuition or mysticism or revelation or any number of claimed justifications for believing the non-objective and the non-perceivable, we have always moved closer to a secure understanding of nature.
Going beyond this reinterpretation of ourselves as intelligent, aware parts of the universe leads us in more speculative directions, and I leave such intellectual adventures to the reader. For myself, I am led to think that death is partly a misconception. All temporary conglomerations of the universe's ingredients die, in the sense that they change into different combinations; even geological formations 'die' and evolve. Some of those 'deaths' involve a degredation on the immediate level, a cessation of certain activity — in the case of humans and animals, activities that are properties of the functioning brain. When the human brain dies, it loses the memories, sense of identity and individuality which were features of its awareness within that particular body. John Smith, when his body dies, ceases to exist in terms of his life's identity. No features of that identity survive the body/brain, and nothing is transferred to some other 'host' as in the idea of reincarnation, an equally unsupportable philosophy in terms of empirical evidence.
Thus one might say that the death of a given body is simply the cessation of certain activities by that particular assembly of atoms, including the properties of the brain that produce identity, memory and awareness. Yet the larger process still goes on. The universe is still functioning as a system of awareness points, something it has done since evolution reached the level of intelligent life, and which will continue as long as that life survives and continues to evolve, on this or some other planet. Is it not possible, then, to look at the situation this way: If we are the universe being aware of itself, with our individual identities and sense of self being temporary expressions of that larger process, nothing has died or ceased to exist, only a kind of opening and closing of component windows. Oblivion does not result within such a system. And this is the furthest point to which I will speculate today: if the awareness we individuals carry is not that of a distinct entity bounded solely by one path of birth to death, but only a part of a larger whole, then in some measure that awareness will continue. Not as the particular identity we developed in the course of one individual life (I wouldn't want to spend eternity —or even part of one — retaining the memory of everything in my own life, thanks anyway), but as the ongoing manifestation of the universe's own development through its evolving self-awareness creations— a much more exciting prospect, it seems to me. Stuck at the moment within this temporary assemblage of atoms, however, I'm still trying to get my limited mind around such a concept. I invite others to try doing the same. If nothing else, you'll find the freedom from hidebound, primitive ways of thinking (or not thinking) quite exhilarating.
But on to more mundane matters....
Brian writes:
I have
bookmarked your website and I find it fascinating! I am a religious
person but I find nothing negative to say about your material, only
compliments. I try to keep an open mind.
I am clear that you consider Jesus Christ to be a mythical
person. The evidence you present is substantial and your logic is well
grounded. However, there are some references to Jesus Christ outside
the Bible, mostly from contemporary Gnostic writings. In the case of
St. Paul, I am not aware of any contemporary writer making any mention
of him at all outside of the New Testament. Do you, therefore, consider
it possible that St. Paul himself was actually a fictitious person?
Even many of his epistles are considered to have been authored by other
people. I strongly suspect that this is the case.
Response to Brian:
Is Paul a Fictitious Person?
There are quite a number of radical scholars today
who consider
it possible that the Paul of the epistles never existed, at least as
those epistles (and the later Acts) portray him, that the letters are
second century products pseudonymously attributed to a shadowy earlier
figure, or simply to a construct representing the issues of the time
and retrojected back into the first century. I find it difficult to go
this far, though I would not say it is impossible. I have
not found any of the cases presented thus far, going back to the Dutch
Radical School of the 19th century, entirely convincing.
Without going into detail here (since this is a subject that would
require a book in itself), I feel that some of the problems raised
about the Pauline letters can be better explained by recourse to the
no-historical-Jesus position. I find that the arguments for later
authorship are often shaky, similar to those I have dealt with
in relation to the radical mid or late second century redating of 1
Clement and Ignatius (see my Supplementary Article No. 12 on the
Apostolic Fathers). However, my mind is
open and I'm hoping that one of
today's more radical scholars will offer a thorough study of the
question that covers all the bases, as it is certainly an intriguing
one. If strong doubts could be cast on the existence of Paul, we would
have to completely recast our picture of earliest Christianity, perhaps
even more so than in the context of a non-historical Jesus. There are
those who suggest that the Christian movement itself did not begin
until the second century, and essentially not until the latter part of
that century. These ultra-radical positions, I feel, founder on too
many problems and inconsistencies, but, as I said, I try to keep an
open
mind.
There is little doubt that many of the
letters attributed to Paul are later forgeries, such as the three
Pastorals, 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians and probably Colossians. Even
the "genuine" letters are probably edited, with later emendations,
additions and a splicing of multiple originals. Essentially, however, a
fairly reliable picture of earliest Christianity as a movement based on
a mythological figure can be derived from them.
I am not sure which "contemporary Gnostic writings"
(meaning of the first century, I presume) Brian is referring to,
especially having reference to Jesus Christ. Virtually all of the
gnostic catalogue, as recovered at Nag Hammadi, can be dated no earlier
than the second century, though elements of some may go back earlier.
Perhaps this is simply a reference to the Gospel of Thomas, in which
one stratum of material may well be derived from the mid-first century,
sharing elements with parts of the reconstructed Q document. That
derivation, however, would be in the content of the sayings themselves,
and not necessarily in their attribution to Jesus, since the little
"Jesus said"
introductions and other apostolic set-ups to the sayings could easily
be later additions. Indeed, the nature of those set-ups often suggest
second-century modes of expression found within gnostic communities of
that time.
It is not surprising to find that Paul is not mentioned outside
Christian sources. As influential as he might have been to the
Christian movement (and even this is exaggerated for the first century
or so), there is little or nothing that would have brought him to the
attention of secular writers that were chronicling the times. But there
are Christian sources outside the New Testament that mention or
indicate a familiarity with him, including 1 Clement and
Ignatius. The problem with mythologizing Paul or pushing all his
writings into the second century is that such sources need to be
redated later as well, often with insecure justification, as I
suggested above.
Matthew writes:
Some researchers point toward the gnostic texts as evidence of a historical Jesus and apostles. They differ from the canon in significant ways, in that Mary Magdalene is portrayed as a learned woman, much favored by Jesus and perhaps even intimately close to him. In Mary Magdalene - Christianity's Hidden Goddess, author Lyn Picknett explores the possibility that Mary was a pagan priestess who knew more about spiritual matters than the other apostles and maybe indulged in sexual rituals with Jesus himself.
In her book, Lyn Picknett argues the following: "On the surface it does seem as if the pagan links militate against a historical Jesus....However, there are several arguments against this theory: first, why invent yet another dying-and-rising god when the new Serapis cult had successfully filled that need? Why create a god whose disciples were known to exist, some of whom professed to have met him? Not all of them were liars and cynical myth-makers. Why invent the only dying-and-rising god without a female consort? And finally, those who wished to fabricate a god would hardly make him so contradictory..."
I expect that you see such writings [the gnostic texts referred to above] as being no more historically factual than the gospels themselves, and I see no compelling reason to argue otherwise. I find the mythicist position to be perfectly convincing and even if a Jesus figure does lie somewhere behind the fable, the dying-and-rising-godman concept can hardly be taken at face value without an understanding of mythology as a whole.
Response to Matthew:
Mary Magdalene and Gnostic Characters
Matthew's own final comments
essentially answer the initial question
as I would myself. Nothing about any of this type of 'alternate'
scenario, often involving women figures in earliest Christianity, has
the
slightest support in the early record. Characters like Mary Magdalene,
in
fact, are entirely absent. One would not know from the extra-Gospel
record that she even existed, and I very much suspect she was Mark's
invention. Perhaps he modelled her on some female initiates in his
own circle or tradition. But this doesn't make his creation a genuine
historical person any more than borrowing elements from would-be
Messiahs (even executed ones) of his day to help fashion his Jesus of
Nazareth makes the latter an historical person.
Lyn Picknett's hypothetical picture
of Mary, if true, would hardly have
escaped attention and some form of preservation by early Christian
tradition,
showing up somewhere in the record, even if only by allusion. Too much
of this sort of missing material is explained away by saying that
embarrassing elements were suppressed, or not spoken of. Ironically,
this clashes with the opposite type of claim that a "criterion of
embarrassment" can be used to identify reliable traditions,
necessitating that embarrassing traditions were often preserved and can be
found in the record. I don't
have much sympathy for any
scenario of this sort (and there is no shortage of them, it seems)
which finds no concrete support anywhere.
As for the specific arguments Lyn Picknett puts forward, as quoted by Matthew, I find them less than effective, once again betraying a poor understanding of the mythicist position. The Serapis cult had been invented early in the Hellenistic age by Ptolemy of Egypt (now two centuries old, it was hardly "new"). Dying-and-rising gods even by that time were plentiful, and more were to come afterwards, including Attis and Mithras (the Greek version), so one such savior god clearly did not "fill the need" in the religious atmosphere of the time. Why create a god whose disciples were known to exist, asks Picknett? This seems to have things backwards. Before the mythological Christ Paul preached was developed, no disciples would have existed for any version of him. If Picknett is speaking of a myth-making developing out of an historical Jesus who had followers, this is a logical contradiction to her statement that the argument can serve to disprove the lack of one (if Matthew has quoted her in the proper context). As for Christ Jesus lacking a consort, he was essentially a Jewish version of a pagan expression, and the Jewish God himself was unique in the same respect, being about the only major deity in the ancient world who had no divine consort. Like Father, like Son, I suppose. And I don't know what she finds contradictory about the fabricated god preached by Paul. Such problems only arose when that god was historicized and placed in first century Judea.
Gerald writes:
I agree with the midrash theory of the Gospels and the mythological development of the New Testament. However, I do feel there needs to be a human starting point in order for midrash to grow. It would seem very strange to take the "spiritual Christ" aspect of God and make it human in order to compare it to Moses, Joshua, Elijah, etc. This would be backwards (and blasphemous). Does God need to be compared to Moses and Joshua and Elijah to show his importance?
It seems more probable that the authors of the Gospels were trying to spiritualize a human (which would later be misunderstood and taken literally) rather than humanizing God. Basically, why would Mark make Jesus human?
Also, if we acknowledge two strands of Christian development, is it possible that Paul's strand was completely ignorant of a human Jesus even if there was one? Could we entertain the thought that maybe Paul was wrong in many aspects but his strand still won the day?
Response to Gerald:
The number of queries of this kind I receive is surprising, and indicates that I may not have laid out sufficiently clearly a fundamental element of the mythicist picture, at least my own. The human character of Jesus of Nazareth is based primarily not on the Pauline-type mythical Christ, but upon the presumed (I regard as invented) founder/preaching figure of the Galilean-Syrian Kingdom of God community, as found in the later stages of the Q document. Mark himself, I have argued, was a part of that broad community (even if he did not possess the document that Matthew and Luke used in reworking his Gospel), was familiar to varying degree with many of its traditions and may have subscribed to the existence of the Jesus figure in Q (if it called him by that name at that stage). When Mark fashioned the first Gospel, he created the ministry story as we know it out of various elements representative of his community's preaching tradition. At the same time, in a totally innovative fashion, he added the passion story, giving his symbolic Jesus of Nazareth a new dimension as a dying and rising savior. To what extent this latter innovation was inspired by a familiarity with the Pauline Christ, and Mark's desire to syncretize the two, may be difficult to say, since even the element of death and resurrection could conceivably symbolize what Mark considered to be the destiny of the Kingdom of God community. Very little is actually taken over from the Pauline Christ and assigned to the Markan Jesus, who some have pointed out is scarcely divine at all; there is no mention of his pre-existence, or his role as creator and sustainer of the universe, and even his 'saving' power —to the extent Mark mentions it at all (only in 10:45) —goes little if any beyond that of the Maccabean concept of the martyred hero. The Galilean strand of Christianity really took on Pauline features only in the second century when it became assimilated by the Christ-myth strand.
Thus, even if there was a certain amount of Christ-myth influence on the mind of Mark, the evangelist is essentially following what Gerald says is the more feasible direction, to turn a human into God rather than vice-versa. His starting point is a presumed human figure, within a human setting. The Gospel ministry of Jesus is the mirror of the Kingdom of God preaching movement which seems to have begun in Galilee a few decades into the first century CE, spreading to parts of Syria (as witnessed by the Didache, the earliest stratum of the Gospel of Thomas, and even the Gospel communities themselves —including John —which were likely all located in Syria). Nor was it Mark's purpose to compare God to Moses, Joshua, Elijah, etc., but rather to give the human community itself these dimensions, and thus the legitimacy they are claiming in their preaching of the Kingdom.
Thus, Mark is not making Jesus, a god, human. Jesus becomes a god because Mark's starting point was a human one. It is the same principle involved in the perennial objection: Why would the Christian Messiah have been made a Galilean? The question sees the thing the wrong way round. The Markan starting point (as in Q) was Galilee, with a human figure symbolizing that community's activities. That starting point was what governed the Galilean heritage of the Messiah, when Mark attached that feature to him. (Note that Q itself never assigns the role of Messiah to its Jesus, only the Son of Man —which, while Messiah-like, was a distinct figure of its own.) Thus, Gerald's objection is misplaced.
One might say, well, does this not constitute what the secular non-mythicists would claim, that a man —as obscure or human as he might have been —was turned into God? On two counts, no. The first is that a careful study of Q would indicate that its Jesus figure was a construct of the later stages of that document's (and its community's) development; a different expression of the Q-type community, namely in the Didache, shows no sign of such a figure. (This picture is thoroughly presented in my book, The Jesus Puzzle, and to a lesser extent on the website in Part Three of the Main Articles and my review of Crossan's The Birth of Christianity.)
The second count is that the essence of what became Christianity is to be found in Paul and the other early epistles. It was this broad strand which was the earliest, founded upon an entirely mythical Christ and extending well into the second century, even to many of the major Apologists who followed an essentially Logos-type religion. Whatever side one gives the greater impulse to, it is this mythical Christ movement which eventually adopted the Q and Gospel-based Jesus of Nazareth, melding it with its own savior concept, and thus one could say, against Gerald's objection, that they did indeed turn a god into a man. (And to agree with Gerald, Paul would indeed have been unfamiliar with any human Jesus, at least as a basis for his own Christ belief.)
All of this may sound rather convoluted, but despite the theoretical Occam's razor, history tends to be complex and cluttered, without the clinical simplicity of philosophical deliberation. Besides, this is what the Christian documentary record itself shows, a messy conglomeration from all over the map of often radically different expressions, theologies, cultural settings, many incompatible with each other, startling and perplexing silences, and so on, leading to postulated sources and dimensions that require unsupported and specious speculation. Scholars have struggled for over a century to try to make sense of it all, but usually with little success when they insist on working from traditional paradigms and centuries of confessional interest. The slate needs to be wiped clean and a different starting point given the chance to lead us in a more fruitful direction.
Your description of reading Crossan was priceless. Having read his two
huge works, including the book you reviewed (The Birth of
Christianity), I must say I found it brilliant but brutal.
[Bruce's long letter
was somewhat wordy, but I will cull a few extracts and comment on some
interesting points.]
Paul's Gospel -
You've very carefully argued that Paul's gospel comes to him from
revelation, and perhaps the scriptures. But this can't totally be. He
persecuted Christians before
his conversion (so) he certainly had to have known something about what gospel they
were preaching....Paul could certainly not have been told that Jesus
was just some wise sage à la Q1 or else his persecution would
make no sense....Given his conversion, he must have believed at least some of the gospel they told
him....Paul is simply lying to say he got his gospel from God....This,
of course, does not make the case that there was much in the way of an
historic figure to what he was told, but it does show convincingly that
his gospel did not all come from heaven....[more below]
Response to Bruce:
The Source of Paul's Gospel / Where are the
Aramaic Texts? / James in Jerusalem
This is a valid observation, but I would say Bruce
is
being too finicky here. I don't think anyone was holding Paul to the
exact letter of his every word. Paul could join the ranks of the
widespread Christ movement (one whose apostles did not all owe their
derivation or allegiance to the Jerusalem group, as 2 Corinthians 10-11
shows) and still come up with his own interpretation of the figure they
worshipped which was sufficiently his own product that he could make
such a claim. While he allows in 1 Corinthians 15:11 that they all
"preach the same thing," this seems restricted to the Jerusalem
group itself, and it has to be balanced by other declarations
he makes about various rivals which allow nothing of the sort (as in 2
Corinthians 11:4 and its surrounding context, which clearly indicates
that those competing messages about "different" Jesus's are a product
of perceived revelation). That revelation, by the way, would have been
largely based on their
readings of scripture, as Paul himself tells us in Romans 1:1-2 and
16:25-6
(the latter may be pseudo-Pauline), and in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4.
Bruce labels Paul "an egomanic who just won't settle
for being an ordinary convert like everyone else," and that is
undoubtedly true, else he would not have accomplished what he did. I
also agree that Paul "claiming his gospel comes from God makes his
gospel
unassailable and puts him, in his mind, on an equal footing with the
pillars." This does not have to entail, however, that the pillars
enjoyed their status because they had known an historical Jesus. That
sort of advantage could not have been ignored by Paul and he would have
had to deal with it openly in his self-defensive arguments. While the
Christ movement was widespread and not all centered on Judea, Paul had
inserted himself initially into that circle (growing out of his
persecution of the Judean church), and he always felt at a disadvantage
toward them in terms of legitimacy. This is why he is anxious to claim
the only apparent grounds for legitimacy, the fact that he had "seen
the Lord" (1 Corinthians 9:1), a 'seeing' which in his case was
entirely visionary,
implying that the other ones were as well. Further, the very fact that
he declares his gospel a product of revelation from God or Christ, and
not "from man"
—
not from
anyone who had known Jesus personally
—
would further argue that no such
relationship existed among some of his fellow apostles. For if
Jesus had existed and
imparted a gospel to his followers whom Paul now knew, it would work against
Paul to simply dismiss them and anything they had to offer. Those to
whom Paul preached would expect
that his gospel should contain elements of what those alleged followers
had received from Jesus himself, for Paul had not known
Jesus and would be presumed to have missed out on important things; his
gospel coming
"from man" would be an asset and a buttress to his own interpretations.
Paul's whole quest for legitimacy, if some of his fellow apostles had
known Jesus, would have taken an entirely different tack, and the
existence of an historical Jesus could not have failed to come through
unmistakeably in his letters.
Paul also makes it clear that his gospel (as stated
in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 and touched on elsewhere) revolves around the
basic features of Jesus' death and resurrection and their theological
and soteriological significance. He would hardly have been preaching
elements of Jesus' life and ministry (which he never shows sign of
doing) and claim that knowledge of these, too, had come to him through
a process of revelation. Bruce makes a common type of mistake in
implying that part of Paul's revelation would have to include the list
of visions
enumerated in verses 5 to 7. Of course they didn't. Information about
these traditions came to him from other people. We do not have to take
such statements as following on in equal fashion from his gospel
statement (of verses 3 and 4), and I go into detail in arguing this in
my Supplementary Article No. 6, The Source of
Paul's Gospel.
... Hebrew versus Greek - If there were
so many Jews involved in the Christian movement, why aren't there equal
amounts of texts in Hebrew? (Or as you asked, where are the Aramaic
texts referencing Jesus' sayings?)....Where are the Hebrew or Aramaic
Christian religious texts that Peter's group would have used in their
preaching to the Jews, the Hebrew or Aramaic Christian letters, or am I
just unaware of them? What language did Peter preach in when he was
allegedly in Rome, Aramaic? I wouldn't think so. Why do they all seem
to have been written in Greek? It certainly makes no sense to assume
that, in this allegedly mixed group, all the Jewish Christians were
willing to have their gospels written in Greek to accommodate the
Hellenists, people the James crowd were reluctant to even eat with....[more below]
This is an intriguing observation, with many
implications. If
Christianity began as the Gospels and Acts portray, directed by a group
of disciples recruited from fishing villages in Galilee, spreading from
Palestine outward, we could hardly envision the complete eclipse of a
preaching and documentary phase that would have been expressed in
Aramaic. Yet there is no evidence of such a thing. The once common
claim that one could detect Aramaic precursors behind some of the
Gospels is simply one of wishful thinking and has been largely
discredited. One of the commonest pro-Aramaic arguments put forward,
namely, claimed "Aramaicisms" in various writings, can easily be
explained by Aramaic influences on the Greek idiom as spoken in the
Levant area and do not necessarily point to an original version in
Aramaic itself. Too much else militates against the latter. Papias may
witness to at least one document in Aramaic that was a collection of
sayings imputed in his time (c.130) to Jesus, but without any extant
version of
it, or even an extant version of what Papias actually said (we rely on
the 4th century Eusebius' account, which implies that Papias had not
even seen this document but heard of it only second-hand), little
weight
can be given to this.
Nor in any case can such a reference be equated with any of the Gospels
or even with Q, all of which have been amply demonstrated to have been
written in nothing other than Greek.
What language, indeed, would Peter have preached in
if he went to Rome (for which there is zero reliable evidence)? Did he
learn Greek or Latin with sufficient proficiency since his days as a
fisherman? Or is it more likely that the Jerusalem circle witnessed to
by Paul was on a more sophisticated level than the Gospel picture?
So thoroughly immersed in a pagan-style Christ mythology as they and
Paul seem to have been, were they more Hellenist in nature than we
realize, already Greek speakers and thinkers? We might even try
tiptoeing
further and join forces with the "radical" scholars mentioned earlier
and consider whether nothing in Paul is reliable and may all be a
retrojected second-century creation from circles that were entirely
part of Hellenistic Judaism. Who knows?
This situation (as does Bruce's final excerpt below,
which I won't comment on further) certainly calls into question the
standard paradigm of Christianity's beginnings, especially as one with
a thoroughly Jewish root and Palestinian provenance. I think the
evidence better fits a widely diffused genesis out of that border
territory between pagan and Jewish religious traditions and
philosophies, found all across the eastern empire, a border which both
Jews and pagans frequently crossed in one direction or another. One of
the several new syncretistic 'nations' they established was gnosticism,
a phenomenon now seen to have been largely independent of
Christianity's development, though the former was later to assimilate
in part with the latter, under the influence of the Gospel Jesus
figure.
...James in Jerusalem - The death of
James is also part of what puzzled me. James is hanging out with Peter
preaching the gospel in Jerusalem for 20 years or so (recall Paul's two
widely spaced visits), with no apparent bother to the Jews. Yet a few
years before this Paul is going to Syria (!) to hunt Christians down,
while (according to Acts) James and Peter are hanging out in Jerusalem
the whole time? And after Paul's two visits to the pillars, 20-30 years
after their "ministry" began, the Jews finally get around to stoning
James? Either James and Peter were so quiet they barely register a
pulse, or there is something seriously wrong with this picture.
Thank you for your book, "The Jesus
Puzzle". It has profoundly affected my life. At bare minimum you gave
me a wonderful hobby that has facinated me for several years.
I write you about the Wisdom of Solomon,
chapter
two, verses 11-21. I believe that Mark used verses 11-21 as a
template for the life of Jesus. The most telling verses are as follows:
[11] Let our strength be the law of justice: for that which is feeble
is found to be nothing worth.
[12] Therefore let us lie in wait for the righteous; because he is not
for our turn, and he is clean contrary to our doings: he upbraideth us
with our offending the law, and objecteth to our infamy the
transgressings of our education.
[13] He professeth to have the knowledge of God: and he calleth himself
the child of the Lord.
[14] He was made to reprove our thoughts.
[15] He is grievous unto us even to behold: for his life is not like
other men's, his ways are of another fashion.
[16] We are esteemed of him as counterfeits: he abstaineth from our
ways as from filthiness: he pronounceth the end of the just to be
blessed, and maketh his boast that God is his father.
[17] Let us see if his words be true: and let us prove what shall
happen in the end of him.
[18] For if the just man be the son of God, he will help him, and
deliver him from the hand of his enemies.
All Mark needed to do was to build an outline
of Jesus' life from the above, fill in the narrative details by
borrowing from Homer and using midrash, then put a few wisdom sayings
in Jesus' mouth. Doesn't verse 12 pretty much summarize the passion
narrative? Mark lets the demons show that Jesus fulfills verse
13 above. The last sentence of the verse might even refer to the
scribes
while verse 11 refers to the pharisees.
A key question is "when was this
written?" Some think that it was written in the first century
BCE, and others in the first century CE. If it is CE, then this
might be an early form of the gospel of some real Jesus figure. If BCE,
it seems more likely that this is the early form of a truly mythic
character.
Response to Lowell:
The Wisdom of Solomon as Template for Mark's
Jesus of Nazareth
Ray writes:
As a former minister in the Disciples of Christ, I have read with great interest and shakey footing the results of modern biblical and faith-oriented research. I have three questions: One: If Jesus the Christ was only a mythological figure, powered by the teeming, competitive early Jewish sects, why the name "Jesus" at all, instead of just "the Christ"? Two, did the name Christians just stick because of the belief in the Gnostic mythical "Christ" the Messenger? Three: Web sites (usually Christian and "touristy") point to an "undoubtable" historical Nazareth. I have read somewhere that Nazareth without doubt did not exist in the First Century CE. Is this true, and where's the documentation?
Response to Ray:
Why the name "Jesus"? / The name "Christ" /
Existence of Nazareth
The term "Christ" is essentially a title, which
would still mean that the new savior god of the circles Paul converted
to would lack a name. Who knows who, how, or when the name "Jesus" was
given to that god, but it would be a natural one, since it means
"Yahweh Saves". It may well be modelled on the deliverer of Hebrew
legend, Joshua, who led the Israelites into the Promised Land. The use
of "Christ" is probably directly dependent on the term as used in
Jewish expectation for the coming "Anointed One" or Messiah, since an
essential feature of the mythical Christ cult as represented by Paul is
the expectation of this Savior's imminent arrival from heaven.
(Second-century apologists like Theophilus of Antioch were to say
instead, when such expectations had died down, that the
self-designation of his faith movement was derived from the process of
'anointing' the believer with the oil of God.) Although we find the
term "Christ" present in some gnostic philosophies to refer to a part
of the divine "pleroma" (emanations of God) in heaven, it's impossible
to say if this had any influence in the earliest 'Christians' applying
this term to their new savior god. As for Nazareth, the
case is "undoubtable" on neither side, but probably the best case yet
made for its non-existence at the reputed time of Jesus is by Frank
Zindler, who has written several articles in the past for American Atheist magazine, and
refers to the subject in the Introduction to his The Jesus the Jews Never Knew. At
the very least, Zindler has shown that claims for its existence in the
first century are completely unreliable. I have dealt with this
question in the past, in Reader Feedback No. 7, response to Bob.
Major writes:
I'm a former scientist now studying for a
M.Div. I've found your site very interesting; it's challenged my
thinking in a number of ways. I'm not quite persuaded yet by your
theory, but I'm certainly re-evaluating the New Testament in light of
it.
I see one major problem which keeps me from
accepting your theory. It relates to the gospel of Matthew. The writer
of Matthew presents Jesus on several occasions as predicting an
imminent end of the world (i.e. in the lifetime of his hearers). For
example, 10:23, 16:28, 24:34. The book also places Jesus
chronologically in the first part of the 1st century. It doesn't matter
whether he really existed, the point is, that is when the book of
Matthew claims that he existed. Now, this seems to me to imply that the
book of Matthew was written within a lifetime after that time. Why?
Because otherwise, the writer would be aware that Jesus' prophecies of
an imminent end of the world did not come true. If someone was writing
a history of Jesus in the early 2nd century, would they be likely to
put in his mouth the claim that the world was going to end during the
first century, when by
that time it had become patently obvious that such an event never
occurred? Do you have an explanation for this?
Response to Major:
Gospel Predictions by Jesus that the End is Near
This is a perennially recurring question, and while
I've dealt with it before (Reader Feedback No. 10), it's worth
revisiting. Major suggests that the point really has
little to do with whether Jesus existed or not, but that the author of
Matthew thinks he existed.
That may be, but the central point whenever this question is raised
seems to be its effect on the date the Gospels were written. If the
evangelists were writing history and regarded their work as such, one would tend to agree with
Major that they would hardly place an imminent prophecy in the mouth of
their central character which could only be regarded as false since it
hadn't taken place in the meantime. But that's a big "if."
First, let's reproduce what I wrote in the earlier
Feedback:
"My view of the Gospel of Mark is that it was written as a piece of symbolism and midrash. The pre-passion ministry of Jesus represented the beliefs and activities of the preaching community of which Mark was a part, while the passion story, constructed in midrashic fashion out of passages from scripture, gave a new significance to the traditional tale of the Suffering Righteous One. Mark and his initial audience would have known that the Gospel was symbolic and that its central character Jesus of Nazareth served partly as an allegory of the life of the community itself. Consequently, Jesus’ ‘prediction’ represented the predictions that were being made at the time the Gospel was written, and thus the problem of fulfilment would only have arisen a generation or two after the writing of Mark.
One might ask how those
who started to view the Gospel
story as historical (sometime in the first half of the second century)
felt about the inordinate lapse of time following Jesus’ supposed
prediction.
No doubt they found ways to rationalize it, just as believers over the
centuries since then have been forced to do so. Papias, by the way, a
bishop
of Hierapolis some time in the 120s or 130s, is reported to have
claimed
that those raised from the dead by Jesus survived into the reign of the
emperor Hadrian (117-138), so perhaps the Gospel of Mark could safely
have
been written even well into the second century!"
If the evangelists were writing a piece of midrashic
symbolism
—
and there are
many indicators that they did not intend
details of their story as literal history
—
then their readers would not
have been expected to take everything as such. I think the
primary purpose was to produce a teaching guide, to convey lessons to
the community and to embody that community's activities, spirit, and
expectations. Nor can we overlook the fact that the evangelists have
made many other 'mistakes' which are unresolvable if taken literally.
What of Matthew's prophecy by Jesus that the Son of Man will lie in the
tomb for "three days and three nights" (12:40)? This is an even more
blatant
contradiction, in that it cannot be reconciled with another passage in
the same document itself, namely the actual account of Jesus' death and
resurrection. Why would the author create such an obvious literal
error? More
than likely because he wasn't being literal. The "three days and three
nights" is a symbolic expression, derived from scripture (the story of
Jonah, as is clear from the first part of the verse). What of the
clear incompatibilities between the various evangelists in their
reworking of earlier sources, such as Matthew or Luke of Mark? They
could hardly think that no reader was ever going to have a copy of the
two different Gospels in front of them and find by comparison that so
much simply didn't agree. (They would likely be taken aback by today's
frantic apologists who are convinced it is absolutely necessary that
they should not disagree!)
If the intended object was not to produce literal history in all its
details, then an argument that an author would never deliberately
embody a seeming contradiction in his writing has no force. Thus, we
can derive no conclusion about the necessary date of a given Gospel by
such an argument.
Mike writes:
On page 311 of your book you say that "Jesus shed his blood —presumably on a hill called Calvary outside Jerusalem." But I was watching Fox News' "Who was Jesus" and they said Jesus was crucified at Golgotha on a rock. A church is now bujilt over the rock and pilgrims do visit there every year. So where was Jesus killed: on a hill called Calvary or at this historicl rock of Golgotha on which a church is built and where pilgrims DO visit every year?
By the way, your book is great, however it is starting to fall apart. Do you think a hardcover book will come out soon?
Response to Mike:
Golgotha (gahl'guh-thuh). See Calvary (Harper's Bible Dictionary, p. 353).
The term "Golgotha" is the original Semitic name for Calvary. It means "skull" or "place of the skull". The name "Calvary" is based on the Latin translation of "skull". As Harper's says (p. 150), "It is likely that the site was so named because of its habitual use for executions. Less likely is an explanation rooted in the physical appearance of the place."
However, Harper's admits that "very little is confidently known about Calvary," even its location. This is curious, for if anything would be preserved in Christian memory, to survive to later times, one would think it would be the place of Jesus' crucifixion, the very site of the world's salvation. So there is a bit of the dubious about the fact that, as Harper's puts it, "since the fourth century the site now marked by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has been revered as the location of Calvary." One wonders why it was left to three centuries later to try to ascertain where the event had taken place, and to decide on a location which is still in dispute among scholars and archeologists.
In fact, neither name, Golgotha or Calvary, appears in Christian writings (outside the Gospels) before well into the second century. Ignatius, while he declares the event historical and locates it in time, never specifies a site. Prior to that, there is no sign of an awareness of the place of crucifixion as a physical location, no sign of pilgrimages to the spot. Since the 4th century, pilgrims have indeed visited a site, especially on the yearly anniversary date. There seems no conceivable reason why they should not have done so earlier, including during the first hundred years of the movement. Except one, of course: that no such event took place in history, that it was invented by the first evangelist to be copied by succeeding ones, and that it took until the middle of the second century for the Christian movement as a whole to regard that story as literally historical. Even then, for another two centuries no site was identified, simply because there was no tradition that indicated where it was. It goes without saying (though I've said it many times) that the same applies to the site of the resurrection.
Will there be a hardcover edition of The Jesus Puzzle? Not in the immediate future at least. I will do my best to keep the book in print, but there are ongoing difficulties in any small publishing venture, not to mention one which sets itself against so much of what society holds dear. Despite efforts by several who recognize the worth of the book and do their best to promote it, when many bookstores or online sellers refuse to stock it, when many libraries refuse donations, when book review magazines refuse to give it exposure, when religious elements do their best to condemn and stifle it, the demand remains limited. Limited, too, are our resources, and an expanded "second edition," whether hard or soft cover, urged by such as Richard Carrier, (which would also involve increased mailing costs), may not be within my means. All of this goes with the territory, of course, and few attempts to buck traditional beliefs have ever enjoyed a different fate.
RFSet 24: November 2004
Because of this increase in concern over issues of religion and rationality, and the disturbing trends visible in North American society today (especially following the re-election of George W. Bush), I am revamping the Age Of Reason website to provide more up-to-date comment on such issues, and to reproduce articles and reports from other sites and publications on a wide range of topics. Please visit: AgeOfReason.htm (URL http://jesuspuzzle.com/ageofreason/index.htm).
Your books, The Jesus Puzzle and Challenging the Verdict, contain the most compelling logical arguments for any position I've ever encountered! They are, in my opinion, great jewels of probity and intellectual honesty.
Emil writes:
Let me begin my telling you how much I enjoyed your book [The Jesus Puzzle]. It was an epiphany. I was brought up a catholic, attending catholic schools during my early education. However, as my training as a scientist proceeded, it became clear that there was a great difference between religious knowledge (blind) and scientific knowledge (logic based). So I came to lose my belief in Jesus as god but still thought christianity was based on a real person. But the thought that an insignificant peasant from a remote area of the Roman empire had such an impact, so quickly, on mankind was difficult to comprehend.
Now all is clear. Your brilliant analysis of the evidence is compelling and overwhelming to anyone with an open mind. By the way, although the vast majority of the scientists I have known throughout my career were non-believers in religion (probably following my reasoning), there were a handful who managed to devote a part of their minds to blind belief. When I tried reasoning with one of them, his response was that logical thinking was a ruse of Satan. How can you argue with someone who believes that logical thinking is demonic?
E.D.: Indoctrination, and the fear that is inculcated with it, are powerful forces, often enough to override the mind's ability to apply rational standards. At the same time, I sometimes wonder whether some minds have a greater propensity to be influenced by indoctrination and fear than do others, somewhat akin to having a gene for addiction in other areas. A study of this question would be most interesting. The growing number of those who are able to shake off their religious indoctrination, or never to adopt one later in life, is hopefully an indicator that our society is, shall we say, 'mutating' out of its traditional orientation toward belief in the supernatural, although when we look around us today it's easy to get discouraged at how far we still have to go.
Steven writes:
I
thought I would take this opportunity to thank you for your two
fascinating books on the origins of Christianity. After I watched a
rerun last year of the PBS documentary on the origins of Christianity I
became interested in doing additional research. I read Crossan and
Fredriksen's books. Clearly, Crossan is trying to construct a
historical Jesus who could be a hero in the present day. Fredriksen, on
the other hand, seemed much less anachronistic. Then I read Spong, who
introduced me to a mythicist viewpoint, although in the end he felt
compelled to dig a historical Jesus out of the mythical dust.
Then I bought a copy of The Jesus Puzzle, and it blew my
socks off. Your books quickly led me to conclude that even Fredriksen's
scholarly work is outdated. Perhaps in academia there are financial
incentives not to cross certain lines.
E.D.: It is not so much a question of financial
incentives. Quite apart from any confessional interests that might be
operating, someone who has worked in the field and made a career of
studying and writing about an historical figure would find it extremely
difficult to do an about-face of this magnitude, and the peer pressure
to toe the basic party line would be considerable. Also, I believe that
few mainstream scholars, even the most progressive ones, have allowed
themselves to consider the possibility of non-existence for Jesus, and
consequently have little depth of understanding of the mythicist
position. Paula Fredriksen herself has demonstrated this, as my article
responding to her comments on one of my site articles shows. (See ChallengingDoherty.htm)
J.D. writes:
I'm a
big fan of your work, and after finding your site a few months ago have
been a regular reader. I was once a bible-belt fundamentalist
Christian, but over the course of the last few years have become a
staunch atheist. In my home town (though it is, thankfully, not my
current place of residence) this causes quite a stir, especially when
my family is involved. As a result of my decision, I've met much
criticism
--
though that's a bit of an understatement.
I've decided--in order to assist those that believe as I
do, to
counter those who question the rationality behind my decision, and to,
perhaps, give Christians some food for thought (I'd even go so far to
say I hope I can persuade a few people to my side of the fence)--to
write a book on the subject.
E.D.: Not only are more people
abandoning their religious indoctrination, many of them feel a need to
help others do the same, an encouraging development. Perhaps one
reason for this is that the style of religious belief (especially
Christian, within North American society) has moved much more
toward the fundamentalist and evangelical expressions than in previous
generations, when the older established churches had a more sedate,
less aggressive, following and a style of belief that did less violence
to modern scientific and social enlightenment. It was probably less
damaging to the believer's intellect and his or her rational and
psychological functioning, and it placed less impediments in the way of
progress. Today, not only has the evangelical brand of faith come to
place greater strains on personal integrity, it has become much more
activist, seeking to impose its reactionary views on society as a
whole, in the areas of education, human rights and much else.
Consequently, those of us who recognize the perils involved feel
motivated to try to do something about it. There is just too much at
stake.
Mary writes:
Thank
you for your fantastic book [The
Jesus Puzzle]. The extent of your scholarship is
unbelievable. I've been a religious skeptic all my life but really only
recently renewed my interest, discovered the mythical Christ and your
amazing book to boot.
You speak hopefully about the reinterpreted scriptures
entering the public consciousness but there is no way the
fundamentalists can be reasoned with. Evangelical churches are strong
and growing. Even if the liberal churches can finally tear down the
crumbling structures and prepare to rebuild on firmer foundations, I
fear the mindset of fundamentalists is fixed. Thus the divide between
reason and irrationality will widen.
Your ideas create as much as they demolish. They are
liberating and present incredible hope for the world. Just imagine if
the Pope recanted! Could Islam be rattled being so derivative of both
Judaism and Christianity (although not as tortured in its scriptural
basis)?
I've started on your website. How can you possibly answer
all those e-mails? When do you sleep? I hope you're reaping some
financial benefits from all of this. Ironically, it may be said, your
immortality is assured. This, to my mind is the most significant book
of the 21st century.
E.D.: Mary's praise may be a bit hyperbolic, but
enthusiasm is a common reaction when entrenched ideas that have sat ill
with the world in so many ways, and for so long, are demonstrated to be
unfounded and no longer tenable. A sense of freedom and exhilaration is
a response I encounter regularly (and I am by no means the only one
responsible for making that possible, as there are others working
effectively in this field as well). Unfortunately, her comments on the
fundamentalist mentality are pretty well on the mark, and it is
important that
we do not allow this segment of society to impose its primitive views
on everyone, and certainly not by default due to a reluctance (or fear)
by society's more rational segments to speak out. As for the Pope
recanting, well, regardless of whatever personal doubts he might come
to feel (though I'm quite sure he doesn't peruse the Jesus Puzzle
website
by night), the Vatican establishment behind him would never allow such
doubts to be expressed.
Roz
writes:
My
Christian parents had opted out of their religions when I appeared on
the scene. Consequently I skipped a Christian upbringing. I've lived in
an agnostic fog for years, unable to swallow the literal biblical
interpretations and unable to voice clearly why. [I was] led to your
web page and am so relieved to find my intuition expressed so clearly.
I can't wait to explore this topic more fully and I'm sure I will visit
often. I will also be looking for your books.
Jesse writes:
Thanks
for
making your website available. Prior to encountering your site I found
biblical scholarship and criticism to be over my head. I could be
swayed this way and that by experts who know more than me, experts with
agendas. Your writing, especially your discussion of the silence of the
New Testament (outside the Gospels) concerning the life, deeds and
sayings of Jesus while he walked on this earth was truly a revelation
to me. I was blind, but now I see. So obvious! Those statements that
seemed to make oblique references to things like his crucifiction [sic] threw me off the trail.
So many Jesus scholars say he was a mortal man first, and
then later
he became immortalized. It now appears that the Logos preceded the
creation of the historical Jesus. The word became flesh and dwelt among
us. This changed perspective is so much more useful than trying to
follow the movements of a mystery man underestimated by his critics.
Maybe the author of John was writing to an audience that would
understand that these were fables with morals.
Well, it will take time to sort this out. But the new
perspective turns the whole world upside down.
Nellie writes:
I see
by the reviews that you have stepped on the toes of the deluded! Hmmmm!
Nikki writes:
Just
wanted to say, THANK-YOU for your site! It's amazing what happens when
people stop and THINK for themselves! Your site is an eye-opener and
also a light in a dark place. May Yahweh bless your work.
E.D.: Hmmm....Obviously, Nikki
is not giving
us the whole picture.
Noel writes:
E.D.: If you have read my site, you will know that Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius are very unreliable as a witness to an actual historical Jesus. Josephus' main reference is a Christian insertion as it stands, and no reliable authentic residue can be extracted from it; similar reliability problems exist in regard to his second reference to Jesus. Suetonius' reference is so ambiguous that it may not be referring to a human figure at all (strife 'caused by Chrestus' could be anything from some man named Chrestus, a common name, to the — mythical — object of worship of the group involved), and Tacitus's passage, if authentic (there are actually some reasons to doubt it), could simply be repeating Christian hearsay of the time which Tacitus picked up in Rome or in Asia Minor a few years earlier when he was administrator there. (Even the odd Christian scholar, such as Norman Perrin, thinks this is more than likely.)
As for those other historians' "references that can be traced to the Bible", I would have to know what specifically this refers to. It was fashionable for Christian writers in the ancient world to claim that even Plato got his ideas from Moses by reading the Hebrew bible (in Hebrew, I guess, since the Greek Septuagint did not yet exist in Plato's time!) Herodotus was a Mediterranean traveller and reported on all sorts of traditions in the lands he visited, so it would not be surprising if he mentioned some Hebrew ones (I don't offhand recall). But Thucydides? Though it's been many years since I read him, I don't remember anything like that, and I don't see what any of this would prove, especially about the bible being "true".
Perhaps they also mention the Roman poet Virgil, who in his Eclogue IV, 4, makes a kind of "messianic" prophecy reflecting a supposed tradition about a coming golden age, a "new generation is descending from heaven". Bible enthusiasts have often seized on this as reflecting an 'instinct' about the coming of Christ even in the pagan mind. But not only is this a political statement by Virgil relating to Caesar Augustus, the first emperor, who had recently come to power and seemed to promise such things for the Roman state and the world as a whole, it reflects a common type of theme throughout the ancient world about a coming great king, etc. who will bring about a new era, etc. The Jewish messianic tradition was partly a reflection of that general tendency.
I only wish that your wife (and others like her) could realize that "fear" is religion's greatest tool to its own survival, and that as part of the process of indoctrination which religions almost universally entail, the fear of doubt, of questioning, of loosening the dogma, is what keeps most believers in obedience and willing to repress their own rational faculties. It is encouraged and perpetuated by religion's directors (from priests to popes) to maintain their own positions, since if we are not allowed to question for ourselves, we tend to go to them for guidance and assurance that all problems are explainable and that we need not worry, or indeed even think about such things. There is no greater power we can exercise over others than the power over the mind. The doctrine of Hell has been particularly useful in that regard for centuries. I recall a harrowing sermon on hell by a white-robed Franciscan monk at our church when I was ten years old, but more than the horrific descriptions he gave (all of them insults to any idea of a loving and merciful God), there sticks in my memory the faces of my father beside me and other men around me: looks of rapt fear and submission, and I realized several years later when I became a non-believer what power these priests wielded over us (power we have given them for no other reason than indoctrination), and what fear could do to imprison our minds. One of the things that struck me about the whole thing was how offensive it is that our minds have been so assaulted and crippled by such men and ideas, often for life. It is unfortunate that so many people simply cannot find the means or ability to break those bonds. To give your child the Christian upbringing your wife advocates would condemn her to a life of fear and repression. Ironically, much of the "cruelty" of the world she wants to guard against relates to what religion itself does to us, or to others that we have to coexist with, whether in our own neighborhoods or on this planet as a whole.
Jeff writes:
It can only be said that greater minds than yours have tried to destroy God's Word for over 2,000 years and it stands true today in spite of their and your best efforts. I grieve for your soul.
E.D.: What we need more of is "grieving for the
mind".
Clay writes:
I want to let you know that I am really enjoying
reading your work.
I am also very interested in the notion of putting together information
that explores the true history of biblical religious thought over the
eons. There is so much misinformation about Christianity pushed onto
the general public, and virtually nothing that tells the story of its
origins. I assume you are in contact with other critical explorers of
the religious texts. Do you think it is possible there might be
interest in trying to put together a television documentary about this?
E.D.: I
have no doubt there exists a lot of interest in doing such a thing.
Unfortunately, two general impediments tend to stand in the way: the
difficulty of raising money for such a production, and the
unwillingness of major networks to air radical material that would
offend their vast religious viewership. If you watch any of the
standard documentaries aired by PBS or A&E on biblical studies, you
will recognize how carefully they tread when allowing a voice even to
the idea of doubt on the part of liberal scholarship about orthodox
viewpoints. On the other hand, fraudulent specials about things like
the discovery of Noah's Ark are regularly and shamelessly offered to a
gullible public.
Willem writes:
I agree with everything you say. But you
offer no hope that our existence has a meaning. Against our better
judgement we believe anything as long as it gives us a glimmer of hope.
We don't want the truth, we want hope. Besides that, religion sometimes
convinces us to do the right thing. Hitler was a man without religion
and that led to terrible things.
E.D.: There is a wealth of potential for comment on this
brief message, but I will keep it short. Of course, Willem has neatly
summed up the reason why religion is so successful, and at the same
time why it is so deleterious. It boils down to wishful thinking, and
whether one chooses to live one's life according to fantasy or reality.
If a belief in a supernatural divinity and a personal afterlife is a
misguided fantasy, then the consequences of how we regard the present
world can only be negative. The theist would like to claim otherwise,
but history and even our present-day experience, proves the
claim wrong. If religion "sometimes" convinces us to do the right
thing, it has more often led us to do the wrong thing. How we have
arrived at that distinction is by the exercise of our own intellects
and moral wisdom. If we possess these latter faculties, we don't need
divine directives to guide us, especially ones that are encased in
petrified writings that are often primitive, contradictory, and
counterproductive to social and intellectual progress.
As for the timeworn accusations about Hitler
(with Stalin usually included as well, as dual examples of the
consequences of 20th century 'atheism'), it is by no means agreed that
Hitler was an atheist, or that atheism was the cause of his or Stalin's
reprehensible deeds. Communism and fascism were political ideologies,
and their crimes were committed in the name of political and
nationalist ideals, not in the name of atheism. Since history and
present-day experience more than amply demonstrate that even religion
is no impediment to criminal inhumanity, the standard argument using
the likes of Hitler and Stalin is hardly compelling. Moreover, the
crimes committed by religions (and Christianity's history is full of
them) are done in the name of religion,
which is an important distinction usually overlooked.
But now on to more technical matters....
Doug writes:
Thank
you for your great site and your fascinating books! I've always had a
question concerning the New Testament usage of "Lord" (Greek "Kurios")
and if the appellation for Jesus as Lord was meant by the writers to
refer to the same Kurios/Yahweh in the Septuagint, meaning they thought
Jesus was God? Am I right that the Septuagint refers to Jewish kings
like David and Solomon as "kurios?" as well, and that it doesn't
exclusively mean God?
What would be the connection between James 5:4, referring
to the "Lord of Sabaoth" and then following it James 5:7, "The coming
of the Lord" which apparently (???) refers now to Jesus. Does this mean
that whoever wrote this epistle believed that they were one and the
same "Lord"?
Response to Doug:
Does Jesus as "Lord" mean he is "God"? / James'
"Lord"
Hans-Joachim Schoeps (The Theology of the Apostle Paul) has pointed out that Paul, in using the title "kurios" applies it to Jesus in exactly the way he would to God, as the Old Testament uses it of God in the Greek Septuagint. Schoeps concludes, with a touch of well-merited astonishment, that Paul thus brings Jesus "at the very least into close proximity with God." James Dunn (The Parting of the Ways, p.188f), in discussing the same point, expresses the same reaction even more strongly. He notes that Paul shows not the slightest discomfort in applying to Jesus passages from the Hebrew scriptures which originally referred to God, such as Joel 2:32: "Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved." This Paul quotes in Romans 10:13 with direct application to Jesus. The hymn in Philippians 2:6-11 is a clear echo, Dunn says, of Isaiah 45:23 which is "one of the strongest assertions of Jewish monotheism in the whole of the scriptures." He goes on to declare: "That a Jew should use such a text of a man who recently lived in Palestine is truly astonishing."
But it would be astonishing only if this is what Paul is doing. The fact that Paul never gives us any indication that he is equating his divine Lord and Son of God with "a man who had recently lived in Palestine" seems to have escaped scholars like Dunn. There is no indication in any of the first century epistles that the early Christian preaching movement has elevated a crucified criminal of recent memory to the status of Godhood, full identification with the ancient God of Abraham. This would have been the ultimate outrageous blasphemy. (Paul's comment in 1 Corinthians 1:23 that the cross of Christ is a "scandal" refers to the idea that his —divine —Christ was crucified, not that a man had been turned into God, a point which is never addressed anywhere.)
A scholar like F. F. Bruce can face the unthinkable seemingly without blinking: "What moved them to do so [apply "Lord" in its fullest sense to Jesus] was the impact which Jesus himself made on their lives —an impact so unparalleled that it made men who had been brought up as faithful monotheistic Jews give Jesus, inevitably and spontaneously, the glory which belonged to the one God." (Promise and Fulfilment, p.49f)
Yet Bruce has shown the inadequacy of the only rationalization available for it. No impact which a human Jesus could have made on their lives would be sufficient reason to overcome the Jewish monotheistic mindset, would ever have led to their declaration of him as God and Lord, pre-existent, agent of creation, atoner and redeemer, conqueror of the supernatural powers, ruler and sustainer of the universe. No man could produce such a reaction (nor ever has). Nothing in Jewish philosophical tradition could have prepared them for it. Even Philo has severely restricted his picture of Moses as a vehicle for the Logos and has made Moses in no way divine. Indeed, to deify a recent man to such a cosmic level as Jesus was supposed to have been immediately raised was without precedent anywhere, in Jewish or pagan religious philosophy. (This cosmic elevation in the early record belies the common scholarly claim that Jesus of Nazareth was only gradually deified, culminating in the Church Councils: it turns a blind eye, or deliberately tries to obscure, the picture of Jesus presented in virtually all the earliest documents.)
It might be said (and I've been among those who have said it) that Pauline Christianity was as much a gentile-inspired movement as a Jewish one, and thus would be less resistant to the elevation of a man to divine status. Yet this potentially more fertile ground of acceptance is entirely ignored in the picture created by the early epistles addressed to diaspora and largely gentile audiences, in that the role of Jesus as a recent human figure is simply not introduced, even where it would have been advantageous. And while early Christianity had a strong gentile element, it was still wedded to the Jewish heritage, if only by adoption; even the Gospels show that many early Christian communities had ties to the synagogue. Scholars have identified the split that occurred in the latter milieu as "the parting of the ways," something that began to take place toward the end of the first century, after which Christian sects could no longer be closely associated with the synagogue and were expelled. What led to this split? Why did Jews and gentiles apparently co-exist in the new movement for several decades in many parts of the Christian world, and then have a fatal and permanent falling out? The mythicist scenario has a simple answer: it happened when the spiritual Christ began to evolve into a Jesus who was seen as an actual man. Once Jesus of Nazareth emerged, the Jewish Christians could not go along, and further conversion of Jews to Christianity came to a halt. (Certain Jewish-Christian expressions survived for some time, but only by refusing to recognize the new Jesus figure as divine, which is a characteristic of so-called Jewish-Christian sects which continued into the third century.)
Out of this rejection of the new Jesus by the Jews came the anti-semitic trend in Christian tradition, an expression of the gentile mind which failed to comprehend the impossibility of general Jewish acceptance of their Jesus of Nazareth as Son of God. Pre-Gospel Christian thought, it is true, had been flirting with a compromise to strict monotheism (dangerously, as it turned out) in its introduction of a distinct 'Son' entity, especially one that had been sacrificed, but the hostility of the Jewish establishment toward the new sect and the persecution it suffered was mild in those first few decades. Traditions about such early persecution, about Paul's personal activities against the new movement prior to his conversion, have been to a great extent discredited as later exaggeration —even on the part of Paul himself. (See, for example, Douglas Hare, Jewish Persecution of Christians in Matthew.) The reason for this mild response in the early period, and why Christians in many areas could be a part of the synagogue, was because the new sect had not stepped over such an outrageous barrier. No human figure, recent or otherwise, had yet been introduced.
The kind of blasphemous elevation Jesus is claimed to have undergone immediately after his death would have resulted in the most severe persecution imaginable. If Jesus himself had gone around Galilee or Judea even hinting at the kind of doctrine about himself contained in the Gospels, especially John, he would likely have been 'lynched' on sight, without benefit of trial. And certainly no Jews, simple or otherwise, would have listened long enough to give themselves a chance to believe it. If he did not, it is incredible that anyone after his death would on their own have come up with such sacrilegious ideas concerning a crucified preacher, and even less likely that if they did, their fellow Jews would not immediately have lynched them.
The other fallacy involved in Bruce's comment is his explanation that it was "the impact which Jesus made on their lives" which prompted this blasphemous elevation of him. Some impact. A dozen Christian writers for three generations could completely ignore every aspect of his life and ministry as of no interest to them. His new teachings made such an impact that Christians could supposedly refer to them right and left without giving him the slightest attribution. His miracles made such an impact that not a whisper of them emerges for almost a hundred years. Such an impact did the life and deeds of this humble Jewish preacher make that he was immediately turned into a cosmic figure which bore no resemblance to the way the Gospels portray the man as presenting himself. He was immediately smothered to the point of total eclipse by a monumental theological construct which borrowed from every philosophical idea of the day. And all of it without a hint of defence or justification, without a glance back to the man himself.
The free distribution of divine titles, the blurring of roles and personality between Jesus and God which even scholars remark on, is understandable once one accepts that Jesus is not a distinct historical person whom people had experienced and remembered, but a theoretical spiritual entity, something one has derived from scripture under the influence of ideas current in religious philosophy. He is an emanation of God, an intermediary force, part of the workings of Divinity, all of it located in the supernatural realm. This manifestation of God is in the process of being defined, being clarified in the minds of writers like Paul. Once we get to the era of the Gospels, which, with the help of the Q-community traditions, have turned this vague intermediary Christ-force into an historical man, Christian writers have an earthly flesh and blood Jesus before their eyes, and they no longer have a problem in referring to him in a very distinct manner.
Doug's query about the two contiguous uses of the term "Lord" in James 5 is a good illustration of the confusion present in the minds of interpreters. In fact, both usages would seem to refer to God the Father, the first one certainly so, the second almost as certainly, as the context (looking back to 5:4) suggests a continuity of thought about who the writer is talking about. (This expectation of the arrival of God himself at the end-time, rather than of Jesus, is found in various early Christian documents, such as 1 John and the Didache, and indicates that the idea of a Parousia of Christ was by no means universal within the movement.) The sole clear instance of a mention of Christ in James is 2:1, and it is a passing one: "My brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don't show favoritism..." Not only is this a good example of the free use of a divine title for Christ, with no self-consciousness, indicating that he is part of a shared divinity with God, he is presented simply as an entity one believes in, with no hint of an earthly life and death. The epistle of James is a notorious example of an early Christian writing that offers all sorts of moral advice resembling that of Jesus in the Gospels without ever attributing it to him. As well, there seems to be no thought of a redeeming death and resurrection, for in 1:21 the writer urges the reader to "accept the message implanted (in you) which can bring you salvation." It is the acceptance of an ethical teaching which "saves your souls," not Jesus' atoning sacrifice or rising from the grave.
The word "Lord", of course, was also used in more mundane settings, applied deferentially to important figures, including David, as Doug suggests. But the context in which early writings like James applies the term to Jesus clearly excludes placing him in this reduced category.
R.C. writes:
You propose an interesting interpretation of the Jesus phenomenon of the first century. I think there is a lot of merit to it. I know that some propose that the gospel-esque Last Supper passage in 1 Corinthians 11 is a later interpolation, possibly by historicizers or possibly by people who pictured the scene as occurring in the world of myth rather than history. But if it's myth (whether originally a part of the epistle or not), I am curious who or what you think Jesus in this story was "handed over" to. Were demons walking around in this mythical world that Jesus could be handed over to? Were they "heavenly spherical" Romans or Jews (their counterparts in this world of myth)?
In this passage Jesus is eating bread and drinking wine, he has disciples and there is day and night. I find it difficult to reconcile this with a Jesus who is entirely a spirit figure living in the heavenly spheres where there would be no wine, no disciples or day or night. A second question I have is that if it is myth, then is it taking place in the upper heavenly spheres or is it taking place on earth in some sort of distant, idealized past when the "gods walked the earth" and so forth.
Response to R.C.:
Envisioning the Mythical World of the Savior Gods
Envisioning the workings of the upper
spiritual world of myth seems to present a stumbling-block for many
people who might otherwise embrace the mythicist case more readily.
Part of the reason is that they tend to take things too literally, in a
graphic detail that often strikes the 21st century mind as ludicrous.
If the Son in relation to "the flesh" was of the seed of David (as Paul
states in Romans 1:3), they imply that one must therefore envision a
"heavenly David" walking around in some upper kingdom, copulating on a
heavenly bear-skin blanket with a heavenly wife, who in turn gives
birth to a heavenly tiny perfect Son, no doubt breast-feeding and
raising him through the rigors of spirit-realm childhood. Now,
mythology in the ancient world could be pretty graphic, and every
ancient religion had detailed myths about the activities of their gods
and goddesses. But how literally were they perceived? The philosophers
(like Plutarch) tell us that we should not view such things literally,
but only as allegories for deeper truths. When the savior-god Attis,
consort of the Great Mother, had a myth of self-castration attached to
him by those who sought an explanation for the practice of castration
by devotees of the goddess, it served the purpose of elucidating
features of faith and practice among the initiates. But should we think
that such a graphic myth could only be taken literally, or that it
ought to have presented a stumbling-block to members of the Attis cult?
Well, we can assume that it didn't,
and while a few philosophers (such as Sallustius in the 4th century)
declared it was all symbolic, it's hard to know how literally some of
the initiates-in-the-street may have taken such myths. But it really
doesn't matter. We know that such myths existed and were an essential
part of the various savior-god religions. We make the mistake of
bringing our modern sensibilities to the very similar Christian myths
and pronouncing them ridiculous as anything but supposed historical
fact. But if we have the example of the religious myths of the time
before us, and if we can accept that they were not placed in specific
history yet were given meaning in one way or another, we have no reason
to reject those of early Christianity as being impossible to accept on
the same level, regardless of questions of literalism.
Observers like R.C. suggest that the
mystery cult myths could be placed in the "idealized past" on earth,
often called
a "primordial time" in or before history, implying that this is more
acceptable and constitutes a key distinction from the upper-world
picture in which mythicists like myself want to cast a scene such as
the Lord's Supper of 1 Corinthians 11:23. But this is really a false
distinction. In mythology more ancient than the period of Christianity,
primordial time was the usual setting in which these stories were set,
yet it was a time and place 'outside' of normal history. Platonism
merely transferred that external setting to the upper part of a
dualistic universe, retaining much of the same character for the myths
involved. The two types of thinking are simply reflective of the
current philosophies, and as I have shown in some detail in Appendix 6
of my book, The Jesus Puzzle,
the evidence in both Christian and non-Christian myth of the period
around the first century clearly suggests that the standard placement
was in a parallel upper spirit world rather than in a distant-past
primordial
time.
Thus R.C. is trying to be
unnecessarily specific in asking whether Jesus was "handed over" to
heavenly Romans or Jews (whether spherically shaped or otherwise). In
fact, Paul in Romans 8:32, says that God himself was the one who
"delivered up" Jesus for sacrifice, using the same verb found in 1
Corinthians 11:23. To whom was God doing the handing over, where was he
standing at the time? Obviously, literalism is not the issue here.
Similarly, in Paul's Lord's Supper passage, we do not have to postulate
a detailed dinner table scene in which we could count the spiritual
cups, no more than we need to similarly detail the scene of Mithras
dining with the Sun god and signing a pact with him, such as we find in
the sacred meal mythology of the Mithraic cult, or ask what the alloy
was of the heavenly knife used by Attis to castrate himself. Did the
average ancient mind even make a distinction between the nature of
material reality and of spiritual reality? All it knew was that they
were two related branches of reality, the spiritual more 'real' and
primary than the material; and in the case of early Christ cultists
like Paul, that the Jewish scriptures presented a revelatory window
onto that higher reality, where the spiritual processes of salvation
had taken place under God's guidance. Any question about 'literalism'
could only have struck him as confused or misguided.
Mario writes:
I must commend you on your thoroughly well researched and lucid web page. Something struck me about those who say that the reason that Paul and other 1st century Christian writers fail to mention an earthly Jesus and his teachings is because it was common knowledge among his followers and therefore need not be referenced.
What about the Old Testament references these early authors use in their discourses? Would not their intended recipients be aware and knowledgeable of these much older scriptures as well? Would it be necessary for Paul et al. to use OT scriptural passages to make their point if their correspondents already knew them? The OT passages had been around a lot longer than anything an earthly Jesus might have said during his life in 1st century Galilee, so their dissemination would be expected to be much more established. We are to believe that the much newer words of Jesus are already a 'given' during the 1st century and therefore need no referencing, but the longer established OT still needs to be referenced.
I am drawn to agree with your conclusion that the 'exclusion' of the teachings of Jesus by Paul et al. are baffling if they indeed were aware of them. The excuse that they need not refer to them because their intended recipients already knew the material seems absolutely groundless to me.
Response to Mario:
As it does to me, making this standard 'explanation' by someone like J. P. Holding an incredibly weak argument. First of all, Paul is writing within the first generation or so of the spread of Christianity, and his audiences are all over the map, literally. To think that scores of centers and congregations across the eastern Roman empire would already have been so fully exposed to all the teachings of Jesus, and knew them so thoroughly, that it was accepted (by many more writers and apostles in the field than just Paul) that no further mention or attribution need be made of them, is simply ludicrous.
Second, the very idea is belied by much of the content of epistles like those of Paul. They are full of disputes that are directly related to issues which the supposed teachings of Jesus had addressed, such as the continued applicability of the Jewish Law, the need for things like circumcision and dietary restrictions, the coming Parousia of the Son of Man (or God, or Christ himself, it varied), and so on. It is clear that those teachings could not have been widely known or accepted, otherwise the disputes would not have arisen or would have been settled by appeal to those teachings. The great contention in Corinth Paul addresses in the early part of 1 Corinthians was supposedly based on different interpretations of Jesus' teachings (so scholars like Helmut Koester claim), and yet neither Paul nor apparently his rivals in that city ever refer to a single one of those teachings (a silence Koester is led to voice surprise at).
Finally, whether such teachings were widely known or not, this should not prevent writers and disputants from mentioning them, as Christian preachers and commentators do today, and have done for centuries. Indeed, the very familiarity with such teachings as envisioned by apologists like Holding would guarantee that they would be on everyone's lips. It is human nature, when debating an issue or urging a course of action on someone, to appeal to an authority who agrees with you, and that appeal is strengthened by the knowledge that the listener is very aware of such authority. If the listener holds a different interpretation of the authority's words, all the more reason to argue it with him.
The widespread use of Old Testament references in the writings of the early Christian authors not only demonstrates this practice, but shows the ingrained need and instinct for appeal and support when a writer is addressing contentious issues. It is simply astounding the extent to which generations of New Testament scholars have indulged in the most far-fetched and fallacious reasoning to explain the pervasive silence on any appeal to Jesus' teachings and deeds in the non-Gospel documents of the first century of the Christian movement.
Pat writes:
Thanks
for your site. It's helpful to me as a believing follower of Jesus the
Christ.
In reading your Top 20 about the silence in the epistles,
I was struck by the fact that Paul has a curious silence also about the
misunderstanding that people of that time had about Jesus actually
being a real living breathing person. Obviously people at that time
thought that Jesus was a real person who did the things that mainstream
Christianity believes today. Even non-christian sources mention certain
reported facts about early believers and followers of a person named
Jesus (Josephus, etc.). If this is true then why didn't Paul go out of
his way to correct this misunderstanding. How do you explain his
SILENCE about an interpretation that Jesus literally lived, died,
resurrected, and that people claimed to see, touch and eat with him?
Response to Pat:
Paul's "Silence" on an Historical Jesus Delusion
/ "Falsifying" the Gospel Story
Pat has apparently been unable to cut through the
fog of preconception to grasp the fundamentals of the mythicist
position. It is anything but "obvious" that any people of his time held
the "misunderstanding" that Jesus had been a real person. Had they done
so, and had Paul held a contrary view as representing an opposite
opinion within the Christian movement, Pat is certainly right that the
question would likely have been raised in his letters. Ironically, that
is precisely the situation we find at a later date, a couple of
generations after Paul's passing. Both in 1 John (in chapter 4), and
the letters of Ignatius (which, whether genuine or not would have been
a product of the early 2nd century), we seem to find a fundamental
dispute going on within their communities about whether in fact Jesus
had "come in the flesh" or had "truly" been born of Mary and crucified
by Pilate.
Pat's question (though from a facetious angle) is simply a variant on the common objection that belief in an historical Jesus when it first arose, supposedly toward the end of the 1st century when the first Gospel(s) began to be disseminated, would have given rise to denials on the part of Jews, pagans, or even of Christians who would have known better, who would have objected that no such figure or events had been true. This, too, is short-sighted. Few such people would still be around in centers distant from Palestine who could have so objected, and the documents mentioned above show that when they were and did, they went unheeded. Those caught up in the fervor of a new idea rarely respond to criticism or correction. Indeed, as Ignatius shows, their reaction is to condemn the objector and hold to their own position with increasing tenacity and attempts to justify it. Those living nearer in time to the alleged events would have had no reason to object, since such a view about an historical figure was not being put forward (which is why Paul, in Pat's scenario, never raised such a question).
"Thomas" was another who recently protested along
these lines. He says: "If your timeline is correct and the author of
the Gospel of Mark is writing in 85-90 CE then this is only 49-64 years
after the fictional crucifixion. This is a short enough time that many
people would be alive who could falsify the story." I can't help
thinking that this objection is somewhat determined by the era we live
in. How would those half a century after the falsely-alleged fact of
Jesus' crucifixion have conducted this falsification? By radio,
television, the internet? Would they have published debunking books
available in every bookstore? Would those who heard their objections
have visited libraries and other available public records to verify
that the denials were accurate? Would lawsuits be launched against
those claimed to be deceiving the public through falsely advertising
certain advantages or products in relation to the new doctrines? Would
politicians or those in authority get worked up about allegedly false
history contained in some document resting in a house-church somewhere
in their district, if it was even brought to their attention?
The point is, when one thinks about such objections
more than superficially, one realizes that in the context of the actual
situation, especially in conditions like those of the first century,
the alleged problem simply evaporates. We know enough about the spread
of religious ideas, even within our own time, to know that the prospect
of opposition, denial or contrary evidence has little effect on the
birth and growth of doctrines which are, to begin with, delusions of
the mind and the product of irrational thinking.
Raymond writes:
Your approach to the problem of the
existence of Jesus seems very similar to that of G. A. Wells. Wells
arranges early Christian texts in chronological order and demonstrates
that early Christian writers know next to nothing of Jesus' life and
teachings, while later Christian writers know more and more. There is,
of course, a great deal more than that in your writings, but the
chronological approach seems central, and its implications are most
devastating to believers.
Alas, a fly has landed on that pudding. Is
Paul the first Christian writer? Did Paul even exist, and if he did,
what did he write? What if the epistles of Paul are not products of the
middle of the first century but the works of later Christians (or even
Gnostics) such as Marcion, and date towards the middle of the second
century? How would that affect the development of your point of view?
If the date of the Pauline epistles must be moved that far forward,
even later than the date of at least one Gospel, Mark, then your and
Wells' development seems to be thrown into confusion: now Mark seems to
know a lot more than "Paul." I think that eliminating the Pauline
epistles must have some effect on your view of early Christianity and
the question of the existence of Jesus.
Response to Raymond:
The Mythicist Case if "Paul" is Second Century
The main "effect" of an inauthentic and second
century Paul would be the amount of material to work with in
recognizing and presenting the mythicist case. Much of what I am able
to conclude is dependent on making use of certain portions of the
Pauline corpus as authentic to the first century. But that is no
different from asking how such a case could be made if we happened to
have no writings of "Paul" at all. The answer is simply that it would
be much more difficult.
However, a second-century Pauline corpus would not per se be fatal to the mythicist
case, not even given its dating of a generation or more after the first
Gospel. The documentary evidence hardly shows a "lock-step" progression
of presumed knowledge about an historical Jesus even through most of
the second century. As my site and books have demonstrated, certain
writings of early Christianity make no mention of an historical figure
well after my own rather conservative dating (as radical scholarship
goes) of the Gospels. A Mark at around 85-90 and a Matthew and Luke
(and even John) by around 125 still precede several 2nd century
apologists, such as Athenagoras, Tatian and Theophilus, who present no
historical Jesus in their defences of the faith. The record of these
and other writings (Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas) shows that even
after the Gospels were presumably written, widespread areas of the
Christian faith were simply not familiar with them or possessed no
copies.
Keep in mind, as well, that the Gospels could
have been in existence for decades without being known much beyond the
confines of the communities which produced them. And that, in fact, is
the situation we seem to find in the documentary record as a whole.
Even within those communities, there is nothing to tell us that such
accounts were regarded as historical when first produced.
It is not so much that one can draw up a precise
chronology of Christian documents and find a steady, coordinated
progression of reference to the presumed Gospel figure and events as
one moves forward in time. But the overall pattern is clearly there.
"Knowledge" about Jesus of Nazareth and his life as supposedly recorded
in the Gospels moves from the non-existent, to the spotty to the
widespread over the course of 150 years. Only in the last two decades
of the second century are we on secure ground in finding a picture of
Christianity as a movement founded on the contents of Mark, Matthew,
Luke and John.
That being said, I regard the silence in the Pauline
epistles in regard to an historical Jesus as being a strong argument
against a dating in the mid-second century. Some have argued that even
as late as that, the epistles could have been produced in circles that
were lagging behind in knowledge of the newly developing traditions
about an historical figure, and yet the second-century scenario does
not fit such a claim. If they were the product of the Roman church, as
many suggest, this is the very milieu which was one of the vanguards in
promoting the Gospel story and its central character. Marcion, too, a
favorite candidate for authorship of the Pauline corpus, eventually
worked in Rome and even if he had composed the epistles in his earlier
travels (one suggestion), he would almost certainly have revised them
once he was operating in the Roman milieu and came to accept an
historical Jesus, even if one rendered docetic. Besides, the mild
gnostic
features one can claim to find in Paul are nowhere near as developed or
as specific as those Marcion seems to have promoted. The great
gnostic-orthodox rivalry at the center of the empire which was a
feature of the mid-second century is simply not present in Paul or even
pseudo-Paul. Unless much stronger cases are made for the entire Pauline
literature as second century products (not simply containing some later
editing
—
though even this
would be perplexing limited), I am convinced
that the mythicist case is not in danger of being jeopardized through
removal of most of the Pauline content from the first-century body of
available evidence. The precise time and circumstances of that evidence
(or even the question of their possible editing during the early
period) is different matter, if one rejects Acts as providing any
reliable picture of early Christianity in general or Paul's career in
particular.
Eric writes:
I first want to commend you on all the work you've put into your site. Now my question: It's been suggested to me that the wedding of John 2 [the miracle at Cana] was, in fact, Jesus' own wedding (though obviously the account obscures the fact), in keeping with the Jewish mishna that a teacher cannot be unmarried. Charles Davis has written that had Jesus been openly celibate, there would have been some mention of this by the Jewish community in the gospels. How might one read the water-into-wine story of John 2 in the absence of an historical Jesus?
Response to Eric:
Virtually all the miracles attributed to Jesus in the Gospels represent wondrous deeds which were either standard among miracle-workers and would-be messiahs of the day (healings, feats over nature, etc.) or were expressions of the expectations associated with the Jewish apocalyptic movement concerning the imminent End-time. What John's story may specifically have been modeled on, or what earlier version it may have been derived from and whether it was originally associated with Jesus, is impossible to say. Robert Price, quoting Raymond E. Brown, suggests (The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, p.77-8) that it was adapted from a "stray bit of infancy gospel material," since it reflects the idea that Jesus is drawn into showing his powers before the time for his public ministry has arrived. "My hour is not yet come" (John 2:4).
In this respect it is like the Lukan scene of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple, impressing the elders with his depth of knowledge and interpretation. Of course, scenes like this are sheer invention, as they reproduce a pattern found throughout ancient 'biography' of great men, "Wunderkind stories" as Price calls them. Philo and Josephus offered similar tales of Moses surpassing his elders, and they are told of other Old Testament figures like Samuel, Solomon and Daniel (more often than not, at the stated age of twelve). Miracle-working by a young prodigy before his embarkation on greatness was also a common theme, reflecting the idea that such greatness was foreshadowed while still in youth. The Brown/Price opinion suggests that the author (or more likely an editor at a later stage) of the Gospel of John adapted it from a more youth-oriented tradition, perhaps from among the growing catalogue of infancy material about the new historical Jesus that, along with all sorts of other apocryphal "acts" attached to early figures, was tumbling out of the legend mill in the latter half of the second century.
As for the suggestion that this was an obscured account of Jesus' own wedding, one wonders why only one evangelist would have included mention of it, even if disguised, and what purpose it might have been thought to serve in Cana context. As far as I know, the idea surfaces nowhere else, and if this Jewish concern for married teachers had really been applied to an historical figure, it says something about that historicity that no such issue surrounding him is found throughout the early documentary record.
Bryan writes:
This is something I've been blindsided with a couple of times. I've had a pastor throw in my face about the current A.D. and B.C. system of measuring years and how that only exists because of Jesus! I was wondering as to who/what made us refer to years as A.D. and B.C. My guess is that the initials are of Roman origin and that they meant something else originally, later getting skewed by apologists into its current After Death / Before Christ.
Response to Bryan:
I'm not sure if Bryan simply made a mental typo about the meaning of A.D., but of course it refers to the phrase "Anno Domini" or "in the Year of the Lord," meaning the number of years after his supposed birth. The system itself was only introduced early in the 6th century. Prior to that, official dating in the Roman empire had been reckoned from the year of Diocletian's accession in 284 CE, although the traditional system of "Ab Urbe Condite" dating (from the legendary foundation of Rome) remained in popular use. A Scythian monk by the name of Dionysius Exiguus living in Rome was appointed by the Pope to institute a more accurate dating system for Easter. As part of that reorganization, he calculated the birth of Christ as occuring in the year 753 of the traditional Roman calendar, a calculation which even those who accept the existence of such a figure now regard as wrong. Of course, Exiguus had nothing more to go on than we have today, which is to say, the imperfect accounts found in the Gospels, mainly Luke. The author of that Gospel lived much closer to the 'event' than Exiguus, but he clearly had no firm tradition about the time or circumstances of Jesus' presumed birth, and the nativity stories of both Matthew and Luke show signs of being constructed not as an attempted historically accurate record but, as always, with midrashic storytelling purposes paramount. The fact that no Christian tradition outside the artificial nativity stories of two Gospel writers preserved any more accurate or specific location of Jesus' birth is a telling silence against actual historicity.
Dick writes:
I have a question relating to the 4 Gospels and their dates. Of the actual manuscripts that are in existence today, what are the dates when these copies were written? Are there any from the time the canons were selected (367 CE)? I think I remember something about 1000 CE as being the oldest date for any of the Gospels.
I also have a question concerning the three books by Barbara Thiering that I have read in recent years. I found them to be profound and thought-provoking, as well as scholarly in presentation. I'm curious as to how the Jesus theorists of today view her writings, especially the book on "The Book That Jesus Wrote" (of course, her theory is that Jesus did not die, and in fact went on to write, or dictate, the Book of John).
Response to Dick:
Our oldest extant manuscripts of the Gospels, in whole and in part, much predate the year 1000. The great codeces containing most of the New Testament, such as Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, date from the 300s. Various incomplete texts come from the years between 200 and 300. A solitary fragment predates 200, namely the famous (or infamous) piece of John containing a few verses of chapter 18, which conservative scholars try to date as early as 125 or even 100, but which cannot be securely positioned any more specifically than the period 125 to 175. None of these (and the latter is too small to tell us much about the Gospel as a whole) fall within an early enough time frame to indicate either the nature of the earliest versions of the Gospels, or the nature of the early faith in general. The formative period of a new sect is precisely when most of the radical change and evolution of ideas takes place, and we have no manuscript record of that development as far as the Gospels are concerned. The fact that the extant writing we do have from that earliest period (epistles, non-canonical documents, etc.) presents a much different picture of the faith and the Jesus figure than the later Gospels indicates a likely evolution that was quantum in scope. Even within the context of the Gospels we see extensive changes between the earliest one written (Mark) and those who subsequently reworked him. All of this does not inspire confidence that the canonical record reflects the ideas or even the events of the initial period of Christianity. Incidentally, although the canon was only finalized in the later 4th century, attempts to form a catalogue of reliable documents reflecting an 'orthodox' position began as early as around 200.
As for Barbara Thiering, she is one of the most controversial figures working in New Testament scholarship today. Many are impressed by her books, but I can't include myself in that group. I read only half of one of them, and have to admit that I found much of her methodology and reasoning dubious or even bizarre. The thesis in "The Book That Jesus Wrote" in my estimation falls into the latter category.
Frank writes:
You present a very compelling case, and I'll never look at the gospels the same way again. There is one topic that I haven't seen you address. You place Mark, and his community, in Syria. Yet there is the letter from Clement of Alexandria discovered in 1958 by Morton Smith. If authentic, the letter places Mark in Alexandria when he wrote his gospel and also identifies him as an apostle of Paul. And then, of course, there is the section that the bishop wanted removed from the gospel, the main purpose of the letter.... I don't see anything in this that contradicts your argument. In fact, it seems to be somewhat supportive in a round about way.
Response to Frank:
I have cut most of what Frank said in his letter about the content of so-called Secret Mark and what it might signify, because it is rendered rather moot by the now widespread opinion among scholars that Secret Mark, and Morton Smith's discovery of it, is a fraud, and that Morton Smith himself (now deceased) was the most likely perpetrator. I am not familiar with the details this opinion is based on, but when a document or artifact claiming to provide special insight into a contentious subject no longer exists or cannot be supplied for independent study, that tends to be a dead give-away. There have been those who still defend Smith, or who claim that a fraud of this nature would have been too difficult to pull off, but these days such objections are rather naive. We have experienced too many frauds in the modern era, and not only to do with biblical research or even history. More than that I can't say in this particular case, but I point this out in answer to Frank because I still see frequent comment about Secret Mark on places like internet discussion boards with no acknowledgement or apparent awareness of the current negative judgment about it.