RFSet 25: September 2005
Anthony writes:

    Just a note to thank you for The Jesus Puzzle. I've found your book profoundly illuminating and it helps to make sense of many things I'd previously been puzzled by. I follow the discussions on the JesusMysteries mailing list but have to admit that much of it goes over my head. But your book is the most comprehensible I've come across.

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Daniel writes:

   I was raised in a Christian family, sent to churches, some Christian pre-school and to a Christian school for Grades 2 to 11. Recently, I have come to the conclusion to reject Christianity as truth, due to the absurdities in the Old and New Testament.
   Christianity is truly a monster of this age. Thanks for knocking it a big blow.

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A.F. writes:

   I First of all, thank you for your site! Secondly, who are you, and where have you been all my life? I am literally blown away by your writings and all the things on your site. It is now at the top of "my favorites". There is hope for mankind, after all.

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Steven writes:

   I thought I'd drop you a quick kudos for your work, which I consider to be the most thorough and scholarly deconstruction and explanation of the Jesus of History. Combined with Jung's work on archetypes and when coupled with an understanding of Egyptian myth, Neoplatonism, and Judaism, a clear picture of the origins of the Christ of faith begins to emerge.
   I consider the deconstruction of fundamentalism to be of critical importance in our troubled world. Thanks again for the great clarity that you contribute to our understanding.

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Jeremy writes:

   I just have to say that I deeply respect you and your insights into the true Christian faith. I can and do spend much time reading your research into the origins of Christianity, and I believe that one day you may be known as a great credit to humanity's enlightenment to the truth. Keep up the spectacular work -- enlightenment is coming!

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Larry writes:

   Your scholarly approach to "The Jesus Puzzle" is extraordinarily helpful to folks like myself who are skeptical of the foundations of the world's major religions while holding hope that the universe has a Designer with a special interest in us. Having been an Engineer all my life, I developed a strong 'technical ethic' for seeking truth in the presence of more tempting alternatives. In this case the Christian belief is a very tempting story that doesn't seem to be well supported. Kudos for tackling this subject in this way and giving us real data to work with.

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John writes:

   I am grateful to you for your courage in publishing these conclusions, conclusions that many people of my acquaintance share. In Britain, almost all the christian sects are in retreat, and most of my acquaintances do not believe in a divine Jesus; some still believe in Jesus the revolutionary, but the rest believe that Jesus is a fictional figure. From our side of the Atlantic the decline of America into ignorant fundamentalism is terrifying. Your blazing light of reason is a beacon of hope, not just for America, but for the rest of the world.

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Rob writes:

   A really great web site, Mr. Doherty. I salute you. I recently ordered both The Jesus Puzzle and Challenging The Verdict. Sorry that I didn't do it sooner. Please keep on with your great work, people like you are very valuable and desperately needed.

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Richard writes:

   I've been reading your website for a couple of nights. It is amazing. I read Theology at Oxford thirty years ago and reading critical scholarship stopped dead my youthful Christian enthusiasm. But I could never make sense of the very issues you address. The absence of the historical Jesus in Paul, the absence of the historical Jesus in the early patristic fathers. I dropped theology, but I kept up reading in it to see if someone could begin to address my concerns.
   Well, you have.

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Gerard writes:

       I want to thank you for your website, it is fascinating reading. I find your Jesus Puzzle reasoning quite convincing. Of course, not being any sort of Believer myself, I wasn't in any need of any auto-deprogramming. Your novel is a great read as well, thanks for making that available.

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Vic writes:

       I am in the process of carefully reading your website material, articles, and literary works. What has made me send you this message is because I am a recent media graduate who sees a problem in the stark contrast between your work and Mel Gibson's pseudo-historical shockumentary that is actually considered infallible by our gullible minds who are exposed to such media today. What bothers me is the other more balanced perspective (yours, along with other credible historical research) in this Gospel and New Testament issue does not receive anything close to the media exposure of the deceiving history of Gibson.

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Michael writes:       

   About two and a half years ago I found the Jesus Puzzle web site. I found it fascinating. Shortly thereafter I purchased The Case for Christ. I could NOT even finish the first chapter. It sounded so wrong. Two weeks ago I ordered Challenging the Verdict. When it arrived, I immediately sat down and read it. It took me less than a day to devour it. Your book is engrossing. I found myself telling the 'witnesses' to shut up with their misinformation and erroneous logic, while at the same time telling you to "go get 'em, Earl!" I also found that I had purchased a Bible, so as to be able to follow theirs and your cases. Couldn't read that either. From the bottom of my heart I thank you for your marvellous work. Keep it up, we will win in the end!
   P.S. Am almost finished with the Testament of Man series. Fisher is an excellent author and his descriptions are very well crafted.

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Brad writes:

   The information on your website makes for compelling and thought-provoking reading. I wonder if you have expressed an opinion about or explored the idea that many of the personal figures found in the synoptic gospels simply disappear from history with no conclusions to their stories or lives. Among the many characters in the gospels, what ultimately happened to them and so forth, seems absent as if the various stories lack historical conclusions. I guess not knowing or possessing viable histories, say, for a figure like Mary Magdalene or the Virgin Mary, allows plenty of latitude to speculate on what became of them. So, in addition to Paul's apparent ignorance of Jesus, does he display the same deficiency for the many other characters too? Is it possible that in such a great story with great characters that we'd have almost no information as to what happened to the balance of their lives, what they did, where they were buried, and so forth?

Response to Brad:

Whatever happened to...?

An intriguing observation. It's really an extension of the silence in Paul and other early writers on the characters we meet in the Gospels. Why indeed is there no mention in the first century documents (and some beyond) of Pontius Pilate, Mary and Joseph, Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist, Judas, Joseph of Arimathea, Simon of Cyrene, and the many other characters who take part in the story of Jesus' life? It is not simply a question of a writer having occasion to mention them —and in any case there were plenty of occasions in the epistles for such mention —but why did these figures not assume a symbolic significance in the thought and preaching of early apostles like Paul? If we can encounter references throughout the epistles to the demon spirits in relation to the death and redeeming work of Jesus, why not to Pilate or Herod? Why not to Judas? Why not to the places and details of the death and resurrection of the Son of God himself on earth?

But as Brad points out, why did not some of the Gospel characters continue to play a role in the ongoing movement after Jesus' departure? Can we conceive of not having the slightest record of what happened to his mother Mary, when and where and under what circumstances she died? As she was barely more than a girl when she gave divine birth, one would think that she might have had a long life following the crucifixion, yet we have not the barest historical detail about such a life. Was the entire Christian world uninterested in what happened to Mary Magdalene, to the many people such as Lazarus who were reputed to have been healed by Jesus or raised from the dead? Would not some of these people have become involved in the spread of the faith? Why didn't one of them accompany an apostle like Paul on his journeys, to give a first-hand account of the wonders Jesus had worked? Would not their presence on the missionary scene have led to some mention of them by Christian writers of the time?

It is only in the second century that we see mention of some of these characters start to appear, no doubt based on the Gospels, and by the latter part of the century legendary embellishment and sheer invention were bursting the bounds of the believable. There is nothing in those later accounts which suggests a basis in actual historical tradition. Every sign in the documentary record points to the whole lot of them being nothing more than literary fabrication.

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Bruce writes:

       I have been struck by a profound lack of comment on something Paul says which, when taken to its logical conclusions, is stunning. You will recall how Paul's church members were growing increasingly concerned that a number of them were dying and Jesus still had not returned. While we don't hear what they asked, Paul clearly answers them that those who had died already would be resurrected into their new lives first, then those living would be next. [1 Thessalonians 4:14-17]
   The profound implication of this for all Christians is this:
1) You are not resurrected until Jesus returns.
2) It is the year 2005 and Jesus has not yet returned.
3) Therefore no Christians have been resurrected since Jesus died and are presumably still in the ground, not in heaven.
4) Therefore no Christians have gone to heaven since Jesus died.
   I daresay that no Christian I know would accept the notion that no Christian since the time of Jesus has gone to heaven.

Response to Bruce:

Are there no Christians in Heaven yet?

I daresay Bruce is right. And yet that is what the text of 1 Thessalonians clearly says (despite occasional apologetic attempts to see it otherwise, though most simply ignore it). Let's follow Paul's line of thought:

4:15 - For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. [Clearly, Paul expects the Lord's coming — not return, a concept he shows no sign of — before some of those he is speaking to will die.]
4:16 - For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; [Those believers in Christ who have died will be resurrected. There is no question of any dead believers having already been resurrected to heaven.]
4:17 - then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord. [Everything happens at Christ's coming; those already dead rise first, then those still alive do not die but ascend to meet the resurrected dead in the sky and Christ himself.]

Since Christ has not come for the last two thousand years, it is clear that if we are to believe Paul, no Christians who have died during that time have gone to heaven. Nor is there a feasible "out" for the soul. Paul says nothing about the soul having gone to heaven after death, with only the body in the earth awaiting resurrection. If that were the case, the readers of his letter would not have had reason to "grieve" over their deceased brethren. 14:13 says: "But we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope." His readers are not grieving for themselves, but for the deceased. Paul is allaying their fears that those who have died before Christ's coming are lost. He assures them that the dead will in fact have pride of place in rising to meet the Lord, followed by those who are still alive. In verse 16 he declares "the dead in Christ will rise first"; it follows that they have not been brought to life, physically or spiritually, prior to this. They will be "dead" until the time of Christ's coming.

Of course, Paul fully expected the coming of the Lord Jesus within his own lifetime, very soon in fact. It did not trouble him if the Christian dead lay in the ground for a short time, awaiting Christ's coming to rise from "sleep." If he had foreseen that two millennia would pass with still no sign of that coming, he might have felt constrained to rethink the fate of the dead believer. It is this kind of passage that causes such problems for those who believe that every word in the New Testament is the word of God. They usually end up ignoring it, or monkeying with the translation, such as the NIV does, attempting to break the link between the two thoughts within verse 13. The New American Bible, in commenting on this passage in a footnote, contradicts not only the text itself, and its own translation, but other comments within the same footnote.

It is this passage which is the principal basis for modern Christian belief in the Rapture, a crackpot idea based on a crackpot idea by Paul, who was no doubt improvising as he went along, convinced that the Son he believed had been revealed to him was about to appear on earth. (The prophet who imagines great things for the future will invariably see them as due to occur in his own future, simply because he cannot accept that he won't be around to get in on the action; the same kind of thinking is rampant among evangelicals today.) When Paul was faced with these doubts among his congregation, he drew on Daniel 7:13 and its vision of the "one like a son of man" —which originally symbolized the Jewish saints at the time of the Maccabean uprising —for the image of Christ arriving on the clouds. But there is nothing in scripture that I am aware of which could have served as the basis for the remainder of Paul's fanciful scene, and we can assume this is the product of his own imagination and of the needs he faced at the moment.

And what consequence from that imagination! Paul writes a letter to a tiny community in a small town in ancient Greece to allay a few people's fears, conjuring up an image that ought to have landed him in a home for the deranged (and probably would today if it was being proposed for the first time). Two thousand years later, half the population on this part of the planet firmly believes in the imminent Rapture of believers, carried up to heaven on salvation's clouds, leaving behind an apocalyptic fate for planet and unbeliever alike. This is what can happen when the human mind slavishly and uncritically surrenders itself to antiquated writings of a primitive past, in a perpetuation of ignorance and superstition that should long ago have been laid to rest. We now belong to a society where such craziness has seized a good portion of the citizenry; where a series of novels embodying this mad scenario tops the bestseller lists; where children are taught to keep one eye on the heavens for the arrival of a supernatural being and their personal levitation in defiance of gravity. Such a mindset pervading so much of what passes for human intelligence cannot possibly fail to undermine the social, educational and scientific fabric of our culture. We are facing a profound intellectual decay, from ordinary neighborhoods to the halls of power. Empires have fallen on far less.

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Dmitry writes:    

      I really enjoyed reading your articles and they changed the way I see Christianity. I also read articles of Dr. Hermann Detering about the apostle Paul and he very convincingly shows that letters ascribed to Paul could not be written in 50-70 A.D. by the same guy, especially a Jewish guy. (So whoever Paul was if he lived before the end of the 1st century and was a Jew he could not write his letters.) Dr. Detering also shows that although having some historic prototype Paul--the hero of Acts Paul--the author of the letters did not exist.
   In your articles, it seems to me you treat letters of Paul as authentic and consider him more or less historical, having at least something in common with the main character of Acts. Do you believe that there was some guy named Paul who acted way before the end of the 1st century and wrote letters, because if he did not exist it somehow affects some of your arguments.

Response to Dmitry:


Kevin writes:

   I enjoyed your commentary in Mr. Flemming's movie! ["The God Who Wasn't There," a film and documentary produced by Brian Flemming which irreverently pricks the bubble of religion and questions the existence of an historical Jesus; in addition to the film itself, it contains on-camera interviews with Robert Price, Richard Carrier, Sam Harris and others, and audio interviews (by telephone) with myself and Richard Dawkins.]
   Something struck me while I was listening to your conversation regarding Paul. Did he offer the savior god mediator, or did he offer the savior god mediation? My understanding of Paul was (that he was speaking of) the coming of the Christ not as a mediator, but of the mediation of the Jewish God.

Response to Kevin:

Does Paul see the Mediator as Jesus, or God?

This is an excellent way of putting things. If Jesus had recently been on earth, living the life which the Gospels portray, there can be no question that he would be the prominent figure in the minds and expressions of the early Christians. He would be regarded as the source of the apostles' gospel and their own call, of the sect's teachings, as the originator of its practices; his acts would cast him as the primary savior and agent of salvation. As Kevin puts it, he would be God's mediator on earth, standing front-row-center.

As we all know, the picture presented in the Pauline and other epistles is quite different. At first glance, it may seem a subtle difference, but once spotlighted it emerges more clearly in all its perplexity. Without exception, the epistle writers of the New Testament present God as the primary savior, the primary revealer, the sole source of the movement's doctrines, prophecies and ethics. Signs and wonders (as in Hebrews 2:4) are performed by God, not by Jesus. God, through scripture and the Holy Spirit, is the source of grace and inspiration, and knowledge of Himself. Most importantly, Jesus is an entity who has been "revealed" in the present time, and while his spirit and his occasional "word" (again through sacred writings and revelation) is alive within the community, his physical presence in the recent past is nowhere to be found.

Paul regards the apostolic movement —with himself at the center —as in partnership with God, bringing knowledge of salvation and a new covenant to the world. What has "come" in the present time is "faith" (as in Galatians 3:23-25). If anyone on earth is or was a "mediator," it is Paul himself, with Jesus virtually imperceptible in the background. Rather, Jesus is spoken of as a channel, a facilitator within the mind of the Christian, an aspect of God through which humanity interacts with Deity. This is the significance of that common expression Paul uses throughout: "in Christ" or "through Christ." To the extent that we can get a handle on Paul's concept of Jesus, stripping away our Gospel associations within the epistles, the early Christian concept was indeed a "mediation of the Jewish God," using his own emanation —Son, word, Messiah —as conduit and instrument. For Paul, Jesus has a personality only as an offshoot or appendage to God himself; the devotion he feels for Christ is an extension of what he feels for God.

While I have styled the Christ of the early Christians as an "intermediary" entity, the sense of distinction between the Son and the Father is a pale ghost of an affair, and it pervades the entire first century record outside the Gospels. It could not possibly have resulted from the reaction to a flesh and blood human man who, within living memory, had taught and worked miracles on the sands of Galilee and bled on the hill of Calvary.

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Gordon writes:

     Have you read Bishop Spong? Does he think Jesus was a myth? He clearly rules out the gospels as historical records. I think it would be profitable to see a review by you of his book.

Response to Gordon:

Bishop Spong on the Mythicist Case

I'm not sure which of Bishop Spong's books Gordon is referring to, but I do have a review of his book Liberating the Gospels on the site. Recently on the JesusMysteries list someone posted a query sent to Spong along with his reply. Once again, it shows the deficient nature of mainstream scholarship's understanding of the Jesus myth question, and in fact, Spong's reply is a rather surprising case of begging the question —surprising, in view of his obvious intellectual powers and openness to new ideas in the several books he has written.

In response to the question: "Mr. [Tom] Harpur...even says there is no historical evidence for the existence of Jesus....Your thoughts?" Spong had this to say:

Clearly, Bishop Spong has no conception of the problems inherent in Paul's letters which indicate that he knew nothing of an historical Jesus, or the presentation in those letters of a coherent picture of a mythical savior-god faith. He relies on Paul having had contact at an early period with apostles who knew Jesus, supposedly precluding the possibility that he was taught about someone around whom so much legend had been attached that Paul believed he was hearing about a mythological figure. (This, of course, does not address the nature of the faith Paul had been converted to a few years earlier.) Spong does not seem to grasp that those early apostles could themselves have believed in a mythical savior, as Paul did, and that no evidence exists in the early record, including the Pauline letters, that they were "people who knew the Jesus of history." That is simply assuming what is in question. As for the time of their meeting being too early for excessive legend to have attached to Jesus, Spong, like so many scholars, ignores the elevated picture of Christ found throughout the New Testament epistles which indicates that Jesus had reached the highest level of Godhead and mythological portrayal from the very earliest point we can detect the movement: enjoying pre-existence with the Father, all the titles of God, all the spiritual roles of a logos-type Son, and so on (as in 1 Corinthians 8:6, Colossians 1:15-20, Philippians 2:6-11, Hebrews 1:1-4). All with no identification with an historical man.

Dr. Spong, like so many of his colleagues, would benefit from a course in Mythicism 101. (He did receive a copy of The Jesus Puzzle from Robert Price at a Jesus Seminar meeting in 1999, right after the first printing of the book, but one has to assume it still languishes in a drawer somewhere.) From his comment about an upcoming book, it seems he will be drawing on that old saw about all this mythical language about Jesus in the early record being an "interpretation" of the man. It's too bad that the record itself gives us no indication that this is what those writers were doing.

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Connor writes:
          
   Perhaps you can help me with something. I have some Christian friends with whom I have discussed the issue of Jesus' historicity (or lack thereof). I have pointed out that there is no mention of Jesus by anybody who actually knew him or by any source contemporaneous with his supposed existence. The response I usually get is that "you can say the same thing about Julius Caesar." In fact, my one friend contends that "there is less evidence of Julius Caesar than of Jesus, but nobody questions his (Caesar's) existence." Is this true? I realize that even if it is true, it serves more to cast doubt on Caesar's historicity than to support Jesus' (such is the sloppy logic often employed by Christian apologists), but I would very much appreciate your reply. 

Response to Connor:

The claim that there is no more evidence for Julius Caesar's existence than for that of Jesus is nonsense. We have coins issued by Caesar, some with his head on them, we have a bust of him created the year of his assassination (44 BCE). We have writings by the man himself (for example, Gallic Wars), we have many mentions of him by contemporary historians and those immediately following, and the history of Rome in the following century, as recorded by multiple historians, can make no sense without him. Such histories are secular works by writers who have no religious axe to grind, unlike the Gospels — the sole evidence for Jesus' earthly existence in almost the first hundred years of Christian record, uncorroborated by outside historians — which are products of faith intended to promote faith in a polemical atmosphere. They contain all sorts of supernatural and miraculous elements, and almost all of their details can be shown to be midrash based on the Old Testament. Like many apologetic claims by Christians, this one is simply erroneous and the product of wishful thinking.

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Nigel writes:
    
    I have just been having a look at your website. There is a lot of material here and what I have read so far makes compelling reading. I would like to ask if you have looked at a site by  a Dr. Mike Magee, who argues, as an atheist, for a historical Jesus, but one who would not fit the mythological version of the gospels? He claims that Jesus was historical, but far from gentle and loving and spreading a message of peace and God's word, he was a criminally minded rebel, and the Church latched onto him as the person who they might wrap a mythology around.
    Of course there is also the argument that there was one (or possibly more) prophet- teachers of that time period, who were perhaps preaching liberal spiritual truths and got into trouble for it with the established order, the mythology then being placed around this. Slavonic texts which might have been the work of Josephus (but might not also) suggest an unedited version of the standard 'War of the Jews' text which appears as a complete insertion by later church writers. The Slavonic texts make reference to a much more ordinary male (no virgin birth, no son of God claims, no resurrection as such).

Response to Nigel:

There are several websites devoted to interpretations of an historical Jesus not in conformity with the Gospel story or orthodox preferences, Dr. Magee's being one of them. My measure of all of them is the same: do these scenarios find support in the early documentary evidence? The answer is always the same: a resounding No. Nothing in the New Testament documents outside the Gospels and Acts, nothing in other early non-canonical documents such as 1 Clement, Hermas, Odes of Solomon, etc., gives us any reason to believe that a mythology was built around a politically active human teacher, prophet or miracle worker. No record, no implication of such a man can be extracted from their texts.

At the same time, such documents provide no insight into why or how the elevated mythological characterization such as we find in them would have been attached to a political activist and rebel, a crucified criminal. Why would Paul or his predecessors have turned an ignoble figure such as some of these scenarios present into the Son of God and Savior of the World? If he was essentially a nonentity (whom no contemporary historian mentions), not unlike several others during the same period, how could he have given rise to a dynamic cult which eventually swept the empire? Josephus mentions would-be messiah figures such as Judas the Galilean, Theudas and an unnamed Egyptian, all of whom led revolts and gathered followers and met untimely ends. None of them were elevated to Godhead.

All such scenarios are basically extrapolated from the Gospels, an attempt to read behind them into a what-might-have-been situation. When one considers that the Gospels as we have them are basically a literary construction out of midrash on the Hebrew bible, so that not even the most fundamental data in them can be relied on as historical, any foundation for these scenarios completely evaporates. As for a "church" wrapping a mythology around a human figure, criminal or otherwise, this puts the cart before the horse, since the earliest church gives evidence only of the mythology itself and, to judge by the epistles, did not exist in any state prior to it.

I am occasionally asked about the Slavonic Josephus, a topic I have never addressed. Briefly, there is an extended passage in the Old Russian translation of Josephus' Jewish War which seems to take as its starting point the famous Testimonium Flavianum of the extant Greek Antiquities of the Jews (Book 18), but with significant divergences and expansions. It is occasionally suggested that this 'Slavonic' version, translated from some Greek predecessor now lost, may have been originally dependent on an authentic mention of Jesus by Josephus, one which was altered to produce the Antiquities Testimonium. Before commenting on this, let's reproduce the Slavonic passage in full. (I have taken the text from Frank Zindler's The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, p.67-8, which in turn is taken from According to the Hebrews, by Hugh J. Schonfield.)


A further passage relating to the resurrection of Jesus has been inserted at a different location in the Slavonic Jewish War of Josephus:


Like the Testimonium Flavianum as we have it, there is no way that Josephus could have authored this entire passage, and few are claiming that he did. But here we face the same problem. If this is a Christian insertion, how do we identify from it any authentic original by Josephus on which it might be based? The language and style is reminiscent of some of the most naive Christian expression. Most of the sentiments and reported events can hardly be attributed to Josephus. If anything resembling such a collection of ideas, even a portion of them, were to be found in some original manuscript of Josephus, there is no way any Christian copyist would have removed it, or reduced it to the bare bones of the known Testimonium. There is no way that Christian writers such as Origen or Eusebius would have failed to mention such a passage and such reporting. Much is made of the fact that in the Slavonic version there is no inclusion of the idea that Jesus was the Messiah, an element that stands out like a sore thumb in the Antiquities 18 passage, and which all are agreed cannot be the voice of Josephus. It is claimed that its absence could indicate that the Christian copyist responsible for these passages in the Slavonic was working from an original reference to Jesus by Josephus which did not contain it, rather than from the patently Christian insertion we are familiar with; the point being that such a basis would be more likely to be authentic than the known Testimonium. But this is all speculation, and a grasping at straws.

Since this particular interpolation seems to come from the hand of someone or some group which was not anxious to regard Jesus as much more than human, there may have been good reason to eliminate the Testimonium's "he was the Messiah" if that passage —as seems likely — was the basis for the one which ended up in the Slavonic. Certainly many of the opening phrases have the same ring to them, and they include a couple which are part of the acknowledged Christian interpolation which now stands in the Antiquities of the Jews 18. Thus, we can be quite sure that the interpolator of the Slavonic passage is working from a post-Christian stage of the Antiquities insertion, which virtually eliminates the possibility that he had knowledge of an original passage by Josephus. He is enthusiastic about Jesus' miracles, but he seems to avoid playing up the divinity of Jesus, and his references to the resurrection are guarded. Thus, his elimination of the phrase "He was the Messiah" could be in keeping with such an outlook. We might locate this interpolation among one of the so-called Jewish-Christian circles which rejected divinity for Jesus and had reservations about traditions of bodily resurrection. (Such groups can only be identified from the latter second century on, and could thus be simply the product of an imagined historical figure based on the Gospels.)

We cannot identify this Slavonic version at any earlier point than the thirteenth century, but it was probably based on a Greek version which was done considerably earlier. The divergences from the canonical Gospel accounts —the curious detail about Pilate initially letting Jesus go, or the Jews carrying out the crucifixion themselves —would indicate that it comes from a time when the Gospels were not yet carved in stone across the Christian world. That divergence might lead some to think that we have in view here (if somewhat obscurely) a Josephan account of a Jesus rather different from what was made of him in the Gospels, a window onto actual history, if you will. But the sentiments of the first paragraph can hardly be assigned to Josephus any more than any portion of the extant Testimonium, as I have demonstrated in both The Jesus Puzzle and on this website. And to assign any of the other elements of this passage to Josephus becomes an entirely speculative affair, no better an alternative than seeing the whole thing as a Christian product, in an era when even someone like Justin could get important details of the Jesus story 'wrong.' Again, any residue of these passages in the Slavonic text that were authentic to Josephus would not likely have gone unnoticed by Christian commentators and remarked on. Someone like Origen was not averse to pointing out statements he disagreed with in non-Christian writers and do his best to correct them.

New Testament scholars in the first part of the 20th century tended to dismiss outright both references to Jesus in Josephus as inauthentic in their entirety. It has since become fashionable, with understandable bandwagon effect, to regard portions of the Testimonium in Antiquities 18 as being probably genuine, on the basis of no secure evidence whatsoever. Representative of the former group was Charles Guignebert, and on the Slavonic Josephus he had this to say [Jesus, ET 1956, p.149]:

 

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Robert writes:

    When I was a child, I had faith because my Aunt told me I should. I remained a christian until I was twenty one years old. When I went to college and learned a few things about science I realized that the creation story was a myth. With an epiphany, I abandonded Christianity on the speculation that if some parts of the Bible were false, then most of it must also be false as it is so fantastic a fable. Reading your web site helps make me glad I stopped wasting my time on Christianity when I was a young man and has helped me fight the old faith and its associated feelings of guilt, fear, and worthlessness. It seems the religious teachings from my youth have been trying to surface into my mind from somewhere deep in my subconscious. Your site and that of other proponents of a non-historical Jesus are helping me overcome the brain washing indoctrination from the thousand or more fundementalist church services I attended while a christian. As almost all the worship services were very emotional, the teachings went deep into the mind.
    I do have a question for you. It is my impression that you have stated or implied that there are very few references to details of the Passion in the writings of the ante-Nicean church fathers. I read the following on the Jesusneverexisted.com site of Ken Humphrey.


So Humphrey quotes Papias expounding on Judas. Since Judas is one of the characters of the Passion play (and if this is a real quote), would this partially invalidate the christ as myth case? If there is a likely and reasonable probablity this is a forgery, then Papias can retain his place of honor in the peanut gallery.

Response to Robert:

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Doug writes:

     I think that even if the canonical gospels and Acts were written from 70 CE to 100 CE as mainstream scholarship says, the reason gospel details are not referred to in Christian writings until 180 CE (except for Justin Martyr) may be because they were viewed as myths meant to convey the spiritual truths taught by those in the Christian movement which was really a Greek mystical/philosophical movement. But by 180 CE Christians who took the gospels literally (a minority in the decades preceding) won out and virtually all Christians believed in the historical Jesus of the gospels. From 100 CE to 180 CE the gospels and Acts were circulating and served as the Christian equivalent of the Greek myths. Justin and a handful of less educated Christians took them literally but the educated apologists didn't and therefore had no reason to quote from them in their writings. What do you think?

Response to Doug:


Doug's proposal is one way of viewing the broader picture. It can be especially useful in regard to the second century apologists. It would allow us to accept the Gospels as products of the late first century and early part of the second, known perhaps in many circles but not accepted as historical documents for several decades, in some places for longer than others. This would also allow us to grant most of the apologists a knowledge of those Gospels, yet because they regarded them as a form of allegorical mythology, they could ignore or dismiss them in their presentations of the faith. This, in fact, is a much more acceptable proposal for explaining the silence on the figure of an historical Jesus in those apologists than that proposed by mainstream scholarship, which has it that the apologists suppressed the figure of Jesus because they were embarrassed by him or felt it was politically advisable to do so. The latter explanation has too many problems if one assumes that Jesus and the Gospel events were historical and that most everyone, pagan and Christian, knew of them; but the idea of deliberate silence works much better if it is assumed that the apologists left Jesus out because they did not subscribe to the historicity of the Gospels or their central character.

Do we have a specific indicator of this in any of the apologists' writing? We certainly do. Tatian refers to "stories" that Christians tell, styling them the same as the "stories" of the pagans. As I have pointed out in my book and website article on the Second Century Apologists, and in my response to GakuseiDon's critique of that material, Tatian makes no effort to stipulate a basic difference between the stories of the Christians and those of the pagans, namely that the former were allegedly historical while the latter were not. All the major apologists I discuss save Justin are silent on things such as an incarnation for their Son and Logos, an atonement doctrine, a resurrection of a divine being from the dead, and so on. If they did not regard the Gospels as history, but as a set of 'in-house' allegories to embody spiritual truths, then leaving them out of their pictures of the faith was perfectly reasonable and not motived by the necessity for concealment. Such myths would simply have complicated their apologies and led to confusion and misunderstanding.

Within this picture we are still faced with a non-unified Christian movement of several strands. The Logos-religion of the apologists cannot be a direct descendant of the Pauline type of mystery cult, since they do not include sacrificial or atonement elements; salvation comes through knowledge of the Christ and his relationship to God. The apologists have evolved from some other first century strand, and we may be able to identify it. It may lie among those rivals of Paul on the Corinthian scene and elsewhere, those who rejected the idea of a crucified Messiah, such as the Alexandrian Apollos (see my Article No. 1: Apollos and the Early Christian Apostolate). Those circles preaching "another Jesus," whom Paul is vying with, seem to have had a Revealer Christ, their devotees being saved through the "wisdom" this spiritual Son imparts. Alexandria was a hotbed source of Logos philosophy; perhaps it gave birth to a strain of Christ-belief that evolved into the philosophical logos-mysticism of Athenagoras, Theophilus, Tatian and their like a century and more later. (For some insight into this, see Article No. 5: Tracing the Christian Lineage in Alexandria.)

Yet another strand was the underlying source of the Gospel Jesus as a teacher, prophet and miracle worker. This came to Christianity from a separate direction, namely a Kingdom preaching movement centered in Galilee in the mid-first century. It was essentially apocalyptic, focused on the expected Son of Man, and it advocated a new social ethic partly derived from a Greek source, the Cynics. When the Gospels were first written to reflect this movement, which by that time included the idea of an historical founder, how much of their story was regarded as history? Did Mark and the later evangelists regard Q's Jesus as an actual recent man? It may be difficult to say, although we can assume that none of them regarded the story they created as historical in itself, since virtually all of it was constructed from midrash on the Hebrew Bible. Matthew, Luke and John could not have regarded their Markan source as history because they felt free to alter it wholesale.

In the second century, these and other strands were gravitating toward each other. Ignatius and Barnabas reflect cultic Christ circles who were absorbing Gospel influences and ever more Gospel details. Meanwhile, the gnostics were emerging with a spiritual Christ that was evolving to a docetic Christ on earth and also absorbing Gospel influences along with the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. The Logos-religion of the apologists seems to have gone the longest in resisting the absorption of the Gospel Jesus and his story as historical; some of their circles may have brought it on board, but only as allegorical mythology. The first to break ranks and join the literalists were Justin, and a little later Tatian. The process seems to have been complete only some time after the year 180.

Those enamored of Occam's Razor (and there are many) may feel that such a broad scenario is too detailed, too complex. And yet it hangs together, it takes into account all the evidence, especially the 'riotous diversity' of the early Christian movement which even mainstream scholarship has to admit. And it conforms to experience, in that most philosophical and religious movements in history operate that way; they coalesce out of multiple strands and broad predecessors. (Think of the evolution of the Hebrew 'nation' and its eventual monotheism: despite the artificial myth-making of the Bible, when we look backward through the history and archeology of the ancient Near East we see the Jewish entity dissolving outward into many diverse strands of development and ideas from Egypt to Phoenicia to Mesopotamia, trajectories coming together throughout the late second and early first millennia to produce Israel and its concept of itself.) Now, there are those philosophical and religious movements which arise out of specific figures, such as Buddhism and Platonism, though even these are dependent on precursor influences. And yet, an increasing number of such movements are starting to be questioned. Did their traditional founders actually exist, or were they later developments symbolizing imperfectly perceived origins? Did Lao-tze live? Did Confucius? Zoroaster? Such questions, such doubts, have been seriously raised. In the ancient world, Orphism was regarded as having begun with Orpheus; the Jewish race and nation with Abraham, its Yahwehan Covenent with Moses. The great panoply of Mycenean kings and heroes immortalized in myth and poeticized in Homer were regarded for centuries as historical. Few dispassionate historians today accept any of them. And when we get to Christianity, with its topsy-turvy documentary record clearly lacking the presentation of an historical founder in its early phase, one who only gradually emerges into the light in second century documents, we are entitled to place Christianity in that majority category: movements which coalesce out of broad and diverse backgrounds, eventually recasting their history in terms of specific founders, specific events and points of origin, losing sight and understanding of their true beginnings.

The principle of Occam's Razor states that assumptions introduced to explain something must not be multiplied beyond necessity. But when the evidence itself embodies and necessitates complexity, the razor is blunted. Complexity, in fact, becomes simplicity —as long as it is understandable and fits the evidence best. Even 5000-piece jigsaw puzzles can be put together to form a coherent picture. William of Occam needed to work a bit more in the field of history and come up with a more multi-faceted cutting implement.

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Jason writes:

   I have read quite a bit of your website and wanted to ask you about your agenda. Don't think I'm a Fundamentalist Christian who is trying to state that your agenda is to lead people to hell or anything crazy like that. But when reading your site I get an overall view that you are trying to discredit Christianity to convert people to a new religion. Much of the positive feedback listed has a religious feel. People are liberated and given hope by your writing. I don't see the difference between the belief of a better future through the works of some god or God and the belief that our salvation lies with us. If you accept a non-spiritual world then there is no need for salvation. What happens to mankind matters little. There is no salvation, just existence. I can accept this and don't see a need to add some mythic future.

Response to Jason:

Is the Jesus Puzzle salvation in a new religion?

Despite a certain amount of perceptiveness, Jason's remarks are quite misguided. I am reminded of the common accusation of religionists against science, that it is a "new religion." Or that atheism is a religion. Or one I get frequently, that rejection of an historical Jesus is "a reverse fundamentalism." Not only are all these accusations absurd, they are an adulteration of language.

How are we to define a "religion"?  The standard definition states (according to the Webster's College Dictionary): "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code for the conduct of human affairs." Most religions contain more than that, of course, usually a host of superstitions, harmful dogmas and out-of-date morality. But the essence of a religion involves belief in the supernatural and an expectation of a life after death as the personal identity one possessed on earth, a fate supposedly determined by one's behavior in life.

Science, on the other hand, contains none of these things, nor does it in principle advocate any of them. Science is not "a set of beliefs." It is a body of conclusions based on evidence and the application of deductive reasoning. Some of those conclusions may be incomplete, or even wrong, but they are not dogmas; they are open to revision at any time and indeed invite revision, since knowledge can only advance through gaining new evidence and revising our conclusions accordingly. (Individual scientists may not always be faithful to such principles, and have been known to resist change and new ideas, but human beings in any field can be guilty of certain failings.)

It certainly can be said that science and scientists in general hold strongly to these principles, but this does not make the discipline a religion. Otherwise, anything that we put a committed investment in could be labeled a religion. A sport, our jobs, altruistic philanthropy, collecting stamps. We are devoted to our children, but this is hardly the same as being "devoted" to God. We may ritualistically apply ourselves to performing our work, but this is not the same as taking part in rituals like baptism and church worship. We trust that the sun will rise tomorrow —indeed, it is virtually a dogma —but it is founded on empirical evidence and long experience, and we understand it on the basis of our observation of the solar system's mechanics; if reliance is placed on methods that produce the same results everywhere, results that are verifiable and amendable, it is not the same as trusting that a God exists or relying on going to heaven after death. Atheists do not construct their lives and expectations around a belief in the supernatural, something for which science has never produced an iota of evidence. To label any of these characteristics religious may be metaphorical (and dictionaries reflect that), but it's wholly misleading to apply the term "religion" to such philosophies or pursuits. Of course, doing so is a defensive measure, seeking to tar one's critics with the same brush they are using on you.

Jason suggests that reactions to my writings are religious because they liberate and give hope. Are medical researchers being religious when they cure a disease or learn how to prolong life? Is the United Nations a religious organization when it helps engineer environmental improvements to areas of the world? Was the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe a "religious" undertaking? (Ironically, the "liberation" of Iraq could well have been impelled in the minds of those directing it by certain religious considerations.) To liberate and give hope should be one of the highest goals of human society, and hardly needs —or ought — to be tied to belief in a God or the supernatural. Science has liberated us from many fears and superstitions: from belief in demons as the cause of sickness and accidents, from terror at natural events due to our ignorance of nature's workings, from erroneous ideas of how we came into being and what it constitutes to be human. It would liberate us from a lot of other things if we were willing or able to remove the prejudices and misinformation that religion has long subjected us to.

But Jason is surely at his most misguided when he says, "I don't see the difference between the belief of a better future through the works of some god or God and the belief that our salvation lies with us." The former is passive, the latter is active. The former renders us powerless, the latter gives us power. One requires belief in the unprovable and often nonsensical, the other seeks and builds on what can be known and predicted; a reliance on fantasy vs. a focusing on reality. One is laden with fear, guilt, and obsessive self-recrimination, the other is positive, pride-inducing, self-enhancing. One extrapolates all that is good and positive in us onto an external entity, the other finds and develops such things within ourselves. One sits on the quicksand of perceived revelation, the other rests on the more solid ground of objective and verifiable investigation. A better future is surely to be achieved when we embrace this life and world as all we have, rather than invest our beliefs and energies in an unknowable dimension and a pie-in-the-sky afterlife.

Jason says, "If you accept a non-spiritual world then there is no need for salvation." But this has always been humanity's problem, from the time when our intelligence was forced to come to grips with the perils and uncertainties of the world and bodies we inhabit. And it has been our biggest mistake. We need to abandon the idea of "salvation" from our natural habitat. Rather, we need to better understand and improve it. Religion has never given us anything which would help in that accomplishment; in fact, it has been one great impediment, one giant cop-out. It misinterprets and denigrates the world and bodies we live in, turning to a fantasy of another world and another existence beyond this one, achievable through the whim or grace of a Deity. The baggage it has heaped on us as the means of accomplishing that imagined end has hampered our progress and stunted our wisdom and burdened our spirits. We need a new concept of salvation, one we can achieve on our own within the universe we are a part of. Neither science nor atheism advocates "just existence." What happens to mankind is of the utmost importance, because it matters to us. And we have yet to plumb the depths and reach the limits of what it is to be us. Whatever we become, whatever we achieve, it is our own responsibility.
  RFSet 26: March 2006


    Thanks for all the effort you put into your website. I have referred it to quite a few people. I am an "official Catholic theologian" with an Imprimatur who gave it all up after becoming convinced that Christianity is not true. The powerful Jesus-myth arguments were too much for me at the time, and I have become more and more convinced that, if one took a video camera back to Palestine from 0-30 AD, one would not have been able to locate anybody resembling Jesus.

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Staci writes:

   The Jesus Puzzle and Challenging the Verdict are both exceptional books and I commend you for your tremendous influence in bringing visibility to the question of the existence of Jesus.
   I find it amazing that so many scholars readily acknowledge that no existing texts about Jesus were written by anyone who actually knew him, yet they still go on to claim that he still existed. I see it as irresponsible at best for historians, the media, biblical scholars, etc. to continue to ignore or dismiss the lack of evidence for a historical Jesus. When I hear serious scholars debate questions such as "how was Jesus able to eat fish if he wasn't bodily resurrected?" it seems they might as well ponder whether Cinderella's fairy godmother really turned a pumpkin into a coach or if Cinderella just took a cab to the ball. Almost as bad are those who are appalled that anyone would dare ask the question, but as most in this group are fundamentalists who take ancient myths of talking serpents and worldwide floods as history, they are more easily dismissed.
   I don't have a great personal stake in the issue and would certainly remain an atheist either way, but I think "experts" should be held accountable for ensuring their claims are supported by evidence. At the same time, if the case against an historical Jesus were to become more widely accepted, perhaps there is a chance that the truly ludicrous beliefs such as creationism, Satan, an eternal hell, etc. would also be questioned.

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Declan writes (from Australia):

   While I have little to add to the debate on the existence of Christ, I simply wish to applaud you for bringing dialectics to the fore (and not to mention the beautifully sharp wit). The Age of Reason I find more practically useful (and equally amusing). Unfortunately, I suppose you're largely preaching to the converted already. I can't imagine a religious fanatic thoughtfully reading your works, which is to their detriment (and I suppose our own). Can I suggest you put together a "Dummies Guide to combating fundamentalism in all forms" for free distribution on the Internet?
   Cheers, mate.

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Frank writes:

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David writes:

   While I commend your refutation of Strobel's The Case for Christ in Challenging the Verdict, I was transfixed by The Jesus Puzzle. I had heard arguments that challenged the historical Jesus before, but I thought the issue had been, for the most part, laid to rest by an abundance of voluminous material from independent contemporaneous historians. Was I in for a surprise!
   I am an attorney living in Dallas, Texas. As you might imagine, the fundamentalist onslaught is almost too much to bear. I have ordered copies of your books for the few right-minded friends I have, as gifts, and they are as intrigued and as impressed as I. As you might imagine, I have not been too popular on the cocktail circuit lately, challenging the historicity of Jesus. Much to my surprise, however, there have been a few staunchly conservative religious folk whose initial ire was replaced with genuine curiosity after hearing my entire summation of your argument.
   Recently, I read anew all of Paul's contributions to the New Testament (or what most scholars ascribe to him), looking for some reference to an earthly Jesus.  Paul's insecurity is striking.  This is a man who begs and whines.  He constantly compares himself to the "super apostles," and desperately needs to convert others for his ego, if not out of guilt for hunting christians.  In short, he needs to be accepted and believed.
   The idea of Paul writing a veritable cornucopia of persuasive letters designed to cajole, intimidate, guilt, scare, and otherwise use any means necessary to convert gentiles without referencing an earthly Jesus and hosts of other fleshly beings to substantiate the latter's miracles and bear witness to his ministry is absurd.  This resonates stronger considering Paul's writings are thought to have been within 20 to 40 years after the alleged crucifixion, and thus would be more likely subject to eyewitness verification.  Paul worked tirelessly at marketing.  Why not use your most powerful sales pitch?  He never encouraged anyone to travel to the historical settings where the earthly, historical Jesus walked, ate, slept, taught, performed miracles, was crucified, or was resurrected.  Paul's personality craved this proof.  Clearly, he would have used these arguments if they were available.  Unfortunately for Paul, the gospel writers and other revisionists did not come along for several decades. I was a philosophy major in undergrad and am familiar with the Platonic tradition.  Paul is clearly referring to Jesus existing in that Greek intermediate realm between Heaven and earth.  The allegory of the cave has clearly left its imprint on the mindset of the time. And a natural reading of Hebrews 8:4 [E.D.: see below] must be troubling to those who argue otherwise.
   Your book inspired me to read the New Testament from a new perspective, unshackled from previous assumptions about Jesus's historicity. The result was nothing short of an epiphany for me!  Yes! Yes! Yes! This is it. Finally, a refutation of the historical Jesus which combines a critical study of the outside historical record, a natural reading of the biblical text itself, the philosophical milieu, and common sense.  By the way, thanks for destroying the credibility of the writings of Josephus, or at least pointing out that his original work was almost certainly altered.  Fundamentalists always throw Josephus at me, and now I am equipped with the rebuttal.
   The only tragedy about your efforts is that Strobel is probably rolling in dough for giving the people their dose of seemingly confirming medicinal gobbledygook and your provocative, sobering books are blacklisted by christian-owned (or at least influenced) bookstores. The Rev. T.D. Jakes just sold his home, less than 2 miles from me, for approx. 5.5 million dollars. For his sake, I hope the needles in heaven have gaping eyes or the camels are awfully diminutive. I've always said, ironically, "The only thing that prevents me from selling God is morality." At any rate, thank you for the books.  I'm doing what I can to spread the good word.

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Maria writes:

   The Jesus Puzzle is still one of the most fascinating books I've ever read, and I've been "fighting the good fight," as it were, by asking people to be intellectually honest about history. It's tough, as you know, because so many people think that the Gospels are valid historical documents. Even the non-Christians I know are threatened by the idea of the Jesus Myth. It's amazing what it does to people. It's like their very foundations have been threatened. Back when I was a fundamentalist, I probably would have had a similar reaction, but then, I was asking many of the questions you answer about Paul, only to have my questions waved away with vague mumbling from church leaders. I abandoned rational thought for temporary assurances of all kinds.

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Brendan writes:

   In college I studied under Paula Fredriksen at Boston University, and for years I was convinced that she did the best job (compared to her contemporaries, like Crossan, Mack, and others) of portraying a historical Jesus who actually made sense in the context of being a Galilean Jew in late Second Temple Judaism.
   There were some lingering questions in my mind that her depiction of Jesus never fully answered (like how he became elevated to godhead so suddenly upon his death, or why the epistle writers show so little interest in Jesus's life and teachings), but until I came across a better explanation, I just had to accept that those questions would remain.
   Then a couple of years ago I found your writings on the Secular Web, became intrigued, and over the course of reading through your entire website, was quite convinced that you have presented a depiction of the origins of Christianity that has the most explanatory power.
   So a heartfelt congratulations on your insight, and my sincere thanks for sharing your scholarship via the internet.
   I do hope that mainstream New Testament scholars will be forthcoming in their serious critical reviews of your work. I was quite disappointed to see my former mentor, Prof. Fredriksen dismissing any notion of a mythological Jesus argument out of hand.
   Finally, I'd like to bring up a point that I don't think I've seen raised in your previous 25 reader feedbacks. It seems that most New Testament scholars, both secular and apologetic, accept that Jesus had brothers and/or sisters (be it James and Jude of the epistles; James, Joseph, Simon and Judas mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew; or the unnamed brothers in the Gospel of John). But what is striking, then, is that throughout the formative years of Christianity, there are not significant attempts made by Christians to trace their lineage back to a blood relative of Jesus.
   It seems to me to parallel the glaring absence among the earliest Christian writers of tracing their chain-of-teachings back through an original apostle to Jesus himself. While having (or claiming to have) a bloodline back to a brother or sister of Jesus might not have guaranteed a position of power in the early church, surely it would have gone a ways toward gaining some respect, authority, reverence, etc.

Response to Brendan:

The Brothers of the Lord

Although the silence on other characters in the Gospels is frequently brought up (such as by Brad in the previous Reader Feedback), there has been little focus on the reputed brothers of Jesus as mentioned by various evangelists, particularly in regard to tracing a line of descent or authority back to any of them. The one exception, of course, is James the Just (as in the Gospel of Thomas, saying #12), although even this does not appear until well into the second century. I have pointed out several times that even the New Testament letters pseudonymously attributed to James and Jude (virtually no critical scholar regards them as authentic) do not identify such apostles as brothers of Jesus, even though they are likely the product of the late first or early second century. The silence in the Christian record during that initial period is universal in regard to anyone having been associated with an historical Jesus. Since the appeal to an authoritative or prestigious link back to people of that stature would be undeniable and irresistible, we must conclude that such links did not exist and were unknown even in theory.

It occurs to me that this throws some light on a perennially argued verse, namely Galatians 1:19, with its reference to James as "the brother of the Lord." Those who claim that this must mean sibling of Jesus, often appeal to a related phrase in 1 Corinthians 9:5:


Here Paul is claiming his legitimacy as an apostle of Christ (note that this is because he, like them, has "seen Jesus our Lord" which, since he is included, can only mean through visionary experience), and by referring to these "brothers of the Lord" he demonstrates that they, too, are active apostles, going about with their wives and presumably their children. If this is a reference to siblings of Jesus, we have direct evidence that they were active in the missionary movement, that they had families, and thus Brendan's observation stands out with perplexing clarity. Why, indeed, would there not have been those in later decades who possessed traditions about these sibling apostles, tracing from them some descent, some apostolic tradition, some line of authority, appealing to the prestige of being associated with the very brothers of the Lord himself? Such traditions and appeals only begin to appear over a century later, and those developments we can certainly put down to artificial constructions based on characters found in the Gospels, writings that were now beginning to circulate throughout the Christian world.

This void is a good argument for interpreting the phrase in a different fashion, not as a reference to siblings of a human Jesus, but as "brethren" in the sectarian sense, dedicated to a figure called "the Lord" —which could mean a spiritual Son of God, or even God himself. In that same sentence, the word "sister" appears, "a sister as wife" —which is hardly a reference to an incestuous relationship, but to a female member of the sect who is also wife to a "brother of the Lord". Since the phrase "the brothers of the Lord" appears as one element in a series enumerated by Paul (apostles, Lord's brothers, Cephas), this could indicate that there was a core group —perhaps the originating members of the sect —which was known by this name, part of a larger active group by the time Paul was writing. This would strengthen the interpretation that Paul's reference in Galatians to James as "the brother of the Lord" (if it is not simply a marginal gloss by a later scribe that got inserted into the text) was in the nature of a title, referring to him not only as part of that core group but almost certainly as its leader and possibly originator.

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Mac writes:

   I have reread your web pages rather thoroughly.  I still come up with the same question.  I'm no religious nut.  But I still get the impression every time the subject comes up that you avoid the subject of the cross.  In discussing if Christ was a man, you point out that the mythical Christ in the hymn in Philippians 2: 6-11 humbles himself and becomes obedient unto death. And that this must be interpreted mythically.  I agree 100 per cent.  But the next phrase says "even the death of the cross."  Here it becomes hard to believe in a mythical cross.  In 1 Cor. 2 the point is not just that "rulers of this age" put the Christ to death, but that they crucified him.  Why a cross and why crucified?  It seems to me that it would be easier for the Jews if the Christ had been stoned to death.  Does having a "Jesus" who is "crucified" give the story an historical setting?

Response to Mac:

Why Christ Crucified?

This is a variant on a type of question I get on a regular basis. The more graphic the description of the death of Christ in the mythical arena, the more difficult it seems to be for the modern mind to grasp and accept. "Death" in the spiritual realm seems OK, but on a "cross"? A death by "crucifixion"? Recently on the Internet Infidels Discussion Board I was in debate with an apologist who claimed that Christ "hung on a tree" (as in The Ascension of Isaiah, chapter 9) could not be placed in the spiritual dimension of the sublunar realm "because there are no trees in the air." He could not understand how the ancients could have envisioned something as graphic as a hanging, or crucifixion, taking place in the mythical spirit realm.

There are a number of ways to approach this difficulty. First is to realize that the myths of the Hellenistic savior gods contained all sorts of very graphic imagery. The dismemberment of Osiris and the burial of his body parts in boxes; the self-castration of Attis with a knife; Mithras' slaying of the bull with his dagger, to mention only a few. The IIDB apologist had two objections. One was that the myths were originally set on earth, and this is true at least of Osiris and probably Attis. Such myths were formed in a period when these activities by gods and goddesses were envisioned as happening in a primordial past, a "sacred time" before actual, real-time history. Only later did Platonic views of the universe lead to a switch of venue, an envisioning of such spiritual processes taking place in higher spheres of a multi-layered universe, although it is difficult to determine how thoroughly that picture was adopted by the man-in-the-street devotee of the cults and how much of a primordial-past outlook still prevailed.

But if there was one aspect of Platonic thinking which did come to dominate views of reality, it was the concept that there was a counterpart relationship between heaven and earth, between the spiritual and material. The higher world contained the genuine reality, of which the material world was only a copy. Moreover, The Ascension of Isaiah contains a clear reference to the idea that what happens on earth also happens in the heavens:

And as above, so also on earth, for the likeness of what is in the firmament is here on earth. [7:10]

The same document also refers to robes, thrones and crowns awaiting the righteous in heaven, and we know that the city of Jerusalem was thought to be paralleled by a "heavenly Jerusalem." Now, it is not always possible to know how graphically these things were 'reasoned' out (if that's the right word to use). Were those robes, thrones and crowns graphically imagined? Did the heavenly Jerusalem contain stone walls, cobbled streets, household amenities? The point is, given the intellectual climate of Platonism with its counterpart-realm concept, we can hardly rule out —indeed, we must accept —that the ancients somehow envisioned that the sort of things they were familiar with on earth also took place in the heavens. (I daresay, modern believers can only envision earth-like settings and activities going on in the Heaven they expect or hope to reach after their own deaths.) That included 'evil' things as well, since the demon spirits were spiritual beings, engaged in spiritual activities, though they were restricted to the lower celestial sphere. Suffering and death could also take place in the spiritual dimension, on the part of spiritual beings, although such 'corruptible' things could only take place in the realm of corruptibility, the lower reaches of the spiritual dimension, namely below the moon, which also included the material realm of the earth itself.

Now, no New Testament writer is this specific. Paul nowhere speaks of the sublunary realm, though he seems to impute Christ's death to the demon spirits ("the rulers of this age" in 1 Corinthians 2:8 —which a "majority" of scholars, says Paul Ellingworth, admit is a reference to spirit forces); and The Ascension of Isaiah has an elaborate descent scenario for the Son and his hanging on a tree by Satan in the spiritual part of the firmament (below the moon). Hebrews' picture of Christ's sacrifice is thoroughly Platonic, but the actual death on the cross is not identifiably located. Did early Christianity follow strictly Platonic rules in analyzing Christ's death? We don't know, but the indicators are there that it followed general Platonic principles. The Odes of Solomon and The Shepherd of Hermas (though neither contains a sacrificial Son) are saturated with mythological thinking and no trace of history, as are Revelation and 1 Clement, whose supposedly 'historical' elements are open to different interpretation.

Another point to be made here is the role of scripture in regard to the mythical Savior-Son of early Christianity, a factor not operating in the pagan mysteries. The early documentary record reveals a faith based on the Jewish sacred writings. Paul's gospel comes from scripture (a legitimate interpretation of kata tas graphas in 1 Cor. 15:3 and 4, and openly stated at the opening of Romans), by revelation through the Holy Spirit. Rival apostles teach "another Jesus" through the same Spirit (2 Cor. 11:4). Hebrews' entire picture of Jesus the High Priest is based on a Platonic reading of the scriptures. Even the epistle of Barnabas —though possessing a rudimentary idea of a Christ on earth —still seems to derive information about him from scripture. I have said that scripture is the embodiment of the Christ idea, that for the early Christians scripture was a window onto the spiritual world where Christ was active and from which he communicated to believers.

This picture of the early Christian thought-world, together with the total void on any sense of a man in recent history who began the movement, appointed apostles, prophesied the end of the world, worked miracles and taught great ethical teachings, is undeniable. It is no stretch to accept that, like the rest of the ancients, early Christians could envision Christ dying in the spirit dimension, even crucified —especially when scriptural passages such as Isaiah 53, Zechariah 12:10 and Psalm 22 spoke of that very imagery of 'piercing' and 'nailing,' perhaps influenced by the existence in their own world of the ignominious death by the cross. Such factors would hve led to the choice of crucifixion as the manner of the spiritual Christ's death, rather than stoning. (Incidentally, most commentators suspect that the phrase "even death on a cross" was Paul's own amendment to a pre-existing hymn, a refinement based on his own reading of scripture, or on the part of the circles he joined; perhaps earlier phases of the Christ faith had not yet fixed on crucifixion as the manner of death. The same lack of specificity is found in the hymn of 1 Timothy 3:16, and the several references in the record to 'hanging on a tree' — as in 1 Peter 2:24 and the Ascension of Isaiah — may also reflect the survival of a phase in which the image of the cross had not yet fully emerged.)

My apologist friend on the IIDB also tried to maintain that such myths as the castration of Attis were regarded simply as allegorical, and thus not having really happened in any literal sense, material or spiritual. But this is hardly demonstrable. The fact that a few sophisticated philosophers viewed things this way does not mean that the average initiate did so. One wonders how the Galli, the eunuch priests of the Great Mother and her consort Attis, would be led to wield the knife on themselves in a frenzy of self-mutilation for the sake of mimicking an allegory, any more than the average Christian would be led to practice self-denial and even physical penance for the sake of an allegorical passion of Christ. Besides, Plutarch, in addressing "Clea" in Isis and Osiris, cautions her against regarding the myths as actually having happened in the ways described, indicating that this was in fact the popular viewpoint which Plutarch wished to correct.

It is admittedly impossible to nail down with any precision the exact viewpoint early Christians held in regard to the death of their mythical Christ, except that it took place in a dimension not our own, in "some other place," as one IIDBer put it. Apologists like to jump on this and claim that this discredits the entire theory. But they don't just win by default. What they fail to acknowledge is that the early record is full of indicators in such a direction, that it makes a good fit with the philosophy and cosmology of the time, and is supported by close parallels with mystery cult mythology; whereas the fit is far weaker on the other side. There are virtually no indicators in the non-Gospel record of the first century of the movement that the death of Christ took place on earth in recent history, that he had conducted a ministry in human form —and many indicators excluding such ideas.

---

Rob writes:

       I would be interested to know more about what evidence there is on the original apostles. Paul, Peter, Andrew are all mentioned in the New Testament, but what other documents exist that would back their existence? I have read that it is inconclusive that Peter's remains are those now resting in Rome.
    Congratulations on your work.

Response to Rob:

Is there any witness to Peter, Paul and other early apostles?

There is no external, non-Christian evidence for the existence of any of the apostles of the early Christian movement, and that includes Paul. If one accepts that anything of the Pauline corpus is the product of a first-century figure, he himself bears witness to certain men of the Jerusalem group he had contact with in the mid first century, James, Peter (or Cephas, if they are the same person), and a John. That they were followers of an historical Jesus is virtually excluded, since Paul gives no hint of any such relationship, and even states (Galatians 2:8) that they were appointed by God, not Jesus, to carry the gospel to the Jews, while Paul was to go to the gentiles. Around the end of the century, the writer of the epistle 1 Clement speaks of the figures of Peter and Paul in a past now a few decades old, which would seem to support their basic existence. But even this writer does not link them to an historical figure. In fact, I have argued extensively (see Article No. 12: Jesus in the Apostolic Fathers) that the author of this letter knows of no historical Jesus, and passages like the lengthy quote of Isaiah 53 in chapter 16 show that his source of information on the object of Christian worship is still scripture.

1 Clement as support for an historical Peter and Paul depends, of course, on its authenticity in regard to general date (within a decade or two of 96 CE, let's say, although the author being the bishop of Rome at the time is in no way reliable). My above article argues for that degree of authenticity (I am unable to accept radical views that it is a later 'forgery' from around the year 160), which leads us to another conclusion. While Peter and Paul are referred to in chapter 5 as early apostles who suffered martyrdom (though even this is not precisely stated), such martyrdom is not placed in Rome, nor is it even said that either figure actually came to that city. If this is a missive from the Christian community of Rome at the end of the century, and Peter and Paul had actually been there to suffer their martyrdoms, it is simply not feasible that the writer would have neglected to say this when discussing their fates. Like so many other later traditions about the early Christian movement, the deaths of Peter and Paul and the long tradition that the bones of Peter now rest beneath the Vatican, can be seen to be baseless and the product of later wishful thinking, designed to increase the prestige and authority of the Roman church, which was itself a product of the mid-second century and beyond.

---

Dan writes:    

      First, let me say that as a long time atheist, I had always assumed that Jesus was an actual person who later became mythologized.  After purchasing and viewing "The God Who Wasn't There" (Brian Flemming), which led me to this website which I have reviewed extensively, I am now convinced (almost, convinced is a strong word) that Jesus was a totally mythological figure. However, I am still disturbed by the quote from the DVD in regard to Hebrews 8:4 which I see again on this website.  The DVD states that Hewbrews 8:4 states in effect that "If Jesus had been on earth..."  In the King James and Revised Standard Edition, the quote is "If Jesus were on earth," admittedly a minor distinction but one that can lead to a different interpretation.  Please be assured that I am not a religionist arguing for Jesus, but I do think that this is an important point, which could lead to religonists dismissing the argument, i.e., "they" misquote the Bible. Is this a translational mistake? or what is the explanation?  The answer will not change my new held belief that Jesus was wholly mythical but I want to be accurate in my arguments.

Response to Dan:


Reg writes:

   In reading your website, I was interested in your feedback on a website writer, Hayyim ben Yehoshua. Though Mr. Yehoshua states his case as one for a mythical Jesus, he actually refers to several historical Rabbis whose description in the Talmud fit certain descriptions of the Jesus of the Gospels, such as Yeishu ben Pandeira, also known as Yeishu ha-Notzri. How do you see these Talmudic references fitting in with your thesis?

Response to Reg:

Jesus in the Talmud

The basic answer to this question is that all written references to a Jesus figure by Jewish rabbis come from the 3rd century and later, and have no reliable basis in actual historical knowledge going back to the first century, but may simply be reactions to Christian developments during those later times. This area is a complex one, and I will refer the reader to two sources on this website. The first is a general survey of the written Jewish commentaries as I laid out in an earlier Reader Feedback in my response to Jarek. The second is my book review of Frank Zindler's The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, which is the best and most thorough review of this literature from the point of view of the mythicist case.

---

Malachi writes:

     I am devoting extensively a website for the real historical Jesus (although you would believe there isn't one).  In reviewing the research, I must say that I don't support your position and really feel as if the evidence is going against you in a very persuasive way.  But I would like to apologize on behalf of Christians for one certain point.  Throughout most of their writings, they criticize your 'credentials' rather than your arguments.  This is known to be an 'ad hominem' attack, and I know it must be tough on you that they disable your claims simply because you might not be a 'professional historian.'  Like I said, I do disagree with a lot of your findings; however, they should not automatically disable your arguments simply because you only have a degree in classic literature (and another one I believe).  The research should be looked at fairly, instead of trying to figure out what backgrounds everyone have.  When people do this, it reminds me of how much they want to the truth to fit their side, while they don't want to be on the side of truth.  I do believe they are right in the conclusions that they have came to (partial authenticity).  But once again, I do not believe it is right to attack simply because you are not considered a professional historian.  I just wanted to let you know that.  We should always attack the argument, not the character behind the argument.  But I do want to advise you to look at your argument from an aerial view of the evidence rather than being so 'into' it.  Once you put 'all of it together,' I believe it will change your mind.  And lastly, although many Christians attack your credentials, please do not put this on every Christian (like me).  We should examine the truth as it stands, and nothing more.

Response to Malachi:

I thank Malachi for his degree of support and commend his dedication to the truth and the evidence. But without some indication as to how he has arrived at his "aerial view" and how he puts "all of it together," it is impossible to comment on his conclusions. But I have to confess to being a bit troubled by his e-mail address, and what light it may cast on his approach to the subject: <CalledbyJesus247>. (Are there really 246 others who use the same e-mail name, and I wonder if they are all as dedicated to the proper use of evidence?) Since Malachi suggests that I am "too into" the evidence, I can only assume that he means I have not brought other considerations to my methodology, such as faith or mystical experience of Jesus —and he would be right .

---

Carla writes:

     [E.D.: Carla asked me several very involved questions, each of which could require an article to answer properly, one or two of which also went beyond my area of research. I would encourage readers to ask questions that are more specific and relate directly to elements of the Jesus Myth theory, although questions and comments relating to the general area of rationality vs. religion are also welcome, since, as you know, I am concerned with such matters on my Age of Reason website. Negative responses, such as from Robert which led off this Feedback, are also acceptable, since it always remains a hope that a believer will have something more substantive to say on the subject than threats of hellfire or appeals to their own subjective experiences of Jesus — something of an evidentiary nature, for example, that might call into question the validity of the mythicist case, and hopefully that have not been raised and answered a hundred times before. For now, I will quote and reply to one of Carla's questions...]
   There seems to be an extreme movement to completely discredit the idea that Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Dionysus died and raised from the dead. But the evidence seems to be incontrovertible, as is the evidence that at least in part they were symbolized by the cycle of vegetation. (Even the Oxford Dictionary of Egyptian Mythology admits Osiris as symbolizing the corn, and his raising from the dead. Similarly, the Orphic myths clearly speak of Dionysus reconstituted after being torn apart by the Titans, and would anyone deny Dionysus' connection to vegetation/vine?) What is your take on all this?

Response to Carla:

Discrediting the Dying and Rising Gods

There is no question that the idea that Christianity began as basically another ancient-world mystery religion with a dying and rising god of the Osiris and Dionysus type — albeit in a Jewish context — is the most threatening one there is to Christian claims of uniqueness and legitimacy. This explains why there has been and continues to be a determined apologetic dedication to discrediting it. The heyday of the History of Religions School which flourished early in the 20th century under such figures as Cumont, Bousset, and Reitzenstein, and which traced many Christian ideas back through the wider Hellenistic religious expressions in the salvation religions, eventually ran up against scholarly resistance in the middle decades of the century precisely because it was recognized to be so threatening; at the same time there was a switching of the focus of attention in mainstream scholarship to Christianity's Jewish roots and to correcting some of its more blatant expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment. This took place after the Second World War, and I suspect some of the motivation for legitimizing Christianity as a Jewish sect and downplaying any pagan roots was a reaction to the horrific fate of the European Jews in that war.

From the fifties on, there was a concerted effort to discredit the parallels between the Jesus story and the myths of the Hellenistic savior gods, by appealing to every possible difference and discrepancy between them, however minor or understandable on the basis of differences in culture between Jewish and pagan. Two of the best examples of this were Gunter Wagner's Pauline Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries (1967), and Jonathan Z. Smith's extended article "Dying and Rising Gods" in the Encyclopedia of Religion (vol. 4, 1987).  The best debunking of such would-be debunkers is to be found in Robert M. Price's Deconstructing Jesus (p.86-93), where he points out that because no single pagan savior god embodies all the motifs found in the field, and none embodies all those attached to Jesus, 'apologists' like Smith assume that this discredits any comparison at all. "Without everything in common, Smith sees nothing in common." I have several times pointed out that basic differences in attitude and expectation about the afterlife between Greek and Jew led to a different casting of the conquest of death in regard to the Osiris type of savior god on the one hand, and Jesus on the other. Just because the Gospels gave Jesus a resurrection in flesh (unlike Paul, who did not), while the Greeks found the idea of the body returning from death repugnant, should not prevent us from acknowledging that the differences between the two "resurrection" types are a product of cultural differences and proceed from the same impulse. They still represent the same motif, growing as different branches on a common tree.

Similarly, the nonsense that the pagan mysteries borrowed their basic ideas from Christianity in the second and third centuries has also been debunked. Christian apologists like Justin and Tertullian admitted that the mystery cults' expressions came first, though counterfeited by demons. And Christianity was in no position in the second or even the third century, in the eyes and estimation of pagans, to be able to entice the mysteries to mimic its concepts wholesale. While the bulk of our evidence on the mysteries comes from the early Christian era, enough is known about its more ancient expression to show that the savior-god phenomenon had long roots, and if we allow ourselves to understand early Christianity as an offshoot of that phenomenon in a Jewish-oriented setting, with certain distinct and even unique features as part of that setting, our understanding of the evolution of western religion will come a long way. Of course, then Christianity will have to be removed from its privileged status and positioned as part of an ongoing natural and human process of evolving ideas.

---

Brian writes:


I am going to assume that Brian did not abandon his fundamentalist Christianity solely from having read The Jesus Puzzle (though I would have no objection to that). It sounds as though he was in a questioning mode already. I have myself suggested that Christianity, if it wishes to survive in anything but a petrified, reactionary form such as we find in modern evangelical fundamentalism, let alone revitalize itself, needs to accept that no historical founder existed and convert to a less literal interpretation of its Gospels and salvation process. Not that I wish to see this happen, or even regard it as feasible. It would be difficult to go back to Paul's conceptions, simply because they were based on views of reality which have been abandoned for some time, as well as discredited by science. Evolution doesn't tend to go backwards. Besides, Christianity has long since painted itself into the literalist corner, and one would be hard pressed to envision how it could work its way out of it with no historical Jesus. My feeling is that it has outrun its founding concepts and outlived its usefulness. The blood sacrifice of a god, whether literal, spiritual or allegorical, should have no place in the 21st century, and so much of Christianity's paraphernalia offends rationality. Good ethical teachings (not that all of Christianity's teachings are such) can find a place in almost any philosophy, preferably an enlightened and scientifically based one.

I know of no Christian sect which has abandoned an historical Jesus, though certain scholarly circles have much reduced him in size while still retaining him as a guiding light. I am not a Unitarian, but I have many friends who are, and while I am still somewhat unclear on their concept as many of them also seem to be, some congregations make a place for him which is not primarily literal. And I will say that most of them seem quite unradical, open-minded, and good listeners. More than that, I can't recommend.

Brian asks why I am not, or couldn't be, a Christian like Paul. Though I could wax at great length on that question (and have done so in other places), I will sum it up in three points. First, I cannot accept the wisdom of basing my life on otherworldly imaginings and subservience to non-existent supernatural beings. Second, I cannot commit the intellectual suicide, denigration of self, and suppression or distortion of much of the human spirit which most religions require. Third, I cannot countenance the divisiveness and strife which religion inevitably creates, between individuals, cultures and nations; there are enough natural factors to fracture human society without introducing claims of superiority and truth for one set of superstitions and delusions over another.

I would encourage Brian to seek his replacement for fundamentalism in more humanistic and rationally based philosophies of life.
RFSet 27: February 2007

 

 

Angela writes:

   Thank you so much for writing your book The Jesus Puzzle. I had heard of the mythic Christ thesis, but didn't honestly think there was much substance to it. Your book has definitely changed my mind on that subject. You make a very persuasive case that the Jesus of the Gospels never existed. You are the first scholar, in my view, to provide a convincing explanation for the profound silences found in the epistles on Jesus of Nazareth. It's not surprising that Paul would have formulated a worship of the Christ drawing upon the mystery cults of that time.
   I have been, at times, a great enthusiast of "historical Jesus" scholarship. I have read the works of Crossan, Borg, et al. None, however, have been as incisive and lucid as The Jesus Puzzle. Your book just seems to cut through all the "noise" and wishful thinking about a historical Jesus.
   I must admit your book has caused me to grieve the loss of an anti-establishment, "left wing" Jesus, but it is a loss that I am more than willing to bear in the name of a truer historical picture. I have also felt a deep pain, realizing that the many atrocities of the last two thousand years have been carried out in the name of someone who may have never existed. I am so struck by the deep meaninglessness of that anguished history.
   Thanks again for an amazing book. I think the mythic Christ thesis is the ultimate antidote to Christian fundamentalism.

 

William writes:

    I have just finished reading The Jesus Puzzle and found it to be the best of the several books I have read exposing the lack of evidence for an historical Jesus. Your approach contrasting the epistles and the Apologists vs the Gospels is a completely convincing scholarly accomplishment.

Nick writes:

   My name is Nick and I am writing to you from Athens, Greece. I recently read your book The Jesus Puzzle and I want to congratulate you on your work. Although I am a devout Christian, I have to admit that your arguments are well established and your case is a strong one. It is difficult for me to accept that there was no historical Jesus, because that would undermine all my previous beliefs, but I will keep following your line of thought. Please keep me informed on any new piece of evidence that you provide in the future.

Jon writes :

   I know you probably hear this a lot, but I want to thank you for all the
work you do.  I used to be an evangelical that debated on the Sec Web.  I
was there when you debated Nomad (Brian Trafford) and though I was a
Christian at the time I was somewhat impressed.  But I never really gave
your view serious consideration, because I accepted the standard Christian
argument: "Even liberals reject the view that Jesus was a myth."  That was
good enough for me.  Since then (about a year ago) I've rejected
Christianity and finally stumbled on your website.  What an eye opener!!
Absolutely fascinating.  And I'll admit it.  I'm persuaded.  I haven't even
read your books yet (I plan on ordering them for my birthday soon).  But
I've learned tons from your website and your continued efforts on the Sec
Web.  I can't believe the amount of abuse you put up with, and truthfully I
cannot understand why many unbelievers are so hostile about it.  But just
know that some of us do gain insight as a result of your toils.
   I get a lot of abuse now myself because I involve myself in online debates
with Christians.  I've admitted that I accept your argument, and boy, that
gets them riled up.  They throw your name around like an epithet.

Alfredo writes (from Japan):

   While I commend your refutation of Strobel's The Case for Christ in Challenging the Verdict, I was transfixed by The Jesus Puzzle. I had heard arguments that challenged the historical Jesus before, but I thought the issue had been, for the most part, laid to rest by an abundance of voluminous material from independent contemporaneous historians. Was I in for a surprise!
   I am an attorney living in Dallas, Texas . As you might imagine, the fundamentalist onslaught is almost too much to bear. I have ordered copies of your books for the few right-minded friends I have, as gifts, and they are as intrigued and as impressed as I. As you might imagine, I have not been too popular on the cocktail circuit lately, challenging the historicity of Jesus. Much to my surprise, however, there have been a few staunchly conservative religious folk whose initial ire was replaced with genuine curiosity after hearing my entire summation of your argument.
   Recently, I read anew all of Paul's contributions to the New Testament (or what most scholars ascribe to him), looking for some reference to an earthly Jesus.  Paul's insecurity is striking.  This is a man who begs and whines.  He constantly compares himself to the "super apostles," and desperately needs to convert others for his ego, if not out of guilt for hunting christians.  In short, he needs to be accepted and believed.
   The idea of Paul writing a veritable cornucopia of persuasive letters designed to cajole, intimidate, guilt, scare, and otherwise use any means necessary to convert gentiles without referencing an earthly Jesus and hosts of other fleshly beings to substantiate the latter's miracles and bear witness to his ministry is absurd.  This resonates stronger considering Paul's writings are thought to have been within 20 to 40 years after the alleged crucifixion, and thus would be more likely subject to eyewitness verification.  Paul worked tirelessly at marketing.  Why not use your most powerful sales pitch?  He never encouraged anyone to travel to the historical settings where the earthly, historical Jesus walked, ate, slept, taught, performed miracles, was crucified, or was resurrected.  Paul's personality craved this proof.  Clearly, he would have used these arguments if they were available.  Unfortunately for Paul, the gospel writers and other revisionists did not come along for several decades. I was a philosophy major in undergrad and am familiar with the Platonic tradition.  Paul is clearly referring to Jesus existing in that Greek intermediate realm between Heaven and earth.  The allegory of the cave has clearly left its imprint on the mindset of the time. And a natural reading of Hebrews 8:4 must be troubling to those who argue otherwise.
   Your book inspired me to read the New Testament from a new perspective, unshackled from previous assumptions about Jesus's historicity. The result was nothing short of an epiphany for me!  Yes! Yes! Yes! This is it. Finally, a refutation of the historical Jesus which combines a critical study of the outside historical record, a natural reading of the biblical text itself, the philosophical milieu, and common sense.  By the way, thanks for destroying the credibility of the writings of Josephus, or at least pointing out that his original work was almost certainly altered.  Fundamentalists always throw Josephus at me, and now I am equipped with the rebuttal.
   The only tragedy about your efforts is that Strobel is probably rolling in dough for giving the people their dose of seemingly confirming medicinal gobbledygook and your provocative, sobering books are blacklisted by christian-owned (or at least influenced) bookstores. The Rev. T.D. Jakes just sold his home, less than 2 miles from me, for approx. 5.5 million dollars. For his sake, I hope the needles in heaven have gaping eyes or the camels are awfully diminutive. I've always said, ironically, "The only thing that prevents me from selling God is morality." At any rate, thank you for the books.  I'm doing what I can to spread the good word.

Tom writes:

   Thank you for your ideas about a mythical Christ. I have been studying and meditating on the New Testament (as a layman) for almost 30 years, and yours is the best explanation I have found for the different representations there of Jesus. You have convinced me that once 'the man from Galilee' is dispensed with, the rest of the early Christian record is much clearer and easier to understand.
   In discussing your ideas with others I am struck by how deeply ingrained is the idea of a historical Jesus of Nazareth. It seems that many, even non-Christians, feel a need to believe in this 'person'. The recent success of The Da Vinci Code points to the ongoing confidence people have in the basics of the Gospel story, even when its orthodoxy is challenged.
   I also agree that the history of the church founded on this literalized myth is a sad, even tragic illustration of how susceptible to delusion humans can be. People are ready to believe in miracles and immortality more than the awesome reality of our universe as we see it around us. I fear that if we as a species remain fearful and ignorant we will invite a real apocalypse upon ourselves.

[E.D.: I couldn't agree more. As for the negative reaction even of the non-believer to the idea that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, part of it, I believe, is an instinctive aversion to feeling that we've all been conned (even if the 'con' wasn't really deliberate), that our entire society has been led down the garden path for two millennia and our history is full of so much sound and fury and pointless atrocity in the name of a chimera. Keep in mind, too, that many current non-believers are actually ex-believers, and it's adding insult to injury that not only were they indoctrinated into a religious system from which they were forced to liberate themselves, they are now told that the whole thing was based on a monumental figment of the imagination. No one likes to be 'had' to that extent.]

Javier writes:

   In your article "Who Crucified Jesus?" you wrote, "But most views of the universe also saw a division of the upper world into several levels, usually seven, based on the known planets." Which seven planets are you referring to? Uranus was discovered by William Herschel in 1781. English and French historians are still fighting over who really discovered Neptune. Astronomers are still debating whether Pluto is even a planet. And last but not least, before the heliocentrism of Copernicus, the Earth was not a planet (it was the center of the Universe). By my count, that leaves five (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, & Saturn) planets known to the ancients.
  
Response to Javier:

The Seven "Planets" and Biblical Cosmology

Javier is concerned that only five planets were known by the ancients, but the term "planets" applied to all the celestial bodies under the stars: namely, the moon, Venus, Mercury, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (in that order, if I recall correctly). Each one controlled one of the seven spheres of the heavens, above which stood the sphere of the "fixed stars" beyond which lay God's own Heaven and dwelling place. In the ancient Near East, including the Graeco-Roman era, these "planets" were looked upon as divine entities, though apparently less so in the Old Testament culture. The biblical books do not refer to them as such, but some prophets condemned star worship among the Israelites.

Biblical references to cosmology and the actual structure of the universe are practically non-existent. The Hebrews were no astronomers, certainly nothing like the Babylonians. It is thus difficult to judge the cosmology of the earliest Christians, how someone like Paul envisioned the activities of the spiritual Christ in the heavenly world. He speaks of being personally "caught up to the third heaven" (2 Cor. 12:2-4), so we can assume a layered universe in his thinking. But he may have subscribed to the three-layered heaven we sometimes encounter in Jewish writing and Semitic mythology, rather than a seven-tiered one. In a heaven of seven layers, rising to the third wouldn't strike one as too notable, and in fact, he seems to refer to "paradise" in verse 4 as though he is still speaking of the third heaven, though this is unclear. If he was only less than half way to the top, one wonders what might have been revealed to him to merit the remarks he makes ("and heard words so secret that human lips may not repeat them"). Since he never enlarges on the matter, I suspect that his experience may not have been as dramatic as he wants to convey; like his having "seen the Lord," such things were required dues he had to have paid in order to justify his apostleship.

As well, no early epistle writer speaks of the distinction between a supralunar and a sublunar location, the dividing line between the corruptible and the incorruptible, though it was pervasive in ancient pagan writing. However, in one Jewish sectarian document, the Ascension of Isaiah, despite certain points of inconsistency which can perhaps be put down to the multi-layered and erratic editing process this writing underwent, we are given a seven-tiered heaven and a distinction between those layers of heaven and the sublunar "firmament." But it is not unlikely that turn-of-the-era Christ belief such as in Paul was an amalgam of Hebrew and Greek thought, as Jewish culture was not immune to Hellenistic influences and Paul operated in both the Palestinian and Diaspora milieus. Too many modern apologists and scholars assume an isolation that simply didn't exist, and close their eyes to the prominent Hellenistic content (especially in regard to the mystery cults) present in earliest Christianity.

It is both amusing and revealing to note how a conservative publication like the New Bible Dictionary (Inter-Varsity Press, England, 2nd ed., 1982) speaks of ancient Jewish views of the universe, as reflected in the Old Testament. According to one of its contributors, M. T. Fermer (Stars, p.1144), "a view of the universe is assumed which is not inconsistent with modern scientific cosmology...the Bible consistently assumes a universe which is fully rational, and vast in size, in contrast to the typical contemporary world-view, in which the universe was not rational, and no larger than could actually be proved by the unaided senses." It is statements of utter nonsense like this which render untrustworthy and dismissable any scholarship in thrall to orthodoxy and belief in a divinely inspired scripture. To modern astronomy's picture (outlined by Fermer) of a thousand million stars in our own galaxy, only one of tens of millions of similar galaxies spread throughout the universe, "the Bible is often closer...in spirit," says Fermer, than it is to ancient cosmologies. As well, "the universe of the biblical writers is rational."

As proof of the latter, Fermer appeals to Psalm 104. There we find that the earth is fixed on a foundation which is immovable, and that all things in nature take place at the behest of God. The first thought is in keeping with the pervasive biblical view, no more enlightened than any contemporary one, that the earth is the fixed center of the universe (remember Joshua stopping the sun?), while the second conceives of no natural laws but only the orchestral conducting of each note of a complex symphony by God himself, a view which persisted into the 17th century. This sort of thing is hardly "not inconsistent with modern scientific cosmology." Claiming that the Bible presents a "fully rational" universe in reputed contrast to non-Jewish irrationality further turns a blind eye on, for example, the Stoics, who saw an inherent Reason (calling it the "Logos") in the cosmos—equivalent to "natural laws"—and who regarded humanity as sharing in that Reason, enjoying happiness best by living one's life in harmony with it. Fermer apparently regards this is far less rational than worshipping and fearing a powerful Overseer in the sky, who according to biblical accounts could be petulant, punitive and merciless, genocidal and homophobic, demanding constant animal sacrifice and dictating misleading and contradictory writings for his people's edification.

As an example of 'spinning' biblical passages, few efforts on the part of apologists can top Fermer's case for arguing that the Bible (through God's inspiration, of course) conveys a knowledge of the universe's "awe-inspiring immensity":

In the promise to Abram, God couples the number of stars with the number of grains of sand. Only c.3000 stars are visible to the naked eye, so on the face of it this is a feeble comparison. But the total number of stars in the galaxy is comparable with the number of grains of sand in all the world! The Bible is full of such implications of vastness quite beyond the knowledge of its day.

And what is that biblical passage conveying such remarkable and unprecedented insight? It is Genesis 22:17, which, by the way, follows right after God's demand on Abraham that he sacrifice his only son, this being the test of Abraham's loyalty and "fear of God."

(Inasmuch as you have done this...) I will bless you abundantly and greatly multiply your descendants until they are as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore. [NEB]

Fermer sees this as a "coupling" of stars and sands, meant to imply that the number of one is as great as the nmber of the other. Hardly. This is simply a double element of poetic extravagance, no more meaningful than if a lover said to his love, "I would cross the widest ocean and swim the broadest river to be with you," which certainly entails no implication that the river is as wide as the ocean. Moreover, if Fermer seeks to be literal and 'scientific' about this, he might question the accuracy of God's statement. Have Abraham's descendents really proliferated, or are likely to proliferate, to the number of stars in the universe, to his own figure of a billion times tens of millions? There have scarcely been a scant fraction of that number of human beings on the face of the earth in all of history, let alone descendants of Abraham, nor could the earth ever support so many. We would have to populate the stars themselves, and there is nothing in the Genesis passage (nor in ancient cosmology of any sort, Hebrew or Greek) which envisions or implies a spread to other habitable planets beyond the seven heavens. The biblical writers could have had no such concept and were simply indulging in uncritical hyperbole.

My point in scoffing here at the NBD's laughable apologetic antics? To lament the fact that this sort of thing is traditional and endemic to biblical scholarship, even in the 20th and 21st centuries, in an attempt to make such primitive writings palatable to the modern mind, if not simply to pull the wool over our eyes as to their outdated and irrelevant nature. It is the sort of thing that continues to be necessary to preserve reliance and respect for anything scripture says, Old or New. It is the sort of thing one gets in Sunday Schools, from pulpits, in books like Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ, from creationists who take Genesis and other improbable—if not impossible—biblical accounts seriously and literally. It is the sort of thing which has crippled critical thinking in the young, which leads people to entertain and preserve throughout their lives all manner of outlandish and insupportable beliefs and attitudes, to offer arguments and 'proofs' that collapse at the slightest application of modern knowledge and common sense. This sort of reasoning is endemic to standard Bible Commentaries written by supposedly intelligent scholars. It has anesthetized generations of Christian believers into accepting the Bible as the greatest book ever written, timeless and superior in every way to the rest of the world's output of thought and science, when it is simply another product of its time, no more advanced and no less primitive than the people who lived it and wrote it. We would no more drive an ancient chariot around the streets of a modern city than we should let such a book govern our lives, laws, ethics and views of reality, and it's time we consigned it to a fossil museum and undergraduate classes on ancient literature.

Chris writes:

   Norman Perrin has written at some length about his proposed origin of the Son of Man sayings tradition. From my reading, this proposed explanation of the "coming" Son of Man sayings are an apology for the violent death of Jesus (A Modern Pilgrimage in New Testament Christology, p.10-22, 57-83). If such is the case, it seems to be a notable problem in your Jesus-Myth hypothesis. The need to apologize for Jesus' death seems to preclude (sic, I assume Chris means something like "require," rather than a word which means to "exclude"): One, that there was an historical Jesus whose death was embarrassing, and two, that the Q community knew of this death (see Q 11:30, 12:40, 17:24, 17:26-30). Though these sayings are all Q2 material, I perceive that they may be problematic nonetheless.

Response to Chris:

The Son of Man Problem

Not having read this particular book by the late Norman Perrin, I cannot tell whether the idea that the "coming" Son of Man sayings are an apology for Jesus' death is stated as such by Perrin himself, or is Chris' own interpretation of what Perrin has to say on the subject. Either way, I think this is a good opportunity to examine the Son of Man question as a whole and to consider what the presence of the particular Son of Man sayings found in the Q document have to tell us about the Galilean phase of Christian origins and the question of Jesus' existence. Incidentally, all the Q sayings mentioned by Chris relate to the "future coming" aspect of the expected Son of Man and give us no indication that the Q compilers regarded this figure as already having been on earth or undergone a death. One of the arresting facts about Q is that it seems to have contained no reference at all to a death and resurrection; and certain Q features suggest that no such things were present in the community's thinking about its Jesus. If Perrin is interpreting some Q Son of Man sayings as implying them, as Chris seems to be suggesting, I would have to say that he is guilty of reading them into the document. The one saying often appealed to—not mentioned by Chris—is 14:27: "No one who does not carry his cross and come with me can be a disciple of mine." But this looks to be a reference not to the cross of Jesus but to that of the prospective follower; the saying is often regarded as a proverb about enduring hardship, and crucifixion was a common form of execution. (See The Jesus Puzzle, p.149 and note 70.)

If there is a prime example of a perennial difficulty being readily solvable by the Jesus Myth theory, it is the so-called "Son of Man problem." In his book Jesus the Jew, Geza Vermes begins his chapter "Jesus the son of man" with this statement:

Shortly before his death, Paul Winter remarked stoically that the literature on the son of man was becoming more and more impenetrable with no two people agreeing on anything. At about the same time, A. J. B. Higgins in an article bearing the typical title 'Is the Son of Man Problem Insoluble?' suggested that the answer 'for all we know already exists among the widely divergent ones familiar to workers in this field'. Soluble or not, the problem is held by most interpreters of the New Testament to be of crucial significance. [p.160]

In the three decades since this was penned, little has changed. Why is there such a problem created by the appearance of this phrase in the New Testament? Vermes lists three "paradoxes" involved. One: despite the fact that it occurs over 60 times in the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke), it is never used by Paul or other epistle writers. Two: in the Gospels the title is placed only on the lips of Jesus. Third: no one around Jesus reacts to its usage, either with puzzlement or hostility. We will return to each of these points later.

(Vermes virtually ignores the usages of "Son of Man" in the Gospel of John, where it occurs about ten times, and I too will set them aside here as not casting any light on the question. John's usage is not derived from Q or its environment, and seems simply borrowed from the Synoptic source that gave the Johannine community an 'historical Jesus' in the first place. The evangelist employs the phrase as a synonym for his concept of "the Son" who came down from heaven, sent by the Father. He discards any apocalyptic connotation and makes him an aspect of Jesus who is destined to be glorified and "lifted up," yet another example of the free-wheeling redaction later Gospels performed on the earlier, unconcerned with historical accuracy.)

The uses of the phrase "the Son of Man" (always presented in English translations as though a title, although there are no capitalizations in the Greek) can be grouped into a number of sets of contrasting categories. First, the phrase is used, on the one hand, as referring to a divine, heavenly figure expected to arrive at the imminent End-time, an apocalyptic judge, as in Matthew 25:31 ("When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit in state on his throne..."). On the other hand, it is used in other cases in a more general sense, as an elaborate phrase simply for "a man" or "this man" with no obvious identification with the apocalyptic figure, as in Luke 9:58 ("Foxes have their holes...but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head"). It could be understood in a "generic" sense, as a reference to "man" in general, or in an "indefinite" sense, as "a man" or "any man," or it could be a circumlocution: Jesus' own roundabout or euphemistic way of saying "I" allegedly for reasons of modesty and supposedly in keeping with Aramaic idiomatic usage (the latter is debated). It might also have a combined sense: the speaker referring to "man" or "a man" but with an intended focus on himself. ("Can't a guy get any respect around here?") Scholars have proposed all these possible meanings for the 'general' sense. (The Gospel of John has none of the general sense usages.)

So we have a first contrasting set, the coming apocalyptic judge called by the seeming title "the Son of Man," and the general euphemism for "man" or "this man," sometimes in phrases that seem almost proverbial (as in Luke 9:58 above, or Mark 2:28: "the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath"). A usage of circumlocution or poetic euphemism for "a/the man" (sometimes representative of 'mankind') goes back into Jewish scripture, as in Isaiah 51:12 ("the son of man who is made like grass") or throughout Ezekiel when God addresses the prophet ("But you, son of man, hear what I say to you").

In the second set, the contrasting usages number three, as classified by Rudolf Bultmann. The first relates to Jesus' earthly activities, such as in regard to forgiving sins (Mark 2:10, "The Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins") and in the 'proverbial' examples given above. These are non-apocalyptic and fall into that earlier 'general sense' or generic/indefinite/circumlocutory category. The second relates to Jesus' death and resurrection, in the form of prophecies about such things by Jesus, as in Mark 8:31 and parallels ("And he began to teach them that the Son of Man had to undergo suffering...to be put to death, and to rise again three days afterward"). The third relates to Jesus' future return, as in Jesus' response to the High Priest in Mark 14:62 ("and you will see the Son of Man seated on the right hand of God and coming with the clouds of heaven") or Matthew's scene of apocalyptic judgment presided over by the Son of Man in 25:31-46.

Vermes prefers a different categorization formulated by scholars, a third set of contrasting usages: the relationship of the various Son of Man sayings to the passage in Daniel 7 which seems to have given rise to an apocalyptic association with the term. We need to look at that seminal passage, responsible for the development of so much apocalyptic thought in the Jewish (and hence Christian) psyche from the time of the Maccabean revolt until the disastrous Jewish Wars of 66-70 and 132-135. Following a pseudo-prophetic passage in chapter 7 outlining in cryptic terms and beastly imagery the history of the conquests over Israel leading up to the time of the document's writing (c.168-4 BCE), Daniel's vision moves on to something genuinely prophetic, something which had not yet come to pass—nor would it ever:

I saw in the night, visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him, and to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. [Dan. 7:13-14; RSV]

It is subsequently revealed to Daniel that this "one like a son of man" represents the righteous of Israel:

"And the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey them." [7:26-27]

The exact nature the author envisioned for this "one like a son of man" in 7:13, whether a personified human, an angel or other divine figure as representative or champion of Israel, is a matter of scholarly dispute, but it is clear that the motifs of this passage in Daniel entered Jewish consciousness as a forecast of the End-time and Israel's looked-for glorification. The "one like a son of man" underwent a variety of interpretations in messianic fashion. He surfaces in 4 Ezra and the Similitudes of Enoch, in rabbinic literature, in Revelation and the Gospels, and he is present in the latter's precursor, Q.

For Vermes and others, then, it is significant that some Son of Man references in the Synoptics are clearly dependent on the Daniel 7 scene, directly (by quoting it) or indirectly (using various of its motifs: clouds, glory, kingship, coming), while others seem not at all dependent on Daniel and make no reference to it, direct or indirect. Vermes totals and compares the number within each category and whether they came from the first Gospel, Mark, whether they are common to Matthew and Luke (from Q) or part of a residue found individually in Matthew or Luke (presumably inspired by Mark or Q). He finds "a real unbalance" between these totals and decides that they "must mean something" (p.178), though he does not suggest what.

But scholars are creating unnecessary problems for themselves, and it is, of course, due to their need to regard Jesus and his ministry, portrayed in Q and the Gospels, as historical. For practical purposes (conforming to our third set above), there are two contrasting categories of Son of Man sayings: those that show a derivation from the ideas of Daniel 7 and those that do not. (The latter includes references to Jesus' activities on earth, as in the general/proverbial type, and the predictions by Jesus of his suffering, death and resurrection which are found only in the Gospels.) How to relate those two categories? A prominent theory has been that the latter represents Jesus' way of referring to himself (a circumlocution, presumably influenced by scriptural and Aramaic speaking habits); subsequently, oral tradition and the evangelists' own editorializing carried over that phrase into alleged references by Jesus to his suffering, death and resurrection, and to his return at the Parousia, but still as a circumlocutory reference; neither Jesus (if he spoke any of them) nor those who came after intended an identification with any widely known apocalyptic figure. The problem is, the dramatic presentation of the coming of the Son of Man and the need to prepare for it, the fearsome expectations associated with him, the powerful motifs drawn from Daniel 7, are so strong and pervasive in both the Gospels and Q that it is difficult if not impossible to believe that a messianic-type concept (no doubt deriving from Daniel) was not operating in these circles, with Jesus identified as that figure. The circumlocutory explanation is simply too weak.

The debate on this score has long centered around the question of whether there was a widely established and unified concept of an "apocalyptic Son of Man" in Jewish circles, to which either Jesus could have attached himself, or his followers attached him after his death. This is still maintained by some, but perhaps the bulk of recent scholarship on the matter is that there was no such widespread, unified concept; rather, a lot of independent circles used the imagery of Daniel 7 to develop a diversity of messianic prediction involving a "one like a son of man." However, the difference is, for practical purposes, little more than semantic. Whether there existed one or many manifestations of the idea, popping up at various times in various guises, both are compatible with the view that the 'Christian' version of the Son of Man in Q and the Gospels represents an End-time figure and expectation, one which had come to be associated with Jesus.

If this were not the case, it would be difficult to understand the survival and pervasive use of a merely generic or circumlocutory mode of expression for Jesus, how it would have been attached to so much that oral tradition presumably preserved or came to invent of Jesus' sayings, so much that was being forecast about his return, and all references to him speaking of his destined death and resurrection. A limited use by Jesus of a local Aramaic speaking habit would be a pretty slim basis for the riotous development of such a christological terminology. (That Jesus' use would have to be considered limited and not requisite, either by himself or by the evangelists, is shown by the fact that the latter offer sayings—and even alternate versions of the same sayings—in which Jesus has no compunctions about using the direct "I" pronoun.)

This would be especially true in non-Aramaic settings, such as Q and the Gospels inhabited. The whole question of an Aramaic basis for the first-century church as revealed in the early Christian documents is too complex to go into here, but we can note that former scholarly theories, such as those prominent during the 1960s and 70s, that an Aramaic root layer underlay the writings and preachings of the early period, have been more or less laid to rest. All the known documents are shown to have been conceived in Greek, despite the occasional Aramaicism absorbed from a multi-cultural environment (just as we in an English culture have taken the odd French expression to use for ourselves, such as "raison d'etre"); most Aramaic expressions used by the evangelists are explained by them, showing that their circles were not Aramaic; and even though Galilee had an indigenous Jewish element—somewhat scorned by Jerusalem circles as equivalent to our 'hillbillies'—the area also contained a cosmopolitan gentile element, whose culture seems to have absorbed and adopted many things Jewish. This being the case, it is difficult to conceive that such an Aramaic-based quirk, the phrase "the son of man" used by preachers simply to report Jesus' references to himself, would be perpetuated so thoroughly and for so long; especially given the fact constantly pointed out by scholars—including Vermes himself—that it is an unusual and even awkward phrase (someone called it "an inelegant barbarism") when translated into Greek: ho huios tou anthropou. How would oral transmission have coped with such a situation, having to explain the non-Greek generic or circumlocutory meaning? (And it never is explained, unlike the elucidations provided for other, direct, Aramaic expressions.) Why would anyone have bothered? The quirk would have died out in the face of more convenient and intelligible modes of expression. There would have been no reason not to simply declare that it was "Jesus" who would be coming in glory on the clouds, and it would be a "return"—not simply an apparent first arrival, which is the manner in which all the Q sayings are formulated, many still retaining that feature when carried over into the Gospels.

Vermes himself makes this admission, remarking that "even at this stage [of a post-Jesus use of son of man as a derivative application from Daniel 7 and not attributal to Jesus himself] it is most remarkable that its use as a form of self-designation still survives" (Jesus the Jew, p.184). Having thoroughly undercut his basic theory by this comment, it is a wonder that the idea still survives in his own thinking even a quarter century later in his 2003 The Authentic Gospel of Jesus. That this theory did not win over  the scholarly community as a whole (despite an initial flurry of support) is shown by some three decades of further research on the Son of Man question which is still as divided as ever.

No, the very survival of the phrase, even through the evolution that took place in Q itself, can only be reasonably explained by assuming that for a non-Aramaic audience, "the Son of Man" in Greek could have a significance beyond a speaker's idiosyncracy of referring euphemistically to himself. That would be true even if it derived from something in the Jewish scriptures. Those scriptures had assumed meaning and importance for many beyond the ethnic circles of Jewry itself, as the multi-cultural Christian movement as a whole attests. That significance of the phrase for the circles of Q and the Gospels lay in the expectation of a divine apocalyptic figure, originally a "one like a son of man." He was being preached by the Kingdom community that produced the Q document, and he continued to be preached by the communities which built on Q or Q-type traditions and produced the next stage: the Gospels. By then, the Son of Man was being identified as Jesus himself, who would return as this apocalyptic figure.

Some have suggested that the disciples misunderstood Jesus' use of a euphemism, taking it as some kind of self-adopted titular reference, but there is no record or suggestion in the Gospels that the disciples did so, that Jesus had to explain himself. And it is hard to imagine that such a misunderstanding could have continued throughout the entire ministry and beyond without being corrected. Besides, the very wedding of the two meanings of the phrase, a simple euphemism for "(this) man" and an expected apocalyptic figure, mixed together willy-nilly throughout the Gospels and Q—and, one has to presume, throughout the early church up to the time of the evangelists—is bizarre in itself if this really represented an actual state of affairs in Jesus' ministry and its aftermath. Confusion would have abounded. Instead, the confusion is entirely ours, and suggests that all orthodox-based attempts to solve this so-called problem are misguided. Scholars have struggled over the generations to try to glean what the phrase meant, which sayings might be authentic to Jesus, if any, whether Jesus really identified himself as the Son of Man and what he envisioned by it, did he really prophesy the Son of Man's suffering, death and rising, what was the connection between the two basic types of saying, and so on. What we need is a fresh and decidedly non-orthodox approach, one that can be supplied by Jesus mythicism and the essential non-historicity of the Gospels. Bultmann was of the opinion that of his three classes of Son of Man sayings in the Gospels, the ones that related to his future coming represented the oldest traditions. I am sure he was correct, but for reasons he would not have subscribed to. This will become clear on looking back before the Gospels, into Q.

Before doing so, let's consider one of the other "paradoxes" of the Son of Man question as noted by Vermes. Outside the Gospels, the phrase appears in Christian documents only three times. In Acts, it appears in the mouth of the about-to-be-martyred Stephen (7:56) who sees a vision of the Son of Man at the right hand of God in heaven; here it is undoubtedly based on the Gospel image. It appears twice in Revelation (1:13 and 14:14) where it is undoubtedly not based on the Gospels but directly derived from Daniel 7's apocalyptic imagery; here it is not in any way associated with a human historical figure (except by reading such a thing into Revelation as a whole). This paucity is another curiosity in itself, but the paradox Vermes is speaking of is that

this presumed christological formula is given nowhere in Paul or the other epistles, i.e. in the explicitly theological expositions of the New Testament.

In other words, in those early writers most concerned with the nature of their Christ, his titles and roles and activities for salvation, there is no sign of Jesus as the Son of Man, no usage of the term at all. If Jesus, or even the early church speaking for him, had styled himself as the apocalyptic Son of Man, and given Paul's fixation on the impending end of the world and Jesus' return (he even borrows biblical motifs in speaking of it, including Daniel's "clouds" in his 'Rapture' passage of 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17), why does neither he nor any other epistle writer refer to Jesus as the Son of Man, let alone discuss it as a christological aspect of Jesus' nature? Given his contact with the Jerusalem apostles, is it conceivable that he could not have known of this designation if it had been an historical reality? Could so many early Christian writers have been ignorant of it?

There is only one scenario which unties this perplexing Gordian knot, and it will become clear by a consideration of the Son of Man in Q. (This, by the way, is a compelling argument for the existence of Q, and against the claim that the alleged 'Q' catalogue is simply the invention of Matthew, subsequently copied by Luke: the restricted nature of this group of Son of Man sayings.) I have maintained that, even though only Matthew and Luke show evidence of possessing and quoting a Q document (perhaps, this being later than Mark, Q was further along in its evolution and more widely available), the author of Mark inhabits a Q-type milieu; he is part of the kingdom-preaching movement represented in Q, centered in Galilee and extending into Syria. When one looks at the content of Q (which Matthew and Luke have elaborated on in Son of Man sayings peculiar to each of them), one realizes that the expectation of the arrival of the Son of Man is an—if not the—essential feature of the movement's preaching. This can be identified as one of those various manifestations of belief in a Son of Man based on Daniel 7, "popping up" in this Kingdom-preaching sect, whether influenced by a wider-established concept across Judaism or being simply a case of a new and independent development of the idea. For all we know, it may have been the earliest, in the early to middle decades of the first century; certainly, none of the other extant manifestations can be dated earlier. The day of the Son of Man is coming, there will be a judgment, the sign given to this generation is the sign of the coming Son of Man. (Mark has none of the specific sayings about the Son of Man taken from Q by Matthew and Luke, but he has those essential features about him, as well as the expectation of his coming on the clouds in glory; sayings related to the latter feature Matthew and Luke have taken from him.)

But here is the key consideration. Is this new sectarian Son of Man, in its original Q form, something associated with a Jesus? Do we, like orthodox scholarship, have to determine whether Jesus made the association himself, which sayings were his product, how his followers reconciled the apocalyptic Son of Man with the non-apocalyptic son of man in other sayings, and so on? Or is it really all much simpler? I suggest that it is, and that the tortured calculations of scholars, from their diverse and incompatible points of view which often propose geneses and processes that would hardly make sense in the real, practical world, can be set aside.

Consider what is said in Q about the Son of Man and what is not said. First of all, one type of saying in Mark, taken over by Matthew and Luke, about Jesus teaching that the Son of Man is destined to suffer, die and be resurrected, is entirely missing, and it is now a scholarly commonplace that these sayings are likely the invention of Mark; they serve a literary purpose to link the Galilean part of his Gospel with the Passion, the one looking ahead to the other. In Q, there is no hint of a death and resurrection at all. (Again in passing, if Q did not exist, why would Matthew have developed a new group of sayings—the ones supposedly copied by Luke—which lack all reference to a death and resurrection?) In fact, the apocalyptic Son of Man in Q is an entirely future figure. His advent is not a "return." Nothing in those Son of Man sayings themselves suggests that this character is coming back from heaven after previously being on earth. In fact, one of the most telling units in Q is the preaching of John the Baptist. Luke/Q 3:16 says:

He spoke out and said to them all: "I baptize you with water; but there is one to come who is mightier than I. I am not fit to unfasten his shoes. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His shovel is ready in his hand, to winnow his threshing-floor and gather the wheat into his granary; but he will burn the chaff on a fire that can never go out."

This is one of the indicators in Q that it initially contained no Jesus or founder figure, and that the apocalyptic Son of Man the Q community preached was a heavenly figure not yet come to earth. This saying attributed to John (no doubt falsely, being simply a co-opting of the now-dead Baptist by the Q community) identifies the Son of Man with no teacher or miracle worker presently walking the same ground as he, nor does the language or tone imply such a thing. This fearsome judge is only "to come," in keeping with all the other Q sayings about the End-time Son of Man. (For other indicators that no founder Jesus was present in early stages of Q, see The Jesus Puzzle, p.165f.)

The Son of Man in Q is not anyone 'on the scene.' This means that none of the problems identified with the Son of Man question will ever be solved by orthodox scholarship because the pieces cannot be put together in coherent fashion given the presence of an erroneous premise. The sect represented by Q began its life as a preacher of the Kingdom, and part of the coming of that Kingdom would be the arrival from heaven of the Son of Man "who would separate the wheat from the chaff."

When a founder was added to the community's view of its past (something not uncommon in sectarian practice throughout history), in the so-called Q3 layer of material (whether he was originally given the name Jesus, we cannot tell), the sect's teachings and miracle-working were assigned to him, and the Son of Man sayings were placed in his mouth. This created the awkward effect (to us) that this Jesus seems to be speaking of someone else. This effect was carried over into the Gospels, though in several cases one or other of the evangelists changed the saying and had Jesus use "I/me" or "my."

One question may present itself: why did the Q community, in coming up with a founder figure, identify him with their expected Son of Man? One could speculate on a reason, but is the question valid? Is there such an identification in Q at all, or did that take place only with the Gospel of Mark? A single saying in Q (Lk./Q 12:8-10) might suggest such an identification, but here the original wording is uncertain, not only because it differs between Matthew and Luke, but because a much more likely original could have preceded the later version: the community preachers themselves saying, "whoever accepts us [i.e. our preaching] before men, the Son of Man [at his coming] will accept before the angels of God; but he who rejects us before men, the Son of Man will reject before the angels of God." This sort of minor revision, usually to do with pronouns and referents, can be deduced in many places, even in simple comparisons between Matthew and Luke. That it happened previously during the evolution of Q is very possible as well, most likely when a founder figure was incorporated.

Thus we can surmise that Q's founder simply took up the preaching of the coming Son of Man as others had before he was introduced to the scene. Virtually every apocalyptic Son of Man saying in Q conveys that very thing, that its Jesus is indeed speaking of someone else, not himself. (Bultmann advocated that interpretation.)

But if such a linkage between their new Jesus and their old Son of Man was present in the thinking of the Q community, perhaps it was under the influence of that other, non-apocalyptic category of sayings, a couple of which appeared in Q. These are the sayings which have "son of man" as a substitution for "a man" or "this man": Luke/Q 9:58, "the son of man has nowhere to lay his head," and 7:34, "the son of man came eating and drinking" (leaving off the capitalization to avoid conveyance of the titular). Mark has others which may be derived from the same circles, giving "the son of man" power to forgive sins and lordship over the Sabbath (2:10 and 2:28, which Matthew and Luke have taken from him). On the one hand, it is entirely possible that the presence of the two categories of saying began as a simple coincidence. The non-apocalyptic sayings have the nature of the proverbial, and it is this proverbial character which could have been more widely understood and which would have brought them in and preserved them within an essentially non-Aramaic milieu. On the other hand, it is also possible that the presence of the apocalyptic "Son of Man" in the community's thinking may have attracted sayings of the other sort, in a kind of 'catchword' process, even if there was initially no common identification between the two, the latter being something that developed only later, either in Q's evolution or in Mark (as discussed above). And with the evolutionary step taken by Mark from the Q ethos to his Gospel amalgamation of the Q Jesus and a cultic sacrificial Christ, the Markan Jesus became the Son of Man incarnated, on earth to teach about his own impending sacrificial act and resurrection, and his return as apocalyptic judge. (Mark also brought in the term "Messiah," adding that to the mix of characterizations of his Jesus, something Q never did. Such a title never appears in Q, another peculiarity that would have to be attributed to Matthew's idiosyncratic catalogue of these sayings if Q never existed.)

When Q evolved a founder figure, he was quite naturally associated with the non-apocalyptic 'son of man' references. After all, those could be seen as referring to present activities and to the founder himself; the 'proverbs' became personified in him. This may have led eventually to identifying him with that other "Son of Man," but as I suggested above, I have a feeling that Q didn't actually take that step. The sayings themselves don't reflect it, and the Q Jesus still sounds as if he is talking about someone else. If this is the case, the orthodox basis of Q (though not its existence) is completely overturned. For the Q community, the Son of Man was not Jesus. Their (imagined) founder and their (equally imagined) expected divine judge were two different figures, and the latter arrived in their thinking before the former.
This destroys any idea that these allegedly early "Jesus people" had any concept of their founder's return at the End-time; that was a role already filled by the Son of Man. By corollary, it pretty well destroys any concept that he had been executed (something Q never mentions anyway), since a tradition of such a fate would inevitably have led to imagining his return in compensatory glory, especially one conveniently linkable to the glorious Danielic-based Son of Man. This is a natural conclusion, since we encounter that very thing in the Gospels and in Christian tradition. But we can go further. We can say that it almost certainly destroys the reality of a Q founder, no matter what the traditions about his fate. If the kingdom preaching Q community owed its very existence, its teachings and miracle-working, its eschatological expectations, to a prominent founder, it is very unlikely that it would have centered its preaching around an apocalyptic figure which had no connection with that founder, or that it would have left such a founder in the dimmest of backgrounds during the early phases of the development of its foundation document, the root stages of Q.

That, too, is an acknowledged feature of Q in the scholarly breakdown of the document's formation over time: the figure and personality of Jesus is virtually absent in the earliest stratum. Even his name appears only in a set of chreiai which can be shown to be a later assemblage (see The Jesus Puzzle, p.162). Only his alleged 'product' is focused on. Even in the so-called Q-2 stratum when we encounter the apocalyptic preaching and controversy elements with the Jewish establishment, Q itself in almost all cases presented only the sayings material, without any contexts (these were supplied by Matthew and Luke) which would have linked them with a specific Jesus figure in a specific recorded setting, as opposed to simply being a reflection of the activities of the community itself. In a couple of extended anecdotes, such as the curing of the centurion's servant and the so-called dialogue between Jesus and John, Jesus becomes a character in the pericope; but the latter is a later construction (see The Jesus Puzzle, p.171), while a certain amount of accommodation of the new founder would have been effected by recasting sayings to use his name, or pronouns like "I" and "he." Thus the Son of Man situation in Q has further provided support for the Jesus Myth scenario.

In any case, we have solved all of Vermes' paradoxes, along with the perplexities of the Son of Man question that have perennially plagued scholars. The Son of Man designation is not found in non-Gospel early Christian documents like the epistles because no such tradition about their Christ figure (who was not human, in any case) was in existence. Paul and his cultic circles lay entirely outside the Galilean kingdom-preaching movement, and a linkage between them only took place with Mark. They may have shared a certain common apocalyptic expectation that was 'in the air,' some of it based on Daniel, but it is significant that for Paul it is the heavenly Christ who will arrive on the clouds, while for Q it is the "Son of Man." The Son of Man sayings in Q originated with the kingdom-preaching movement represented by Q. It is no coincidence that, as Bultmann notes, it is the "coming" Son of Man who is present in that oldest tradition, since no earthly Son of Man was envisioned by them. The presence of a few proverbial "son of man" sayings was largely an incidental feature and originally did not refer to an individual on the scene, though it may have stood 'generically' for the community.

Why is Vermes presented with a second paradox: all of the Gospel Son of Man sayings being found only in Jesus' mouth? Because such sayings originated with Q, which was essentially a sayings collection. No matter who first regarded the Q Jesus as identifiable with the Son of Man, that pool of sayings came from a milieu which had placed them in his mouth, and the evangelists did not step outside that system. Mark, in drawing on his own more limited oral traditions concerning the coming Son of Man (he had no Q document), fashioned unprecedented sayings about death and resurrection, but felt no need to have any other character speak such a designation for Jesus but Jesus himself. Perhaps the contexts, in his mind, didn't require it.

Why did the Synoptic evangelists not have other characters query Jesus' usage of that seeming title which identified him with an expected apocalyptic figure? (John has the crowd once ask, in 12:34, "Who is this Son of Man?" that Jesus has just referred to, but Jesus gives them no explanation.) Again, there is a simple answer. First, this is how Vermes puts it:

The third paradox lies in the curious lack of impact made by the expression on the contemporaries of Jesus. Far from being treated as a mystery, the most problematic of all New Testament problems, there is no record in either Matthew, Mark or Luke of any query concerning its meaning or objection to its use. Among friends and adversaries it arouses neither enthusiasm nor hostility. [Jesus the Jew, p.161]

No one in Jesus' Gospel audience queries his usage of the term "son of man" because the Gospel and Q accounts do not represent actual history. Q in any case contains very little in the way of biographical settings, the sayings mostly stood on their own, so no such reaction on the part of bystanders or disciples would have come into play in that collection. When we get to the Gospels, particularly the first one, we need to realize that this was not conceived as an historical record. It was an allegorization of the activities and beliefs of the communities that produced them (which is why later evangelists had no compunction about wholesale reworking of the earliest one to fit their own communities and agendas; they were simply 'improving' a literary creation). The immediate audience for these pieces of "good news," the believing community itself, knew the meaning of the Son of Man and did not require any explanation to be incorporated into them. In the broader society within which these sectarian communities proselytized, many people may have acquired a familiarity with the figure the sect was preaching to them and would not need to be portrayed as puzzled by it; their hostility was simply in the form of rejection, as the sayings themselves indicate. And as noted, by now a certain widespread attitude toward the Danielic figure as having messianic overtones could have been in circulation, familiar to much of the Jewish establishment, even if they didn't subscribe to it. On this 'paradox' we could speculate at length, but all we have to remember is that it was the evangelists who controlled their story, not history. It is they who, for whatever reasons, chose not to incorporate a reaction to their main character's statements. And the latter simply reflected the symbolism they chose to give him, a symbolism that did not need explaining to the community itself, for which these documents, in true sectarian fashion, were written.

Once we abandon the a priori assumption that the Gospel Jesus existed, that he preached and may in some way have used the phrase "son of man" in designation of himself, that the Gospel scenes are to be regarded as anything resembling remembered history (other than symbolizing the faith and activities of the community itself), we eliminate the paradoxes and problems inherent in this most problematic of New Testament puzzles and open up the way to a solution. We can trace the development and evolution of the Son of Man sayings to arrive at the Gospel catalogue. As is often the case, the adoption of inaccurate or unexamined premises can foil the solution to a problem. The whole of ancient philosophy and cosmology, and with it the period's religious constructions, were utterly divorced from reality, since everything was approached from erroneous and unverifiable premises about the nature of the universe. Prior to Darwin, religious convictions, even by major philosophers, were based on a profound ignorance about the biological development of life through evolution, which is why evolution has proven so devastating to those convictions and revealed them, too, as divorced from reality. One day scholars will come to realize that all their continually debated and ever changing predications about the Gospel Jesus have been wrong, simply because of their erroneous (and largely unexamined) premise that such a man existed.

John writes:

       I have been reading up lately on the ancient myths of Cybele and Attis. What 'pre-christian' texts are there still in existence to support these stories? And what parts relate to the Old Testament stories and also the Virgin birth, death and resurrection?

Response to John:

Cybele and Attis and the Relationship to Christianity / Resurrection in the Mysteries

Cybele was the Phrygian version (north-west Asia Minor) of one of the most longstanding myths of ancient and prehistoric times, that of the Great Mother, or Earth Goddess, or simply the Goddess, found over the entire Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. As the earth, she was the fount of all life, but in Asia Minor she assumed qualities rather wild and savage, partly under the influence of Dionysos worship in neighboring thrace (north-east Aegean) which was carried into Phrygia and Lydia. In the midst of the dark days of the struggle with Hannibal (2nd Punic War), the Roman Senate decided to adopt Cybele as a national Roman goddess, being assured by oracles and the Sibylline Books that she would bring them victory over Carthage. This move had some justification, since according to legend Rome itself had been founded by Trojans fleeing the fall of their city a millennium earlier. In 204 BCE, the king of Pergamum (near the ancient site of Troy) sent the black meteoric stone that represented the goddess by ship to Rome, where it was installed in a temple on the Palatine. (The very next year Italy was blessed with a record harvest and the withdrawal of Hannibal from Italy, so who knows?) Rites of the goddess over the next few centuries were strictly controlled by the Senate.

In the accounts of this coming of the Great Mother to Rome there is no mention of Attis. He appears in the mythology associated with Cybele, some of it earlier than the Roman adoption, as her only lover, a shepherd boy who raised her jealous ire by dallying with a nymph or marrying a king's daughter (depending on the version of the myth). The result was his death, although the precise nature of that death (by a boar or castration) and whether it was self-inflicted was not fixed in the first few centuries of the mythology. When the myth reached its classic form, it became self-castration in a moment of madness, mirroring the practice of the priests of Cybele, the Galli, who emasculated themselves in bloody fashion to better serve the goddess. (A little more drastic and primitive counterpart to modern Catholic priests who take a vow of celibacy, and less reversible.) Here we have a probable example of myth arising from rite; the practice of castration by the priests of Cybele would have led to the development of the myth of the precedent-setting castration by Attis who himself had served Cybele.

While Attis appears in mythology early on (from Herodotus to Diodorus), the big question is, when did he begin to be worshipped as a deity in his own right, and when did he become an actual savior god? The Romans initially seemed to take little or no notice of him. Eventually, in the third and fourth centuries CE during the twilight of the mystery cults, he became a solar god, but what his status was at the turn of the era, when Christianity began, is debated.

Figurines of Attis have been unearthed from the temple precincts dating from the first century BCE that indicate 'resurrection' for and worship of Attis, and inscriptions from the Augustan period refer to hymns to Attis. The emperor Claudius in the mid first century CE officially reorganized the Cybele cult which included festivities for Attis commemorating his death and (possibly) resurrection. The exact nature of the latter is in dispute (and I will discuss the meaning of the term later). In the earlier versions of the myth (up to Diodorus in the late first century BCE, one of which is preserved in the 3rd century Arnobius), Attis remains dead, or at least he is not resurrected to earth (an important distinction); and he does not seem to be regarded as a deity in his own right.

That apparently changed in the early first century. In the ceiling fresco of a recently excavated building from the reign of Tiberius, we see a winged Attis leading someone to Olympus, which must mean that he is immortal himself capable of granting immortality to his devotees. Then in the reign of Claudius we have the formal institution of March festivities for Attis which involved a 'passion week' celebration quite similar to the Passion of Christ (from which it was hardly derived at that early a date). But what elements did the festival contain at that time?

The fully developed festival, as witnessed more clearly in the 3rd and 4th centuries, was spread over some two weeks. On March 15, the "entry of the reeds" (bearers carrying them) seems to have commemorated Attis' youthful induction as a shepherd, and it may also refer to his emasculation which legend has it was done with a broken reed stalk. On March 22 came the "entry of the pine tree," this being the tree under which Attis died after his bloody castration. In some representations, Attis is actually attached to the tree, and borne into the temple. The 22nd and 23rd were days of mourning for the dead Attis. From the beginning of the festival to this point, the faithful fasted and practised sexual abstinence, and on the 24th the priests performed flagellation on themselves and sprinkled their blood on the effigy of Attis on the tree and on the temple altars. Novices who had committed themselves to taking the plunge may have performed the rite of self-emasculation on that same day. The night of the 24th, Attis and the tree were buried and the faithful kept watch over the site.

The 25th of March was known as the Hilaria, the "rejoicing." Firmicus Maternus around 350 CE records the morning pronouncement by a priest of the cult, generally assumed to be the Attis cult, although there is a similar pronouncement in the cult of Osiris:

"Be of good heart, you novices, because the god is saved.
Deliverance from our sufferings will come for us, as well."

"Sufferings" was probably a reference to this world in general, and thus the idea of a resurrection to a better life.

To digress for a moment, the parallels to the Christian Passion week are evident. Without suggesting that either one borrowed directly from the other, we can see the natural common elements that the cultic mind would apply to the death and rising of a savior god. The festival begins in both cases with a celebratory entrance, the carrying of the reeds and the strewing of the palms on Palm Sunday. After several days comes the death of the god, with the common motif of the tree to which the god is attached. Devotees in both cases mourn and fast and abstain, as in the Christian Lent. The bodily suffering of both gods is accentuated, whether through scourging and crucifixion, or self-inflicted wounds. Another common element is the mourning of the god by a woman close to him (something almost universal to the myths of dying saviors), Attis by his lover Cybele, Jesus by his mother Mary at the cross. Then comes burial, followed by a resurrection, a period of grief ended by a morning of celebration and renewal of hope. It is also not a coincidence that both festivals occurred at the spring solstice, since both myths were ultimately inspired by the astronomical cycle of the season, when the sun became dominant once more and the days turned longer than the nights.

We can also make comparisons with the mystical thought of Paul as applied to his Christ. The death of the god occurs, followed by his burial, then after a period a resurrection. No more does Paul need to see those elements of his "gospel according to the scriptures" (1 Cor. 15:3-4) as a witnessed occurrence in recent history than the devotees of Attis did (whether they envisioned it on earth or in a mythical spirit world). And how did Paul's devotees of Christ share in the mystery of his experiences? First, they joined in the death of the god Jesus through baptism (Roman 6:3, "we were baptized into his death"). We can compare this with the taurobolium of the Attis rites, where the initiate was drenched in the blood of a bull slaughtered above him. This rite is only attested to from the 2nd century on, so we cannot say if it was introduced any earlier than the next great surge of the Attis cult after Claudius, namely in the reign of Antoninus Pius (138-161). But it was likely preceded by more benign rites of baptism and rebirth, something common to virtually all cultic expression of the kind under examination.

Paul also speaks of being "buried" with Christ (Romans 6:4) and to this we can compare the hint in Clement of Alexandria and Firmicus Maternus, that during the period of mourning between Attis' death and his resurrection, the devotees symbolically "descended" to the womb of the Goddess, referring to myths like that of Persephone who reigned in the Underworld. Paul's mystical understanding of dying with Christ thus envisioned accompanying him into burial and the earth, in parallel with the expression of the mysteries. (This in itself would be sufficient to explain his reference to Christ being "buried" in 1 Cor. 15:3, which need not have an historical meaning.) Since the ceremonies of the mysteries, as noted by Maternus, involved the symbolic dedication of the devotee to undergo voluntary death before being permitted to descend into the realm of death (apparently carried out in the Attis rite through entry into a cave or subterranean part of the temple), we can see this sort of thing translated sacramentally into Paul's conception of Christian baptism. And as the initiates in the mysteries would emerge from this death and burial in a reborn state, guaranteed salvation, Paul too sees a resurrection for the Christian devotee linked to the savior's one: "If we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall be also in [the likeness of] his resurrection" (Romans 6:5).

There is even an allusion to a rite of eating and drinking associated with the Attis festival. Both Clement and Maternus record a formula announced by the initiate: "I have eaten from the tambourine (associated with Cybele) and have drunk from the cymbal (associated with Attis)." This may well have referred to a ritual meal the initiate undertook before being allowed to enter into the innermost temple from which he emerged reborn. Whether the elements of the meal commemorated the passion of Attis is not known, but we can certainly see a parallel to Paul's "Lord's Supper," which too need no more have commemorated a recent historical event than did any of the sacred meals of the mysteries, and they virtually all had one. (The parallel is also evident with the Gospel "Last Supper," yet another element in common between the two "passion weeks.") That the meal of the Attis cult, like that of Dionysos, represented the body and blood of the god is very possible, since the two cults were linked in both derivation and geographical location.

These close parallels demonstrate the intimate connection between the soteriology of the savior god religions and that of Christianity, and make any denial that both are cut from the same cloth the ultimate burial of one's head in the sand. It also justifies regarding Christianity, in the essentials of its rituals and theory of salvation, its fundamental principle of unity with the savior deity, as a pagan expression rather than a Jewish one. Judaism shared nothing with the above discussed features, despite the elements it did contribute to syncretistic Christianity, such as its scriptural basis, its messiah and apocalyptic expectations and assorted other traditions.

The critical part of the debate over the connection between Christianity and a cult like that of Attis, much exercised in Christian apologetic circles, concerns the Hilaria, the celebration of Attis' deliverance from death. When did it become part of the March festival? Maarten J. Vermaseren, perhaps the leading authority on the Cybele-Attis cult in the latter 20th century, subjects this question to a close examination in his Cybele and Attis: the Myth and the Cult (see pages 110-123). There are less than a handful of extant texts before the 4th century which refer to the Attis festival, all of them brief and none directly mentioning the Hilaria, although one (by Herodian around 187) may do so indirectly. When Vermaseren adds the archaeological evidence (of which there is almost as much a paucity as the textual), the picture gets a little less obscure. Even before the turn of the era there are representations of a winged and dancing Attis, indicating not only that he is regarded as an immortal (and thus having conquered death), but that his celebration is representative of the theme of the Hilaria, the rejoicing after mourning, the resurrection following death. Vermaseren points in particular to the scene in the unearthed temple mentioned above as demonstrating that the resurrection concept was in existence in the early 1st century. While he admits in summary (p.123) that the scant evidence of both types allows no more than a "hypothesis" about the addition of the Hilaria to the Attis festival, he believes "this hypothesis tends toward a resurrection conception," which arose a good deal prior to the 4th century. He might have added that if such a concept was part of the Attis cult in the 1st century, it is hardly feasible than an observance of it would not have become part of the Attis festival until another three centuries had passed.

It is unfortunate that our evidence is indeed so scanty, making it possible for apologists to postulate the theory that the Attis cult of the later empire consciously mimicked Christian antecedents in an attempt to win over adherents, including from Christianity itself. This is unlikely in principle, simply because the Attis cult was part and parcel of a broad range of savior god mythology which was based on the dying and rising concept (even if "rising" had a multiplicity of applications), and the thought of imputing to all of them a deliberate copying of Christianity is beyond the feasible, let alone the sensible. More than one Christian apologist of the 2nd and 3rd centuries (such as Justin and Tertullian) argues against the current accusation of borrowing in the other direction, with no intimation that Christianity is alone in its concept of the savior conquering death. Celsus, writing around 170, having made himself quite familiar with the details of the Christian faith, makes no bow toward a major feature like resurrection as a unique aspect of Christ, and in fact accuses the Christians in blanket fashion of outright plagiarism from the Greek traditions.

A. T. Fear ("Cybele and Christ" in Cybele, Attis and Related Cults, ed. E. N. Lane, 1996, p.39-50) goes so far as to style the cult of Attis in the 4th century a "created religion" designed to "confront Christianity on its own ground," since it was supposedly clear to the pagans "that Christianity had fundamentally changed the religious agenda of their society." While fearlessly giving voice to that favorite apologetic fantasy that the similarities between Christianity and the mysteries can be put down to pagan copying, Fear's theory is entirely speculative, which his own language admits:

We can see therefore how the changes in the [Attis] cult might not have been merely mutations which took place unconsciously over time to ensure the cult's survival in the religious marketplace of antique polytheism [a scenario, certainly a sensible idea, which he has earlier admitted "could be"], but could rather have been a deliberate attempt to produce a rival to Christianity. [p.44]

This speculative proposal requires that the extant record, as discussed above, must be interpreted as meaning that anything not directly stated in the record of the earlier centuries must not have been current, but was only introduced at the time when it is clearly found, namely in the late 3rd and 4th centuries. It means ignoring the indicators that Vermaseren sees as indicative of a "resurrection conception" as early as the reign of Tiberius. There is probably no doubt that the cult of Attis underwent a surge of attention in pagan circles in the early 4th century when Christianity shot to the top of the heap at the command of Constantine, who virtually turned it into the state religion; and this surge was no doubt in response, to try to counter the new upstart. But that hardly means that the Attis cult was reworked from the ground up (pun intended), introducing overnight under the machinations of some backroom conspirators dramatic new concepts such as resurrection and the addition of the Hilaria, where none existed before. The populace would well have known that such ideas were not traditional and ancient. A few decades later, Julian the Apostate, no ignoramous he, did his best to give an acceptable philosophical and allegorical veneer to the Attis cult, and it is hardly likely he would have been taken in by so recent an overhaul of a fundamental aspect like resurrection (which he allegorized, in the case of Attis, as the ascent of the soul). One is reminded of the dubious attempts of those earlier Christian apologists to explain away the close similarities between Christianity and the cults, but at least Fears doesn't suggest that it was the demons who did it.

Now, it has become crucial to make an important clarification here, one I have mentioned before, including in The Jesus Puzzle (p.115-116). On both sides of the perennial question concerning the similarities between the pagan and Christian salvation cults, there have been excesses. Apologetic websites countering claims that everything in the Jesus story has previous parallels in the mysteries, down to the moles on his skin, are proliferating, and poor old Kersey Graves [Sixteen Crucified Saviors] has become a punching bag. At the same time, less informed skeptics continue to circulate these detailed comparisons between Jesus and savior gods like Osiris, Attis and Mithras, presenting the former as nothing more than a plagiarized mirror of the latter. The battle centers particularly on the idea of the god's "resurrection." Yes, on this score the historians of the History of Religions School of the early 20th century may have gotten carried away, although I think it was more in the nature of a semantic miscalculation than a 'factual' one. Both sides need to nuance their focus and stop presenting straw men.

When we speak of a "resurrection" or "resuscitation" in the pagan mysteries, we are not (or should not be) speaking of a return to earth by the god, in flesh, to resume his former life or remain for a time on the material plane. Apologists, and even some mainstream scholars, exercise themselves needlessly over this point, anxious to show that the gods of the mysteries did not rise from their graves to walk the earth again in the way that Jesus is portrayed in the Gospels. This is certainly true. Osiris was not reassembled by Isis to stand on the banks of the Nile once more. Attis did not return to earth after the period commemorated by his mourners; the Hilaria was not a rejoicing to celebrate Attis' return to the fields to tend his sheep and play his pipe. One of the versions of the Attis myth (the one recorded by Arnobius) expressly has Zeus refusing to restore him to his previous life.

But no religion has ever celebrated death per se, and certainly not death as a finality. It may be a departing of this world, but the great majority of humanity has always hoped for an afterlife, and preferably a happy one. Osiris and Attis, perhaps the two most prominent 'dying and rising' savior gods of the ancient world, did not need to return to earth. They conquered death to set up shop in the next world, where they welcomed the souls of those who were joined with them and to whom they had shown the way. The future lay in the next world, not in this one, and it was generally regarded as a future in spirit only, the body (which pagan philosophers regarded with little love) shed forever.

In ancient Egypt, only the Pharaohs and the nobles could afford to undergo the rites of passage (including proper embalming) that would guarantee survival in the world of the dead. The masses simply perished into oblivion. The mystery religions as a social phenomenon arose in part so that ordinary individuals could take their eternal fates into their own hands and achieve salvation through being initiated into the rites and knowledge that would open the door to the afterlife. Through being linked with the savior, they could join him in a resurrection to a new existence. It was not in flesh and it was not on earth, and thus it did not require that the god be resurrected in that sense as a precedent.

To some extent, the Jews saw things differently. Though there were a variety of viewpoints about what, if anything, happened after death, Hebrew thought was not strong on afterlife concepts until a couple of centuries before the turn of the era. When the idea of survival after death became popular, it tended to expect God's (or a Messiah's) arrival to set up a Kingdom of God on a transformed earth. Sectarian expressions sometimes deviated from this and saw a heavenly messiah-figure as guaranteeing an ascent to heaven of the righteous where they would assume "thrones and crowns" and "garments of glory" (as in the Ascension of Isaiah and the Similitudes of Enoch). Paul has a foot in both worlds, which is fitting since Christianity as originally formulated was a syncreticism of the Hellenistic and Jewish. United with the god Christ Jesus through baptism and faith, the devotee is guaranteed resurrection into the kingdom of God, where "we will always be with the Lord" (1 Thess. 4:17); but not in flesh and blood, for "flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God, and the perishable cannot possess immortality" (1 Cor. 15:50). As he says in that passage, Christ himself constitutes the prototype for the resurrected believer's new spiritual body.

And yet Paul in that passage fails to tell us that this "prototype" is a resurrected body that was formerly flesh, dying on earth and rising from his tomb; in fact his entire argument excludes it, despite centuries of insistence on reading such a thing into the text. Which leads us to another observation that presents a stark reality no one wants to face. Not only do Paul and other epistle writers fail to tell us that Jesus rose from the dead in flesh, or returned to earth after his resurrection (the "seeings" of 1 Cor. 15:5-8 are better understood as visions), the early Christian writings tell us explicity where Jesus went immediately after his rising from death: to Heaven, to take his place at the right hand of God. 1 Peter 3:18-22, Ephesians 1:20, Hebrews 10:12, the hymns of Philippians 2 and 1 Timothy 3:16, exclude any period on earth. (Can we really believe that if there was such a thing, not a single epistle would make mention of it?) In other words, Jesus after his death (which to judge by the early writers is in myth, not history) is resurrected to the afterworld, there to receive his devotees. That is the resurrection which is the "firstfruits," with the resurrection of believers to follow into the same place. This is all that Paul presents to us. Christ's is a resurrection just like that of Osiris and Attis. Whether that afterworld is located above the firmament or below the earth, or in some unspecified spiritual dimension to which souls go, is essentially a matter of cultural difference, as well as cultural attitudes regarding the worthiness and survivability of material flesh and blood. Apparently, in regard to the latter, Paul sympathizes more with the pagan outlook.

If the myths of the savior gods are essentially rooted in the seasonal cycle of the life, death and renewal of agriculture (and there are few doubts about this, though many interpretations), then rising must follow dying. But while plants resurrect on the same earth in which they die, it was clear that not even the Pharaohs came back to the same earth, so they were seen as living on in the next world; their this-world aspect lived on in the succeeding Pharaoh. Since the gods who represented, who were responsible for, the life and death cycle of plants did their work from an invisible realm, it was to that invisible realm, to that other world, that the souls of the dead went who achieved salvation. It would seem that Paul and the early Christian writers had much the same concept, for they make nothing of any rising of Jesus in flesh to appear to his followers, or of any concept that we too will rise in flesh. Instead, both Christ and the believer enter the realm of God following resurrection, both with spiritual bodies.

If properly interpreted, the theme of "dying and rising" is not a misnomer when applied to the mystery deities. Apologists are, as is their wont, apealing to straw men. Frazer and others of his time may have been less than clear on what they meant by resurrection; perhaps they were even less than clear in their own minds, and thus share responsibility for creating the straw man in the first place. But there is no reason why we cannot be fully clear today, and argue both sides on that basis, not on a false one. And if we do not insist on reading the Gospels into the epistles, we can also see that earliest Christianity shared in the same basic concept as the mystery religions. Not that Pauline Christianity was based directly on the cycle of the seasons; it was of too recent vintage for that. But its ultimate ancestry was the same, with the addition of its more distinctive and contemporary input from Judaism.

The Gospels, once they were misinterpreted as history, turned this whole system on its head. Just as Ignatius wanted Christ to have suffered in the same flesh as he himself inhabited, so too did he need Christ to have been resurrected in flesh to guarantee the same destiny for himself. Today's Christians seem to envision some amalgamation of the two ancient thought-worlds. Heaven will be a place where the flesh lives on, immortalized and transformed into perfection. Many, following in Paul's delusional imaginings, see themselves raptured directly to Heaven, avoiding the unpleasant process of death altogether. But everything that science and empirical observation tells us indicates that life is not about immortalizing the individual. There are no discernible gods that direct the cycle of the seasons, but only nature itself, impersonal processes. The plants that die in the winter are not the same as those that are renewed in springtime. The ancient mysteries suffered under the delusion that we, as individuals, are destined for an afterlife, but at least they recognized at the core of their rites that "death...is at the base of all new life," that "without death there can be no life; without dying, no fertility." (Walter Otto, "The Meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries," in The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks II, p.20, 29). Without the passing away of the old growth, new growth is not possible. Thus, we live on in our progeny (which includes our ideas when adopted by others: both genes and memes), contributing to an ever evolving-process, not in some paradise where nothing changes and the only activity seems to be the unending worship of an insatiable Deity. Personal salvation has been a life-destroying fantasy, obscuring a reality that is much more complex and ultimately, perhaps, far more profound.

Frederick writes:    

      I'm a huge fan of your website and I wish your interview on Brian Flemmings' DVD would have been even longer.
   I was looking at 1 John 3:12 (right after the verse that doesn't attribute the "love your neighbor" quote to Jesus) and I noticed that the example given of one who did not love his brother as he should was Cain. Wouldn't this have been a logical place to mention Judas?
   Also, not related to the new testament I noticed that the Sodom story of Genesis 19 is repeated almost identically in Judges 19 in a slightly different setting. Seems like too much of a coincidence to me.

Response to Frederick:

Silences in 1 John / Midrash in the Old Testament

Frederick is a good example of a public that is growing ever more perceptive of the anomalies present in the biblical record. The statement in 1 John 3:11 is: "For this is the message you have heard from the beginning: that we should love one another." If this is a reference to a command that came from Jesus in his teaching on earth, this is a curious way to put it. Why not say, more naturally, something like: "For the Lord himself instructed us to love one another"?

The phrase "from the beginning" recurs several times throughout this epistle. In fact, it begins the epistle: "What was from the beginning..." The "what" is a neuter pronoun, repeated in successive phrases referring to a message or revelation which took place at the beginning of the sect:

Traditional scholarship likes to style this "prologue" a reference to apostles witnessing the person and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, but this is a stretch. Again, the pronouns are neuter, not masculine; what was "with the Father" is feminine, referring to the word "life." There is no direct reference here to any historical figure. The most natural way to take the passage is as a poetic description of a revelatory experience by persons unstated, an experience that happened at "the beginning" of the Johannine sect, from which was derived a conviction in God's offering of eternal life, accompanied by commands such as to "love one another." The writer urges his readers to retain "what you have heard from the beginning" which can hardly refer to them having heard Jesus himself. More than once he makes it clear that the command to love came from the Father, most notably in 2 John: "...just as the Father commanded us. And now, dear lady, I am not writing you a new command but one we have had from the beginning...As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love." That command and that beginning lies within living memory of some of the sect's members, and it comes from God.

As for 3:12, which Frederick calls attention to, an appeal to Cain who did not love his brother but in fact slew him might well be natural in this context, but then, so would a reference to Judas, who did not love his master but betrayed him. Here we have yet another of countless places in the epistles where the writer is silent on anything to do with the Gospel story, and while one example does not make a substantial case, repeated examples do tell us something. Judas is likewise missing in Hebrews 12:15-17:

Certainly Judas should have jumped to mind here. And when the writer of 1 Clement appeals to examples of those who suffered at the hands of jealous men, he too fails to mention Judas' betrayal of Jesus.

Frederick has also pointed out a good example of midrash in the Old Testament. There are about as many definitions of "midrash" as writers who try to define it, but the bottom line is that it constitutes any use of a previous passage or combination of passages or themes in scripture to formulate something new. The purpose may be for instruction, elucidation, a presentation of new truths, telling of a new story, etc. Here, the writer of Judges 19 tells the tale of a Levite travelling with his wife, and during a visit to his father-in-law in Gibeah townsmen come to the door of the house, demanding that he be surrendered to them for their sexual pleasure. He and his host offer as a substitute the Levite's wife, the host's daughter. This is virtually a carbon copy of the account of the angels visiting Lot and his daughters before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and is clearly a literary derivation, not an historical account. Here we have an existing element from scripture pressed into service to tell a new story.

The New Testament Gospels are full of such pieces of midrash, in fact it would seem that almost the entire Gospel story has been put together on that basis. Jesus' life experiences, his miracles, the details of his trial and death, are dependent on Old Testament themes and passages. To offer just one example, the story of the slaughter of the innocents in an attempt by Herod to kill the newborn messiah is a carbon copy of the tradition attached to Moses' birth and his escape from Pharaoh's slaughter of the Hebrew newborns in Egypt. When so much of the Gospel story is seen as derived from such midrashic processes, the work of the evangelists can no longer be labeled "biography."

Bart writes:

   I have enjoyed your book immensely. I am recommending it far and wide as the best of its genre, and quite compelling.
   Why do you think Mark, who had no direct knowledge of the Galilean area, chose to put Jesus and his disciples there?  One would think that it would be useful to a writer to place events in a locale familiar to himself and his readers. Why were the particular cities chosen for his ministry (Capernaum, Magdala, Tiberias, Bethsaida, and Cana) while ignoring the larger and better known capitol Sepphoris?
   Also, do you have any source information to corroborate the existence of synagogues in the region of Galilee prior to the end of the Jewish war? Mark's presentation of Jesus and his disciples being persecuted by the synagogues is obviously something that would not have occurred until late in the first century and was put in the gospel to deal with a current situation. But I am of the understanding that there is no solid evidence that the synagogue system was even there prior to the war.

Response to Bart:

Why is Jesus a Galilean?

I think it is a basic misunderstanding to imagine that Mark simply fished around for a place to put his "invented" Jesus and chose Galilee, perhaps by flipping a drachma. Rather than a "choice," Mark set his story there because Jesus was symbolic of the kingdom-preaching movement Mark was a part of, and that movement was centered in Galilee. However, it also seems to have extended somewhat beyond that region, into parts of Syria. Mark's reputed ignorance of Galilean geography is not that profound; he simply makes a few mistakes in the relative locating of certain places. That would be possible if he were located not too far outside Galilee and was not well travelled. Thus the Galilean character of his Jesus would be determined by pre-existing conditions. As for the particular sites, one might suggest that the movement operated in the smaller centers, not in the major cities of the gentile portion of the populace, and thus these are where the story's activities would take place.

I also think it is a mistake to regard Mark as the "inventor" of Jesus of Nazareth. He put flesh on the bones that had been formed in the preceding kingdom movement (or at least that part of it responsible for the Q document), but it was they who had "invented" a founder for themselves, modeled on their own activities and teachings, incorporating him into their collection of community sayings and anecdotes. I believe Mark did invent the composite character of the Gospel itself, Jesus of Nazareth, particularly that aspect relating to his trial, death and resurrection. What specifically inspired him to the latter is difficult to say, though it may well have had something to do with the Christ cult as preached by the circles of Paul (though not at all necessarily Paul himself).

Not that Galilee wasn't convenient for Mark. Galileans were still rather maligned 'outsiders' in the eyes of the Jewish establishment, and to tell the symbolic story of such a preacher who challenged and bested that establishment, ultimately to be vindicated by conquering death itself (all of it representing what the sectarian community itself was doing and anticipated doing), would have served Mark's purposes well.

I am not going to attempt to pronounce on the synagogue question. This is a recurring and often heated debate based on archaeology, and it doesn't seem resolvable. It does seem likely that synagogues, to the extent that they are presented in the Gospels, did not enter Galilee as an established cultural feature until after the Jewish War of 66-70 when areas outside Judea witnessed an inundation by exiled Pharasaic rabbis after the destruction of Jerusalem.

Response to Philip:

First let me remark on Philip's final query. The term "gnostic" is often used in far too broad a manner where the first century is concerned, since it leads to confusion with the fully developed gnosticism of the 2nd century. No first century Christian writer, and certainly not Paul, reflects that kind of gnosticism. Certain features of Paul's thought and expression may resemble milder aspects of it, such as the informal ranking of those who are "spiritual" and those "unspiritual" (1 Cor. 2:15), or in his discussion of "wisdom" in the same letter, but there is nothing like the gnostic concept of the True God being distinct from and higher than the God of the Old Testament, or the heavenly Pleroma of divine and proliferating aeons, or many other features of mature gnosticism (which was a riot of diversity itself). At best, we should refer to any "gnostic" character of writers like Paul as simply a "proto-gnosticism," and that in only some aspects. There is as much in Paul that constitutes a Logos religion, which is not related to gnosticism and which may have had some influence in manifestations during the 2nd century, as witnessed in certain Christian apologists of that later time who preach a Logos-Son but no historical Jesus.

Nor is there so dramatic an evolution between Paul and those who subsequently wrote in his name as to style the latter "literalist." They still perpetuate the basic thought of Paul, while reflecting some evolution of ideas beyond his. This will become clear in my quotes in answer to Philip's question.

Mainstream critical scholarship is pretty well agreed on seven genuine letters of Paul (not that they couldn't have undergone a certain amount of editing later), while rejecting Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonions and the three Pastorals as not by Paul, but written under his name to claim the authority and prestige of the apostle in the service of issues that arose anywhere from ten to fifty years after his death. The best capsule discussion of the arguments for non-authenticity of these epistles which I have encountered is by Calvin J. Roetzel, in The Letters of Paul: Conversations in Context. He deals with each epistle separately, itemizing the reasons why these works are not by Paul. I will not reproduce Roetzel's entire arguments but make a few representative quotations.

Colossians (p.93-96):

"a. In the linguistic evidence, one can cite the appearance of language which is unusual for Paul, the absence of favorite Pauline words and expressions, and the presence of certain stylistic features that are rare or missing altogether in the undisputed letters. Thirty-three words appear in Colossians that occur nowhere else in the New Testament and fifteen words which, though used by other New Testament writers, fail to appear in the recognized letters of Paul...."

"b....Even a casual reading of the letter will uncover its redundant style. Expressions like...'for ages and generations' (1:26), 'teach and admonish' (3:16), and 'psalms and hymns and spiritual songs' (3:16) are common in Colossians but less pronounced in the undisputed letters. Morever, there is in Colossians a greater tendency to string together dependent clauses and phrases into long, rambling sentences."

"c. At many points the theology of Colossians agrees with that of the undisputed letters, but in its concept of apostleship, Christology, and eschatology we see significant departures....Although in the undisputed letters Paul does represent himself as the apostle to the gentiles who shares in the sufferings of Christ, nowhere does (he) speak of the vicarious character of his suffering. In Colossians, on the other hand, the apostle gladly suffers, he tells his hearers, 'for your sake' (1:24)."

"Finally, in Colossians the sense of urgency so characteristic of the apostolic mission in the undisputed letters is missing altogether. No longer is the apostle driven to complete his work before time runs out. No longer does the apostle write under the shadow of the world's denouement. No longer is apostleship itself seen as a gift of the endtime..."

Ephesians (p.100-102):

"b. The theology of the letters more than the vocabulary and style suggests that the author was someone other than Paul. In at least three important areas the outlook of Ephesians differs from that of the undisputed letters: its eschatology, view of the church, and understanding of apostleship....The tension between the 'now' and 'not yet' characteristic of the genuine letters is muted in Ephesians. The approaching end and impending judgment are alluded to only in the most general way (1:4). The sense of urgency that informs the apostolic mission is gone, and no interest in the parousia (or coming) of Christ is expressed....In these three statements about Christ, salvation of the gentiles, and the understanding of the believers [1:21, 2:13, 3:18], space rather than time is the controlling category."

"Where in 1 Corinthians the church is seen as the body of Christ, in Ephesians the church is viewed as the sphere of activity of the cosmic Christ. The presence of this cosmic Christ expands the horizons of the church enormously. It is the universal church now rather than the local congregation that is emphasized....This world-wide community, founded on "the apostles and prophets" (Eph. 2:20f), which serves as the seat of the cosmic Christ, differs markedly from the struggling local congregations we know from the undisputed letters."

"Finally, the understanding of apostleship in Ephesians differs significantly from that of the recognized Pauline letters. The apostles provide the foundation of the church (2:20f), a statement that would have made Paul wince. Thirteen times the apostle is referred to as a saint. According to the undisputed letters, the mission of the apostle is to proclaim the gospel to the gentiles (Gal. 1:16, 2:7, etc.)....in Ephesians, on the other hand, Paul's apostolic task is to proclaim the unity in the church of Jews and gentiles (3:2-6). This shift of emphasis reflects a situation that developed after the time of Paul and, therefore, argues for a post-Pauline date for this letter...."

2 Thessalonians (p.106-108):

"2 Thessalonians receives strong support for inclusion among the authentic letters. Persuasive arguments can be marshaled both for and against Pauline authorship, but it is included here because its authenticity is in doubt...First, the language and style of this letter differ from the undisputed letters...On the other hand, we find many places where 2 Thessalonians agrees with the wording of 1 Thessalonians...Some argue that Paul wrote 2 Thessalonians either shortly before or after 1 Thessalonians and naturally uses the same language to address a situation that has changed little. Others notice that most of the parallels appear in the letter opening and closing, traditionally the most stereotyped parts of the letter...The issue of authorship must be decided on other grounds."

"All of the undisputed letters have one thanksgiving, except for 1 Thessalonians which has two. Now we have learned that the second thanksgiving (1 Thess. 2:13-16) was added later. The break in the material, the unusual language, and a veiled allusion to the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 support the argument that the second thanksgiving was added after Paul's death. The second thanksgiving was inserted to reflect the developing tensions between non-Christian Jews and Christians after the war. Now, 2 Thessalonians, duplicating the unusual form of 1 Thessalonians, also has two thanksgivings. It is possible then, if not likely, that a later writer using the edited version of 1 Thessalonians with the two thanksgivings, imitates the version before him. It follows, obviously, if such were the case that Paul could not have written 2 Thessalonians."

"One other small clue seems to point toward some author other than Paul. In 2:2, the author urges his hearers not to be disturbed by letters "purporting to be from us." From what we know of pseudepigraphy elsewhere, most often the names that are taken belong to some venerated figure from the past (e.g., Moses, Enoch, Abraham, or in the New Testament, Peter, Paul, James, etc.) We know of no instance of a pseudonymous letter being written in the name of a living person. From a practical point of view we can see why. For it would seem contrary to reason for a person to adopt the name of a contemporary figure when the risk of being exposed would be rather high....Moreover, a special problem intrudes when one argues, as many do, that Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians only a few weeks before 2 Thessalonians. While such an argument explains the similarity of the letters, it is difficult to see how in only a few weeks after the writing of the first letter a pseudonymous letter could appear bearing Paul's name."

"...In the first letter Paul expects that some of his readers will still be alive at the parousia of Jesus (4:17). We have seen above that this emphasis on the imminent return of Christ persists throughout the undisputed letters of Paul....It seems strange, therefore, in 2 Thessalonians to see an apocalyptic timetable that postpones the end. Before the "day of the Lord" (2:2) the believers will witness the appearance of the "restrainer" (2:6), the "man of lawlessness" (2:3) [the latter two terms are never used in the genuine letters], and a period of apostasy from the faith (2:2-12)...the delay effected by the apocalyptic timetable is unique in Paul's letters."

I will not here address the arguments concerning the Pastorals, as dispute in their regard is more muted, the evidence for 2nd century authorship being quite strong. (And Philip did not raise them specifically.) But protestation in varying degree against the non-authenticity of all these letters is a regular feature of conservative scholarship, as well as by people in other circles less acquainted with the details of the case against authenticity. These counter-arguments usually amount to little more than the claim that Paul changed his views—and his vocabulary—as time went on. Such dubious appeals hardly stand up to close examination. The undisputed letters themselves show no sign of such drastic changes on Paul's part, an observation which includes Romans, generally regarded as his last extant letter. Such an argument would require that all the disputed letters be dated afterwards, in the last four or five years of his life, but with no way to tie them to an itinerary or Sitz im Leben as there is, at least tentatively (given the reliance on Acts), in the case of the others. Besides, the scope of some of those "changes" in Paul's thought are too vast to conceive of being possible within the same mind and within such a short time period.

This picture of several important evolving viewpoints fitting the development of a faith movement over time, involving more than one personal outlook (in fact, several), is also a strong argument against the ultra-radical scholarship which claims that nothing of the Pauline corpus is authentic and in fact is all to be dated to the 2nd century, either as the product of Marcion in their original forms, or in their present versions as Catholic redactions in response to the co-opting of Paul by the gnostics. It would be almost impossible to conceive how this sort of radical scenario could have given rise to the pervasive and clearly identifiable features discussed above that we see in the corpus: the evolution of ideas and the adjustments to issues that would logically develop over time in an eschatological sect. Marcion was not apocalyptically oriented; nor was the mid-2nd century Roman church. Such things had receded into the background as impending events. Whence, then, the vivid and imminent apocalyptic expectation of letters like Romans or 1 Thessalonians? Why is there a universal absence of reference to an historical Jesus and Gospel details if these letters were fashioned by writers and editors who would have been quite familiar with at least some of those details? How could a second century cadre of forgers have managed to convey the highly vivid and emotional personality that jumps off the pages of the undisputed letters, and yet give the group of epistles regarded as pseudonymous a much flatter, stilted character lacking so much of the persona of the rest? For these and other compelling reasons, I cannot subscribe to the "second century Paul" position that so many other radical scholars in the field are keen on. (A further point in this regard will be noted below.)

Frank writes:
   
   I was wondering what kind of answer you had to 1 Corinthians 11:23 where Paul talks of the Lord's Supper and how Jesus was betrayed. Doesn't this seem to suggest that Paul is pulling this from knowledge of the Gospels? Also, if Paul invented Christianity then how come the Gospels don't really ever mention him?

Response to Frank:

Is Paul's Lord's Supper dependent on the Gospel scene? / Did Paul "invent" Christianity?

I don't know what Christians and apologists would do without 1 Corinthians 11:23 and 15:3f, the latter for its alleged references to the post-resurrection appearances of the Gospels (despite the fact that Paul nowhere refers to an empty tomb or says that Jesus ever rose in flesh, and despite the fact that his language and implication is that these are all visions—like his own), the former for giving them at least one passage in the entire Pauline corpus that sounds like something from the Gospels. Of course, both passages have long been undermined as such by mythicists, including myself in The Jesus Puzzle and in website articles like "The Source of Paul's Gospel."

It is surprising how much confidence is placed in English translations of the epistles, with never a thought as to how reliably they may be rendering the original language, or how much the translators may be reading from the Gospels into the epistles. The word "betrayed" in 1 Corinthians 11:23 is a prime case in point. The trusting reader invariably assumes that this is a clear reference to Judas and his betrayal of Jesus to the authorities.

But the verb which this translates is "paradidomi," which in its basic definition means simply to "hand over/on" or "deliver."  It can be used in the context of an arrest or betrayal, and so it is in the Gospels. Mark 14:17 has Jesus say, "One of you will betray me," using the future of this verb. In the Gethsemane garden, Judas is referred to as "the one betraying," ho paradidous. However, in 15:1, the verb is used in stating that the Sanhedrin "delivered" Jesus to Pilate, where there is no sense of betrayal. Even less of that sense can be present in Romans 8:32:

"He (God) did not spare his own Son, but delivered him up for us all." Here it can hardly imply betrayal or arrest. In Ephesians 5:2 and 25 it is Christ who "gave himself up on your behalf." No thought of Judas or of an arrest on Passover eve would be present here. As to the scene being set "at night," there is nothing to prevent mythical stories from being given such a setting, especially those involving death and sacrifice. If the Corinthian communal meal is observed after dark (Paul does not specify), the origin myth would likely be set at a corresponding time. [The Jesus Puzzle, p.112]

To which I could add that virtually all the mystery cults had a sacred meal commemorating the precedent-setting actions of their savior gods. That of the Mithras cult symbolized the 'event' in which Mithras and the Sun god shared a repast on the carcass of the bull just slain by Mithras. This was hardly looked upon as historical.

One often hears that "Paul invented Christianity," although the phrase "as we know it" is generally understood, in reference to his theology of the Christ. Yet it is difficult to tell what of his christology was original to him, despite his claim that his gospel came from no man but through personal revelation (Gal. 1:11-12), derived from "the scriptures" (1 Cor. 15:3-4). After all, he does admit in 1 Corinthians 15:11 that "we all preach the same thing," referring to the group he has just mentioned who enjoyed visions of the spiritual resurrected Christ. Other apostles of the Christ in the wider proselytizing arena he moved in were definitely not preaching the same thing, as he makes clear, accompanied by a few anathemas, in Galatians 1:9 and 2 Corinthians 11 and 12.

Why did the Gospel writers not mention Paul? Well, first of all, they tell a story set prior to when Paul arrived on the scene, which may be all the explanation that is needed. But I think it is far from certain that the evangelists were that familiar with him. Even though the Gospels' Last Supper may ultimately be derived from the sacramental significance Paul applied to an existing communal meal, his "Lord's Supper" may have spread into more general knowledge by the time Mark came to write his Gospel. I think it unlikely that any of the evangelists knew much, if anything, about Paul's epistles.

Indeed, Paul's influence on the range of sectarian expression which came together in Christianity seems to have been quite limited until the middle of the 2nd century. As Peter H. Davids says (The Epistle of James, p.41): "[W]e suspect Paul's influence was much less pervasive in large areas of the early church than has often been thought true." His ideas are completely absent from Q, and even from the Gospels, whose bare concept of atonement (such as in Mark 10:45) is so general and basic that it hardly requires dependence on Paul's thought. ("Luke" who is supposed to have been a companion of Paul shows none of it in the Gospel itself, especially as the one vicarious atonement element, in the eucharistic scene of 11:19-20, seems to be a later insertion.) Paul is also missing, as is his doctrine of atonement, from most of the major 2nd century apologists: Theophilus, Tatian, Athenagoras and Minucius Felix. Even Justin fails to mention him. On that score, J. C. O'Neill (The Theology of Acts in its Historical Setting, p.27-28) comments:

The only satisfactory explanation of Justin's silence is that Paul was not an influence on his theology; that Paul's writings were not in use in his Church; that Paul was not especially remembered for his missionary work; that Paul was not quoted against Justin's church by Jewish controversialists; and that Paul was not counted as one of the Apostles...it was possible for Christian writers to be ignorant of Paul or to ignore him. Luke [in Acts] seems to be a midway case....The silence of Justin about Paul indicates two things: that the hero of one part of the Church could be as good as unknown in another part; and that even the collection and publication of the letters of Paul took time to affect the whole Church.

O'Neill believes that, despite the use of one or two letters of Paul by Ignatius and the writer of 1 Clement, a Pauline corpus was not published much before 135 CE. Communities which had contact with Paul, or were recipients of his letters, such as Rome or Antioch, knew some of his teaching (as in 2 Peter, Ignatius and 1 Clement, the latter very vague as to his fate as though the legend of his martyrdom at Rome had not yet fully developed), but the first comprehensive adoption and treatment of him as an authority was on the part of the gnostic Marcion, well into the 2nd century. Marcion seems to have provoked the proto-orthodox Roman church to get off its posterior and do something to reclaim the apostle to the gentiles for themselves.

There is no sign of Paul in the Epistle of Barnabas, in the Didache, in the Odes of Solomon, in the Shepherd of Hermas; nor in Revelation. The first named, written sometime around 110-130, is surprising, since the writer is focused on scriptural interpretation to support his views, something for which Paul should have been well known. Even in discussing circumcision (ch.9), Barnabas is completely silent on Paul's view of the subject which was in keeping with his own. Nothing specifically Pauline can be found in Hebrews, which contains much that is remote from Paul's particular soteriology.

Another thing we have to realize is that contrary to popular opinion, Paul does not seem to have founded all, or perhaps any, of the communities he came in contact with or influenced. The clearest case in point is the Christian community at Rome, which had been in existence "for many years" (Rom. 15:23) when Paul first wrote to them, never having been there. Burton Mack is also of the opinion (Who Wrote the New Testament?, p.104) that Paul did not found the congregation in Corinth (although in 1 Corinthians Paul seems to want to intimate that he did), and that further, "it is questionable whether Paul was the first to introduce the Christ gospel to Athens, Ephesus, and other cities in Asia Minor for which Luke [in Acts] gave him full credit." Nor is there anything in the early record which suggests that the Jerusalem apostles around a figure like Peter engaged in any far-flung missionary activity to establish such congregations, certainly not beyond the Palestine-Syria region. (Nor can we reasonably accept the picture in Acts that hordes of Jews visiting Jerusalem following the resurrection were converted to Jesus and brought the gospel back home to their own communities: observant Jews being convinced on the spot that a man was God and had risen from the dead, then converting many fellow Jews in multiple distant centers to the same outlandish and blasphemous ideas—yeah, right.) As to the reference to "I follow Cephas" in 1 Corinthians 1:12, many scholars acknowledge that there is no evidence elsewhere that Peter ever went to Corinth and that this phrase does not necessarily mean that a specific party of believers in Corinth had attached themselves to him. (On this, see my Supplementary Article No. 1: Apollos and the Early Christian Apostolate).

To pick up on a point made in an earlier response, this picture of a fragmentary knowledge of Paul and an influence which only picked up steam as the 2nd century progressed further argues against the radical view that the Pauline corpus was the product entirely of 2nd century writers, perhaps Marcion as the originator, and the Roman church as redactors to claim Paul for the new orthodoxy. It is again virtually impossible to imagine that such 'forgers' would not have presented a scenario of Paul's movements more amenable to their own positions and claims for Paul. What party would have been interested in creating the picture of widespread rivalry to Paul's teachings, or to make the differences in doctrine so unclear? Why would the church of Rome have deliberately conveyed the message that Paul did not in fact found their own community?

Once again, we encounter the picture of a fragmented, uncoordinated movement whose traditions were not universal, which had a piecemeal, schizophrenic development that only came together in the latter part of the second century.

Joey writes:

What about "Spirituality"?

I wonder what Joey will do with a Theology major given his status as an agnostic who isn't afraid to reveal his liberal views. We can only hope that he'll put it to good use in promoting rationality in an overly irrational Christian society.

As for "spirituality," this has become perhaps the wooliest term bandied about in modern times. What does it mean? Joey defines it in part as "seemingly unexplainable subconscious/extra-sensory experience," referring perhaps to mystical experiences which many Christians claim they have enjoyed. His key word here is "seemingly." Is everything for which we don't have a ready explanation to be slotted into some kind of supernatural category? The history of science shows that even the most subtle and perplexing behaviors of nature and the human brain will eventually be found to have natural, discoverable causes behind them. We can see that nothing need be put down to mysterious, non-earthly forces, that the belief that we are tapping into higher, otherworldly realities and divinities is simply a figment of our imaginations (and certain brain propensities). As to spirituality being "important," I can't tell what Joey has in mind here, but I can hardly agree that basing one's life or philosophy on concepts that bear no relation to reality is going to be very productive.

"Spirituality" is sometimes used to convey the idea that one is in tune with nature or some greater power/energy/meaning beyond our individual awareness and identity, and to the extent that this relates to the behavior and potential of the natural universe and ourselves within it, still uncovered or perhaps only imperfectly perceived—with nothing 'super-natural' about it—I have no objection, although I object to having such concepts referred to as 'God.' Too many proponents of ideas like this adopt an anti-science stance, as though these things are beyond science and understanding, yet can be reliably grasped through intuition or a special 'spiritual' connection to such ultimate realities. This is little more than religious faith and revelation in another guise, televangelism under another name. (Please pay the guru at the door.) Science does not have to be conducted solely in the laboratory, but wherever it is practiced it adopts procedures and outlooks that involve objective observation, controlled experiment, and verifiable conclusions. With a methodology like that, we are in less danger of having the wooliness of spirituality pulled over our eyes.

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Nyk writes:

   Thank-you for your treatises, commentary, rebuttal, dissertation, et al. on the question of the existence of an historical Jesus. I have always suspected as much and not having the ability to research the original materials could never articulate what you so eloquently have done.
   The stories of God in Genesis are very suspicious to me. Almost like a grandfather who makes some serious mistakes in judgment, someone who has no knowledge of the universe. (A discussion on neutrinos would have been out of the scope of understanding, but that the earth revolved to separate the night and day would have been substantial.) Have you researched this area of the existence of a God with a vested interest in His people?

Response to Nyk:
 

The Bible as Misery?

Nyk touches a nerve here. Why is it that the bible shows no interest on the part of God in aiding humanity in any way other than preparing us for the presumed next world, rather than improving our lot in this one? How can a loving God create us within an environment that in so many ways is inimical to our well-being, whose nature and workings have been so hidden to our understanding, requiring so long and painful a process of discovery on our part to learn about and exercise any control over? The bible contains not a single piece of insight or information that was not available to the limited knowledge of the time, which is to say, comprising mostly the misinformation of the time. The book of Joshua assumes that the sun revolves around the earth. In the Gospels, the very Son of God believes that illness is caused by demon spirits! Not a single scientific insight can be found on the pages of the Deity's own writings, not a single piece of advice or technological revelation that would alleviate some of the misery humans have had to struggle with, or to correct the failings and deficiencies of the Creator's human body. The bible, in fact, has contributed to our store of miseries, in a range of superstitions and erroneous information about the universe, its xenophobia and homophobia, its misogyny, its general intolerance and the support it has given to persecution and slaughter, its all-round primitive outlook which too many people today are still working mindlessly to perpetuate.

To suggest, as Christians do, that mankind's misery is of its own making because of some mythical Original Sin, serves only to highlight what is perhaps the bible's greatest crime against humanity: its indoctrination of so many with an obsessive sense of sin and guilt and self-abasement (I receive letters talking about such things with distressing regularity), its picture of the "fall" of humanity into evil, and its foisting upon us of a complicit God with a monstrous fixation on demands, injunctions, prohibitions, and punishments both immediate and eternal.

We need less of God's 'love' and more of our own.

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....As a further comment on the foregoing, I will give the final words to a concerned reader....

Chris writes:

Any honest appraisal of the state of our world, or of human history, will lead you to conclude that the evidence for an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent Creator who takes an interest in the affairs of men and women is impossible to find.
  

1.  Accepting that violence is not an option, what action should be taken to counter the religious world threat?
2.  How can the ordinary person who realizes the need for such action, participate in, and help develop, such action?

RFSet 28: March 2008

 Note: Only those reader comments which are given a response are listed in this Index:

• To Ben: When Were the Gospels Written?
  
• To Doug: Romans 1:3 & "kata sarka" Again / Outside the Gate (Hebrews 13:11-13)
  
• To Tim: Revelation 13:8 - When was Jesus Slain?
  
• To Keith: Jesus' Audience in 1 Corinthians 11:23 / Paul an "Abortion" (1 Cor. 15:8)
  
• To Jim: Galilee and Paul: Joining Historical and Mythical Figures?
  
• To Michael: Matthew's Guards at the Tomb and the Toledoth Yeshu
  
• To Warwick: Michael Grant and the "annihilation" of Mythicism

 

Martin writes:

   Your website is excellent. Thank you for making your work freely available. I found it when looking for some informed criticism of Lee Strobel's book [The Case for Christ] which a "committed christian" friend of mine lent to me after I asked for a good case for his faith. I did not have a solid response to the book and I look forward to benefiting from your work [Challenging the Verdict: A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel's 'The Case for Christ': see excerpts at StrobelIntro.htm and ctvadvert.htm].
   While I have been an atheist for almost 40 years, I have never really had a coherent picture of how christianity arose. Your work on the mythicist position provides answers beyond anything I could have hoped for. Oddly, I felt after cursory research that the mythical Jesus view seemed plausible despite the ready dismissal about which you so rightly complain, and the non-christian "evidence" for his historicity seemed weak, but I was unaware that such a coherent thesis as you lay out could be constructed. Now that I have read it, it seems that no other account comes close to making as much sense. It has the kind of power that I remember plate tectonics had when it emerged as the successful organizing principle for a wealth of disparate geological observations. Suddenly elements which made no sense fitted together - like a puzzle - and previous silly speculations of orogeny through geosynclines or the spread of organisms across mysterious land bridges could be discarded.

   Keep up the good work. If I have one complaint, it is that you have written so much that I am spending most of my free time on your website!

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Roger writes:

    As a victim of a Jesuit education, it has taken me a long time to shed the Christian religion. Your writings have helped enormously. I am still endeavoring to understand why I, and other people that I regard as reasonably intelligent, can believe such (now obvious to me) constructed rubbish.

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Bruce writes:

   For the last several days I have been reading the web sites concerning your work, The Jesus Puzzle. The work is masterful and quite readable.
   I wish I had this information when I was 12. It would have spared me a lot of anguish; a comforting shining light in a dark world. I was raised in an unnecessarily strict Irish-Catholic world that made no sense to me. I questioned the myths from about age 8 onward, much to the consternation of a long line of nuns which, in turn, got me in a lot of trouble at home. I spend several decades after that studying and arguing most of the same issues you present so well.

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Randy writes:
   
   I count you as one of the early influences in my own research into the origins of that religion which plagues us.  Though my focus has been more on the origins of Judaism, which I have come to believe was greatly influenced by the Persians and Zoroastrianism, I am beginning to see those same roots as having so much in common with Christianity that I cannot understand how it could be ignored.  Not only did Zoroastrianism provide aspects of Christian belief ranging from angels, Heaven, Hell, Satan, etc., but the first monotheistic religion to preach an eschatology that would be resolved by a divine savior (they called him the Sayoshant) who would redeem mankind and establish a kingdom of God was Zoroastrianism.  I think a pretty clear case could be made that Judaism was consistently influenced by Zoroastrian beliefs and that ultimately, after Alexander's destruction of the Persian Empire, these influences were covered up by the Hasmoneans.

   The point is I wondered if you had ever considered that a lot of the mystery religion beliefs were examples of Persian influence on the religions of their captive nations.  It simplifies the creation of the Jesus myth. Revelation reads like the Avesta (much of the Zoroastrian holy book was destroyed by Alexander and then later by the Muslims so there are large parts of it that could not be reconstructed), as it fits closely the eschatology therein expressed.  In fact there have been a few books published about the parallels between the Avesta, Daniel and Revelation (both Lawrence H. Mills and Mary Boyce have written extensively on this subject).

    Thanks for the site and your views.  I think anyone who does not seriously consider your arguments and professes to be a biblical scholar is simply fooling themselves.

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Gary writes:

   Thanks for your great web site and your jesus puzzle work. The two new articles on Hebrews and Galatians were very welcome. I have spent the last half year examining these and the other "Pauline" letters. After reading your work and that of G. A. Wells, I decided to read the letters through and see how well the mythicist argument held up. It holds up very well.

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Noel writes:

    I've been simply taken over by your web site, sir. I recently came across it and am so happy to have access to the wealth of material there. Thank you for your efforts. I love your way of reasoning, your writing voice has to be near-perfect, and the writing itself is quite clear and correct, a quality I appreciate as a copy editor. So far, for purely logical presentation, you are the man.

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Tom writes:
   
   I'm a regular visitor to your website, and have enjoyed your articles and reviews.  I accept your mythicist arguments (as much as I can understand without Greek skills), including your newest analysis of Hebrews.

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Rod writes:
   
   I am a big fan of your work and consider your website to be a valuable source of information and enlightenment. I would especially like to thank you for turning me on to the “Testament of Man” series by Vardis Fisher (I had never heard of it until I visited your website). I located and purchased the books one by one through the ABE.com website and finished reading the series this past summer. Wow. Someone really needs to bring that series back into print.

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David writes:   

   Just a quick note to say 'Many thanks' for your website and all the valuable information contained in it. After being a fundamentalist in my teen years and then rejecting this and all religious belief, I have retained my interest in the subject. I was wholly 'converted' to G. A. Wells in the 1980s and therefore always welcome discussion from the Mythicist stance. I have heard numerous various Christian counter-arguments and as these invariably fail to produce anything useful and, sadly, are primarily devoted to unpleasant personal insult, these, to me, merely confirm the weakness of the Christian position on the historicity question.

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Larry writes:
   

   Thanks so much for your excellent book, "Challenging The Verdict" and please, please, please tell me you plan on writing a book (or at least a review) on Lee's new book, "The Case for the Real Christ". Best wishes in our quest to find happiness and to avoid suffering.

[E.D.: I have no plans for a review. Once you've read one of Lee Strobel's books you've read them all, since he uses the same kind of devices and special pleading methods no matter what his specific subject matter, and once you've read one review exposing those devices, you can safely dismiss anything he has written. However, there is a very good amateur review on the web of his The Case for the Real Christ. Check out Paul Doland's http://www.caseagainstfaith.com/articles/therealjesus.htm]

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David writes:

   As a former Lutheran Pastor, who began to question as a result of NT studies in seminary, I have one thing to say to you: thank you.

 

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Nick writes:

   My name is Nick, and i am writing to you from Athens, Greece. I have read your book 'The Jesus Puzzle' and i want to congratulate you for writing such a book. I am a devout Christian and i believe not only that Jesus existed, but also that he is God incarnate, although i have to admit that your argument for the non-existence of Jesus is worthy of serious consideration. Your book provides new insights and is thought provocative.

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"In love with God" writes:

   You have to be the dumbest person out there to blasphemy God.  You won't be talking like this when your in hell burning.  Its not too late to change your wicked ways.  You make me sick to my stomache, all the hypocrites and blasphamers do.  No respect for God, He is the reason you are alive.

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Ben writes:

   As a former child member of a Christian cult (Armstrongism), I have made slow progression towards the realisation that religion is a purely human construct. Such things as the various inconsistencies in the gospels etc are never mentioned in churches. Yet even as a child I read and questioned them, yet no good answer was given to me as to why the "holy accounts" did not coincide. The evolution from brainwashed Christian to atheist has been slow and painful. It is still an issue of contention between members of my family.
   I have read with interest your thesis The Jesus Puzzle. I have also recently finished "Forgery in Christianity" by Joseph Wheless. If your thesis is correct and Jesus never existed except as an abstract, then I must assume you agree with Wheless that the scriptures are "pious forgeries"; ie not written by who is claimed to have written them. Nor written early in the 1st century but are rather the product of doctrinal advancement in the 2nd century. For all intents and purposes, "forged" to reinforce the particular doctrines and authority favoured by the forger. 
   My question is this: Why do I see the dates of the Gospels creeping forward from the 130-180 CE indicated by Wheless (from the writings of Irenaeus) to 100 or even 90 CE by certain other writers, even critical writers? I realize that Wheless' work is old but his theories seem sound. I cannot believe that if "God's Holy Words" were floating around for nearly 90 years that none of the early church fathers would have mentioned them. Has new evidence of extant early manuscripts of Gospels been uncovered proving an earlier date?
   I understand that the argument from silence is not considered conclusive. However, for myself the idea is simply too incredible that early religious fanatics would not have spouted from "Holy Gospels" and quoted them at length had they known of them at all.
 
Response to Ben:

When were the Gospels written?

Ben has opened up a large can of worms here. “When were the Gospels written?” may be the question which critical commentators would place at the very head of the list of most important and debatable issues in all of New Testament research. Those familiar with my writings will know that I do not subscribe to the very radical late dating of the Gospels (post-130 and beyond) held by the likes of Joseph Wheless or the Dutch Radical School of the 19th century, or moderns like Hermann Detering and Acharya S, and even Robert M. Price, but would place Mark in the late first century (the 90s, let's say, as does G. A. Wells, discussed below), with the other three canonicals following within the next few decades. The question is a complex one, involving other non-Gospel documents, and issues historical and theological within the Christian movement covering almost a century. To try to bring them all together into a detailed examination would be beyond the scope of this response. But perhaps we can look at a few key elements.

Traditional attempts at dating have been primarily dependent on the analysis of the Little Apocalypse of Mark chapter 13, which most mainstream scholars have regarded as referring to the upheaval of the Jewish War of 66-73 CE, centered on the destruction of the Temple and much of the city of Jerusalem in 70. Its key element is the reference to the “abomination of desolation” (13:14). A possible Jewish literary source used by Mark has been postulated as having originally referred to the threat by the emperor Caligula in 37 CE to set up a statue of himself for worship in the Jerusalem Temple . Be that as it may (there is no direct evidence for such a document), Mark in creating his own text was drawing midrashically on Daniel 11:31 and 1 Maccabees 1:54, both of which use the phrase “abomination of desolation” to refer to the setting up of a pagan altar within the Temple sanctuary in the time of the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes (167 BCE), which led to the Maccabean revolt. (Antiochus also imposed the placement of pagan altars throughout Judea.) It has been generally assumed that Mark in 13:14 used the term to refer to the sacrilegious activities of the Romans in the Temple when they conquered the city in 70 (though this appears not to have involved the setting up of a formal pagan altar).

 

But there are difficulties here. The whole tone of Mark’s scene suggests that it is not a simple allusion to history placed in Jesus’ mouth in the form of a prophecy. If the event of the “abomination of desolation” lies in the writer’s—and the readers’—past, what is the purpose of the reference and especially its accompanying warnings? Why would Mark include it? Rather, it has the same content and atmosphere as other passages in the Synoptics (and in Q) in which prophecies are made about the future coming of the Son of Man, what can be expected when he arrives and how best to prepare for it ahead of time, even if one does not know the hour.

 

In other words, such prophecies are meant to enlighten and caution the reader, not to recount history. Indeed, Mark goes on to have Jesus prophecy about the coming of the Son of Man. And the insertion of an ‘aside’ at the very reference to the abomination of desolation—“let the reader understand”—is Mark’s alert to his readers that this is something cryptic, something the reader is going to have to interpret. There would be no necessity for this if Mark were simply having Jesus refer to a future (for him) historical event every reader was familiar with.

 

In such a context, in fact, the passage about the abomination of desolation and the urged response to it would make little sense. By the time the Romans have conquered Jerusalem and desecrated the Temple , the campaign would essentially be over, the country overrun. There would be no thought of a man being “on his roof” or out “in his field” attending to normal chores, with still time to flee to the mountains. Nor is it easy to understand why Mark would place such warnings and directives in Jesus’ mouth unless they were relevant to his own readers—unless they were directed at those readers, which could hardly be the case if the whole thing referred to an event in their past.

 

To get around this problem, it is sometimes suggested that Mark was written in the years just prior to 70, when the war was building and the Gospel writer anticipated the event of the “abomination” and the necessity to flee. But this raises more problems than it solves. Even during the build-up, would the writer have truly anticipated the utter destruction of the Temple , “not one stone left upon another”? Would he have recommended waiting until such a climactic moment before fleeing to the hills? Would he, from such a vantage point, not have been likely to view the accelerating events he was witnessing as a sign that the End was indeed near, and thus would not have introduced earlier in the chapter broad hints that a certain amount of time after the throwing down of the Temple would be yet to pass before the final days, that following “battles near at hand and far away” (13:7) “the end is still to come”? That “the Gospel must be proclaimed to all nations” (13:10)? It is hard to believe Mark would consider such a requirement to have been fulfilled by the year 66. For such reasons it is difficult also to place the Gospel shortly after 70, as traditional scholarship tends to. Thus, we need to look for another ‘event’ some time after 70 to which the “abomination of desolation” and its accompanying advice can refer and serve as a relevant warning to Mark’s readers to drop everything and flee.

 

When stepping back and looking at the entirety of Jesus’ prophecy in Mark 13, we find that it is a curious mix, until we perceive that it conforms to traditional apocalyptic writing and devices. As in the classic example of the book of Daniel, written between 167 and 164 BCE while purporting to be the product of someone earlier (in this case the prophet Daniel some four centuries previously), the writer of Mark has included, as part of a prophecy by his Jesus some four decades before the fact, the destruction of the Temple in the Jewish War. The writer of the book of Daniel had his Daniel ‘predict’ historical events up to 167—predictions which of course had come true—in the hope that the readers would have faith in the additional prophecies being made for their own future after that date. Similarly, Mark ‘hooked’ the reader into thinking that the Jesus figure—or the movement he is meant to symbolize (we are not sure if Mark’s allegory-Gospel envisions a founder figure he believes existed)—had accurately predicted a future historical event; by this Mark hopes to convince the reader that his own prophecies about the arrival of the End time, beginning with the abomination of desolation, followed by dramatic celestial events and the arrival of the Son of Man as laid out in 13:24-27, can also be trusted to happen.

 

The lesser apocalyptic events outlined in 13:8-13, wars and earthquakes, false messiahs (repeated in v.21-3), floggings in synagogues, arrests, trials and betrayals, are likely also things that have already been happening, prophecies fulfilled, including between the Jewish War and “the end still to come.” But the abomination of desolation which Mark is predicting is yet to occur. The scene is clearly meant to have meaning for his readers, to serve as a warning for their own future. Its portrayed character seems quite specific, and we should presume that Mark has a real development in mind which he perceives as potentially imminent in his own environment.

 

And what was that environment? Here we face another difficulty, in that the writer directs Jesus’ warnings to “those in Judea.” But is Mark writing to “Judeans”? After the War, actual Judeans were to a great extent dispersed, dead or enslaved. What “abomination” were they yet facing that they could flee from and save themselves? What Christians now inhabited Judea? Moreover, what members of a Jewish community would need the explanations for Jewish traditions which Mark supplies throughout his text? And why is it that the writer shows a misunderstanding of certain geographical features of Galilee if he were part of a Judean-based Jewish-Christian community? Such questions lead many to surmise that Mark was written outside Palestine , and for a readership of non-Jewish Christians. (However, there seems no need to push him as far away as Rome , especially if we assume that Mark’s Q-like environment spells a locale not too far from Galilee—probably Syria , where we can see that the Kingdom-preaching movement embodied in Q had extended.)

 

Thus we ought to conclude that the phrase “those in Judea” does not refer to literal Judeans, but to Mark’s readership, as a kind of code phrase. It would be pointless to construct a prophetic scene out of scripture and have Jesus warning a group of people who had nothing to do with that readership. Perhaps the “people of Judea” was used by Mark’s community to highlight its self-understanding as the new people of God’s promise.

 

That the scene was inspired by scripture is clear from the passage in 1 Maccabees which contains key elements drawn on by Mark. King Antiochus had set up the “abomination of desolation” in the very Holy of Holies of the Temple, but he had also built pagan altars throughout the country and ordered the Jews on pain of death to worship the gods at them (1 Macc. 1:54). Mattathias and his five sons defy the King’s orders and start destroying the altars throughout Israel , killing apostates and the king’s officers. Then:

 

“Follow me,” he shouted through the town, “every one of you who is zealous for the law and strives to maintain the covenant.” He and his sons took to the hills, leaving all their belongings behind in the town.” [2:27-8, NEB ]

 

Mark borrows the latter thought in 13:14:

 

But when you see ‘the abomination of desolation’ usurping a place which is not his (let the reader understand), then those who are in Judea must take to the hills,

 

not stopping to take anything from the house, not even a coat. It has been suggested that a closely similar situation existed in the reign of Domitian (81-96), specifically around the year 90, when this emperor planned to force Jews—which would have included Christians, since the requirement applied to all Rome’s subjects—to participate in the rites of emperor worship. While we don’t know if there was any intention to set up special altars for the purpose, the parallel with the situation under Antiochus as recounted in 1 Maccabees is striking. Is this the “abomination of desolation” Mark is referring to, the threatened practice of pagan rites to be established in all the empire’s centers, which Christians could never agree to participate in? Mark, through Jesus’ symbolic prophecy, was warning his community about this imminent eventuality, this new abomination. Taking his cue from 1 Maccabees, he advised them to “flee into the hills” as Mattathias and his sons had done. It’s a compelling proposition. And it would place the writing of Mark no more than two decades following the horrors of the Jewish War, so resonant of the crisis surrounding Antiochus, a time when the idea that the End and the arrival of the Son of Man was around the corner could still have been alive and vivid. As well, in a location like Syria this resonance makes much better sense than a directive to Christians in Rome to flee into hills.

 

G. A. Wells [The Historical Evidence for Jesus, p.108-112] presents this analysis in detail, drawing on E. A. Haenchen’s Der Weg Jesu. He says in part:

 

     Haenchen argues, then, that what Mark envisaged was an attempt by a Roman emperor to force pagan worship on Christians, as Antiochus had done on his subjects. The Book of Revelation [E.D.: generally dated to the 90s as well] reckons with such a possibility. The point was not baldly stated, since open criticism of imperial power would have been dangerous not only for the author but also for the community in which his book was used. For this reason, Revelation’s author sometimes writes “ Babylon ” when he means “ Rome ,” and disparages an emperor without mentioning his name. But to make sure that he will nevertheless be understood, he several times insists that his readers should seek out the secret sense of his words (“If any man hath an ear, let him hear”; “Here is wisdom” for him “that hath understanding,” etc.).

     Haenchen argues that Mark had to be equally cautious of Rome , and for that reason adopted the same method of warning his readers that his message was in coded form (“let him that readeth understand”). And he decodes Mark’s message to read: As soon as preparations (that is, the setting up of an image or altar) are seen being made for a compulsory sacrifice to a pagan god or to the emperor himself—as soon, then, as the sacrilege is seen standing “where he ought not to be”—then those in Judea (that is, Christians) are to flee to the mountains. Judea is named because Mark regards the coming Roman persecutions as fulfilling the prophecy of Daniel; he reproduces Daniel’s phrasing so as to be unintelligible except to his Christian readers, who will understand that, although only those in Judea are mentioned, Christians anywhere in the Empire are meant…

 

Other features noted by Wells support the logic of a date around 90 for Mark’s composition of this chapter. But another interpretation has been raised by more radical scholarship, in keeping with the trend noted by Ben to date all the Gospels post-130 or even later. Could the abomination and the warning to flee refer to events of the second Jewish War/Revolt of 132-135 CE? By this reading, Hadrian’s establishment of pagan altars on the Temple mount after 130 became the “abomination of desolation” which Mark is referring to, and with the revolt under Bar Kochba taking shape in response, Mark is warning his readers to flee to the hills. In this case, “those in Judea,” where the revolt started, would be meant literally.

 

This interpretation, however, encounters much the same difficulties as before. It is highly unlikely that Mark is writing in Judea for Judeans. If his readership is as far away as Rome , or even only in Syria , there would be no need to urge people in those areas to take to the hills. The second war, as a rebellion and in terms of the Roman response, was more limited in scope and territory than the first one.

 

Proponents of the later dating also point to the possibility floated at the time of the Bar Kochba revolt that the Temple, destroyed 60 years earlier, could be rebuilt, and that this is what Jesus is alluding to when in Mark 14:58 he is accused at his trial of having said: “I will throw down this temple, made with human hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.” Is this meant to be a prophecy of the Bar Kochba situation, when Jews were holding out the expectation that the Temple would be rebuilt? (This would require that Mark wrote before the failure of the revolt by 135.)

 

Yet this requires a serious contravention of the words of the statement itself. First of all, the rebuilding of the Temple after 60 years is hardly “three days later,” and Jesus is saying that it is himself who will do the building, and not “with hands.” The prophecy clearly bears a spiritual significance, with the three days no doubt referring to his resurrection. It should also be asked why any Christian would have an interest in seeing the Jewish Temple rebuilt, to resume the old sacrifices which Jesus’ own sacrificial death had supposedly supplanted. Mark would be very unlikely to purposely associate Jesus’ prophetic intentions with the rebuilding of the Temple , especially at a time when Christianity had made a complete break with Judaism and there was mostly bad blood between the two groups.

 

Associating Mark 13 with the second Jewish War of the 130s is problematic enough to be denied credence. Besides which, there are difficulties of a more general nature associated with such a late date. By 130, apocalyptic expectations among Christian’s had receded. The Gospel of Luke, for example, downplays any immediacy for the future Parousia of Christ, whereas for Mark the event was almost around the corner. And yet, if Mark was written no earlier than 132, this means that the other two Synoptics, and even John, would have had to follow as redactions of Mark almost immediately, within a handful of years. By the 140s, Marcion was operating in Rome and putting together his canon of authoritative documents in support of his own theology. It featured a shorter version of the Gospel of Luke (probably the postulated Ur-Luke later doctored and expanded by the Roman Church around or just after the middle of the 2^nd century). Justin, hardly a few years later, was speaking of, and quoting from, multiple accounts he called “memoirs of the Apostles.” The fragment P52 of the Gospel of John, usually dated about 125—though around 150 would be a more cautious and reasonable ‘mean’ date—would indicate that at least an early version would have been in existence no later than the second quarter of the century.

 

This would mean that all of the four Gospels would have to be crammed into a window of composition not much longer than a decade. Since it is assumed that they were not all composed in the same center, this would necessitate an immediate and rapid distribution of copies of Mark to most major Christian communities and its equally immediate transformation into other divergent versions. This is something which is hardly suggested by the dearth of witness to the Gospel story in many centers even well past the mid-point of the century. To get around that, some radical scholars have suggested that in fact Marcion’s version of Luke was the original Gospel, a suggestion too problematic to seriously countenance. One of the things it requires is that Mark was actually later, and not the first Gospel; but Mark as a drastically reduced version of Luke or Matthew cannot hold water.

As well, the mid to late 2^nd century dating of all the Gospels has required that other early Christian documents be judged as forgeries and placed beyond the mid-century mark as well. This includes 1 Clement and the epistles of Ignatius, since these are regarded as showing at least a basic knowledge of some Gospel elements. (Here, I believe the latter view is weakly supported, at least in terms of elements that would have been derived from circulating written documents. The Ignatian epistles in their simpler, “Shorter” recension may be forgeries, but written not too long after his death.) The epistle of Polycarp, perhaps from the 130s, also shows signs of Gospel knowledge, as does, rather crudely, the epistle of Barnabas from roughly the same time. But when most of these documents are pushed past the mid-century in the interests of supporting the radical late dating of the Gospels, we get the sense that the whole structure has become unwieldy, an unstable contrivance. When it is occasionally suggested that even the works of Justin are a later forgery (I've even encountered the same for Irenaeus), the whole thing verges on the outrageous.

 

Firm attestation of written Gospels is admittedly late, in Justin (150s) and by inference in Marcion a few years earlier, but this in itself cannot determine the date of composition; especially since modern scholarly dismantling of the Gospels to reveal their midrashic non-historical nature points to a situation in which they could well have been written decades earlier as allegorical works, known within a limited range of communities but not to emerge into the wider light of Christian knowledge until they began to gain traction as historical documents, relevant to a newly-imagined genesis of the faith. (I regard Ignatius’ basic Gospel biography of Jesus, from sometime between 107 and 120, let's say, as “rumors” of an historical Jesus based on a Mark or Matthew beginning to make waves from somewhere beyond his own community of Antioch, since Ignatius makes no appeal to a written document in support of his Jesus crucified under Pilate and fails to make mention of any teachings or miracles attributed to him.) A date of Mark around 90, with Matthew following perhaps a decade later, Luke a decade or so after that, and John not too much beyond the Synoptic group, would fit all the details of the picture which early Christianity presents, including knowledge of the Gospel ‘events.’ Only by the year 180, as witnessed in the writings of Irenaeus, did all four crystallize as canonical, having passed through a certain amount of editing by the Roman Church and acquiring the names of their newly-imagined authors.

 

Ben is puzzled by the fact that Christians did not quote from these “Holy Gospels” soon after they were written, if the proposal for their earlier composition is correct. But one cannot quote from something which has not reached one yet, or is not regarded as something representing the words and deeds of an historical person.

 

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Doug writes:   

   I've been a long-time reader of your website and have e-mailed you in the past and you've even posted a couple of my posts along with your responses on your Feedback page. I puzzle over your interpretation of "according to the flesh" in Romans 1:3. You say it refers to "the realm of flesh" in the upper heavenly spheres of Platonic cosmology. But the same phrase is used in Romans 9:3 where Paul clearly means that he is biologically related to his Jewish brethren. In Ephesians 6:5 and Colossians 3:22 the authors use the phrase to refer to the masters of slaves. In 2 Corinthians 1:17 and 10:2 the phrase refers to the carnal, unspiritual nature of man. Isn't the most logical reading of the phrase in Romans 1:3 that Jesus was a real man who (Paul claims) was literally descended from King David?

 

   Also, your reading of the passage in Hebrews 13:11-13 seems counter-intuitive in the same way. If Jesus being executed "outside the camp [I think Doug meant to say 'gate' here]" was a mythological derivation from the sacrifices offered by priests in the days of Israel 's wandering in the wilderness then why didn't the author just say Jesus was also executed "outside the camp"? Instead, he writes "outside the gate." You speculate that he suggests in verse 13 that Christians are outsiders in the same sense that Jesus was. I gather you mean that in the first century outcast Christians were "outside the gate" because in those days the Jews lived in walled cities rather than camps. But if that is the case then why, in verse 13, does the author go right back to saying "outside the camp"? It seems obvious to me that he speaks of Jesus killed "outside the gate" because he was in fact a real man who was crucified right outside the walls of Jerusalem .

Response to Doug:

Romans 1:3 and "kata sarka"Again / Outside the Gate (Hebrews 13:11-13)

Romans 1:3, seconded by Galatians 4:4’s “born of woman,” is the passage most often appealed to when challenging or questioning the mythicist case and my own especially. On the latter passage, I have increasingly over the years leaned toward regarding it as an interpolation, and my most recent Supplementary Article, “Born of Woman?,” explains why and discusses the matter in detail. However, I do not regard Romans 1:3 as an interpolation, but it is the passage whose explanation in the context of my case is most consistently misunderstood. I will make another effort to try to clarify.

 

First let me repeat two points I have regularly made. If biography, this would be the only such reference Paul ever makes about an historical Jesus (allowing that 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 is an interpolation—on which many critical scholars agree—and 1 Timothy 6:13 is part of a 2^nd century document, not by Paul; in any case, the latter too may be an interpolation—see the Appendix to Article No. 3, Who Crucified Jesus?). Since there is no identifiable reason why Paul should refer to Jesus’ historical descent from David in the context of Romans 1, this would be an odd singularity. However, it is not so odd if we draw on that context to explain the reference and its source.

 

Romans 1:2 makes it clear that Paul is speaking of the source of his gospel about Jesus: namely, the “gospel of God...about his Son” as found in the prophets. The descent of the Messiah from David is a prominent element of traditional Jewish prophecy, and Paul is stating that he has derived such information about Christ from those prophecies. Since it is in scripture, he is led to apply it to his spiritual Christ, even if it originally applied to a human man. How he conceives of that relationship between Christ and David is not clear to us, but such a connection is not impossible, given what we know about ancient mythical thinking and the relationship between heaven and earth and between spiritual and material counterparts in Platonic-style cosmology. We don’t know even if he had any clear understanding of it in his own mind, or was simply relying on scripture as pointing to some cryptic truth. The fact that he pairs this relationship to David with an obviously scriptural and spiritual ‘event’ in verse 4 also persuades us that the former is a scriptural and spiritual conception as well, having no necessary connection to an historical tradition about an historical person.

 

What, then, of the “kata sarka”? Here in particular there is usually a misunderstanding of my treatment of this phrase. I have never said, contrary to Doug, that it represents “the upper heavenly spheres of Platonic cosmology.” As we know, it is usually translated as “according to the flesh,” but what does that mean? The phrase is used in a variety of contexts, as Doug suggests, and the natural reading is that it refers to flesh of the fleshly realm, that is, the realm that humans are a part of. Sometimes the word “sarx” can be a reference to actual humanity, as in Romans 9:3, or more loosely to aspects of being human, as in 2 Corinthians 5:16, where the phrase does not refer to Christ’s ‘flesh’ but to the “human standards” by which people like Paul have previously judged Christ.

 

This is not to say that the term sarx does not at times refer to Christ’s own—spiritual—flesh (more on this shortly). In regard to the phrase “kata sarka” itself, in The Jesus Puzzle (p.122) I allowed that it could in certain places, like other phrases using sarx, signify Christ taking on “the spiritual counterpart of flesh.” (Scholars do acknowledge such a concept and use of the word: see The Jesus  Puzzle, p.103 and the latest edition of Bauer’s Lexicon.) But I have since moved away from that option for “kata sarka” itself (and I trust I am allowed to change or refine my position on some things over eight years) to focus on the other interpretation I offered. “According to the flesh,” while woolly, primarily suggests the meaning that would be conveyed by the translation “in relation to the flesh,” “in regard to the flesh,” “as affecting the flesh,” etc. One can see that here the word itself is not a reference to Christ’s own (spiritual) flesh, but rather to humanity, to the fleshly material realm. It is Christ’s relationship with that realm which is at issue.

 

Thus we need to analyze Romans 1:3 from the point of view of a meaning not of ‘Christ in his own flesh was of David’s seed,’ but rather ‘Christ in relation to David and the realm of flesh was of his seed.’ The difference is significant because the concept no longer hangs on literal or standard meanings of the word “flesh.” The word itself can be allowed to assume its usual meaning, as a reference to humanity and the fleshly sphere. In relation to humanity and its sphere (“kata sarka”) Christ possesses or has assumed a certain character having to do with David. The knowledge of that character has been derived from scripture. Believers like Paul in a spiritual Son of God discovered in scripture have applied, of necessity, characteristics to him which scripture has revealed, such as a relationship to David, and (possibly, if it is not an interpolation) the “birth” from a woman in Galatians 4:4, derived from Isaiah 7:14.

 

As I said, these concepts would not be impossible in the context of Platonic mythology, though again, we cannot know just how Paul and the early Christians understood them. The epistles are full of references to “mysteries” of God that have been revealed, including the mystery/secret of Christ, and we can point to a subsequent “mystery” which Christianity has accepted without understanding it, namely the Trinity. Given the evolution of the concept of Jesus, the Trinity doctrine became necessary in order to make room for Jesus in a monotheistic Godhead. It is no more outlandish to think that early Christians accepted the spiritual Christ’s relationship to the human David simply because it, too, was necessary: scripture said so, and that scriptural designation had to be applied to their heavenly Son and Messiah.

 

In the matter of Romans 1:3, I have further suggested (taking a cue from C. K. Barrett, something which is regularly misunderstood as well) that “kata sarka,” in its meaning of ‘in relation to the flesh,’ could also envision that “flesh” in a locational sense, as “in the sphere of the flesh,” to use Barrett’s phrase and give it a more pronounced locational meaning than he probably intended. Since the ancients had greater associations of location than we do in distinguishing between flesh and spirit and the inhabitants of both, the activities performed by spiritual beings which affected humanity—and particularly if they involved suffering and death—belonged to a specific lower area of the universe, usually located below the moon. Paul is not clear about the exact location of Christ’s crucifixion, but there are certain indicators (such as 1 Corinthians 2:8) that he, and others, regarded the agency of that crucifixion as the demon spirits. They were denizens of that “sphere of flesh” below the moon, inhabiting the firmament or “air” up to the region of the moon and possessing their own kind of material corporeality, though not of human flesh. (Again, see The Jesus Puzzle, p.103.)

 

Thus, the thought behind Romans 1:3 could include the idea of Jesus’ redeeming activity when he had descended to the realm of fleshly corruptibility, which did not have to be all the way to earth itself. It was in this context that he was seen as possessing his scripture-revealed relationship to David. In traditional Jewish thought the Messiah, as descendant of David, would be the savior of Israel, and so, as Savior, Christ in that role which he assumed upon his descent into the realm of flesh may have been conceived as being “of David’s seed,” as scripture indicated. There is also a wide spectrum of meaning, from literal to symbolic, in which that relationship to David could have been interpreted, and from the brief and cryptic reference in 1:3 we cannot tell where along such a spectrum early Christian thought lay. “Kata sarka” can be used in metaphorical ways in other contexts, such as the common reference in the epistles to “walking kata sarka,” i.e., living and behaving according to the ways of the flesh (e.g., 2 Cor. 10:2-3), or judging by worldly standards, or acting according to one’s baser nature. It can describe the human condition or a state of mind. It is hardly a stretch to assume the possibility of an equally symbolic intention in Romans 1:3. The savior of Israel would be a “son of David,” and just as “son of God” was applied to many people in a non-literal sense, Jesus as the seed of David may also have been meant in a non-literal way, especially when scripture had to be accommodated. In the excerpt below, I point out that gentiles are spoken of as “of Abraham’s seed” in a sense that is not meant to designate literal physical lineage.

 

In regard to the locational sense behind this verse, we can postulate the same in the first line of the christological hymn of 1 Timothy 6:13, which uses a variant of kata sarka:

 

“who was revealed in flesh [en sarki]…”

 

This need not be a reference to Jesus’ own flesh, but to the realm of flesh, of humanity: he was revealed to humans within their own sphere. The hymn goes on to say nothing about an earthly career and specifies that he was seen only “by angels” and “was proclaimed throughout the world,” with no mention of him proclaiming himself or anything else in his own voice. (Compare also 1 Peter 3:18.)

 

In the upcoming second edition of The Jesus Puzzle I will be providing a new and lengthy study of the use of the term “sarx” in the epistles and how this can lead us to non-literal and non-human interpretations of certain characteristics given to Christ. For now, I will quote an excerpt from that planned Appendix here, where it focuses on Romans 1:3…

 

I outlined earlier that several usages of “sarx” do not describe flesh per se, but relationships: between humans, and between humanity and divinity. Thus Paul says (Romans 9:3) that the Jews are his “kinsmen according to the flesh (kata sarka)”; Abraham is “our forefather according to the flesh (kata sarka).” Since the phrase should be entirely superfluous and unnecessary, we can only assume that Paul uses it because in his thinking the human world contains other relationships that are not according to the flesh—such as the one between Abraham and the gentiles who are his “seed”: a mystical linkage based on faith and being “in Christ,” not on any necessary physical lineage. (See Romans 9:8, “the children of the promise [i.e., Paul’s gentiles] are regarded as [Abraham’s] seed,” the latter word being the same as the one used in 1:3.)
    We can also note that in Galatians 3:16, Paul declares Christ to be Abraham’s “seed” through a rather tortured exegesis of scripture dependent on the word “seed” being in the singular. Since he can bring the gentiles into this “seed” equation through their mystical link to Christ, it would seem that Paul is designating Christ as “seed” of Abraham in a similar mystical fashion, dependent on scripture. If he had meant it literally, he need merely have proclaimed it through human genealogical channels, as Matthew and Luke were to do. His strained use of scripture would have been unnecessary.

If humans can have a relationship to humans mystically, as in the case of the gentiles being of Abraham’s seed, then there should be even less impediment to seeing Christ, a spiritual entity, also having a relationship to a human figure in the same way: mystically. We have just seen it in regard to Christ’s relationship to Abraham. Christ being of David’s seed should be no less feasible, no less non-literal. The concept is arrived at through mystical thinking, and is derived from scripture. Why does Paul in Romans 1:3 use “kata sarka”? Because here Christ has a relationship with the inferior world of humanity. It is ‘in relation to a human being.’ Note that in the next verse, we have its opposite counterpart: a relationship on the level of spirit. Christ relates to God as his Son “kata pneuma.” The “according to the spirit” is cryptic here, because it adds the phrase “of holiness,” and it has been an unresolved question as to whether this is a reference to the Holy Spirit or to the spiritual venue of the event, the spiritual realm of heaven.
    These two verses may also be a pre-Pauline liturgical unit, which by its nature (and the demands of poetic structure) imposed a “kata sarka / kata pneuma” dichotomy upon the text, so that we cannot know the exact intention or understanding behind the first phrase, or even if there was much of either. Also, as discussed in Chapter 8, the lead-in of verse 2 makes it clear that Paul is assigning the source of both these items to scripture, to the gospel of God about his Son as pre-announced in the prophets. We do not need to assume that Paul invented or repeated these words with any concrete comprehension of what it meant for a spiritual being to be “of David’s seed.”

That Christ could be regarded as “of David’s seed” in a way that was not a literal earthly lineage should be evident once an historical Jesus arrived on the scene. There is a secondary reading of Acts 2:30 which speaks of Christ as a “descendant” of David kata sarka who would gain the throne of Israel . Since the author of Acts belonged to the line of thought that Jesus was born of a virgin, he was thus not being presented as a literal descendant of David. Ignatius does the same thing in his epistle to the Smyrneans: he declares (1:1) that Christ was “of the line of David according to the flesh (kata sarka),” yet in the same sentence declares him born of a virgin (something derived from Isaiah 7:14, with its “young woman” mistranslated in the Septuagint as “virgin”). This should have ruled out any understanding of Jesus as a literal human descendant of David. Ancient and modern apologists have subsequently come up with the idea that Jesus was a descendant of David through Mary. But ancient royal lineage was not through the female. And when Matthew and Luke came to invent lineages for Jesus, they presented the line of descent not as through Mary but through Joseph, even if he was only Jesus’ nominal father. But ‘adoption’ would have been an even weaker linkage, and just as unacceptable. And yet Irenaeus and Tertullian both state that Jesus’ descent from David was through Mary, even in the absence of any such genealogy and in contradiction to Matthew and Luke’s genealogy. Thus Christians for two millennia have been faced with an unresolvable conundrum. If those ancient Christians were able to accept and live with such an irrational contradiction, they would surely have been able to accept the equal conundrum of a spiritual Christ being of the “seed” of David. In both cases, they were kowtowing to scripture.

Throughout this book, I have been stressing the concept of scripture itself being the embodiment of the ‘event’ of Christ. He and his activities have been “revealed” through a new reading of scripture, and apparently solely from scripture. From there one discovers information about him—even including what he “says.” Hebrews 10:5 assigns him a “body” for sacrifice because it said so in Psalm 40:6-8 (LXX), which the author quotes, understanding it as the voice of Christ speaking from scripture. (That’s the ‘speaker’ he refers to in 1:2 as the voice of God in these “last days.”) Even in 5:7, the writer has Christ performing things “in the days of his flesh” which are drawn from scripture. 1 Peter 4:1 has him “suffering” (which had to be in “flesh,” not in spirit) because Isaiah 53 told him so, and that is the source he appeals to in 2:22-23. There is no oral tradition or historical memory in evidence. Through such revelation Christ has “come” in the present time, which is why so many of the references in the early non-Gospel record talk of Christ in the present tense. As Bishop Lightfoot observed in regard to 1 Clement over a century ago, they know him as a present phenomenon rather than as an historical man of the past, memories of whom guide and enrich the community. Thus, Christ is “of the seed of David” because it said so—even using those very words—in many messianic passages of scripture now identified with the spiritual Christ. And maybe that was simply that.

If Christ can be seen as having a mystical relationship with David and Abraham, he can be seen as having a mystical relationship with Israel as a whole. If he can be seen as in some way of the seed of David kata sarka, he can have some connection to Israel kata sarka as well. Again, there was no need for the early Christian cult to understand exactly what this meant. The general concept of spiritual-material parallels between heaven and earth would aid in accepting it in principle if not through comprehension. And since the thought of people like Paul already contained so much of a mystical nature that could hardly be rationally explained, such as the inclusion of humans in the spiritual “body” of Christ, why should anyone have balked at Romans 1:3?

As for Doug’s query about “outside the camp/gate” in Hebrews 13:11-13, he has apparently not yet read Part 3 of my recent study of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which I discuss these verses at some length. I will reproduce a key passage of it here:

    The “camp” is the camp of the Israelites at Sinai. First of all, a change from this word would again be needed no matter what, because the writer could hardly specify that Jesus had suffered outside this “camp.” Jesus did not suffer and die at Sinai, or at any other “camp.” A parallel governed by scripture would still have to specify some other location; it is the “outside” that is the essential part of the parallel. And what “gate” might the author have had in mind? Since the “outside” at Sinai is related to the “inside” where the animal was sacrificed, we may suppose that the “outside” in Jesus’ case was similarly related to the “inside” where he offered his own sacrifice, the latter being the heavenly sanctuary, or simply heaven itself where the sanctuary was located. If his thought was governed by the scriptural precedent, then in order to reflect a proper parallel with the sacrificed animal, the “outside” in Jesus’ case must refer to heaven. Outside Jerusalem would have had nothing to do with it, since Jesus’ offering of his blood did not take place inside Jerusalem . And Jesus did indeed have to suffer and die “outside” heaven, since he could not undergo such experiences within heaven itself. Thus, we may presume the strong possibility that in the writer’s mind the “gate” refers to the gate of heaven.
    Why, then, did the author revert to “camp” in verse 13? Well, he could not maintain the reference to heaven, since he could hardly suggest that the readers join Christ outside heaven. Nor, on the other hand, could they join him outside the Sinai camp. But the writer has made certain parallels between the situation of the Israelites and that of his own community, and he implies one in verse 14, in that both they and the Israelites are, for now, homeless, seeking a new city . The present community is outside the pale, not belonging to this world. And so was Jesus outside his own home when he underwent death. The thought of “joining Jesus outside” would reflect a paradigmatic relationship between Christ and his devotees, in which both share similar experiences of separation and suffering.

Furthermore, if “gate” had been the gate of Jerusalem , there should have been no reason not to continue that motif. Both writer and readers could readily have envisioned joining Jesus on Calvary “outside the gate of Jerusalem ,” even if only in spirit. There they could be seen to suffer together. Verse 14 even speaks of a “city,” or rather of two cities, the worldly one they have left behind, the other the one to come, the heavenly Jerusalem . The former city would have fitted perfectly with the earthly Jerusalem , outside of which the community could have joined Jesus. Yet the author does not continue the “gate” idea. This virtually rules out the thought that in the previous verse he has the gate of Jerusalem in mind, and supports the idea that it is the gate of heaven. And so he was forced to revert to “camp,” even though—as in so many of his attempts—the parallel was imperfect. But at least the Sinai camp, being in the wilderness, far from home between the old Egypt and the new Promised Land, would bear a similarity to the situation the believers felt themselves in. And so the motif was pressed into service, an analogy that was, perhaps, “not meant to be pressed,” although envisioning themselves within their own ‘camp’ in which they temporarily set up abode (like the Israelites) while awaiting entry to the Promised Land, would not be a stretch. In getting inside the writer’s mind, of course, we can only speculate, but even speculation can be rooted in the text and in logical deduction.

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Tim writes:

       Why would you avoid looking at Revelation 13:8 which says Jesus was crucified before the world was made? Wouldn't that help your argument? To me, it goes nicely with the idea of Paul, 1st Clement and Colossians all saying that Jesus was the firstborn of the dead (how could he be if he is the Jesus in the Gospels?), but being killed before the world began he WOULD be the first to come back from the dead.

Response to Tim:

Revelation 13:8 - When was Jesus slain?

Revelation 13:8 (literally):

And there will worship him all those dwelling on the earth
whose name has not been written
in the scroll of life of the Lamb who was slain
from the foundation of the world.

Grammatically, the Greek is ambiguous. It could be the ‘names’ written from the foundation of the world, or the ‘slaying of the Lamb.’ Many translations make a note of the ambiguity, but most opt for the former meaning. Perhaps it is the more natural reading in the context of Revelation as a whole, which speaks of the predestined salvation of the elect, as recorded in the sealed scroll (ch. 5-7). Such ideas usually include the principle that such predestination has been decided by God since the beginning of time.

In English, an uninflected language, we can sometimes have difficulty formulating sentences to make clear the relationship between different elements in them. Greek, being inflected, has less difficulty in maintaining the sense of those relationships within a long and complex sentence, although in Revelation 13:8, there is no inflection in the final phrase that can be grammatically linked to one or the other of the possible antecedents. But the ambiguity lies as much in the English translation as in the Greek original. The structure of Greek phrasing places “slain” after the noun it modifies, “tou arniou tou esphagmenou” (lit., “the lamb the having been slain”). But if we translated the third line above as: “in the scroll of life of the slain Lamb” there would be less incentive for our minds to link “from the foundation of the world” with the antecedent “slain.”

Interestingly, there is a classic ambiguity present in a passage which is very pertinent to Tim’s query. He is suggesting the point that if Jesus, according to one reading of Revelation 13:8, was killed at the foundation of the world (in a mythical spiritual context), this would cast light on what various writers have in mind by saying that Jesus was “firstborn of the dead,” since he would be the first to die, and be resurrected. He calls attention to Colossians 1:18. In the hymn about the Son (1:15-20), 1:18 says:

...he is the beginning, the firstborn [prōtotokos] from the dead...

1 Corinthians 15:20 has a similar thought:

But now Christ has been raised from the dead, firstfruit [aparchē] of those who have fallen asleep.

Tim is right in suggesting that the concept of Jesus dying and rising at the time of the foundation of the world would, in one way, fit well with the mythicist case. If that mythical redeeming act took place outside the boundaries of material space and time, it could have happened at any ‘temporal’ point. Traditional myths of the gods were generally placed in a primordial time at the ‘beginning’ of things, or sometimes simply in a remote and undefined past. But with the arrival of Platonism and the concept of divine activities being acted out in a higher spiritual realm, temporality became in a sense timeless. However, early Christian thought does seem to place Jesus’ salvific acts at a point ‘subsequent’ to certain historical events in Jewish history, even if they do not or cannot locate them at a specific subsequent point in time, or at some equivalent point to lower-world temporality. But we have to keep in mind that ancient mythological concepts did not—and certainly do not for us—lend themselves well to rational, scientific analysis, and whatever intuitive grasp the ancients may have thought they had on the subject is something we can no longer share. It is also possible that they regarded Christ’s acts as ‘subsequent’ simply in terms of the revelation and application of those acts. Christ would be the “second Adam” because the applied consequences of his acts postdate the consequences of the acts of Adam. 1 Corinthians 15:22: “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” This in itself would not preclude the act of Christ from which that consequence proceeds as having occurred even before Adam’s existence. It is not the “when” of Christ’s redeeming act which matters, it is the “now” of it, as revealed and applied through apostles like Paul. This is something we can see throughout the epistles. The event of Christ’s death and rising is relegated to some undetermined past, never historically specified, while the focus is placed on the present-time revelation of that act by God and the benefits now available from it. My recent Article on “Born of Woman”? examines that very feature of the Galatians 4 passage.

The passage pertinent to Tim’s query, and to my own examination of the question of when Jesus was conceived to have performed his act of redemption, is 2 Timothy 1:9-10, for it seems to present the concept that Jesus performed that act “before time began,” (pro chronōn aiōniōn, lit., “before times eternal”). The meaning of that Greek phrase is unclear; biblical commentators cannot agree on just what the writer has in mind here. (See The Jesus Puzzle, p.118-119.) But it seems to be speaking of a dimension that lies outside or before the span of world history, the spiritual sphere of God. The question is, what is it that took place there? Here is the layout of the passage, and I’ll note the grammatical ambiguity I referred to earlier which is entailed in it, an ambiguity which in fact has an effect on our interpretation of the issue being discussed.

8   ...the gospel according to the power of God [theou, in the genitive case]
9   the one having saved [tou sōsantos, in the genitive case, referring back to “God”]
     us and called us to holiness,
     not from any merit of ours but according to his own purpose and grace,
     which was given to us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time
     [lit., before times eternal, pro chronōn aiōniōn],
10 but now manifested [i.e., God’s grace] by the revelation [epiphaneias]
     of our Savior, Christ Jesus [Xristou Iēsou, in the genitive],
     having abrogated [katargēsantos, in the genitive] death
     and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel...

The ambiguity resides in the “having abrogated,” “katargēsantos” in the genitive case. Does it refer back to the immediately preceding “Christ Jesus” or does it look all the way back to the end of verse 8 (it’s all one big happy sentence in the Greek), to “God”? As such it would be in parallel to the whole of verse 9 and part of 10, which is introduced by “the one having saved us” which refers back to God. The distance and intervening material is not technically a problem for Greek because inflections help keep track of things, and the ambiguity may arise simply by the accident that the intervening thoughts end with a noun which also happens to be in the genitive.

This reading would fit well within the context as a whole, for the writer is speaking about the actions of God. Verse 9 speaks of God doing the “saving,” in parallel with the similar thought in the latter part of verse 10, the “abrogating” of death, etc. Moreover, that the writer is intending God as the performer of this second action is virtually required by the means cited for it: “through the gospel,” which for Paul and the pseudo-Pauls is always a product of God, a gospel received from him through revelation (the “brought to light” also points to knowledge revealed). It would indeed be odd for the writer to be saying that Christ abrogated death and brought life and immortality to light “through the gospel,” which in the immediately following verse 11 is the gospel assigned to Paul, not to Jesus.

Thus we can see that once again, consistent with so many other expressions in the epistles, the redeeming acts of Jesus are relegated to some indeterminate time and place, and he and those acts are spoken of as having been “revealed” (epiphaneia can be taken in its sense of the revelation or manifestation of a god, rather than as a physical, historical “appearance” implying incarnation). Instead, the focus is on the benefits of those acts now being applied, through a new revelation granted by God to people like Paul. This is in complete sync with the analysis of Galatians 4 I mentioned above.

But now to pro chronōn aiōniōn. What is it that is located there, before times eternal?  Grammatically speaking, it is God’s “purpose and grace.”  Does this mean that God merely formulated his purpose at or before the beginning of time, or did the redeeming act of Jesus take place at that point, with its benefits stored up to be revealed and used at a future time? On the other hand, it could be maintained that only the “grace” is being said to have been given pro chronōn aiōniōn, since “given” is in the singular, and because it is awkward to speak of “purpose” as being “given.” But what does it mean to say that God’s grace could be given before times eternal? Would this imply that the grace was created (if not yet bestowed) through the performance of Christ’s act? If that act transpired in the heavens at the hands of the demon spirits, it needed only the creation of those heavens and spirits in order to take place, with God and a pre-existent Son acting with foreknowledge even before the occurrence of the Fall for which it would serve as a redemption. On the other hand, would such a gleaned meaning be compatible with the temporal implications of other references to Jesus’ redeeming act elsewhere in the epistles?

One could argue on both sides of the uncertain meaning behind this part of verse 9. But if the possibility inherent in its ambiguity were workable, this passage could further lend support to Tim’s suggestion that Christ’s mythical acts could conceivably be located prior to the creation of the world, in a mythical and timeless dimension. Certainly, the evident exclusion from specific and recent history, which this passage and others in the epistles present to us, is a strong indication that such acts were, at the very least, envisioned to lie outside the time and location of material human history. In a world of myth.

In the second edition of The Jesus Puzzle, I will be examining in depth the 2 Timothy passage and others, in order to try to answer the question of where and when Jesus died.

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Keith writes:   

   I have enjoyed your website enormously over the last few years and have learned more about the bible and christianity from you than I ever did from all those Sunday sermons I heard while I was growing up.
   I have a couple of questions about the apostle Paul. In 1 Corinthians 11, when Paul is relating the words of Jesus at the last supper, I understand that Paul seems to be referring to something that he received through revelation and not through human channels. But on the night that Jesus supposedly spoke those words, to whom was he supposedly speaking to? Who was there to hear the command to "Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." How is this interpreted in the cosmic christ belief?
   Also, when Paul says in 1 Cor. 15:8 that Jesus appeared to him even though he was "untimely born", what does Paul mean by this? This seems like an odd thing to say since Paul was supposedly a contemporary of Jesus.

Response to Keith:

Jesus' Audience in 1 Corinthians 11:23 / Paul an "Abortion" (1 Cor. 15:8)

The words introducing this passage “For I received from the Lord” identify what Paul is about to say as the product of personal revelation. Apologists, but also regular scholars, try to find ways to get around this, but it’s pretty clear that Paul would not be claiming this as his own personal knowledge derived from a revelation to himself if such knowledge was circulating throughout the Christian community in oral tradition. He would look pompous and foolish. Besides, we can find no mention of the Gospel Last Supper, or Jesus’ reputed words on such an occasion, anywhere else in early Christian documents before the Gospels. It is notably missing in Hebrews, 1 Clement and the Didache. The latter document even contains the description of a Christian thanksgiving meal, but there is no sacramental significance attached to the bread and wine, let alone words of Jesus linking them with his body and blood. This void would suggest that no such tradition was floating about, and that Paul’s implication of direct knowledge from his heavenly Christ is the right interpretation.

 

Most attempted explanations of the phrase claim that the use of the preposition “apo” (from the Lord) signifies that Jesus was the ultimate source of these words, that Paul did not receive them directly from him but through oral transmission—as opposed to a use of the preposition “para” which would have signified direct reception. But this distinction was not universally adhered to, even in the New Testament. (See my Article No. 6, The Source of Paul’s Gospel, for a full discussion of this matter.) In any case, the claim founders upon Paul’s very clear declaration that “I received from the Lord,” which looks to allow for no intermediaries. Bauer’s Lexicon makes this admission: “Probably 1 Cor. 11:23 is to be understood in the same way [i.e., as the previous definition: ‘hear from someone’s mouth, i.e., from him personally’]; Paul is convinced that he is taught by the Lord himself.”

 

Paul’s discussion of the communal meal shared by the Corinthians (1 Cor. 10 and 11) indicates that they already regarded the bread and wine as a “participation” in the body and blood of Christ (10:16), and Paul in 11:23 is reminding them of something he has already told them. It is quite possible that the whole sacramental significance of the meal is his product, part of his preaching message. He is likely building on a thanksgiving meal of Jewish origin, but such a practice was also common among pagan cults. Most of the mysteries had them, and it was also common to regard such a meal as having been established by the god, in some mythical setting. Such things are foundation myths, meant to explain and justify a group’s practices and rituals. Some mind at some point came up with them, or carried them further, and there is no good reason to reject the idea that we may well have identified the mind that was responsible in this case.

 

The cult of Mithras had a meal modeled on the mythical meal shared by Mithras and Helios the sun god following Mithras’ slaying of the bull, in which the two deities made a covenant between themselves. That meal is depicted on many Mithraic monuments and meeting places. Was it regarded as having taken place in some dimension of reality? That would be difficult to say, but it certainly served to symbolize something. Unfortunately, we have no Mithraic writings to enlighten us. Is Paul in 1 Corinthians recounting a scene he believes actually happened somewhere? What exactly has the Lord revealed to him? We need to realize that Paul is seeking to counter the Corinthians’ objectionable behavior at their meal by stressing its sacramental significance. He has been under pressure to come up with something. Has the ready example of sacred meals in the cultic atmosphere of the time (he refers to the “table of demons” in 10:21), along with traditions of the divine establishment of such meals, led him to dream up a foundation scene of his own?

 

What do his words of the Lord constitute? Quite possibly they are the words that Paul himself would have spoken about such matters to people like the Corinthians. He could well have said to them, “This bread is the Lord’s body, on your behalf; when you break it you do so in remembrance of him. This cup represents the new covenant in his blood; when you drink it, you do so in remembrance of him.” He could then have converted such words into words of Jesus, changing the pronouns accordingly.

 

Keith asks, who is the Lord speaking to? Well, Paul does not say that he was speaking to his disciples. Nor does he really need to have envisioned specific mythical figures to whom Jesus has addressed these words; they are in effect addressed to Paul’s earthly audience. And while most translations have Paul identify the occasion as “on the night he was betrayed,” this is a Gospel-induced rendering of the verb paradidōmi, which simply means to hand over or to deliver up. Elsewhere, Paul says that God himself delivered up Jesus (Romans 8:32), while in Ephesians 5:2 and 25 it is Christ who “delivered himself up on your behalf.” In Paul’s hands, the concept need be no more than one of ‘surrendering’ to the salvation role determined by God and accepted by Jesus. Nor do we need to imagine that Paul had worked out some heavenly (or even earthly) scene in his mind. Paul needed only to convince himself that in some setting, Jesus, like many other savior gods, had spoken these words which founded the ritual and rendered the Christian meal of sacramental significance.

Nor is there an impediment to placing a mythical event at night, perhaps inspired by Paul's linking of Christ with the Lamb of Passover (1 Cor. 5:7), whose celebratory meal, and probably Christian meals in general, took place after sunset. We might note that Paul curiously uses the imperfect tense for “was delivered up,” actually saying “on the night he was being delivered up,” making the meal and the delivering up going on simultaneously. While we should not read anything conclusive into this curiosity (almost all commentators pass it by without remark), it may suggest that Paul’s conception was not quite as literal as the Gospels later rendered it.

 

We also need to keep in mind that here, too, there was a spectrum of interpretation of such salvation myths. Plutarch, in Isis and Osiris, is the best example in his declaration that “these stories did not actually happen as described.” He says this to caution his addressee, the priestess Clea, not to regard them as literal; rather they are allegory. (The 4^th century Sallustius says the same thing.) The very fact that Plutarch does so testifies to a certain portion of the population actually believing they are literal. Paul Veyne’s oft-cited Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? is not too helpful here, because he focuses on the classical Greek mythological figures of gods and heroes, and not the myths of the savior gods. But even he notes the range of belief and skepticism about details of those mythical stories between the “ingenuousness of the people,” “the educated classes” and “the learned” [p.42-43].

 

Where do Paul and the early Christians fall on this spectrum? His remarks about Jesus’ “suffering” would indicate that he regarded it as in some way literal, that his spiritual Son actually suffered and died at the hands of the demon spirits in the heavens (“the rulers of this age” in 1 Cor. 2:8), but how literal would he have regarded all the details of such an event that our modern minds could come up with? When he was crucified, did the demons use ‘heavenly nails’? Did the tree on which he was hung in the firmament (Ascension of Isaiah 9:13) have leaves and roots, perhaps requiring watering? Some apologists I have debated are fixated on the question of such literality, considering that, because such things trouble their own modern, scientific and literally-oriented minds, they must have bothered the ancients and precluded them from adopting such mythological claptrap.

 

But we know that concepts like the heavenly city of Jerusalem existed: did it have cobblestoned streets and brick houses? Some apocalyptic documents have the evil angels warring against each another in the heavens: did they use swords and spears? There is no indication that the writers would not have conceived of such things as literal in some spiritual form, and Platonist cosmology carried to its ultimate level should certainly have allowed for them. Ancient views of how the world operated were not like ours, and we cannot bring our own modern outlooks and logical mindsets to bear on them. Their concepts of the nature of life and the universe, of divinity and humanity, are no longer tenable. We cannot tell exactly how Paul saw his Lord’s Supper scene, or whom he conceived Jesus was speaking to, but we are not entitled to impose on him the subsequent literality of the later interpretation of the Gospels which began in the second century and started the process of turning Christianity’s initial mythical thinking into earthly history, a mythical sacred meal into a supper on the eve of an historical Passover. If Mithraism had triumphed and done the same, we would today be wondering about where the fossil of the historical bull Mithras slew might be found (some Mithraic Mt. Ararat perhaps), and upon what sort of table its meat and blood was laid for consumption by Mithras and Helios, the latter, no doubt, turned into some symbolic historical figures.

 

As for Paul’s description of himself as an “abortion” in 1 Corinthians 15:8, Keith is not the only one puzzled as to its meaning. Paul Ellingworth [A Translator’s Handbook for 1 Corinthians, p.293] says: “This phrase and the rest of the verse present serious problems for the translator.” He suggests as possibilities that Paul is referring to “an insult made against (him) by the people of Corinth,” or “the monstrous fact of a persecutor becoming an apostle,” or even “some previous or widely known use of the expression, as one might refer, for example, to ‘the fiery furnace,’ with Daniel 3 in mind.” The Translator’s New Testament admits “The sense in which Paul uses the word [ektrōma] is not very clear.” It, too, suggests that “It may have been used by his enemies as a term of abuse, accusing him of being as undeveloped and repulsive as a dead foetus…If Paul was turning his opponents’ abuse to advantage, no modern English translation has succeeded in making this clear.” The NEB makes an attempt: “In the end he appeared even to me; though this birth of mine was monstrous, for I had persecuted the church and am therefore inferior to all other apostles…”

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Jim writes:

   First of all, can I say what an eye-opener your website and other materials have been for me! I have often argued the case against a historical Jesus with Jehovah's Witnesses and others at the door, but your arguments, and some of those on other websites which look at similar issues, have certainly helped.
   However, I notice that you often refer to the myths and legends attached to for example Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana, Alexander the Great and so on (even down to Rabbi Schmeerson!) The obvious point that arises from these examples, to my mind, is that we are dealing here with real people, who other real people responded to in such a way as to create the mythos. However, your argument is, it seems, the opposite of this: that a mythic character, already invested with Godhead, was "brought down to earth" as it were by followers at a later stage. The former examples are ascending, if you like, while the latter example, Jesus, is descending. Do you have a view on this, and couldn't this suggest that, at some point, and in some way, the mythic Christ of Paul and others became associated with a small group of followers of a Hasid type individual from Galilee?
   Not that I believe this, but it does seem to point up a potential problem in your position as a whole. I don't think I've seen this particular issue dealt with anywhere, but I could have missed it.
   Thanks again for your very erudite and, I find, unbiased approach to the question, working from the evidence rather than imposing the desired answer from the start.

Response to Jim:

Galilee and Paul: Joining Historical and Mythical Figures?

We should first of all note that where figures like Pythagoras, Alexander the Great and Rabbi Schmeerson are concerned, we have independent and strong evidence about their existence, beyond whatever we might label ‘myth’ that has been attached to them. Whereas, for Jesus the sum total that the earliest record gives us is simply the myth.

And what a myth! Pre-existent Son, agent of creation, sustaining power of the universe, God’s throne partner and intermediary between divinity and humanity. As an expression of the Logos (see 1 Cor. 8:6), Christ is the model, the ‘first idea’ from which the world and humanity follows. Finally, he is the redeemer of the world’s sins, uniter of a sundered universe and victor over the demon powers of the heavens. Needless to say, the aforementioned historical figures pale by comparison. Moreover, Alexander the Great may have attracted legendary elements, but he was never lost sight of as an historical figure at a specific time, performing his actions in an identifiable earthly location. Whereas until the Gospels came along, at least half a century after his death—and more, if one measures by their dissemination—no one locates Jesus within either historical time or place.

 

A qualification could be made in regard to Q (although we know Q only through the prism of the Gospels), and this may be what Jim has in mind. In fact, Q as revealing the genuine original Jesus is what recent critical scholarship such as the Jesus Seminar proposes—with one crucial difference. None of those critical scholars (to my knowledge) postulates that the “mythic Christ of Paul” was not in some way based on the Q Jesus. They still envision an “ascending” process, not an originally independent mythical Christ, or a Paul who had nothing to do with the Gospel Jesus of Nazareth. That remains too radical a step to be taken by mainstream scholarship.

 

What Jim is proposing is that we do what the scholars are loath to do: make Paul’s Christ entirely mythical and postulate a junction between the two: the “genuine Jesus” of Q becoming associated with the spiritual heavenly Son of the Pauline cult, or vice-versa. Essentially, of course, he is proposing my own position—but again, with a crucial difference. The Jesus of Q looks to be only an invented founder, developed in the community’s mind as it, and its recorded material, evolved over several decades. Q itself provides the main evidence for such a scenario. I have made an extensive case for that scenario in The Jesus Puzzle, chapters 14 to 19, and won’t repeat it here. But I will explore one aspect of it further.

 

It is my contention that Mark is the pivot point at which those two diverse phenomena initially came together, the Kingdom preaching movement centered in Galilee which invented its founding sage, and the mythical Christ cult of Paul & Co. which never had any link to an historical figure. But this view has to be carefully nuanced. The first Gospel did not constitute a Big Bang, a six-bridesmaid wedding of the two, mounted in a straightforward fashion at a single point in time. Let’s note that it doesn’t matter here whether a Q founder did exist or not. By the time Mark is translating the movement he was a part of into his Gospel, the belief in the existence of such a founder seems to be established, at least in some circles of it. (It is missing in the Didache, whose chapter 11 also entails a similar Kingdom of God preaching movement. See Appendix 8 of The Jesus Puzzle, or the section on the Didache in my review of Crossan’s The Birth of Christianity.)

 

First of all, Mark barely renders his Jesus of Nazareth divine. (Some would say not at all, though this is an exaggeration.) Jesus’ death as an Atonement is scarcely developed; Mk. 10:45 could owe as much to the 4 Maccabees concept of martyr-atonement as to anything else. None of the lofty christology of Paul (as noted above) and of other documents like Hebrews figures in Mark’s picture of Jesus. Whatever his roots (or combination thereof), Mark is not coming from a full-fledged Christ cult of the Pauline variety to which he wants to give voice in his Gospel. (This is one reason why I am skeptical of proposals that Mark directly knows Paul or is building upon him.) A complete melding of Galilee and Jerusalem would not be accomplished until the later 2^nd century and even beyond.

 

Second, Mark is not attempting to write actual history. Even individual elements of his ministry of Jesus—miracles, prophecies, other anecdotes—are midrashically constructed out of scripture, even though it is all placed in a setting which reflects the teachings and activities of the community on which Q was based, a broad movement of which Mark was a part. On one level, the ministry symbolizes that movement. Even if he believes the Q founder existed, Mark has little or no specific historical material to draw on to incorporate in his Gospel. This, by the way, is another good reason to reject any of the Q material as actual historical traditions going back to a genuine Jesus. Even if, as I suggest, Mark was located in a circle which did not possess the Q document itself (since he includes none of the Q material used by Matthew and Luke), there is no reason to think, if the latter represents preserved traditions about Jesus, that Mark would not have been familiar with some of them through those oral channels.

 

Thus, the proposal that a “Hasid type individual from Galilee” (or any kind of teaching figure) has served as one side of Mark’s composite equation is considerably weakened by the difficulty of actually uncovering in any reliable fashion such a figure, or elements that need to  be attributed to him. We cannot be sure to what extent Mark himself envisioned his Jesus of Nazareth as representing an historical figure. And with his scarcely-divine Christ missing much of the cultic trappings of the Pauline scene, we cannot identify the exact nature of the other side of his equation either. Nor can we tell the nature of the ‘resurrection’ envisioned by Mark, as he has no appearances on earth or in flesh. Thus, the idea of Mark as a dramatic wedding of an historical Galilean teaching figure with the cultic Savior-Christ of Paul is lacking in clear definition, although the general principle seems sound.

 

Pertinent to this is that the reconstructed Q demonstrates that the Galilean Kingdom movement had nothing to say about a death and resurrection for its supposed founder. He is not even made an agent of salvation; he is given no soteriological role in regard to his own person. One might then ask what would have led anyone to link such a limited figure, or the idea of him, to the transcendent mythology of the Christ cult. The answer would be that no one person or group did. Such a large-scale development took place only in increments, which is why the process in the record is so drawn out and uncoordinated, covering decades. Mark’s dying and resurrecting Jesus might be seen as much an allegorical reading of the believers’ own role and fate as a translation of Paul’s dying and rising Christ in the spiritual world. His passion story could have been generated by a variety of influences.

Such a general ‘wooliness’ as to derivation between one writing and another (or others) should warn us against seeking to create too defined a picture of sources, especially written sources. A surviving document is only the tip of an iceberg, representing one version of a broader background ‘noise’ of ideas held within wider circles whose extent we are unsure of, perhaps expressed within other documents that have perished. They are isolated windows, partially opaque. If we find similarities in a given writer with another writer or set of writers, we cannot rush to a conclusion of direct dependence, especially if there are notable divergences or missing parts. The similarity may be due to derivation from that background noise, from which the surviving postulated source document is also a derivation and innovation of its own.

 

Mark would then represent an initial and limited conjunction between the two, a point of contact which only subsequently crystallized in a way Mark would not have envisioned. Ignatius, perhaps two decades after Mark, has heard of and absorbed the idea of Jesus of Nazareth in a basic way, linking him with the much more mystical and cultic Christ of the Pauline type—the latter being part of the world he inhabits to a far greater degree than Mark did. A different type of cultic Jesus in the Johannine community, a Revealer Son rather than a sacrificial one, encounters the Jesus of Mark and/or his redactors Matthew and Luke, and someone decides to mesh the two, hedging on the sacrificial aspect but incorporating the crucifixion in a non-atonement way in keeping with existing Johannine christology (the Son as the bread of saving knowledge, etc.). The creation of the Fourth Gospel resulted in something substantially different from its predecessors, a difference all of later Christianity has worked to deny or downplay.

As for Paul, his own cultic Jesus, with whom believers could enter into mystical linkage (a concept much like that of the mysteries and something which Mark shows no inkling of), languishes in its own circles of faith for some time until it is pulled into orbit along with other satellites that are coalescing around the now historically-viewed Gospels to further enrich Mark’s relatively tame initial conjunction of disparities. And so on, through that wonderful “riotous diversity” of the early Christian and proto-Christian record that has so taxed orthodox scholars for centuries. Such centripetal forces increased until everything crunched together more or less by the end of the 2^nd century, a reverse Big Bang that created the core Jesus of Nazareth which close to two millennia of world thinking has mistakenly envisioned as the starting point and explosive force of what is actually a far more fascinating evolution of ancient world religious obsession.

 

Complex? Yes, but Occam’s Razor has no bearing here. We know from a study of history of all sorts and times that complexity is the rule of the day, and nothing is merely “simple.” Besides, Occam’s principle states that we should look for the simplest explanation that accounts for all the evidence. That evidence is diverse and complex, while the simplistic “Gospel Jesus” explanation fails to come close to being adequate.

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Michael writes:
   

   I found your site in early January, and at the very least, am impressed by your respectful demeanor and writing style. The points you make are certainly fascinating, and I believe that your site is definitely one that I would recommend to people interested in a discussion of the Jesus Mythicist position.
   However, there is a question that I wish to pose. In around 165 (AD), the early Christian Apologist Justin Martyr wrote his work Dialogue with Trypho. At the beginning of Chapter 108, Justin recorded a letter, supposedly going around the Jewish community at the time-
 

"A godless and lawless heresy had sprung from one Jesus, a Galilean deceiver, whom we crucified, but his disciples stole him by night from the tomb, where he was laid when unfastened from the cross, and now deceive men by asserting that he has risen from the dead and ascended to heaven."

 
   I have read articles where you have discussed Mr. Martyr, but you never actually talked about the "letter". Although it may appear irrelevant, it simply seems to be an early mention by the Jewish community of the empty tomb. This is even more interesting due to the fact that you (and I) feel that the majority of the Gospels weren't written until the 2nd century, and I can't help but feel that nobody would bother to respond to a claim that came from people that at the time, were merely members of a small savior cult.

Response to Michael:

Matthew's Guards at the Tomb, and the Toledoth Yeshu

I am not sure where Michael derives the idea that Justin is speaking of a “letter.” The passage he quotes speaks of Jewish spokesmen going out to proclaim those contentions, but there is no mention of anything in written form (nor is there in his previous reference to this apologetic activity by Jews, in chapter 17, where the word “publish” in translations merely means ‘spread about’). In any case, this is indeed the earliest reference outside the Gospel of Matthew to a claim by the Jews that the disciples stole the body of Jesus, supposedly an explanation meant to discredit Christian claims of his resurrection. We find another reference, apparently, in Tertullian a few decades later in De Spectaculis 30, a passage we will also look at. Let’s note, however, that both of these references are Christian ones, not Jewish, and in fact we find no such claim in any writings by Jews themselves, from earliest times right through the Talmuds. The Jews, to judge by their own writings, show no knowledge of such a claim on their own part, that the disciples stole the body. (And that includes the Toledoth Yeshu which we’ll examine later.)

 

We might also note that, in general, we have no contemporary evidence—outside the claim in Matthew—that Jews prior to Justin were saying anything in dispute, condemnation or ridicule of Gospel or Christian traditions about an historical Jesus. If we exclude someone like Tacitus (if authentic) as simply ‘historical’ reference, the same applies to Greek and Roman writers. It is only in the years immediately following Justin that we encounter the pagan satirist Lucian poking fun at Christian doctrines surrounding Jesus, and the 3^rd century Origen preserves, and answers, criticism by the pagan writer Celsus who wrote his Alēthēs Logos around 170. In that work Celsus, according to Origen, framed his accusation that Jesus was actually the son of Mary in adultery with a soldier as coming from a Jew. (He also made other criticisms in his own voice.) If that is accurate and not a device on Celsus’ part, we can presume that slander about an historical Jesus and criticism/ridicule of the Christian story had arisen among Jews about the same time as similar pagan comment, although we have no extant record of such from Jewish writings. The later Talmuds contain alleged records of such things from the earlier period, but the reliability of those later developments as accurately reflective of earlier Jewish comment can be questioned. (See my review of Frank Zindler’s The Jesus the Jews Never Knew.)

 

It all begins, getting back to our main topic, in the Gospel of Matthew (which I would date not long after 100 CE), in his scenes of the guards at the tomb (27:62-66, continued at 28:4 and 11-15). There the Jewish priests persuade Pilate to set Roman guards before the tomb where Jesus is buried, so as to preclude the possibility that his disciples will steal the body and claim he has fulfilled his prophecy that he would rise after three days. At the resurrection, the guards faint in shock. Afterwards these (Roman!) guards go to report to the priests what happened and are offered a bribe, which they accept, to say that they had fallen asleep (on duty!) and during that time the disciples had come and stolen the body. Matthew concludes the scene with this remark:

 

“This story became widely known, and is current in Jewish circles to this day.”

 

Few critical scholars, if any, are willing to give the scene as a whole credence. Matthew is the only Christian writer to record it, and the story of guards being placed at the tomb and being subsequently bribed to explain its empty state is generally regarded as Matthew’s invention to counter a current Jewish claim that the disciples had stolen the body. In other words, they say, the only factual thing about it is that final line, that there was a circulating ‘spin’ by the Jews to explain the alleged resurrection: the disciples stole the body; but there were no guards, in shock, asleep or otherwise.

 

My contention, however, is that even the concluding remark is fictional. If this bears the marks, as some claim, of a separate authorial comment, it would make Matthew out as a liar, either way you look at it. Either the statement that this is a current story among the Jews is false, or the statement is true but Matthew, to judge by his words (which we’ll examine closely), is declaring that the made-up scene of the guards is true, which is a lie, since scholars have every reason to judge this scene to be Matthew’s invention, not the least because it is attested to nowhere else. It is almost impossible to think that in over a century of Christian writing, including the other three evangelists, no one before Justin would show any knowledge of either the presence of guards at the tomb or the tradition among Jews that the disciples had stolen the body. If it were known that guards had been posted, it would be difficult for the other Gospel writers to construct their scenes of the resurrection and its aftermath and not take them into account. Like Matthew, they would surely have been led to record the guards’ witness and reaction to this event. And if the Jews were really widely declaring that the disciples stole the body, as Matthew claims, the other evangelists would surely have felt the need to deal with it in some fashion; if Matthew’s guards explanation was fiction, they would have had to come up with some apologetic counter of their own to the accusation.

 

If early Christianity was founded on the claim that Jesus of Nazareth had exited his earthly tomb in risen flesh, any claim on the part of Jews that the disciples had stolen the body could not fail to be seen by Christians as a dangerous rejoinder that would require rebuttal, and we should expect to find some response to it in the wider record. Nor would the Jews themselves have underplayed its potential usefulness, and so it would have been widely spread among them. But there is something of a hitch here. Such an invented spin by the Jews would involve a double admission on their part: that the body was gone and the tomb was empty. We might ask if they would be willing to make such an admission, or would they be more likely to find ways to argue that the body had not gone missing and the tomb was not empty? (Jeff Lowder argues this in the book he co-edited with Robert Price, The Empty Tomb.) This would make Matthew’s contention very dubious, and in fact we have no early record of an argument between Jews and Christians over either point. We don’t even have Christians themselves referring to an empty tomb before the Gospels came along.

 

Matthew, we might note, seems to imply in his final line that the Jewish ‘spin’ arose early. He uses the aorist tense for “was spread about,” which suggests that such a claim by the Jews was begun early on, certainly before his own time. The “to this day” is meant as a subsequent development, as illustrated by the NASB translation: “This story was widely spread among the Jews, and is to this day.” The implied early circulation makes it even less likely that the other evangelists and early Christian writers would have missed hearing of it and addressing it. If disputes were going on over empty tombs and stolen bodies in the mid first century, we could wonder why, in 1 Corinthians 15 where he is proclaiming the necessity of believing in a gospel of Christ’s rising, Paul does not address such disputes and counter them in some way, as Matthew does. In the face of such claims as Christianity is supposed to have been making, a man being God and fulfilling the Jewish scriptures in his life on earth, it is astonishing that neither the Jewish record of the time nor the early Christian record from the likes of Paul gives us an indication that such a give-and-take over these supposed claims was happening. (Paul defends a crucified Messiah, which could encompass a spiritual one, but he never defends his faith against the blasphemy of turning a man into God.)

 

Scholars, as I said, are persuaded that everything before 28:15b is Matthew’s invention. But in seeking to retain the final line as accurate, they are overlooking one feature of it which throws a monkeywrench into the works. “And this story was spread about…” What story? What is the “stolen body” story according to Matthew’s own words? It is the ‘fact’ that the elders bribed the guards to say, if knowledge of the missing body came to light: “His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.” The whole sense of Matthew’s scene, especially with those last four words, implies that he has in mind the entire account of the posted guards when he uses the phrase “this story was widely spread,” and not just the bare fact that “the disciples stole the body.” But the guards story itself has been rejected as almost certainly fiction. And the story is further rendered ludicrous and unbelievable by any idea that the Roman guards could be bribed to say that “we were asleep.” What good is a bribe when to admit such a thing to Pilate would have resulted in their execution? The priests’ assurances that they will smooth things over with Pilate and “see that you do not suffer” is a piece of Matthean naivete, though it may show that he recognized one problem with his story.

 

Thus, Matthew in his final line has to be referring to the entirety of his preceding concoction. Verse 15b cannot be intended as a separate ‘authorial insertion’ by which he declares the actuality of a simple accusation that the disciples stole the body. His language tells us that the story he says is preserved “by the Jews to this day” includes the whole guards scene. In any event, if (whatever the claim encompassed) it was “widely known to this day,” one might ask why Matthew felt any necessity to step outside his narrative and inform his readers of something they would already be familiar with.

 

So what was Matthew doing? Was he telling a bare-faced lie in his entire guards-at-the-tomb sequence? Such a judgment would require that we evaluate all the Gospels as lies from start to finish, since so much of their content constitutes scenes contrived out of scripture, or blatant alterations of their sources in Mark with no apparent concern for historical accuracy. But if the Gospels are essentially allegories, symbols of their writers’ faith and real-world activities and expectations, then they are not intending to record actual history, and we need not call them “liars.” Perhaps Matthew just got carried away in that final line in declaring his story of the guards ‘true.’

 

But why did he introduce the stolen body idea at all, if it was founded on no claim by the Jews about such a theft? It could be said that it was entirely unnecessary; it could even be said that, if no such spin existed, why make it up and place it in his readers’ minds as a possible argument against their faith in the resurrection? Why, as well, risk giving the Jews the idea? (Although they must have missed it, since no Jewish extant source has picked up on it—only Christians!) The answer is quite simple. If we regard the Gospels as essentially allegories, Matthew is working within that internal literary world. He has decided he needs the guards scene within his own storyline. In enlarging on Mark’s ‘novel,’ he considers that the idea, the possibility, that the disciples stole the body would be something that would occur to the reader, just as it occurred to him, and thus he includes a reproof against it by having guards bribed to present such an excuse. For that, he needed to have guards posted there in the first place, something no one else thought of doing. (The apocryphal Gospel of Peter has a similar guards scene, but this work is almost certainly based on Matthew. For J. D. Crossan’s different take on the GoP, see The Jesus Puzzle, n.78.)

 

Thus Matthew was not taking a risk of putting the thought in his readers’ minds; he assumed it would be there unbidden. Some listeners to readings of the Gospel of Mark in his community may even have raised such questions. And if he was not claiming history, there was no fear that he would be giving ‘enemy’ Jews ammunition, since the latter would not (as yet) be taking the story seriously as history, if they even encountered it. Apparently the Jews did neither, for some time afterwards.

 

It is also possible that Matthew, in including the guards, was doing nothing more than providing a ‘nice touch’ for his story. Hellenistic romances were all the rage in the early Christian period, and many of them involved concluding episodes centered on tombs where the hero or heroine had been laid (often not really dead), and a lot of shenanigans took place in those tomb settings in the final scenes. Adding the charge and guard sequence may have been motivated by little more than Matthew wanting to put in his own shenanigans at the tomb in his final scenes. As for that concluding line, it does enhance the impact. Instead of “stepping outside” the narrative, he was putting himself into it. In an entire story of fictional stuff, it doesn’t seem out of place that the author could feel comfortable with inserting something which is also making a point that is not true.

A brief digression: For those who reject a Q and have Luke copying Matthew, why did Luke not carry the guards scene over into his Gospel? This is particularly telling if Matthew’s final line were true and the Jews were indeed spreading the idea that the disciples stole the body. Surely Luke would have known of such a spin, and thus should have found Matthew’s entire guard sequence as a useful counter to it. Even if the spin was Matthew’s fiction, would Luke have had sufficient reason to doubt its truthfulness and ignore it on that basis? Luke is the most ‘gentile’ of the Gospel writers and may not have lived in a heavily Jewish environment, so not hearing about this Jewish apologetic should not have convinced him that it did not exist and that Matthew was making it up. (On the other hand, if the author of the original Luke was still writing in the “allegory” mode, he might automatically presume that the guards scene was the product of Matthew since he, Luke, might not have regarded the death and resurrection of Jesus as historically factual, and nothing about Matthew’s guards scenario appealed to him on a literary basis.)

 

But now we need to consider those two later passages in Justin and Tertullian. Might they represent knowledge of a Jewish spin about a theft of the body from the tomb? Or are they entirely derived from their reading of Matthew, both writers simply assuming that Matthew was telling the truth about an actual Jewish spin known to him? There is nothing in either author which would rule the latter out. Justin says to Trypho:

 

“You [the Jews] have sent chosen and ordained men throughout all the world to proclaim that a godless and lawless heresy had sprung from one Jesus, a Galilean deceiver, whom we crucified, but his disciples stole him by night from the tomb, where he was laid when unfastened from the cross, and now deceive men by asserting that he has risen from the dead and ascended to heaven.” [ANF translation, vol.1, p.253]

 

Other than the reasonable possibility that Jews by the time of Justin were going about condemning the Christian sect as a heresy, there are no details provided here which would suggest any independent source or tradition besides one or more of the Gospels. Tertullian is the same. In his tirade against the perfidious Jews suffering in the flames of hell, Tertullian might be interpreted as saying that he shall throw their own words in their faces:

 

“This,” I shall say, “this is that carpenter’s or hireling’s son, that Sabbath-breaker, that Samaritan and devil-possessed! This is He whom you purchased from Judas! This is He whom you struck with reed and fist, whom you contemptuously spat upon, to whom you gave gall and vinegar to drink! This is He whom His disciples secretly stole away, that it might be said He had risen again, or the gardener abstracted [i.e., removed], that his lettuces might come to no harm from the crowds of visitants!” [ANF, vol.3, p.91]

 

But all these details are derivable from Matthew and the other Gospels. Indeed, it is inherently unlikely that Tertullian is quoting, or even paraphrasing, actual spoken or written words by Jews in some anti-Christian polemic. It would have required an intimate knowledge of Gospel details on their part, supplemented by nothing else that did not conform to canonical Gospel content. It would require that Tertullian is reflecting actual Jewish polemical practices, something which is attested to nowhere else, since nowhere else (not even in the Toledoth) do Jewish writings betray such a degree of intimate knowledge and use of details from Christian Gospels. In fact, as witnessed in the later Talmudic references to Jesus, the Jews seem almost ignorant of the basic Gospel scenario, having Jesus stoned or hung, taking on full responsibility for his death with nary a hint of Pilate and the Romans’ role, variously locating Jesus almost a century to either side of the Gospel period. (The Toledoth has Jesus literally hanged on a tree, by Jewish sages during the reign of Helena widow of Alexander Jannaeus, around 70 BCE.) Everything about Tertullian’s remarks suggests that he has conjured up details from Matthew and elsewhere, and allotted them to Jews so that he can throw them in the faces of his hell-bound deniers of Christ. Note that he does not actually say that the Jews have spoken such words. This could simply be a literary and very emotional device he has adopted within a passage of “fervid rhetoric” (to use the ANF’s footnote phrase).

 

We might also take a look at Tertullian’s final words. The “gardener” would seem to be derived from John, but in the latter there is no hint that the gardener figure has been introduced with any intention of squelching some “The gardener did it!” claim by the Jews. The reference is far too weak and indirect (unlike Matthew’s sequence) for that. It is undoubtedly no more than ‘color’ for the scene, Mary Magdalene mistaking Jesus for the gardener and failing to recognize him in order to create more emotional impact when she does. John adding the gardener (a character never actually seen) so as to demonstrate that such an innocuous figure had, or could have had, no role in removing the body, is far too subtle, too easily missed for that to have been his motive.

 

However, Tertullian seems to witness to something subsequently made out of John’s ‘gardener in the background’ in just that direction. He alludes to his polemical Jews declaring that the body was stolen, if not by the disciples, then by “the gardener” who wished to remove the body of Jesus so his followers and other visitors would not be coming to visit the deceased and trample his lettuces growing in the vicinity. Now, the Jewish Toledoth (to be looked at presently) does introduce such a character as the gardener, but there he is portrayed as having removed the body and buried it elsewhere in order to preclude any possible theft by Jesus’ disciples, not to protect his lettuces. And the Toledoth, as we shall see, was hardly early enough to have influenced Tertullian, though a Jewish spin along Tertullian’s line could conceivably have existed and been later transformed in a different direction in the Toledoth.

 

Yet the possibility of a Jewish source for Tertullian is hardly compelling. It’s a very minor detail, and who knows where Tertullian might have taken it from? We can tell from the Christian record that all sorts of different versions and embellishments on basic Gospel themes were rife from the later 2^nd century on, a flood of enlargements and sheer invention, not all of which have survived. An apocryphal Gospel that built on John may have added something like it, or some preacher whom Tertullian heard may have stuck in the lettuce when giving a sermon, and Tertullian put his own twist on it, who knows? The idea that he picked it up from Jews is only one option among many feasible ones. One might even ask why Jews would be particularly prone to introduce lettuce as a reason for moving the body.

 

Going back to Justin, what is his source, if any? Is he, like Tertullian, taking his cue from Matthew and imagining Jewish activities out of Matthew’s remark, activities in which Jews were claiming the disciples had stolen the body? To that, as noted above, he may have added what we might surmise was general Jewish condemnation of Christianity by the mid 2^nd century as a “godless and lawless heresy,” one which had begun to make ridiculous claims about a man risen from the dead. (If we can judge by Minucius Felix, even some Christians were calling them ridiculous.)

 

The one curiosity in Justin is the phrase “whom we crucified,” as the voice of the Jews. That, of course, is not, strictly speaking, the way any Gospel portrayed it. Is Justin simply putting a Christian spin on the Jewish role in accusing Jesus before Pilate and thus opening the way to his crucifixion? Moreover, can we really believe that Jews familiar with the Gospel story were going about claiming that they had crucified Jesus, in contradiction to that account? It is difficult to conceive that Jews would have taken on themselves, willingly and without qualification, the entire responsibility for Jesus’ death. That would be extreme masochism, considering the attacks that were being mounted against them by the Christians right across the board for failing to respond to Jesus. Besides, if the Gospel story were in any way history, everyone would know it was the Romans who performed the act. In the face of this, we can hardly think that the Jews would still be proclaiming, “Yeah, we did it. We killed the bugger!” Talk about a death wish—one that was granted them for much of the next two millennia.

 

In the later Talmud, it is true that the rabbis seem to assume sole Jewish responsibility for Jesus death, but this only makes sense if the Gospel story is not history, and their statements lacked any basis in remembered traditions of their own. Instead, they have garbled what they gradually took out of Christian historicist developments which they only started to absorb in the later 2^nd century. While their incompetence in so doing is certainly bizarre, the explanation may lie in how Frank Zindler presents the development of alleged Jesus references in the rabbinic writings, beginning in the 3^rd century with references which were not actually to Jesus at all, but were only in subsequent centuries interpreted as such by later rabbis. (Again, see my review of the Zindler book.)

 

Having noted that, judging by the Talmuds and the Toledoth, the Jews were notorious at getting the Gospel elements wrong or distorted, one might expect that people like Tertullian would have felt compelled to deal with such errors and distortions in their own day, and yet they do not. In fact, if we were to take his De Spectaculis 30 as repeating the Jews’ ridicule of the Gospels, they would have been amazingly accurate, down to quite small details!

 

One final point about Justin and Tertullian. If they were relying on Matthew to refer to Jewish claims that the body had been stolen, why did they not at the same time offer his explanation of the guards at the tomb to discredit those claims? But Justin’s remark about the stolen body is made as part of his enumeration of broader activities by Jewish anti-Christian missionaries. To digress to offer Matthew’s elaborate scene to explain how this particular accusation could be countered might well have been felt unnecessary. In Tertullian, such a digression would be even more out of place. Tertullian is exulting on how his faith gives him the anticipation of seeing the wretched Jews confined to Hell at the Judgment, the Jews who had visited such suffering and deceit upon Christ, who had made such irresponsible accusations against the Christians, one of which was that the disciples had secretly stolen away his body. Such an apologetic as Matthew’s guards scene would have been an unwieldy digression as well as irrelevant to this passage.

 

Finally, we need to take a look at the Toledoth Yeshu. Does this provide relatively early evidence, as some suggest, to a Jewish spin about the disciples stealing the body? It is indeed the only extant Jewish source which comes anywhere near to making such a reference. This work, as Robert Price describes it (The Pre-Nicene New Testament, p.239), “is the title of various related anti-gospel texts which present Jesus as a false prophet and magician. They often contain nasty parodies of the Christian gospels, probably as a safe way to let off some of the steam of hostility Jews felt over their hideous treatment by Christians.” In fact, it is far from clear exactly what the earliest version, or versions, of the Toledoth contained, how far back it goes, and who were the authors. In fact, it cannot even be spoken of as “a” book, since it is more a tradition of Jewish satirical response to Christianity with extremely obscure roots. As an organized work, all manuscripts come from the medieval period and were actually first published by Christians (leading to the contention that Christians had written it to foment hatred of the Jews). While the latter is quite unlikely, only certain elements and themes that later became the complete Toledoth can be traced earlier, with much variation and uncertainty. Some of those themes can be found alluded to in Christian writers of the second and later centuries, but nothing that could identify an actual “book” in circulation, or even a source in an ur-collection common to the Toledoth. In the surviving manuscripts incorporating those traditions (and they run into the scores) there are great numbers of variants, including basic things like the circumstances of Jesus’ death and what happened to his body afterwards. There is no way to trace any of these elements back beyond the later Talmudic period, let alone say with any confidence that “the disciples stole Jesus’ body” was something in circulation in some form of Toledoth during the 2^nd or 3^rd centuries.

 

In any case, the Toledoth as we generally have it does not conform to Matthew’s scenario and cannot therefore be taken as confirmation of Matthew’s statement in 28:15b. In chapter 7, the body is found to be missing from the grave where it was buried (not in an above-ground tomb). After a fruitless search for it, a gardener informs the authorities that he had taken it upon himself to remove the body from its grave lest the disciples steal it, and to bury it in a pit in his garden, diverting a stream to do so and then restoring the flow over the new grave. The Jews then recover the corpse and drag it behind a horse through the streets of Jerusalem . (Frank Zindler’s The Jesus the Jews Never Knew devotes about a third of its length to a study of the Toledoth.)

 

The Toledoth scenario hardly supports Matthew’s apologetic explanation, since the disciples do not steal the body and the body has only temporarily disappeared. Matthew could make no use of such a Jewish spin, nor would his scene counter such a thing. He is dependent on the body disappearing permanently, as the only thing that could support resurrection. Turning it around, the temporary disappearance of the body in the Toledoth would bear no relationship to the Matthean scenario and could not be used to explain a permanent disappearance of the body (although it could be a denial of the latter). Thus, the Toledoth cannot serve as evidence that an actual Jewish claim of the Matthean sort lies behind his scene of the guards at the tomb, let alone its concluding line.

 

At best, the Toledoth scene represents a new spin, turning the Gospel picture of the empty tomb on its head and claiming that in fact there was no permanent disappearance of the body. It necessarily postdates the Gospels, even John, since the gardener, as a motif, may have been inspired by the figure mentioned in the Fourth Gospel. This passage in the Toledoth as we have it may well date only to the later Talmudic period, and not necessarily be based on a close study of the Gospels but on more general exposure to Christian traditions which Jews during that period show signs of garbling quite extensively.

 

The bottom line for mythicism in all this, of course, is that Matthew’s guards at the tomb scene and its concluding statement cannot be used as an argument in favor of an historical Jesus, or that from early on, the Jews were addressing themselves to an historical situation involving claims of the disappearance of a man’s body from an earthly tomb.

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Warwick writes:
   
   What would you have to say in reply to the quote below:

"Michael Grant stated that the view of the Jesus myth is derived from a lack of application of historical methods:

...if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the eixstence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned....To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has "again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars." In recent years, "no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus"—or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary. Overall, the unhistoricity theory is regarded as effectively refuted by almost all biblical scholars and historians."

Response to Warwick:

Michael Grant and the “annihilation” of Mythicism

I don’t know the source of Warwick’s overall quote, but the quote within it is from Grant’s 1977 book Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels, p.199-200. I have discussed these views of Grant at the beginning of my website article Alleged Scholarly Refutations of Jesus Mythicism which addresses a century of so-called refutations of the Christ Myth theory. One will note in Grant’s quote above that the remarks about “annihilation” and “no serious scholar” are quotations by Grant from other writers who, as I point out, have not themselves undertaken to demonstrate this annihilation, just as Grant has not. As to the specific question of “historical methods,” Grant seems not to take into account that methods applying to non-religious figures in history are not the same as those we need to apply to religious figures who are witnessed to only by religious writings like the Gospels and not by general historical writings. (What all these ‘annihilations’ constitute generally turns out to be arguments at the level of “Josephus and Tacitus.” If one perseveres throughout the entire three parts of my above article, I think it will be seen that the claim at the heart of Grant’s remark, “the unhistoricity theory is regarded as effectively refuted by almost all biblical scholars and historians,” is simply poppycock.)

Grant was writing before the era (since around 1980) when it has been increasingly recognized by critical New Testament scholarship that there is little if anything that is reliably identifiable as historical in the Gospels, that virtually everything can be seen as midrash on Old Testament themes and passages. If he were writing today, he would no doubt realize that the “criteria” used for “other ancient writings containing historical material” (my emphasis) simply doesn’t apply to the Gospels.

Grant himself, in his book, shows that he has the means to recognize the true nature of the Gospels and the so-called history contained in them, but is unable to follow these insights to their logical conclusion. The following is a telling passage—for mythicist purposes—from page 38. Grant, drawing on ideas from various scholars, from J. Jeremias to D. B. Macdonald, is examining the reputed miracles of Jesus and asking if those ‘impossible’ acts really took place:

    It would have been difficult to elicit an answer to this type of question from an ancient Jew. To him, the natural and supernatural spheres, the visible and invisible, were one and inseparable and equally real, both manifesting in their different ways the divine will. But the supernatural and invisible realm was hard to describe. Abstract argument was no use; this extra-logical, extra-historical dimension could be expressed only figuratively, by means of metaphor and imagery. For what had to be conveyed was not mere statistics but a higher, more elusive sort of truth: dry literalness was of no avail when people’s imaginations had to be kindled. And these considerations were particularly relevant to Palestine, ‘where words have never been regarded as necessarily a reflection of fact’, but possess a life and vigour of their own. It was a world in which stories were used as freely as we use metaphors—a world in which possibility or impossibility, prosaic truth or untruth often seem to be beside the point. C. J. Ball writes,

    ...The rabbi embodies his lesson in a story, whether parable or allegory or seeming historical narrative; and the last thing he and his disciples would think of is to ask whether the selected persons, events and circumstances which so vividly suggest the doctrine are in themselves real or fictitious.
    The doctrine is everything; the mode of presentation has no independent value. To make the story the first consideration, and the doctrine it was intended to convey an afterthought as we, with our dry Western literalness, are predisposed to do, is to reverse the Jewish order of thinking, and to do unconscious injustice to the authors of many edifying narratives of antiquity.

Here, ironically, Grant has summed up a central pillar of the mythicist case. The Gospels are “edifying narratives” that may “seem” to be historical, but are really “metaphor and imagery” in the service of conveying “a higher, more elusive sort of truth.” Such “stories were used as freely as we use metaphors.” Grant is willing to apply such principles to the question of Jesus’ miracles, but not to the story as a whole, not to the character himself. He can speak critically of the dry literalness of the Western mind in the interpretation of traditions attached to Jesus, but he cannot bring himself to question that same dry literalness in regard to the Gospels as a whole. He also recognizes the ancient mindset regarding the natural and supernatural spheres and the connections and continuity between them, the “reality” of the invisible realm, but he fails to see that this is indeed the reality envisioned by Paul, and the reality which the Gospels serve to reflect in “metaphor and imagery.”

So near, yet so far.

Set 29: November 2010

Note: It has been two and a half years since the last Reader Feedback file. For all but the last year of that time, I was busy expanding The Jesus Puzzle and printing Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. Much of the present Reader Feedback is devoted to reviews and reactions to the new book. At the same time, there have been less queries made to me over these last few years, but I apologize for any that I may have lost track of from 2008 and 2009.

Only those reader comments which are given a response are listed in this Index:

• To Bob: Jesus Son of Ananus in Jewish War / Mythicism and Mainstream Scholarship
• To Luiz: Mark's Intention
• To Will: How Would a Non-Existent Q Affect the Mythicist Case?
• To Thomas: G. J. Goldberg on the Authenticity of Josephus' Testimonium
• To Walt: Were Early Christians "Lying"—or only Modern Mythicists!
• To Krystian: Dating the Gospels in the 2nd Century and J. P. Holding's Appeal to Tacitus
• To Dave: "Born of Woman, born under the Law" As an Interpolation
  

Damian writes:  

   Congratulations on your latest offering, JESUS: NEITHER GOD NOR MAN. In reading your various writings one cannot but help notice the huge volumes of knowledge and careful logic that you bring to your analysis.

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John writes:

   I have confessed you as my personal savior ever since reading "The Jesus Puzzle". I could not imagine how you could improve on that, but you did. "Jesus: Neither God Nor Man" is a sweeping epic that, like a top trial lawyer, slowly, methodically builds an irrefutable foundation and then - wham! - connects all the seemingly unrelated elements into a stunning gotcha. Masterful!
   You had me hooked within the first three chapters of "The Jesus Puzzle" whereas "Jesus: Neither God Nor Man" takes you deeper and farther back and develops more slowly.
   Thank you so much and I'll be re-reading it shortly.

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Vincent writes:

   I read The Jesus Puzzle with great interest, and I don't think I have any argument with anything you state in your book. It's a fantastic piece of New Testament exegesis. I, by the way, have a Master's degree in comp. lit. from Columbia University and am an occasionally published author of fiction (Adrift in a Vanishing City is my only book). I just finished an essay setting the record straight, so to speak, on Satan (he and Lucifer are entirely separate entities). All of which I mention just to say I have an abiding interest in Christianity and have cast as critical an eye as I could on your arguments but no alarm bells went off. I'm not, of course, a biblical scholar or even a classical one, but I think there is just too much merit in your thesis for you to be very far from the mark.

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Art writes (a posting on the Freethought Rationalist Discussion Board):
   
   I just wanted to jump in with a plug for Earl Doherty. I too had some misgivings about him as he was "not within the field." But when I did some checking around, I found that some heavyweights within the field were profoundly impressed with his work. For example, the world renowned Ph.D of History, Richard Carrier, says that Earl's work has actually shifted his view of Jesus' historicity [paraphrasing] from leaning toward the view that he probably existed to now leaning toward the view that he probably didn't exist Or again, let's take Robert Price, of whom I'm sure you have heard, as he is a Jesus Seminar heavyweight, as well as editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism, as well as a professor of theology and scriptural studies at Johnnie Coleman Theological Seminary. In a clip on YouTube (I can't post the link yet. If you go to YouTube and search "Robert Price," the clip is "Robert Price Part 1"), he has this to say about Earl's work:

"Another book you might want to look out for is by Earl Doherty, and it's a double-size expanded version of his great book, The Jesus Puzzle, and this one is called [Jesus] Neither God Nor Man, and it is really super. This man has just this incredible x-ray vision into the text. I've studied the New Testament from various perspectives for decades, and I'm reading this guy and I'm thinking, 'What an idiot I am! Why did I never see this? Why did I never think of that?' Just astonishing stuff. Some may object and carp that, 'Well this can't be much; he had to resort to publishing his own book.' Yeah, well so did Hume. Enough said."

   With these heavyweights on the record as saying Earl's work is more than sound, I myself don't really care if some twerp sitting in his/her editorial cubicle never sent Earl's work out to some other twerps in their respective cubicles to review it and send it back to twerp #1. In the end, it's my own take on things that I go with; I'm 10 chapters into Jesus Neither God Nor Man, and I, like Price, though I have a Master of Divinity degree and have researched some of these issues before, am constantly saying, "What an idiot I am! Why did I never see this?"

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Albert writes:

   I just finished your chapter on Hebrews....it is truly brilliant and greatly buttresses the mythicist postion. You know what I really like: your use of contemporary, extra-biblical sources (such as 11QMelch and 2 Enoch) to illumine otherwise shadowy figures and types alluded to in the Biblical texts. Nicely done, sir.

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Ken writes:

   I am mesmerized by your writing. I had read Spong's Liberating the Gospels and have been deeply influenced by it, as I have been by authors such as Pagels, Erhman, Riley, and others.

   I think you raise immensely important questions, especially in your critique of Spong. I don't have historical answers. I have spiritual ones and I wish to meditate more deeply on the basic conundrum you have so richly and elegantly raised.

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Richard writes:
   
   I have read your latest book on Jesus once very carefully. Am studying it a second time and am into it 300 pages. I intend to digest it a third time going over all the Bible quotes in detail.   

   I am 78 years old and a retired lawyer in Salt Lake City. I own approximately 3,000 books. I am an atheist raised in the Mormon tradition. There is not any book that I own that I have read three times and spent a month digesting.   

   As a former attorney, I appreciate evidence and there is so much set forth in this book, not to mention the numerous insights. Intellectually, I am most grateful and it was a pleasure to converse and listen to your talk in Montreal [The Atheist Alliance International Convention, October 2, 2010. For the complete text of that talk, see http://montreal2010.org/proc/long/doherty_earl_long_en.html]. I am very sincere in this praise and have not had any book influence me such as yours. Thank you very much.

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Peter Gandy (co-author of The Jesus Mysteries) writes (a posting on FRDB):

   Your work has had a profound effect on me and my respect for your scholarship is huge. And on a personal level, just knowing that you are out there making your case is a great comfort. We, and I'm including you, me and the majority of posters on this list here, are a small voice in a very large crowd. Our investigations have led us to challenge a vast and entrenched body of received opinions, and our conclusions stand received history on its head. They overturn everything that most people think they know about the origin of Christianity. Making even a tiny dent in that consensus is going to take a long time.
   To the vast majority the idea that there was no Jesus at the start of Christianity is quite simply an unthinkable thought. They are not able to arrive at our conclusion because they have not made the journey that we have. Instead they have arrived at a half way house demonstrated by the phenomenal success of Dan Brown. They are prepared to believe that everything they have been told about the origin of Christianity by the Church is a pack of lies. They are prepared to believe that the gospels are not the 'gospel truth' and do not tell us the 'real' story of Jesus' life. But they simply cannot conceive that there wasn't 'someone' at the bottom of it all. And with this last stubborn fantasy still in place they are happy to cooperate with Dan Brown in recasting the Jesus story in the spirit of our modern times, complete with the big romance and a Hollywood style happy ending. This is huge progress in terms of the consciousness of the masses, but necessarily frustrates those who want to see people take that last step. However, I do not think they will do this in our lifetime.
   But the paradigm will change. It will not change because the establishment embraces it, but because they will die off and be replaced by a new generation who take the new paradigm in their stride. I see signs of this happening. The internet generation are indebted to you and your work and will carry it forward. And when the history of 'how the paradigm changed' is written up at some uncertain date in the future, your name will feature large. Keep the faith, or should I say lack of it.

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Wayne writes:   

   The book looks very impressive.  If chapter 1 is any indication, your way of explaining your thesis is getting even more clear and elegant.  It was good to see the first chapter make such a strong start!

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Delano writes:

   I have been following your books with great interest and find your writings to be very enlightening and thought-provoking. You have convinced me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there was never a historical Jesus.

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Kent writes (from Sweden):

   Your first book The Jesus Puzzle was an eye-opener for me and I had to consult the bible to see if Paul (or whatever his name was) really could be interpreted as he knew of only a mythical Jesus throughout the so called genuine epistles. It was a great learning experience to re-read the epistles from that viewpoint and the puzzle just fell together!
   I'm an atheist so consulting the Bible is not something I do that often! But as I said, your book was a great read and I do believe that you are as spot on as someone ever can be. I think that your work has made you unavoidable so to speak - meaning that every scholar writing on the subject of early Christianity must consider your work, regardless if these scholars are religious or not. I don't know if that really is the case but it should be. That's my opinion anyway. And if I'm not mistaken, the case for a mythical Jesus has been greatly strengthened since your book came out. My impression is that there's much more on the internet about the subject, than for say 10 or even 5 years ago, and also that the number of books with a critical look at religion has increased.

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Geoff writes:

   Just a word of encouragement: I have been studying Christian origins for over a decade now and the last couple years I have spent much time considering your Jesus myth explanation. I think it is by far the most persuasive explanation of the evidence that I have found. When I try to explain what I think to others, I like to use the model of evolution. The fragments of how Jesus evolved are like indicator fossils. If the Jesus to Christ theory were correct, we would expect to find evidence of a belief in the preacher from Palestine, if nowhere else then at least in Paul. We don't. On the other hand, if the idea of a human Jesus evolved out of a belief in a heavenly intercessor Jesus Christ, we would expect to find ideas of a heavenly intercessor that predate the idea of Jesus Christ (we do, for example, in Philo) morphing into a vague idea of a Jesus Christ in some mythical past (we do in Paul)...it fits the fits evidence much better!

   Anyway, thanks for all the work you do and the enlightenment you bring! Keep up the most excellent work!

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Jim writes:

   Just to say that I really like the new website. Very eyecatching and user-friendly!

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Bob writes:

   If I may be so presumptuous, I have a question, actually two. I read The Jesus Puzzle, THEN found out about your new book! But it was well worth reading Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. You are amazing in your analysis of the material. I'm at the end of the book where you're ripping the Testimonium apart.
   Is the mythicist position picking up acceptance in scholarship? I'm sick of hearing "Fringe" and "Whacko". Also, I came across this, I'm sure you know of it. I'm curious as to why you don't mention it. [Here Bob quotes from Josephus' Jewish War, Book 6, Chapter 5, Section 3, and its account of Jesus, son of Ananus, who went about in the years before the War prophesying the downfall of the city, even when subjected to bloody punishment by the authorities. The account goes on at considerable length.]
    Isn't that strange? I guess he wasn't all that impressed by the "Real Jesus".
 Why would Josephus write so much about a nobody Jesus and less than a quarter as much about, well...the Messiah! Does that make sense? What do you think? What are the chances this passage was known to Mark and formed a basis for his character? There are certainly some astonishing parallels.

 
Response to Bob:

Jesus Son of Ananus in Jewish War / Mythicism and Mainstream Scholarship

Jesus son of Ananus wouldn't have been exactly a “nobody” given the notoriety of his activity in Jerusalem before the War, but Bob’s point is well taken. If a Jesus of Nazareth had had anything like the impact which Christian tradition gives him, or even what would be required simply if the Christian movement had arisen in response to such a person, the difference in the amount of detail between what Josephus allegedly had to say about him and what he said about the other Jesus is striking. While no one today thinks that Josephus wrote that the Jesus of the Testimonium “was the Messiah,” he should hardly have been unaware that many people, including many of his own Jewish countrymen, believed him to be so—and even more amazingly, believed him to be the actual Son of God, part of the very Godhead. This should have led Josephus to devote far more to him than the short and simple paragraph which modern scholarship thinks to distill out of the extant Testimonium as likely ‘authentic.’

As for Mark’s inspiration, there is little question that, while he was writing a fictitious and allegorical story (constructed out of scripture) about a man who he might or might not have believed actually existed, his casting of that character could well have been influenced by certain figures on the first century scene, such as Judas the Galilean and even the noted Jesus son of Ananus. However, it is probably not likely that Mark’s inspiration came from Josephus’ own writings.

As for mainstream scholars having any sympathy for the mythicist theory, with the failure of the Jesus Project to get off the ground mostly due to the reluctance of many of its members to address the question of Jesus existence, I have to say that it looks like we're still at least a generation away from them taking it seriously. Even someone like Bart Ehrman, who has all but declared himself an atheist, won't give it the time of day.

Their loss...  

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Luiz writes:   

   Congratulations on your book The Jesus Puzzle. Although it was first published in 1999, I only came to read it this year and I just loved it. I hope I have the patience necessary to read the 800+ pages of your new book Jesus: Neither God Nor Man". I am a 46 year old Brazilian lawyer. I was a Christian until the age of 15, a Pantheist until I was 40, and finally, an atheist for the last 6 years ( and out-of-the-closet for like 2 years). I was very happy to read your book, because, being an atheist, I always regarded the Jesus Christ story as a great mystery, one that from time to time used to shatter the very foundations of my atheistic convictions. Now, thanks to your book, this mystery has been finally solved, and the solution is that there was never even a mystery to begin with.
   I totally agree with what you say in one part of your book, that Mark might be regarded as THE most influential figure in all of humanity. What an unimaginable turmoil this guy created in the world for the past 19 centuries!!! It´s almost unbelievable. So unbelievable that I would like to take this opportunity that I wrote to praise your book and ask you a question: What do modern scholars currently hold true?  That Mark willingly WANTED his story to be regarded as history or did he intend it to be just a fictitious novel?
   Once again, thank you for your book. I "saw the light", and keep up the great work. I´ve become a fan of yours.

Response to Luiz:

Mark’s Intention

What was in the mind of the author of Mark is a key question, and not an easy one to answer. We can certainly assume that he knew that the actual story he wrote was not history, since he constructed it almost entirely out of scripture. But did he regard the figure represented in that story to be historical, based on the development of an imagined founder within the kingdom preaching sect represented by the Q document extracted from Matthew and Luke? (Mark himself, I have suggested, did not possess the document itself, but he was a party to its general background ideas, being part of that Galilean/Syrian sect which preached the imminent coming of the kingdom and the Son of Man as an apocalyptic judge.) We can also assume that most of the characters which fill his story—other than those independently known to be historical, such as Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas the High priest—were his own invention, people like Mary Magdalene, Simon of Cyrene, Joseph of Arimathea, even Jesus’ mother Mary, since none of them surface in all the early writings until the Gospels become disseminated in the 2nd century. But whether he was creating an “historical novel” about an assumed historical figure about whom virtually nothing specific was or could be known, or whether his intention was to create an allegorical tale symbolizing a combination of the kingdom movement and the cult of the sacrificed heavenly Christ, with his Jesus of Nazareth merely a representative figure for those religious expressions, cannot really be determined.

As for the outlook of mainstream scholarship, it probably contains a wide spectrum. Generally speaking, the traditional way New Testament scholars have regarded Mark is that he inherited a collection of oral traditions about Jesus which he fashioned into a narrative which probably did not reflect an actual sequence of events other than the basic progression from baptism by John to crucifixion by Pilate. Critical scholarship in the last quarter century has come to realize the pervasive presence of a form of midrash in the Gospel, in that almost everything can be seen to derive from Mark’s use of scripture, rather than oral traditions. Such traditions, as well, are coming to be acknowledged as mysteriously missing from all of the early writings outside the Gospels, though attempts are still made to ‘explain’ why this might be so and still preserve their presence in an unstated background. (What cannot or will not be believed is not there will be read into the matter, regardless of the fallacy of doing so.)

But Luiz’ question is actually quite perceptive: in view of their recognition of Mark’s reliance on scripture to create his story, of what opinion are critical scholars in regard to Mark's intention? Did he expect his readers/audience to recognize that the story per se was fictitious, an allegory based on scripture, or did he try to pass it off as actual history, that the events themselves as he portrayed them had really happened? I have yet to read any New Testament scholar who analyses such a dichotomy head-on; most seem to tiptoe around it, if they address it at all. Most that do take refuge in the rationalization that, as early Christians were apparently largely ignorant of any “history remembered” about their founder Jesus (a dubious idea in itself), they were forced to create a story about him by plumbing scripture, perhaps regarding those scriptural passages as prophecies or prefigurations of him; besides, they say, scripture was so much a part of the new movement's mindset and inspiration, it was an inviting source to turn to. All well and good, but if the earthly Gospel figure can scarcely be detected in the non-Gospel documents, and if the elevation of a figure about whom so little was known to such a cosmic level as we find in Paul would be very difficult to understand, especially among Jews, scholarship ought to realize that a whole different approach to Mark’s intention is required.

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Will writes:

   I hope you are doing well, sir. I just wanted to tell you you how excellent "Jesus: Neither God Nor Man" is! Fantastic work! 
   I have recently been reading some stuff by Thomas Brodie who applies a very persuasive literary analysis and shows a lot of intertextual relationships between the NT Gospels and other texts from the period (Septuagint, Plato, Josephus, and Virgil) as well as many of the Pauline Epistles. He also has a very convinving theory of relationship between the synoptic gospels which excludes the necessity of a Q document. I realize that you provided a very strong defense for the Q hypothesis in this latest work of yours...but I was thinking, it still seems to me that your overall mythicist theory could easily adapt to a synoptic model that didn't evoke the Q source as a necessary explanatory device. It would seem that the various layers of stratification that you, and others, have teased out of the Q material based on terminological and thematic groupings could easily be applied to another synoptic explanatory model. What are your thoughts on this? I know your are pretty solid with the Q hypothesis, but if it was overturned to your satisfaction, what would the effects be on your particular mythicist reconstruction? Do you agree that the effects would be fairly trivial to your overall case that Jesus probably never existed? I was just wondering how you see the importance of the Q model on your own mythicism?
   Thanks so much for your time as well as all the brilliant work you have contributed to the historical Jesus/mythicist discussion.

Response to Will:

How Would a Non-Existent Q Affect the Mythicist Case?

While I have read Thomas Brodie on other things, I don’t know his theories surrounding Q, and unfortunately Will has not indicated which of Brodie’s books he is speaking of. But this is a speculative question, a little like asking if it turned out your wife was a serial killer would you have married her? The point is, I don’t know of a no-Q theory which I would regard as convincing; so my answer to Will’s question has to be entirely theoretical. 

I have been chided more than once for endorsing a position—the existence of Q—which actually makes it easier to defend an historical Jesus, in that the Q document could be, and has been, upheld as an early witness to Jesus and his teachings. Given the existence of Q, I am forced to disprove the common scholarly position that the founder figure it seems to have contained at the point it was incorporated by Matthew and Luke into their reworkings of Mark did in fact go back to the roots of the document. Far easier for me, supposedly, if I could dispense with a Q altogether. 

But apart from the fact that, in my judgment, accepting the evidence in favor of a Q is far more secure than subscribing to the problematic condition of the prevailing no-Q scenario (Luke copying Matthew, as set out by scholars like Mark Goodacre), there are compensating advantages to accepting Q. First of all, I maintain that a good case can be made for seeing the founder figure in the ‘finished’ Q document used by Matthew and Luke as a development that took place during the course of Q and its sect’s own evolution, and that he was not there from the beginning. Such a demonstration essentially rules out the existence of a root founder, and strengthens the mythicist principle applicable to Christianity as a whole that a founder figure can be invented at later stages in a sect’s development. Second, Q has itself shown that this so-called Jesus movement was not consonant with certain other Jesus/Christ expressions of the time, in that it almost certainly did not entail any concept of a sacrificial death and resurrection, nor any reference to its founder being the Messiah. This, too, aids the mythicist case in helping to reveal (as the rest of the record does) a broad movement which lacked unifying concepts and a common origin. 

Q also admirably portrays a sectarian background which provides a setting for the Synoptic Gospels to make sense. One of the requirements faced by those who reject Q is to explain where the Gospels are coming from. Some would deny that the Synoptics represent any current or longstanding sect on the scene, but are little more than freestanding allegories, a kind of literary exercise among various related authors, though it would be hard in this case to pin down what they are allegories of and what purpose they served. If, on the other hand, they are seen more reasonably as representing an actual sectarian movement of the time preaching the imminence of the Kingdom of God and the arrival of the Son of Man as an apocalyptic judge, then the presence of a distinct body of common material within two of these Gospels (Matthew and Luke) and a similar set of ideas in another (Mark) would strongly support the likelihood of a preceding tradition in some literary form which we can label the Q document.

Without a Q, the features of the movement as laid out in the Gospels themselves would lack any perceivable headwaters. None of the teachings assigned to Q can be found in the prior (and contemporary) non-Gospel record, other than some vague similarities—so-called “echoes” of Jesus’ words—unattributed to anyone within the movement reflected in the epistles and other non-canonical documents. We would be left with assigning such teachings to the Gospel writers (mostly Matthew), drawn from sources and precedents, some of them commonplace, all over the Jewish and pagan map. The Gospel Son of Man would seem to have come out of nowhere, a product of the evangelists’ imaginations, since reference to such a figure is completely lacking in the epistles. And so on. 

Of course, mainstream scholarship has traditionally maintained that the emergence in the Gospels of all the alleged traditions about Jesus’ words and deeds was a product of oral transmission, though this would require that such traditions had been lying in some kind of eclipse during the period when most of the epistles were written—or at least had lain in their background but never to be expressed by any writer. Incredible in itself, this ‘solution’ no longer works, however, because the Synoptics can now be seen as not full of oral traditions emerging from some intervening silence, but rather of scenes artificially constructed out of scripture. Mark and his redactors seem to be creating out of whole cloth, with no traditions, oral or otherwise, to draw on. 

If, theoretically speaking, a truly convincing case were put forward demonstrating a workable alternative to Q (and I am not persuaded that such a thing is possible, given the pervasive problems involved in the Luke used Matthew scenario), we would still be facing much the same dichotomy between the early Christian components. The epistolary record of the Pauline type of Christ cult would still be lacking all sign of the Galilean scene and its teaching message—beyond simply the imminent arrival of the Kingdom, which virtually every Jewish-oriented sect on the first century scene shared. The Gospel ethos, while now containing an atonement death and resurrection story, would still be missing the elevated christology of the epistles: Christ as the creating and sustaining force of the universe, his pre-existence, Paul’s concept of baptism into Christ, the ‘body-of-Christ’ and ‘Christ-in-you’ concepts. 

If Luke had copied Matthew and there was no Q to reflect the content of a preceding sectarian movement, then we have all the teaching material otherwise assigned to Q as the product of one man, the author of the Gospel of Matthew, and the basic outlay of the story of Jesus as the product of another single man, the author of the Gospel of Mark. I have pointed out inherent problems in such a scenario, in that Matthew as the author of the Q material does not ring true for the personality of Matthew elsewhere in the Gospel. Moreover, we now have a specific body of Matthean material which not only fails to reflect the editorial interests of the rest of Matthew, but is missing all reference to a death and resurrection or salvific role for its Jesus figure. We also have distinctive redactional features which Q scholars like John Kloppenborg have identified within that block of material, namely clear signs of editing and textual evolution which Matthew could not have been responsible for if we were dealing simply with a subset of his Gospel creation. See, for example, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, p.362-3, and especially the analysis of the Dialogue between Jesus and John (Lk/Q 7:18-35), p.369f, which can be seen—and scholars like John Kloppenborg do—as a composite creation at a later stage, employing earlier disparate elements. In summary, from p.374: 

The very fact that such analyses as the foregoing can be made about many of the passages assigned to Q is a proof of the integrity of the theory. The structural features, the stratigraphy, the clear indications of evolving interpretation and redaction over time: such things could only arise in the context of a distinct document whose textual history could entail all these things. (We could call it Q’s ‘moons of Jupiter.’) The alternative, that all these passages with their unique features of evolution and redaction were the original creation of Matthew, to be copied by Luke, is not feasible. These processes had to be independent of and precede Matthew. 

On the other hand, let’s say for the sake of argument that Luke did copy this block of material from Matthew, something which Matthew derived from an outside source which—since we now wouldn’t need any further explanation for the common wording between the two—could have been an oral body of material that had developed prior to Matthew’s time within a kingdom-preaching sect. What would we end up with? We would end up with the same situation as with a literary Q, only in this case it’s an ‘oral Q.’ (Or maybe it is literary, with only Matthew having had access to it.) We still have a witness to a pre-Gospel phase of belief which is totally divorced from the cultic side of things as in Paul, and one which shows no sign of a dying and rising Messiah. It might be a little more difficult to clearly demonstrate the lack of an historical founder behind Matthew’s source if it were oral, since we would be having to deal with a text, as a rendering of the oral source, that was Matthew’s product. But the end result for the mythicist case would essentially be the same in its most important aspects, in regard to the fate of Christianity as we know it.

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Thomas writes:

   I was wondering if you had addressed the arguments of G.J. Goldberg on the authenticity of Josephus's Testimonium.

“In 1995 a discovery was published that brought important new evidence to the debate over the Testimonium Flavianum. For the first time it was pointed out that Josephus’ description of Jesus showed an unusual similarity with another early description of Jesus. It was established statistically that the similarity was too close to have appeared by chance. Further study showed that Josephus’ description was not derived from this other text, but rather that both were based on a Jewish-Christian “gospel” that has since been lost. For the first time, it has become possible to prove that the Jesus account cannot have been a complete forgery and even to identify which parts were written by Josephus and which were added by a later interpolator.”http://www.josephus.org/testimonium.htm

 and

"In this article the Testimonium is shown to be a close rewording of a text that also appears in the Book of Luke. This modification of a source while respecting peculiarities and difficult phrases can be explained as Josephus' standard method of working, but cannot be explained as the normal manner of composing a Jesus story by later Christian writers. The conclusion is that the account in the Antiquities is almost entirely the work of Josephus, based on a Christian proselytizing document that was in circulation circa the year 90." http://www.josephus.org/GoldbergJosephusLuke1995.pdf

    What does this mean for the historicity of Jesus? Is the Testimonium authentic, an interpolation, or what? What do you think?

Response to Thomas:

G. J. Goldberg on the Authenticity of Josephus' Testimonium

I was aware of Goldberg’s proposal, but I considered it over-stated. The similarity relates only to the first sentence, in which statements are made whose commonality (such as it is) could be simple coincidence due to their basic nature. But Goldberg’s biggest failing is that he apparently has overlooked the possibility that whoever forged the Testimonium was (consciously or unconsciously) drawing to some extent on the Lukan scene, familiar to him from the Gospel. If the interpolator was Eusebius (or any other scribe), familiarity with Luke’s Road to Emmaus scene could be expected.

Goldberg also fails to attempt an explanation for why Josephus would be drawing on some Christian document that Luke also drew on. Besides, Luke would hardly need to do so for that kind of basic information, and one can be sure Goldberg’s postulated common source document would not have contained any road to Emmaus setting. Moreover, it would necessarily have been brief, since Josephus contains so little of it.

Perhaps I could or should have dealt with Goldberg’s proposal in my new book, but I had set it aside years earlier as too weak to be seriously considered and did not think of it. In any case, I don't think it has achieved much traction.

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Walt writes:   

   I'm a member of the Jesus Mysteries group, and I also am currently in the middle of your new book. Currently, I'm in a discussion on Farrell Till's Errancy list with an individual who has characterized the mythicists position as one that claims early Christians "knew Jesus was a myth" and "were lying and knew they were lying" when they claimed he was historical.
   I have asked him to name me the mythicists who claim such a thing, since I have read Wells, Freke & Gandy, Robert Price, and currently your work and have not seen any claim that early Christians knew they were lying about anything, or believed that Jesus was a myth. I have stated that early Christians, including Paul, viewed Jesus as a real being who lived in the spiritual realm. Not that they believed Jesus was a myth.  
   Also, how would you classify the goal of Mythicists: to show that Jesus WAS a myth, or to simply show that there is no evidence Jesus was a historical figure, and was LIKELY a myth?

Response to Walt:

Were Early Christians “Lying”--or only Modern Mythicists!

You are correct in maintaining that no mythicist puts forward the idea that early Christians were deliberately lying about the Gospel figure, knowing that he had never existed. I don't know where he got that idea, certainly not from me, although this is typical of a certain type of HJ defender, in that he considers the mythicist theory so horrifying and impossible (without actually investigating it, of course) that he can only conceive of mythicists being deliberate charlatans.

However, you may be using the terminology a little misleadingly. To say that “Jesus was a myth” is really just saying that he never existed as an historical figure. It’s a bit colloquial. I prefer to say that the early Christ “was a mythical figure” and his death and resurrection were “mythical events.” This says that he and they existed and took place in a non-physical dimension, not on earth.

For myself, I would say that I have sought to demonstrate that the early Christian Christ WAS a mythical figure, operating in the heavenly world, and that this can be shown by the record itself. Not that since there is no evidence he was an historical figure (I would put it that such evidence is weak and severely compromised, and trumped by stronger evidence to the contrary) he was then “likely” non-existent.

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Krystian writes:   

   I have read some of your texts with interest and I agree with many of your points. What I would like to discuss is the question of the creation of the Gospels in the second century. I find the arguments for their second century origin (based on the lack of earlier references) quite convincing. However, certain online Christian apologists such as J. P. Holding (and others, such as one Jan Lewandowski from my country - Poland) have responded saying that the references to works of Tacitus Annals are also much later than the time of his life and the work is also anonymous just like the Gospels), however nobody denies that it was written by Tacitus. How may one respond to such an argument? I know that there is proof of early references to the works of Tacitus such as the Histories but is it so in the case of the Annals?

Response to Krystian:

Dating the Gospels in the Second Century and J. P. Holding's Appeal to Tacitus

I will not try here to get into the complex question about a 2^nd century origin for the Gospels (since this is not the focus of Krystian’s question), except to say that I find most of the arguments for dating all the Gospels post-130 too problematic and less than convincing. (As my readers may know, I would date the earliest version of Mark around 90, with the others, again in their earliest versions, following at various times before perhaps 125.) But I will point out that Krystian’s appeal to the lack of earlier references to the Gospels should not be regarded as an indication that they could not have existed earlier. If Mark and to a great extent those who redacted him (Matthew and Luke, and even John) were composing their stories largely as allegories, not intended to represent actual history, an intervening period of a few decades between their composition and when they were disseminated across the wider Christian world as constituting newly-perceived history—only at which time would they tend to be attested to—would be quite understandable. 

Krystian mentions J. P. Holding’s counter-argument of choice, that just because something is not attested to for a long period doesn’t mean it didn’t exist earlier, is backed by an appeal to the case of Tacitus, whose Annals are accepted as existing earlier (because they are regarded as authentic to him) and yet lacked attestation until much later. (Part of Krystian’s statement above is confusing in seeming to say that the Annals is “anonymous” like the Gospels, but I won’t try to unravel that.) While I might hate to give him that credit, Holding’s argument and his comparison with Tacitus can have some validity in general principle, as long as one has a reasonably possible explanation for the intervening silence, as I have just demonstrated in regard to the Gospels. 

However, the comparison is in more specific respects not all that happy, in that the failure of later Roman historians to employ or quote from the Annals in areas where they might have done so would hardly be of the same caliber as the pervasive silence on the Gospels which spans their traditional dating (between 70 and 100) and their first clear attestation as historical documents by Justin in the 150s. Failure by other Romans to quote Tacitus’ Annals is not as eyebrow-raising as the consistent failure of so many early Christian writers for so long to appeal to biographies (or even oral traditions!) of their own divine founder and the events of his life and death on earth—if Mark was indeed meant to represent history and could be dated as early as 70, let alone dated even earlier (along with other Gospels), as many conservative champions have tried to do. 

In regard to Tacitus, it is, however, another matter entirely when one recognizes that no Christian writer before the 5^th century appeals to the key 15:44 passage of the Annals in which a Neronian persecution of Christians as accused arsons in the Great Fire of Rome is recounted, along with mention of their founder “Christus crucified by Pilate.” That includes Tertullian who had a fixation on the topic of martyrdom, and Eusebius who was concerned with recounting the martyrdoms of renowned figures like Peter and Paul and James the Just. That silence, the centuries-long period of non-attestation to the Christians/Christus passage in the Annals, should indeed go a long way to spelling its non-existence over that period. And in fact, even in the 5^th century, the appearance of something resembling the Tacitus account in Sulpicius Severus does not cite Tacitus as its source, nor does it include the reference to Christus crucified by Pilate. There is thus scope for postulating that the Severus passage was not drawn from the Annals but from some Christian invention which subsequently served as the basis for an interpolation into 15:44. Clear attestation to this alleged ‘non-Christian witness to Jesus’ can be dated no earlier than the 9^th century. 

To get back more specifically to Krystian’s question, there are a fair number of attestations to other works of Tacitus throughout the period between their composition and Renaissance times, but strangely enough not for the Annals. (For a complete listing, see C. W. Mendell, Tacitus: The Man and his Work, p.225f.) However, we do have a reference in Jerome to the existence of the Annals in a ‘boxed set’ with the Histories, though no quote from them. Mendell considers that Jerome may not actually have read them. 

This silence for three centuries (at least) on the part of Christian commentators about the content we now find in Annals 15:44 is often explained away by suggesting that the works of Tacitus, or any other Roman historian, would not have been common reading material among Christians. But Tertullian, Jerome and others show knowledge of other works by Tacitus, yet in discussions of the Christian history of martyrdom, no appeal is ever made to Tacitus’ account of the dramatic and horrifying Neronian persecution. It is hard to believe, regardless of regular Christian reading material, that an account of such a dramatic event in Christian history, indeed the elimination of a vast portion of the Christian community in the capital of the empire, would have remained for centuries under the radar of every extant commentator.

This observation almost becomes inconsequential, however, when set against the fact that no Christian writer during those three centuries ever clearly refers to that Neronian persecution per se, simply as something present in Christian tradition, regardless of whether they knew the Annals account or not. This state of affairs can hardly be disposed of through J. P. Holding’s counter, for such a silence is so incredible that we can logically conclude that the event never took place, and that the passage in the Annals cannot be authentic to Tacitus who lived within a generation of the Great Fire itself. Other historians of the period, such as Suetonius and Cassius Dio, when recounting the fire, impute its responsibility to Nero himself and make no mention of any Christian involvement as arsonists or persecution on such an account. This angle on the matter essentially demolishes the 15:44 ‘Christian’ passage and with it the alleged Tacitean witness to an historical Jesus. I devote a long chapter in Jesus: Neither God Nor Man to a discussion of it.

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Dave writes:

   Earl, in your article do you mean to suggest that this phrase "born of woman under the law" may have been an interpolation as a direct challenge or "correction" to the non-human Christ of Marcion?

Response to Dave:

“Born of Woman, born under the Law” As an Interpolation

Yes. In The Jesus Puzzle (1999) I largely avoided significantly addressing the option that “born of woman, born under the law” was simply an interpolation, preferring to interpret it in a ‘mythical’ fashion as authentic to Paul. In more recent work, especially in my new book “Jesus: Neither God Nor Man” I give equal time to the option of interpolation, and in fact do now lean in that direction. Bart Ehrman's work would lend some weight to that option. He notes that there is manuscript evidence of later tampering with the “born of woman, born under the law” original (whether Paul's or an earlier interpolation).

My chapter on “born of woman, born under the Law” in the new book is a reworking of the website article No. 15—which you are seemingly referring to—for the purpose of greater clarity of argument. I do not know if the interpolator was directly countering Marcion, or simply the growing trend in the first half of the 2nd century to recasting the newly-introduced Gospel Jesus as not a fully human man, which Marcion was not the only one championing.