I recently posted on Eric Zuesse’s Christ’s Ventriloquists: The Event that Created Christianity with a link to David Hamilton’s views of the book. The book also comes with nice endorsements from Richard Dawkins and James Crossley and others.
The author had sought a similar endorsement from me and I sent him my conclusion of his thesis:
Given the assumptions on which your thesis rests, it is a consistent and valid argument.
So when David Hamilton finds the thesis interesting but not quite convincing, and when other readers, scholars and non-specialists, find the book’s thesis likewise interesting, I can understand and respect where they are coming from, and to some extent I share their viewpoint. I am quite open to the possibility that some of the assumptions underlying the author’s case — assumptions shared by many scholars, too — will eventually prove to be established certainties. But I’m not ready to take that leap yet.
Unfortunately Eric Zuesse turned upon me with some hostility when, after pressing me to spell out the reasons for my reservations about his thesis, I attempted to clarify why I was not ready to accept the assumptions upon which he builds his argument. So I have little personal interest in writing a formal review for Eric’s sake now, but readers know my stake in this argument and can judge the following in that light.
I post here my criticisms of Eric Zuesse’s book that I wrote him under pressure from him to explain my reluctance to embrace his thesis. Keep in mind that this was written at at time I was attempting to avoid offending Eric who was becoming increasingly acerbic in his replies. But I give most space to trying to clarify what I think is the essence of his own viewpoint and how the studies of Christian origins should be pursued.
First, here is the book’s introductory outline of its argument:
Christ’s Ventriloquists is a work of investigative history. It documents and describes Christianity’s creation-event, in the year 49 or 50, in Antioch (present-day Antakya, Turkey), 20 years after Jesus had been crucified in Jerusalem for sedition against Roman rule. On this occasion, Paul broke away from the Jewish sect that Jesus had begun, and he took with him the majority of this sect’s members; he convinced these people that Jesus had been a god, and that the way to win eternal salvation in heaven is to worship him as such. Paul here explicitly introduced, for the first time anywhere, the duality of the previously unitary Jewish God, a duality consisting of the Father and the Son; and he implicitly introduced also the third element of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost.
This work also explains and documents the tortuous 14-year-long conflict Paul had had with this sect’s leader, Jesus’s brother James, a conflict which caused Paul, in about the year 50, to perpetrate his coup d’état against James, and to start his own new religion: Christianity.
Then, this historical probe documents that the four canonical Gospel accounts of the words and actions of “Jesus” were written decades after Jesus, by followers of Paul, not by followers of Jesus; and that these writings placed into the mouth of “Jesus” the agenda of Paul. Paul thus effectively became, via his followers, Christ’s ventriloquist.
A work such as this can be documented and produced only now, after the development (during the past 70 years) of modern legal/forensic methodology. Previously, the only available methods, which scholars have used, simply assumed the honesty-of-intent of all classical documents, especially of canonical religious ones, such as Paul’s epistles, and the Four Gospels. Only now is it finally possible to penetrate deeper than that, to reach the writer’s intent, and not merely his assertions, and to identify when this intent is to deceive instead of to inform. Whereas scholars have been able to discuss only the truth or falsity of particular canonical statements, it is now possible to discuss also the honesty or deceptiveness of individual statements. This opens up an unprecedented new research tool for historians, and Christ’s Ventriloquists is the first work to use these new methods to reconstruct, on this legal/forensic basis, not just how crimes took place, but how and why major historical events (criminal or not), such as the start of Christianity, actually occurred.
The author explains: “What I am doing in this work is to reconstruct from the New Testament the crucial events that produced it, without assuming whether what the NT says in any given passage is necessarily true or even honest. Instead of treating the NT as a work that ‘reports history,’ the NT is treated as a work whose history is itself being investigated and reported. Its origin goes back to this coup d’état that Paul perpetrated in Antioch in the year 49 or 50 against Jesus’s brother James in Jerusalem, whom Jesus in Jerusalem had appointed in the year 30 as his successor to lead the Jewish sect that Jesus had started. The Gospel accounts of ‘Jesus’ reflected Paul’s coup d’état – not actually Jesus, who would be appalled at the Christian concept of ‘Christ.’ That concept was radically different from the Jewish concept of the messiah, and Paul knew this when he created it.”
I always have a problem when I see someone purporting to write history comparing his or her efforts with those of the legal profession. Wasn’t it a lawyer, Frank Morison, who was able to use his legal training to prove that Jesus really rose from the dead in Who Moved the Stone?
My initial response was this:
My position is more closely aligned with the old Dutch radicals who questioned the authenticity and integrity of the Pauline epistles. [This was November 2010 — I am less inclined to the position of the Dutch radical school now]. That is, if we rely on external controls for verification, on the understanding that self-witness of a narrative alone is insufficient to establish authenticity, then we have no certainty that the Pauline letters were composed earlier than the second century. They are first testified as belonging to Marcionite and other “unorthodox” Christianities. Further, when we find them discussed by the likes of Tertullian, it often appears that neither he nor his opponents did not know the letters in the form in which we have them today. It appears they have been subject to a series of redactions that reflect theological/political power struggles of the second and third centuries.
To extend the courtroom analogy, no witness is accepted solely on his own claims about his own identity and story. There has to be some external control for the court to be satisfied that the witness really is the person he is claiming to be. This is especially important in the case of early Christian literature which is well-known for its use of pseudonyms. Additionally, Christian schools traced their foundings back through legendary/mythical genealogies of teachers or apostles.
Rosenmeyer has written an exploration of the way epistolary literature was often used to create or propagate fiction in the ancient world. Scholars who argue for the authenticity of just seven of the Pauline epistles do so with circular logic. They identify a common emotional thread through those seven, then say that Paul had that emotional disposition, so these letters are genuinely Pauline, but the reason we know Paul had that disposition is because he expresses it in his letters! All the common emotional thread legitimately tells us is that a common school of thought was behind the core of the letters as we know them today.
A substantial amount of mainstream biblical scholarship is based on such circular fallacies. Whenever I mention external controls to biblical scholars, and the circular reasoning on which their hypotheses rest, some of them become very offended and hostile towards me.
So my position is that given the assumptions on which your thesis rests, it is a consistent and valid argument.
All the best with it,
Eric responded with the quite correct claim that Paul’s letter to the Galatians is considered by scholars to be the gold standard of evidence concerning the start of Christianity. He added that my argument (above) would, in his view, nullify Sophocles’ plays just as much as Paul’s letters. More than that, if I was starting from a position that questioned the soundness of using the text of Galatians as a historical source for the events of early Christianity, then I would be “nullifying practically all of ancient ‘history’.”
My response:
I often hear criticism along these lines, but this criticism misses the point of the original argument: In the case of other literature we have independent external corroboration for the existence of certain authors and events. We have nothing but self-testimony in the case of Paul’s letters. Far from undermining the historical enterprise, a few biblical scholars themselves have pointed out the circular fallacies that are accepted among mainstream biblical scholars. The “revolution” within Old Testament studies has begun (if not in the US so much, though) to bring OT studies in line with normative principles of historical inquiry, but the same methods have yet to make the first dent on NT studies.
We hit a brick wall at this point. Zuesse did not see how my view undermined what he had already said. He believed I was being very “shoddy” in the way I was supposedly “dismissing” and “casually rejecting” scholarship. I was directed to read his introduction on methodology. I will attempt here to highlight the main points of Zuesse’s methodology with a few extracts that I hope will be acceptable within the bounds of fair use.
Eric Zuesse’s Methodology
Eric Zuesse stresses the uniqueness of his approach. It is quite unlike anything biblical scholars have attempted, he says:
[T]his book is not like others about history . . . . The reader will therefore be reading history here in a different way – the way that a jury reconstructs, from the evidence, a history of how and why and when and where, and by whom, a crime was committed, and renders a verdict saying that this is the history (of the crime), and that any other alleged account (of this event) should be considered to be partly or wholly fictional, on the basis of the evidence. However, a verdict is rendered not only on the basis of the evidence; it’s rendered also on the basis of the methodology, which here is legal/forensic methodology – what’s used in courts of law in democratic countries. Legal/forensic methodology is the scientific methodology for reconstructing history from evidence; and, on this basis, you, as a juror, will be reading, directly from the evidence, the actual history – no mere story, no fiction at all – the event that, in fact, started Christianity.
Being a responsible juror requires immense attention and care, far more than does simply reading a mere narrative “history” of an alleged event. In the present instance, investigating what might possibly have been the biggest deception in all of history requires a degree of intellectual concentration which will greatly sharpen the mind. Anyone who is prepared to engage in such an analysis will find the process itself to be rewarding, not only because of the new information and understandings which result, but also because the methodology, that’s used in this discovery, possesses wide applications, far outside courtrooms. A skill in recognizing liars (and their lies) protects one against deception, no matter what the particular subject might happen to be; and this increases one’s intellectual capacities. . . . .
At the end of his book Zuesse explains why the canonical gospels are dismissed as worthless evidence for Christian origins. At best they are recollections of witnesses and recollections are notoriously unreliable. Sometimes witnesses even lie. A professional magician’s job is to routinely deceive people into thinking they are witnessing something other than what is really happening. Besides, the gospels were written to persuade people to convert to Christianity so they cannot be considered objective history.
So, on many major grounds, no reasonable person would assume the Gospels to be historical accounts of how Christianity started. . . . .
I suspect Zuesse’s criticisms of the gospels can at some level apply as much to the letters of Paul, yet he believes his totally new method is able to cut through those problems there to get to the truth.
Zuesse certainly sees his book as a radical pioneering way to reach the real truth about how Christianity started. He can even uncover the intentions of persons of long ago:
In order to achieve an authentically historical account of Christianity’s start, we shall here rely upon new methodological advancements for examining evidence: advancements which developed after World War II in courtrooms in democratic countries throughout the world, during trials of white-collar crimes, where the evidence has (like the evidence about Christianity’s start) consisted largely of documents – which in these cases were memos, e-mails, etc. – and where the motives of the authors of those documents have been as much the focus of investigation as were the allegations which those people made in those documents. For example, sometimes, in order to reconstruct, from evidence, a sequence of events – or a “history” – that can explain how a given contract came to be written the way it is, misrepresentations are crucial to identify in the prior communications between the two negotiants, and the intentions (and not merely the words) of the writers are crucial for the court to interpret accurately. Sometimes, it’s necessary to get beyond merely what the words say, and to reach the mental state and intentions of people, in order to become enabled to reconstruct a history accurately, from a given body of evidence, and so to explain the contract or other outcome.
This has been done here, concerning the start of Christianity. The documentary evidence, in this case, has been explored, identifying not only what it says, but also what the agendas of the individual writers were. . . .
New Testament scholars are a poor lot compared with those of the legal profession. Lawyers know far more about how to do history and science than theologians:
Simply put, the procedures that courts employ, at each and every step of the way, in order to separate fact from fiction, are far more careful, and far more bound by rules to exclude forged or otherwise bogus “evidence” from being considered and from misinforming and thus misleading jurors, so that to prove a case in court is vastly more challenging, and far more bound by the rules of science, than merely a scholar’s routine, regardless of how sophisticated the latter might be. . . . .
The reader of this history thus experiences here the first-ever scientific analysis of the evidence concerning Christianity’s start: a scientific reconstruction of history . . . .
Nonetheless, Zuesse accepts the consensus of theologians as his starting point:
Scholars widely recognize that the authentic letters (or “epistles”) of Paul in the New Testament were the earliest-written parts of the New Testament, and were written before the Gospels – the parts in the New Testament which describe Jesus. This consensus has been accepted here.
Zuesse explains why he accepts this consensus of theologians while rejecting their interpretations of Galatians:
The reason that the present work accepts scholars’ consensus opinions regarding the authenticity and approximate dates of documents, even while barring use of scholars’ opinions about the meaning of those documents, is that these are two very different subjects, from a legal/forensic standpoint, and that a court of law in a democracy makes a clear distinction between these two competencies and admits into evidence the opinions of experts regarding authentication and dating of documents, but not regarding the meaning of documents – which is left for the jury to determine.
Furthermore, no reason exists to reject the consensus opinions of scholars regarding the authenticity and dating of these documents. If an acceptance of this evidentiary consensus failed to produce a legal/forensically sound solution to the problem of how Christianity started, then the necessity would exist to repudiate that scholarly consensus and to explain why, and to provide and document an alternative theory to explain when and by whom these documents were created, before formulating and presenting in court a theory of the case. Fortunately, that did not happen here. A consensus of scholars can therefore be accepted as authoritative regarding the authentication and approximate dating of these documents.
That sounds a bit like saying that a method is validated if it gives us a result we are looking for. I can understand why lawyers would consider this principle to be valid, but here we are dealing with historical manuscripts with nothing but their self-witness to authenticate them and with no way of testing any of their claims or relevance against living witnesses or victims.
Zuesse continues with a train of thought that demonstrates little acquaintance with philosophical discussions among historians on the nature of history:
As a general rule, the aim of science is to solve problems, whereas the aim of scholarship is to preserve problems. When a problem is solved, this solution becomes, in turn, a tool to solve the next frontier of problems, and so science makes progress. If, however, the solution is found to be deficient, then more research is done on the original problem, and so a better (more accurate) solution is found, which, in turn, becomes a better tool to solve the problems at the new frontier. However, only science can solve problems. Thus, if a problem in a scholarly field is ever solved, it’s solved by means of introducing science to that field, and the scholarly field is gradually abandoning scholarship, and adopting science instead. This is what has been happening when scholars more accurately date documents in the New Testament. No longer is the scholarly prejudice that favors the priority of the canonical Gospels being accepted. Instead, scientific means of authenticating and dating documents are applied. Until the present instance, scientific means of interpreting documents have not been applied within the traditional fields of scholarship. The chief epistemological purpose of this work is to introduce science to the interpretation of these documents.
So scholars use “scientific methods” to establish the authenticity and dates of ancient documents? They use carbon-14 to date Paul’s letters? Or course not. I recently posted one scholar’s observation that his New Testament peers do NOT use “scientific methods” to date the Gospels — or for that matter, even the letters of Paul: See Scientific and Unscientific Dating of the Gospels.
Zuesse accepts scholarly “scientific” views for the dating of the works of Paul (without explaining what those “scientific methods” are), but faults scholars for taking Paul at face value when he alleged to be a follower of Jesus:
Paul’s assertions alleging himself to be a follower of Jesus (such as his repeated statements that he was an “apostle” of Jesus), are taken at face-value by virtually all scholars but the work you’re now reading will assume neither that he was, nor that he wasn’t, and will conclude, from the best evidence of all, which is Paul’s authentic letters, that, during the period of his life (late in his career) when he was writing these letters, he definitely wasn’t a follower of Jesus, but that he was instead an enemy of the sect of Jews which Jesus had established – an enemy who had departed from this sect in the year 49 or 50, with the intention to replace it by an entirely new religion, which Paul designed specifically to satisfy the Roman Imperial regime that had executed Jesus.
Zuesse argues that the four Gospels and whole of the New Testament were all written by enemies of Jesus — Paul and his followers — and not by followers of Jesus.
Zuesse believes his method trumps anything produced by biblical scholars because he knows how to discern and rely upon the “best” evidence — a method lost to the biblical scholars. This is why he relies upon Galatians as “evidentiary gold” for his argument. For the first time ever, valid methods that can only come from lawyers will be applied to the epistle of Galatians and reveal at last the true origins of Christianity:
A court presents to the jury not (as scholars are accustomed to doing via huge bibliographies and numerous footnotes) the largest quantity of evidence regarding a particular matter, but instead the highest quality of evidence regarding any specific question. For example, DNA evidence trumps witness testimony, and that’s why many convicts have been released from death rows after the advent of DNA testing. . . . Similarly, the best-evidence rule is employed so as to winnow out evidentiary gold from evidentiary chaff, to avoid contaminating jurors’ judgment by less reliable “evidence” which prejudices rather than informs judgments. . . .
Paul’s letter to the Galatians is widely considered by scholars to be the best evidence regarding early Christianity. That consensus also is accepted here. Not only is Galatians accepted as direct witness testimony to the events it describes (which, for example, the Gospels were formerly widely thought to be, but no longer are: they’re second- or third-hand accounts at most, just hearsay), but, as The Oxford Companion to the Bible stated in 1993, “None of the letters bearing Paul’s name is so indubitably his as Galatians. Galatians is, indeed, the criterion by which the authenticity of other letters ascribed to him is gauged.”
If any of the evidence (either inside or outside the New Testament) that concerns earliest Christianity is authentic, it’s Paul’s letter to the Galatians. This is thus the strongest foundation upon which to build an authentic history of Christianity.
A legal/forensic analysis of Christianity’s origin will therefore be based upon that document, the best evidence. And under its first-ever legal/forensic analysis, Galatians will, indeed, reveal how, when, where, why, and by whom, Christianity started.
Eric Zuesse thus assures his readers that by following a much narrower range of evidence than is normally found in scholarly works, they are in fact following along with the best evidence, and will as much as possible be reading the facts “directly from Paul’s testimony” instead of reading “third-hand from what some pre-selected group of ‘experts’ . . . say he meant”. (I understand Zuesse to be explaining that our choice is between a pre-selected group of experts and a self-appointed expert.)
Zuesse embraces the assumptions of New Testament scholars that suit his purposes, however. He “knows” as well as New Testament scholars apparently do the respective audiences of the letters and gospels, and which of these documents experienced checks from people interested in assuring their historical accuracy. He also “knows” Paul was writing in a context of peoples who had known and followed the historical Jesus:
Those seven letters from Paul are considered by scholars to be the earliest-written of all Christian documents, and the ones written closest to Jesus. Unlike all other documents in the New Testament, only these seven were written to an audience of people who were living during the time when Jesus’s disciples – the people who had known Jesus personally, and who had heard him speak – were still around to comment about Jesus, and about the veracity of what these seven documents were saying about him and about his authentic disciples. All other documents in the New Testament were written for readers who had no way to verify them – no one to consult who could say, with any credibility, whether they were true or false, or what in them was true, and what was not. . . . .
the writer of Paul’s letters knew that anything he said which was blatantly false about Jesus and about what Jesus’s religion was, would be exposed as false by representatives sent from Jesus’s followers in Jerusalem, people who had known Jesus while Jesus was alive.
Thus, these letters from Paul are in a class by themselves, far more reliable than any other New Testament documents or than any other evidence regarding Christianity’s start.
Zuesse explains that his method is to “start with the first line of Galatians and proceed forward, line-by-line, until we reach the climax, toward which each of those earlier lines has been building.” And it is this climax — 2:11-21 — that will be Paul’s account of the event that started Christianity.
As he exegetes each line he will sometimes turn to other letters of Paul to clarify a point. Thus “Paul is used to interpret Paul”. What is different about Eric Zuesse’s exegisis is that it is “the first-ever legal/forensic exegesis of Galatians“. This makes “all the difference” in not only what the findings are, but in how reliable they are. Since his argument will be based on the “best available evidence” — that is Galatians — we will have a more certain claim to know how Christianity really started.
But I do wholeheartedly agree with Zuesse’s observation of the way New Testament scholars have generally approached the study of Christian origins when he writes:
. . . . virtually every “historian” until now has chosen to use the four canonical Gospels, plus Acts, in order to formulate their theory of “The Birth of Christianity” (a common phrase for these, essentially, retellings of myths; they’re not actual histories of Christianity’s start), and then has used the seven authentic Pauline epistles (if at all) only to fill in details of their thesis which has been formulated upon the basis of the Gospels and Acts. They formulate their theory of the case upon the basis of the later documents (such as Acts), and then add to that dubious “historical” reconstruction some details from the earlier evidence (such as Galatians). So, they have chosen to start with the Christian myth.
That’s true. As anthropologists Claude Lévi-Strauss or Philippe Wajdenbaum would say, all these scholars have done is to write another version of the myth of Christian origins.
Eric Zuesse claims his interpretation is superior to anything presented till now because it is based exclusively upon the “most reliable” evidence and uses the forensic methods applied to documents in criminal trials after the Second World War.
[T]he thesis in the present work is formulated from only the seven widely-viewed-by-scholars as being the highest-quality items of evidence, which are the generally-agreed-as-authentic letters from Paul; and the canonical Gospels and Acts are employed here solely to fill in more details of that thesis. This procedure does the most that can possibly be done to avoid using tampered-with or otherwise unreliable “evidence” as the basis for reconstructing history from the available body of evidence.
So much for all the work of scholars who have published on the evidence for the way that Galatians itself has been tampered with, interpolated, redacted, and so forth. So much the worse for the scholarly observation that the very notion that Paul himself really persecuted early Christians is entirely a “(proto)orthodox” Christian notion that is nowhere to be found among its “heretical” rivals. So much the worse for more recent scholarly research into literary analysis that has offered us good reason to see Galatians as a well-crafted stylistic work that can only be accepted as a genuinely personal outpouring of emotion and autobiography on a naïve reading that is ignorant of the conventions of ancient literature.
Sorry, Eric, but the Nuremburg-trials model does not necessarily work when applied to the question of Christian origins.
The fallacy or Eric Zuesse’s method is surely becoming apparent:
The reliability-ranking of evidence, prior to the interpretation of evidence, is crucial in this process. Thus, for example: One can reasonably ask whether an allegation in Acts supports Galatians, but one cannot reasonably ask whether an allegation in Galatians supports Acts.
Zuesse fails to see that Galatians is just as much an historical literary artifact as is Acts. The letter-genre does not change this simple fact. (Hence my Rosenmeyer reference above.) On what basis can we opt to claim that the self-testimony of one is genuine (that is, it is really written by the one whose name appears at the opening, that this name is really the name of the real author and the author of other documents we have in hand, that it is really a spontaneous letter to address a situation that is genuinely historical, that there is an honest link between this letter and the Christian church that we see emerging one or two hundred years later, etc etc) while the self-testimony of the other is suspect?
Unfortunately for Zuesse, he relies upon New Testament scholars for far more information than he is prepared to admit.
My Response
I replied:
I certainly did read your work before responding as I did.
I can only repeat that my views are hardly my own idiosyncratic quirks, but are based squarely on the work of biblical scholars themselves such as the Dutch radicals and the principles enunciated by the contemporary “Copenhagen school” — and are consistent with normative secular historical methodologies.
Thomas L. Thompson is hardly a lightweight when it comes to historical methodology, and he is beginning at last to address New Testament assumptions, too, by bringing over the same principles one finds among classical and ancient historians into the realm of New Testament studies just as he and a handful of others initiated with Old Testament studies a couple of decades ago. I mention him as only one example, but certainly one of the most well-known and reputable in his field.
Eric then asked me what I consider to be the “best evidence” if I don’t roll with his views. I replied:
I read your draft, and I will often discuss Christian origins within the mainstream assumptions about the Pauline letters. But that is because I have to allow for the possibility that they are “true”, so arguments relying on those assumptions are worth testing and exploring. Yours is one of these.
My preference is, however, to work with evidence as it is understood through external controls. In the case of the Pauline corpus, I find it interesting that our first external testimony to its existence appears at the same time as external witnesses first pointing to other Pauline literature — the Pastorals and the Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Acts of the Apostles. The themes of each of these suggest, furthermore, a world of ideological or theological disputes. And this is the time that Marcionism is first witnessed in the literature. This suggests to me a striving to claim ownership of Paul within a context where Paul’s authority was important. Why was Paul so important at this time? Who was he? Is there significance in his name supposedly meaning “small” and the regular references in gnostic literature to the new convert as a “small” one? What of the many echoes we read bouncing between the lives of Peter and Paul? What of the genealogies of heresy and orthodoxy and their links with one or more of the Simons? Is there anything to the view that Galatians was really written by Marcion and was the trip to Jerusalem a cipher for Marcion’s trip to Rome?
William Walker, Winsome Munro and others have argued some excellent cases for interpolations in the Pauline letters. I think many scholars who are not in the conservative camp are persuaded that the arguments of Birger Pearson (1971) and Daryl Schmidt (1983) that the 1 Thess 2:15-16 passage is an interpolation.
I don’t know. The numbers of questions (and their nature) that present themselves leave me suspending judgment.
So the position I opt for is to study the gospels and letters as works in their own right — that is, not assuming their narratives are based on historical reports, but to attempt to see what we can understand about them as literature and as theological discussions in comparison with contemporary or similar literature. What do we learn about their authors, audiences, views, from such studies?
I suspect Christianity began in much the way Judaism began — not as a inheritance from a literal Abraham and Moses, but as a response to a traumatic catastrophe or loss in collective identity and a need to establish a new identity to survive as a collective unit. In the case of Judaism, this was occasioned by the deportation and resettlement of peoples into the land of Palestine under the Persian empire to establish the province of Jehud. (We have Assyrian, Babylonian and even biblical testimony that deportees were sometimes told that they were in fact returning to the lands and/or gods of their fathers.)
In the case of Christianity, this was occasioned by the destruction of the Jewish nation by Rome. Two of the responses that attempted to deal with this crisis were Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. Gnosticism going its own way may have been a third. Christianity appears to have spun off from the Enochian and other Second Temple sectarian views (e.g. the atoning and saving blood of a literally sacrificed Isaac) that dwelt on visions, sons of God, angels, etc. Christianity’s struggle for the new identity of the “new Israel” against Rabbinic Judaism is reflected in the Gospel conflicts between Jesus and the Pharisees and Jerusalem priesthood.
This still leaves the letters of Paul and others in the NT canon hanging in limbo. That leads to the question of how they might be understood if read without gospel narrative presuppositions.
This probably sounds way off the ball, given that it is a synopsis and not an argument that covers the details.
But as I said, I am also willing to test Paul’s Galatians as a first century document and to take its contents at face value. But when I do I always have in the back of my mind the question as to why the author spoke of a Peter and a Cephas as if they are the one person within a short passage. Why use two names for the one person? And how do we account for the differences in content between the canonical Galatians and Tertullian’s commentary on it at the end of the second century? How can we be sure what we read in our NT canons is what Tertullian himself read, and more important, what the original author actually wrote? Tertullian accuses Marcion of mutilating the letter. Is he right? Or is Marcion? How can we know?
Sorry Eric, I have more questions than answers.
That is why I will probably never get around to writing a book and why in some ways I envy you! 🙂
Eric and I then bogged down a little into the question of what is meant by “historical facts”. My final response to this segment of our discussion was:
When a historian speaks of Julius Caesar he speaks of Julius Caesar as a person, a “fact” of history, and justifies this concept of “fact” on the basis of primary evidence and secondary evidence that allows for a range of probabilities.
Just picking up a collection of letters that themselves claim to be by someone and include indications they were written in a certain period, without having any means of external corroboration until a century later, when they first appear serving a very specific set of political agendas, and in an age when literary fabrications were par for the course, and then taking the claims of those letters at face value, is not a judicious way of handling them as “evidence”.
To which Eric replied that if I could not produce anything concrete about “an event” that started Christianity then I had no way of arguing for how Christianity started. That struck me as invalid. Why assume that Christianity started with ‘an event’?
To which Eric replied that if I was saying that some things are not “clearly definable” then I was repudiating science itself, since all science depends upon clear definitions.
Unfortunately the rudeness of the response around this time led me to cut off any further correspondence with Eric. The point I was trying to make was that the idea that there was “an event” that “started” Christianity is itself entirely a hypothesis. Not all major social revolutions begin with, and then snowball from, a single “event”.
I am sure if Eric has any further rejoinders to add he will do so here.
Neil Godfrey
Latest posts by Neil Godfrey (see all)
- A Historian Noticing Historical Jesus and Mythicism Debates - 2024-12-28 07:40:15 GMT+0000
- ‘Tis that time of year when . . . - 2024-12-24 05:03:20 GMT+0000
- Is Everything a Question of Probability? - 2024-12-15 03:04:03 GMT+0000
If you enjoyed this post, please consider donating to Vridar. Thanks!
It seems to me that history is continuity. Everything is connected to what came before it, and what comes after it.
Any explanation of a widespread social movement (i.e., Christianity) that relies on a single event to explain its origins, whether the Easter Big Bang or this alleged Pauline mutiny theory, seems implausible in such a light. History is not a courtroom drama with a smoking gun and a single culprit.
Eric Zuesse will defend himself, but I find it difficult to fully imagine how “an event” such as the one he describes could sustain a momentum that took over the world. The “riotous diversity” origins of mythicists like Earl Doherty have the clear edge when it comes to explaining the origins of Christianity as a social movement that spread so far and wide with such variation in the ways the record (not the orthodox narrative) indicates.
Well, it wasn’t one moment. The break from the Jerusalem community was the watershed moment, but events had been building in that direction for some time, perhaps years. According to Eric Zuesse, Paul planned the transition and gradually nudged his following into a direction which would enable him to wean them away from the Jerusalem community. Galatians shows the events and concerns of the period surrounding the break, but earlier texts also show some evidence of the recognition that Paul would find the break necessary — positioning.
Hi, again, Neil. I have come up with another example of a major historical and social movement that started from a single event. Just like with Paul, there were key events that led up to this event (the Cold War’s start) in the person’s life and which gelled into the history-shaping decision which was the event. The person in this case was Harry Truman, and the event occurred on 25 July 1945, the event that produced the Cold War and a 180-degree reversal of his predecessor FDR’s carefully worked out plan, which FDR had begun in August 1941, to produce a “United Nations” that would terminate all empires, by becoming the global all-encompassing federal democratic republic of nations, a democratic international government, which would be responsible, legislatively, juridically, and executively, for all international laws and possess no jurisdiction over any nation’s intranational or domestic laws or jurisdiction or enforcement. FDR had concluded that contesting imperialisms had created both World Wars and so must not be allowed after WW2. Starting in August 1941 he privately clashed vigorously with the imperialist Churchill about this but promptly dropped the matter as something that must not get in the way of winning WW2 and so must await that war’s end in order for FDR then to demand post-WW2 Churchill’s cooperation. Churchill’s post-WW2 plan was (at that August 1941 meeting) ONLY for a future NATO against the Soviet Union, and not at all for anything that would REPLACE any empire. On 25 July 1945, President Truman, who had not yet gelled his foreign policy, finally and decisively did, when, upon the advice of his personal hero, General Eisenhower, he accepted Churchill’s view and rejected FDR’s: Ike persuaded him that if America would not take over the world, then the Soviet Union would. 25 July 1945 was the date when Truman imperiously told Stalin that under no circumstances could he accept the legitimacy of Stalin’s “police governments” over the areas that Stalin’s forces had conquered from Hitler unless the U.S. Government would approve of their Governments. Stalin was shocked (he made no similar demand upon Truman). Stalin could hardly believe it, and for a few months did what he could to appease Truman short of complying with his demand, but before the end of 1945 recognized that there would be no possibility to carry forward the U.S.-Soviet alliance, and that Truman was just as much an enemy as Churchill was. Here is one summary of this history: https://archive.is/Fo3ou and here is a summary of that specific event: https://archive.is/jJo9a
This is not addressing my point. Of course “single events” spark other major historical events (the assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary; Hamas attack of Oct 7). You can post countless examples of that obvious fact. Before going to such lengths to write up about other historical events it would be better if you were sure you actually understood the point I was making so you would address that, and not a straw man.
“our first external testimony to its existence appears at the same time as external witnesses first pointing to other Pauline literature – the Pastorals and the Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Acts of the Apostles.”
Neil, could you expand on this? When and where do we start seeing attestations of Pauline epistles and of Paul himself? Are these the anti-Marcionite writings from the mid-second century?
Yes. The first testimonies to the knowledge of Paul are from the second century. When Paul makes his first appearance in the record he is said to be “the apostle of the heretics”, in particular the Marcionites. Marcion was the one reputed with having collected and edited the corpus of Pauline epistles.
I have written on Dennis MacDonald’s The Legend and the Apostle a few times but cannot recall if there I discussed this specifically. One point Dennis makes is that when we first see knowledge of Paul in the record he is the target of rival interpretations — Marcionism, the orthodox Pastoral Epistles and our canonical Acts, and the Acts of Paul and Thecla. Robert Price has also pointed out that the evidence for Paul makes its audition in the second century.
Other studies (I would have to look up the details to be sure I am accurate as to authorship and specific words now) have pointed to a few anachronisms in some of Paul’s letters that point to an authorship in the time of the Antonines.
Paul’s letters have been targets of second century “editing”, reflecting the controversial status of this apostle, as we can strongly suspect from works by the likes of Winsome Munro and William Walker.
Recall my recent post on Lemche’s discussion of how to date documents “scientifically”. Now external attestation is not the only factor, of course. But it is where we must start. And I can never forget Rosenmeyer’s book demonstrating the way budding authors would be taught the art of writing fictional letters that carried all the marks of authenticity.
But if Paul was such a prominent identity to be fought over ideologically in the early second century, where did his status come from? So that brings us back to an earlier generation — but then we run into the problem of the void. One does have to wonder if there is something to the arguments that the name Paul is a cipher for another who has since been excised from the record.
“Previously, the only available methods, which scholars have used, simply assumed the honesty-of-intent of all classical documents,”
So, up until the 20th Century, no scholars thought that Tacitus, Procopius, Heredotus, Livy, etc., had a line to push? Surely not!
“However, only science can solve problems.”~Eric Zuesse
I am in no way a biblical scholar. However I have been deeply interested in theology for most of my life. I am more of a philosopher than a theologian. I suppose this is why the quotation above struck me as a rather arrogant statement.
In this postmodern era of ‘technocracy’ the term “science” itself seems to have taken on a form of theocratic and dogmatic character.
As a social and cultural critic,I would also comment on the term “democracy” to ask, just exactly what Zuesse might mean by this term. I am afraid my deconstruction of Eric’s writings may be quite a bit harsher than the author of the present page.
I certainly enjoyed reading this piece, a lot of food for thought here.
~Willy Whitten
I’m glad I offered enough for others such as yourself to make up your own minds about where Eric is coming from. I have invited input and response from Eric himself.
I suppose you may be familiar with a woman named Murdoch, or Achira S. as she also goes by….{“Hi there”, she says….I always think of “Hi there sailor”…Lol}
At any rate I mention her here to try to get a quick take on what the attitude is here to spirituality__NOT religion in the organized sense, but the supposition that there may be more to the universe than simply material things.
I would imagine that there are a variety of views expressed on these pages, so to be less general, what is your take Mr Godfrey? I sense perhaps agnostic as per the religions.
If you are well known in this field and I should know better, please excuse my ignorance, as I said I am not well studied in this field. I have heard of Dawkins. I seem to recall he is a firm atheist. Is that correct, or is there more subtle ground there?
If this is too far off topic, it can go unanswered without my taking insult. I will simply read some more of the site to get acquainted.
Thanks, ww
I like Richard Dawkins and have recently posted a video of an interview with him where he addresses all the points that have made him controversial over his public statements on religion: http://vridar.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/richard-dawkins-al-jazeera-interview-on-religion/
The only point where I find myself in disagreement with him is that I believe he, like Sam Harris, has bought into the simplistic populist view that modern terrorism against Western interests is the result of the Muslim religion. If it were as simple as that we would have expected to see such terrorist activity consistently throughout all periods and regions of contact between the West and Muslims. I suspect a reason Dawkins, like so many others, has this simplistic view is because he has relied more upon mass media messages than his own study of the history, cultures and peoples of that faith. The West has seen a shift since the Second World War whereby the wide-spread anti-semitism of the pre-War years has been replaced by a bizarre kind of bifurcated anti-semitism: Jews can do no wrong (or can only do wrong through either misguided good intentions or understandable and forgivable lapses that can be forgiven and atoned for by the Holocaust) — that is, Jews have shifted from being sub-human to being something above-human in their claims for righteousness; their enemies, Arabs (the other branch of Semites) have been displaced as the “honourable Oriental” and taken the former place of the untrustworthy and sinister “other”. This latter has expressed through stereotypes of the Islamic religion. (It has taken the place of the old Cold War red menace.) Both branches of the Semitic peoples are thus “de-humanized” today — one closer to god, the other closer to the devil.
My own view of “spirituality” is that it, like “religion”, fosters an unnecessary and unhelpful anti-scientific view of things. It seems to me as if people are still clinging to some hope that there is a “mind” or such behind everything even though science has steadily been showing for generations that one “mystery” after another has a scientific explanation. I prefer to think of poetry, awe, unknowns, mystery as part of the human experience and that none of these are lost once we do discover scientific explanations for phenomena. They are actually enhanced.
As for D. Murdock (it’s with a k, not an h), I have to part company here with some mythicists I highly respect and say I do not believe she is helpful to the case of mythicism. It took me some time to confirm my suspicions that her approach is not scholarly but, “spiritual” or “mystical” — the scholarly is only a veneer, a sales pitch line. But I have always deplored the insulting and abusive attacks on her personally by others from all quarters. I have in the past steered clear of addressing her views but recently some of her supporters came here and pressured me to address their arguments. I did so, and was taken aback at the vitriolic reaction both from them and Murdock herself. I did not attack her personally but kept myself to a straight description of the content of the key book on the one topic they were all pressuring me to address, astrotheology, and one of her supporters even threatened me with legal action for my pains. I am still under pressure from others apart from her supporters to stop all discussion of her book. But I can’t see any harm in making it clear to others that there is a clear line between everything that interests me and that I am about and the views she presents.
But that’s just me at the moment.
Thank you very much for the thoughtful reply.
I asked about D, Murdock because I too find her work interesting up to a point but then see it as little more than PR when looked at more deeply.
I was taken back at one point for the very same reasons you discussed about Dawkins.
I was getting her newsletter for a time. I received one that went into what I felt was a completely jejune diatribe against “the evil Muslims”.
She was quite insulted by my reply, although I was respectful in my explanation. I have been studying the craft of Intelligence for some forty years, that is the study of this national security state, and the architecture of modern political power.
It is a bit much to go into and take up too much of your space here, but I attempted to give her some clue as to the way empire works in the real world. What is going on now with the so-called PAX Americana is the same tried and true techniques developed throughout the centuries, and rather perfected by the British Empire for a couple hundred of those years; which can be summed up as the strategy of tension under the title of the ‘British Raj’. A divide and conquer Hegelian dialectical technique of promoting the most radical elements of a society, be they ‘religious’ or ‘national political’, and using them as a wedge between the more moderate elements within cultures.
In the modern period after WWII we see this with the development of the Taliban by Western Intel, even to the point of financing their madras and publishing the text books on violent jihad, right here in the US. The interconnect between al Qaeda and Western Intel is another example of this strategy. Brzezinski himself has been quite outspoken about the US creation of al Qaeda to sucker the Soviets into a full fledged invasion of Afghanistan “to give them their Vietnam”.
But the cover story that the events of 9/11 were the result of “blowback” is just another revetment veiling the fact of the systemic use of false flag operations to justify foreign adventures.
The above is a paraphrased example of what I tried to explain to Ms Murdock. She called me a “tin-hatted conspiracy nut” {grin}.
As far as ‘spirituality’ v ‘science’ I have thoughts of my own that may diverge somewhat from yours. I think I have indicated that on another thread on the blog here.
“Science for many takes second place to metaphysics and superstition.”~Earl Doherty
Actually a great deal of “science” IS metaphysics parading as science in the postmodern era.
Consider the ‘creation myth’ of The Big Bang:
‘In the beginning there was nothing, then it exploded’.
And this idea is presented as rational by the practitioners of modern cosmology.
It should be pointed out that any discussion of a ‘pre-physical’ scenario is necessarily within the realm of “Metaphysics” as this is the very definition of the term.
How can this dilemma be escaped by the rational mind? To posit an eternal universe without beginning nor end [1≡∞]: All simply is.
But is such a position gratifying to the curious mind?
What is known and what is conjecture? I would posit that all is conjecture beyond the awareness of being: I am. This is the only certainty, all else is conjecture.
The Psychosomatic Universe may very well be true as the heart of this matter – but you are going to have to shed a helluva lot of preconditioning to experience that directly now.
POSTMODERN COSMOLOGY
Vibrations, or waveforms. Particles. What is the source? I would answer that the source is the Source; [1≡∞] ta panta nous__the all mind.
The “concept” of ‘particles’ is to ground us in the material world, and describe ‘reality’ as material manifestation.
The “concept” of of ‘waveforms’ is to ground us in the notion of linear time.
Letting go of both of these concepts leaves only Imagination. Imagination thus unbound means ANYTHING is possible, and EVERYTHING is probable.
We live in a moment of time that we call the present moment; Now.
It is rather remarkable to note that it is right now, and to note if you think back on this conversation ‘later’ it will again be “now” as you contemplate this.
So I would end by saying that Time is the greatest mystery of all, in how it takes a ‘future’ to manifest that which always was is and will be.
I do not believe in any of the myths, I don’t even believe in the current one.
~Will
I think we can leave the conversation at this point. We’ve each expressed where we are coming from. Others have attempted to argue much the same as you are proposing here and I’ve engaged at other venues and times with ideas you express here so it’s far from new. I do not accept that there is a non-scientific explanation for the origin of the universe and I do not accept that a scientific explanation involves something “spiritual” like “mind” or whatever. I am not interested in trying to engage with anyone arguing the contrary. Been there, done that, too many times.
While reading that comment, I got the same uneasy feeling I did when I first stumbled upon the TimeCube.
Eric Zuesse is just an angry senile idiot. He claims to be a historian and he claims to be a scientist but in reality he is just a lonely old man from a third-world sand box with no life bored out of his mind and growing ever more senile- and with an expired green card. He no longer has the mental capacity to really understand reality and his writings show his growing dementia senility. The man is an internet bully. Anyone who disagrees with him he launches into nasty personal attacks without provocation. He really needs medical help and for someone to take his keyboard away from him. He expects everyone to read his concocted unrealistic drivel and bob your head up and down in total agreement and to never question him or his opinion. If you challenge him, you are the devil and he hates you. If you agree with him you are an angel and he loves you. His mode of operation is just as pathetic is he is. Just toss his word arrangements into the trash and don’t bother wasting your time with any of it.
It sounds as if I was not the only person Eric Zuesse approached with his manuscript, then — or the only one to suffer his abuse when I had the temerity to raise some questions about aspects of it.
Having come across articles by Eric Zuesse about MH17 I wonder where he really gets his information from. Seems to me he relies upon nonsense.
His bullet hole rhetoric about MH17 is a clear example of what I view shoddy work.
The document can be downloaded from:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/237516048/20140823-G-H-Schorel-Hlavka-O-W-B-to-Mr-v-Putin-President-Re-Ukraine-and-Its-Constitution-MH17-Versus-Titanic-Etc
As I did set out the bullet holes are in fact rivet holes. If Eric Zuesse is nevertheless continuing to rely upon his so called expert pilot then one may question what credibility he may have in other matters he writes about.
Agreed. I think he’s had some lucky works published but he does by and large appeal to the conspiracy theorists and such ilk.
Looking for the what the ‘discovery’ actually revealed in evidence when Eric Zuesse got to trial in addition to Galations 2:11-21 (citation helpfully provided above), I found on the Amazon page for Zuesse’s book a post by Jorge Trullos Fumanal:
“…”God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me”. Paul…claims that he was predestined to be the bringer of the Gospel… that makes sense if you want to emphasize the fact that your authority …[came before]… the men that physically knew Jesus.” [!]
Good point!
….And, I felt hybridrogue1 (above, in reply) had a good point when he wrote: ” …I would posit that all is conjecture beyond the awareness of being: I am.”…
But, I do not think he would be comfortable with accepting that all known awareness arises from snot.
Eric Zeusse posing as hater of Obama, and Greg Bacon posing as hater of Jews, are staging a mock debate throughout the internet. Presumably their goal is to force readers to conclude that hate is inevitable. Please don’t fall into their trap.
Sorry to leap in on this after so long a parenthesis – Zuesse’s thesis was just drawn to my attention after I posted a link an unrelated political comment by Miroslav Volf on Facebook. So I googled Zuesse and found this … which happens to be close to one of my own theological interests (as is Volf, but that’s another story). Besides, I liked the coincidence of family names.
On the whole though I have always found the (not exactly new!) “Paul as Founder of Christianity” somewhat unconvincing at a psychological level. Yes – as a Pauline scholar I will readily admit – there is much that is distasteful in Paul’s passionate and sometimes vitriolic correspondence, as he sought to preserve as a matter of life and death the revelation he believed he had received on the Damascus Road. That was a conversion (or re-jigging, perhaps) experience, to him a revelation, on which, as a feisty Hebrew, he had reflected for many years after the event and before (much) public ministry.
Yes, he represented a radical break from the Jerusalem pillars – though I love the mythology surrounding his meeting an ugly fate in tandem with nemesis Peter. But as a sort of narrative theologian (and by no means I hope naive) my reading of Paul and other NT writers draws me over and again to the conclusion that their passion had to be matched by the experiential journey of their audiences. The experience of new faith hope, all those things that came to the earliest Christ-followers in fellowship and liturgy and their own breaking open of Hebrew Scriptures and oral Jesus-teachings had to connect with the instructions and other diatribes they were receiving from figures like Paul, like the author of Hebrews, like James, the Johns and eventually the compilers of oral narrative, the four gospel writers.
At the heart of Paul’s kerygma is the Jew Jesus – life, death, teachings, and Paul would add resurrection. Paul’s urgent epistolary, combative, exhortative shorthand turns all that ‘Jesus package’ into ‘Christ-event’, yes, and to that extent gives the emerging Way a new impetus, but that had to be authenticated by both intellectual credibility (Paul was no slouch there) and devotional experience. In Corinth, in fact, where ‘devotional’ and other matters have gone awry, Paul confronts thosee issues head on because they must resonate with the traditions he was immersed in and teaching. In Galatia, where devotional issues have gone awry in different directions, he does the same. He knows the importance of ‘right devotion’, the experiential dimensions, and argues from them as he makes his case (The author of Hebrews does, too … and Revelation in a strange but apocalytic-stereotyped way). In doing this, no matter how much he fought the Jerusalem pillars over doctrinal matters, he was not generating a new religion but honing that which had been handed down to him after (and, critically, strangely before) his conversion. His kudos amongst those to whom he wrote was such that, even while some of the Jerusalem and no doubt Corinthian and ‘Galatian’ pillars probably would willingly have issued a fatwa against him, eventually his vision of the Christ event resonated with their experience, connected with a ideological vacuum in a crumbling Roman Empire, and the mission to the Gentiles about which he was so passionate took off. But that’s very different to inventing a new religion, and I suspect Paul and Peter probably had a beer or two together either before or after their shared sticky end.
For better or for worse.
Unfortunately I found Eric Zuesse in email correspondence to be quite an unpleasant character who had a difficult time with anyone who questioned his assumptions.
You speak of Paul’s Damascus Road experience, but is that not a second century narrative drawn from earlier Jewish literature and included in Acts as a great addition to a Hellenistic romance?
Have you had a look at Roger Parvus’s investigation into Paul and Christian origins? Now there’s a new challenge to think about: http://vridar.org/other-authors/roger-parvus-a-simonian-origins-for-christianity/
Zeusse:
========= =
Being a responsible juror requires immense attention and care, far more than does simply reading a mere narrative “history” of an alleged event. In the present instance, investigating what might possibly have been the biggest deception in all of history requires a degree of intellectual concentration which will greatly sharpen the mind. Anyone who is prepared to engage in such an analysis will find the process itself to be rewarding, not only because of the new information and understandings which result, but also because the methodology, that’s used in this discovery, possesses wide applications, far outside courtrooms. A skill in recognizing liars (and their lies) protects one against deception, no matter what the particular subject might happen to be; and this increases one’s intellectual capacities. . . . .
= =========
I (a Christian) am appalled. However, I do believe that my mind is intact. It’s hard to argue that God (perfect, holy, all powerful) is behind threats to kill children for their parents sins, such as what we see when Jesus (speaking for God through other angels to John) at Revelation chapter 2, verse 23). Which (in circular fashion) kind of supports what I was going to say about Eric’s above words. How could he honestly claim that when someone’s core – identity, including what fundamentally forms it – is ripped out of him (or…), via that person’s own analysis (or critical examination), he will feel rewarded? That’s disingenous. I note that Eric there didn’t remind readers that the Christian Bible itself recommends such anaysis. Please examine closely and you’ll find what I don’t want you to find-? There’s Paul’s comments about the Beroeans, who, when he and Silas found them were “noble-minded… for they accepted the word with the greatest eagerness of mind, carefully examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.” (Acts 17: 10,11)
Rejectors of God are, if they happen to be more interested in debunking God’s word than, say, studying physics or linguistics, are of course going to both eagerly examine the Bible ‘and’ feel rewarded when they can point to conclusions, and evidence adduced to lead to them, that reveals Christianity to be a fraud. No surprise there. Yes, Examine. Don’t disbelieve first, then acquire a hostile attitude toward believers and then examine and draw conclusions and proclaim your success and nobleness in achieving it.
I landed here after following links that originated in Eric’s Off Guardian article about “America’s Planned Conquest Of America,” which he should acknowledge is hardly a discovery first made by him. I have for long been following politics, from a Left perspective (and discovering, to my horror, how much of the Left is actually traitorous and in league with destroyers on the Right) since the mid or late 80s. I was a Jehovah’s Witness for a few years and don’t regret it even though I feel let down by them. There is no one who will teach you – in plain language – what’s in the Christian Bible better than the Witnesses. But I came to believe that they got some big things wrong. As well, I didn’t like the way I was treated there. Which doesn’t mean you jettison what you believe when you shun those who you know longer feel support you. That would then make you an apostate, even if Witnesses might call you an apostate for disagreeing with them. (No, I never explicitly heard them say that, and even asked. But I felt that that is how I was being treated. And there was my disturbing experience of having door knocking Witnesses scream at me that I was possessed when I explained to them how they got their own teachings wrong in one instance. They didn’t realize that the Watchtower Society does not teach that all are ‘in’ the New Covenant. Never mind the ignorance. Look at the ‘spirit’ on display!) Anyway, I left my Bible studies long ago, not after having made the determination to do, but solely as a result of circumstances, namely life and chaos. I have forgotten more than most self-identified Christians know, sadly. And it doesn’t help that people (my family included) get their knowledge of God and the world from corporate owned media.
I segued into politics after seeing a review of Noam Chomsky’s “Deterring Democracy” in the Toronto Star. I thought, in a simplistic fashion, that here was a book that would give me ammunition in my spiritual struggle and in conversations with people about God and democracy versus theocracy. Then I read Noam’s book. It was information overload, to say the least. But, although I don’t possess formal education worth mentioning, I can read. I’ve always been a reader. So I read it and never looked back. That was my introduction to politics, or knowing what’s going on in the world in other words. Thank goodness I started with that book! It’s scary to think how much of life, our own trajectories, is by chance. I won’t say we don’t enter life with some inclinations that stem from upbringing (which I sort of never had, with my father absent and my mother utterly uneducated) and one’s own limited views etc, but for sure a lot of it has to do simply with people, family or friend or strangers, who we bump into and in that way change our direction.
Years later, I wrote Noam a long letter in which I raised many questions and made many observations, including God. It took him some time to respond (and I didn’t think he was going to), but his letter to me dealt with every comment I had made. He enjoyed my letter, and despite expressing belief in a God who cannot be measured, he expressed an appreciation for those who held religious beliefs. (I can’t see or touch Chomsky’s mind, but is it true that I can’t measure it?) Years, and many Chomsky books, later, I came to realize that Chomsky also has issues with what he sees as the promotion of violence in the Bible. It’s too bad he doesn’t see in it what I do, but I (and God) can hardly find fault in someone’s rejection of a source that is hypocritical about violence. Chomsky’s letter to me didn’t deal with this in any more detail than he dealt with other subjects looked at and it wasn’t anguished, although I have seen passaged in his books, dealing with God and Christianity, that I would described as anguished, in which he felt anger toward Christianity and those who uncritically embraced it. It’s up to Jehovah God to determine whether Noam has crossed the line. I never thought so myself.
Here’s a good reason for an ‘edit’ feature. I said that Chomsky expressed a belief in God. I meant disbelief. Apologies.
Eric Zuesse is a remarkable writer. He has a gift for sifting the evidence. I believe that science has a basis in discipline and a basis in straight out debauchery. So Eric, IMO, is at a slight disadvantage in bringing the line that science can contribute to faith. Since the Creator is inscrutable and leaves no forensic trail to follow Eric is up a gum tree. I submit the Flood – no evidence exists for it (either local or worldwide). I submit Exodus – no evidence suggests that Israel under Joshua drove out 18-foot giants. I submit that Shishak is not determinable as an Egyptian prince. I submit there is no evidence Nineveh was ever disintegrated ca. -612. I submit there is no evidence Jesus Christ was crucified in the 4th decade of the 1st century. Etc, etc, etc.
If our mate can’t get to first base on even one of the above he is pretty much out of contention for the ‘event’ that kick-started Christianity. Christianity is but the evolving so-to-speak of everything we know from Adam, Seth, Enosh(?) Enoch, Noah and the rest. I say this because Genesis can be said to be a Mosaic compilation of records reasonably attributed to at least these Patriarchs listed. Where does he start? There are no tablets – only Moses’ written record. The guy is out of his depth, clever as he is, and someone should say to him that the so-called scientific explanations of X, Y and Z, the mathematical treatises on sea-shell colorations or whatever are only models.
Abstractions are fun but no use to someone who has to live in the real world.
Regards
Are you saying that we don’t need evidence as a guide to what to believe since we can only rely upon the word we believe to come from a God without any supporting evidence?
Science is based partly in debauchery? If you really think that then I suggest you have never sought to understand what science is apart from the nonsense you have been taught by your cultish belief systems.
I was just trying to give the benefit of my experiences regarding some aspects of Science. I am saying nothing of the sort. What I am saying is there is no DIRECT evidence – of course there is a way through but it is not based on in-your-face type evidence. You would need a very good education to follow through on the arguments.
Sorry to confuse but I made assumptions about your knowledge-base.
[Personal information deleted — Neil]
Regards,
Ian Shears
Your “We have nothing but self-testimony in the case of Paul’s letters.” (at https://archive.is/1tuQb#selection-273.228-273.293 ) is saying that Acts (which discusses Paul) doesn’t exist. And what about Clement of Rome, writing around AD 95, quoting from Romans; and what about Ignatius of Antioch (d. AD 115) quoting from 1 Corinthians, Romans, 1 Timothy and Titus? Those letters from Paul were known not only by Paul’s congregations during his own time, but by Paul’s followers after Paul died. Do you actually think that Paul didn’t exist? And why did you assert “We have nothing but self-testimony in the case of Paul’s letters”? Some people question whether Jesus existed. And some people still remain flat-earthers. But so what?
What I was saying was that historical facts are established by means of independent verification of some kind. Authors claiming to be Paul’s followers after the time of Paul are not independent evidence. The most they can tell us is that they believed in a Paul of an earlier generation. Paul’s case is unlike that of Socrates, for example: Socrates can claim to have contemporaries who knew and wrote about him, and one of them, at least, ridiculed him.
Historical inquiry does not lead me to “beliefs” — you ask if I “believe” Paul did not exist. I simply do not know if a person named Paul existed in the mid and latter half of the first century doing the sorts of things Acts describes. How can we know? Acts, at best, appears to be intent on denying much of what is found in Paul’s letters and its stories are clearly drawn from various other literature, including the gospels and the earlier narrative of Peter.
As for historical evidence, there are various proposals for the dates of Clement of Rome’s letter to the Corinthians, and ditto for the letters of Ignatius. But again we need to be careful and not read into our data what is not there. Clement’s letter does contain a passage that is also found in Romans but the author does not say he is quoting Paul. How can we tell if that passage from Clement’s letter was not at some point inserted into Romans after Clement’s time or was an independent free-floating saying? We do know that when Paul’s letters first appear in the independent historical record they are the subject of hostile debates and claims and counterclaims about interpolations and redactions.
Your last sentence suggesting that anyone merely asking the question about the historicity of Jesus is the equivalent of a flat-earther leads me to think you may not be particularly open to questioning conventional assumptions. The historicity of Jesus is a hypothesis proposed to explain the data we have (there are other hypotheses that are rarely considered); Jesus’ historicity is not a bed-rock fact in the sense we can reasonably claim for the likes of Socrates. Refer back to the point about independent controls to establish “historical facts”.
Paul existed, and so did Jesus, and Paul, the creator of Christianity, was an enemy of the Jewish sect that rabbi Jesus (as he was referred-to, specifically as a “rabbi,” in Matthew 26:25&49; Mark 9:5, 11:21, 14:45; and John 1:38&49, 3:2, 4:31, 6:25, 9:2, 11:8, and 20:16) had created. We have better evidence for all of this than exists today about almost everything else that exists for almost everything else in classical history before the First Century CE.
Just making declarations like that are not reasoned or justified arguments. I ask you to respond to the specific point I have made about how historical facts (as distinct from hypotheses) are made. Further explanation is set out at https://vridar.org/historical-method-and-the-question-of-christian-origins/
We have better evidence for all of this than exists today about almost everything else that exists for almost everything else in classical history before the First Century CE.
The “Methodology” in my CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS is set out first in the book’s Introduction, and then yet again at the very end of the book, in much fuller detail. I have stated fully there my methodology.
You seem to refuse to read and/or respond to my criticism of your methodology and my explanation for how historical facts (as distinct from hypotheses) are determined — I have posted on this topic dozens of time here and given you a summary explanation above and a link to a fuller explanation but you simply ignore all of that and repeat your assertion.
Give me an example of a historical figure for whom our evidence for Paul or Jesus is superior. I trust you will in the process acknowledge my references to many historians who explain the difference between the determination of facts and of hypotheses. I have given you the example of Socrates and demonstrated why our evidence for his historicity is superior to anything we have for Paul or Jesus. You simply ignore that and repeat your assertions to the contrary.
Well, my point is that if we are to doubt whether Jesus existed, or whether Paul who wrote about Jesus existed, then what are we to say of not Jesus but instead Socrates? And what are we to say of not Paul but Plato? I don’t think that that’s a constructive presumption when writing about any personage of ancient times.
I have answered that a dozen times. Please see my posts on historical methods and how we determine what is fact from rumour or fiction in all areas of life, not just in biblical studies.
Page post: https://vridar.org/historical-method-and-the-question-of-christian-origins/
Blog posts:
https://vridar.org/2022/04/04/historical-research-the-basics/
https://vridar.org/2019/02/16/ancient-historiography-and-historians-vridar-posts/
https://vridar.org/2018/09/08/tall-tales-do-not-mean-we-doubt-the-historicity-of-davie-crockett-why-should-we-therefore-doubt-jesus/
https://vridar.org/2018/09/06/how-do-historians-decide-who-was-historical-who-fictional/
https://vridar.org/2018/09/03/heres-how-philosophers-know-socrates-existed/
https://vridar.org/2018/05/07/doing-history-how-do-we-know-queen-boadicea-boudicca-existed/
https://vridar.org/2017/12/05/why-the-biographies-of-socrates-differ/
https://vridar.org/2017/08/09/did-the-ancient-philosopher-demonax-exist/
https://vridar.org/2016/10/20/and-the-mysterious-unknowns-of-other-historical-figures/
https://vridar.org/2016/07/24/the-quest-for-the-historical-hiawatha-the-historical-mythical-jesus-debate/
https://vridar.org/2013/12/08/jesus-is-not-as-historical-as-anyone-else-in-the-ancient-world/
https://vridar.org/2013/11/07/how-can-we-know-if-the-jesus-narratives-are-memories-or-inventions/
https://vridar.org/2013/01/31/that-chart-of-mythical-and-historical-persons-with-explanations/
https://vridar.org/2013/01/29/the-historical-jesus-and-the-demise-of-history-2-the-overlooked-reasons-we-know-certain-ancient-persons-existed/
https://vridar.org/2013/01/19/the-historical-jesus-and-the-decline-of-history-1-what-has-history-to-do-with-the-facts/
https://vridar.org/2011/09/25/is-it-a-fact-of-history-that-jesus-existed-or-is-it-only-public-knowledge/
https://vridar.org/2011/07/25/what-is-history-what-is-a-historical-fact/
https://vridar.org/2011/07/16/was-socrates-a-man-or-a-myth-applying-historical-jesus-criteria-to-socrates/
https://vridar.org/2011/01/26/how-do-we-know-anyone-existed-in-ancient-times-or-if-jesus-christ-goes-would-julius-caesar-also-have-to-go/
https://vridar.org/2010/05/01/comparing-the-evidence-for-jesus-with-other-ancient-historical-persons/
[This was November 2010 — I am less inclined to the position of the Dutch radical school now]
Hi Neil, have you written up your latest thoughts on ‘authentic Paul’, or is it still to come?
No. But I think my current thoughts are back closer to the Dutch radicals now. I simply don’t know what to make of “Paul” right now.
I would love insight even into your confusion here! I read Carrier’s argument for why Paul is authentic, and I am inclined to see his point, but Carrier seems more intent on winning arguments than exploring the nuances further.
I am more of a “purist” with respect to historical evidence than is Carrier. I want to see clear signs of independent evidence to confirm the historicity of an author rather than rely upon tradition and the claims of the letters themselves.
And if any of the contents of the letters seem to fit better with second century interests — as determined by evidence independent of the letters themselves — I prefer to remain “undecided” as to the historicity of Paul as per the image we have from Acts and a naive reading of the letters themselves.
I, and I assume other people, would be fascinated to read a blog post from you describing how Paul’s letters reflect the Antonine period.
I am currently busy in moving, but after I move, I hope to email to you an account from me of a person whose work and its preservation seems to support some type of pre-2nd century CE Paul – although ironically, my interpretation of the person and his fascinating writings (obscure in the world) have inclined me to think that Paul may have been active in the 1st century BCE rather than in the CEs. But that is only a provisional interest, and I would not go so far as to claim the the evidence which I have in mind proves that Paul must have existed and written his letters.
I’d be interested to know what assumptions follow from this or that conclusion about Paul. For example, if we accept the consensus view that 7 of the letters were written by the same person (let’s call him “Paul”), we have a prima facie case for the existence of “Paul.” If we accept the consensus view that these letters began to appear at about mid-1st C., they then become the earliest known historical record of a personage or a phenomenon which we come to identify as Jesus Christ. As “Paul” explains to us, his familiarity with this personage or phenomenon is not in the form of knowledge of a flesh and blood person. It’s a “revelation.” A “revelation,” in the non-religious understanding is essentially a thought in someone’s mind. Thus, what follows from the consensus views of Paul is that the earliest known evidence of Jesus is that he was first conceived as a thought in someone’s mind.
So then, what assumptions would follow if we were to assume that, e.g., “Paul” did not really exist as a known person who wrote letters, had no history as in Acts, but was invented as an “author” of the truly existing letters? Or, what follows if he lived and wrote, not in mid-1st C., but earlier or later?
One can do one’s head in with such thoughts! ;-). I see the gospels being composed in the second century but to explain their relationship it is, I suggest, mandatory to imagine the authors conceptualizing Jesus as a metaphor, as an invention of the respective authors to personify the different theological points of view. They were not referring to historical traditions about Jesus but were recasting Jesus according to theological notions.
In both Paul and the gospels Jesus is first and last an idea, if that is the case. Neither Paul nor the evangelists were working from historical traditions.
I think my main problem with an early 2nd century Marcion-era origin for ‘authentic’ Paul is that it does not leave much time for the gospel of Mark to have been derived from these writings. However, I do not find the autobiographical material in Galatians very plausible, more like a highly propagandized gloss of events.
I also question if these letters could really have had an audience in Rome in the 50s AD. It seems like they were always meant to be open letters/tracts with fictitious titles to portray the anonymous writer as having traveled and being well established in the readers mind.
As for the parallels between Marcion’s life and Pauls as alluded to previously – how would that actually work chronologically? If Marcion is writing an allegory of his own experience in Rome, then this really squeezes the timeline, and Ephesians goes further with allusions to Paul being marginalised from the others. Yet, this work (although ‘non-authentic’) gets into the Catholic canon – are Marcion’s enemies still happy to buy into his forgeries even after they have rejected him?
It would be good to have safe-place to discuss these issue where we don’t descend into ad-hominen chaos!
Is a Hadrian-era / 130s Mark too late for you?
“Is a Hadrian-era / 130s Mark too late for you?”
No, not too late if you can make the case for it! Sure, you might kill a few sacred cows to get there.
I think it actually creates some interesting possibilities about Marcion’s gospel and the works of Papias being source materials.
Another issue is Thessalonians, and whether someone would forge an apocalyptic letter as if it was written in the past while predicting an end of times that never came. A strong case of ‘criterion of embarrassment’ for it being a product of its own time, not of the forgers? Mark has the same issue here, but that could be solved by making it a product of the Bar Kochba period and not 70s AD as usually assumed.
But then, why would Marcion be working on a canon if he believed the end times were imminent?
Doe Tacitus give us a witness to a Passion gospel existing before 120AD?
A later date for Christianity explains the silence of Josephus nicely but whatever theory I entertain has problem!
As I have indicated in several discussions I do not believe we have evidence for any popular messianic expectations until after 70 CE (Josephus’s usual suspects are not “messiahs”). But after 70 and up to Hadrian we do have the false messiahs attracting large followings that led to violent persecutions — all as per Mark 13. Then of course the temple of Zeus on the temple mount.
The “end”, if read with Markan ambiguities and imagery in mind, has happened with the destruction of the Jewish nation. That leaves us with post 70 CE as the the time Jesus had come and replaced the Jewish nation or post 135 CE. The end/coming of the kingdom of God is the time of the church replacing the Jewish nation.
Those are key ideas in summary. Not explained or justified in this short note, of course.
Thanks Neil
I will search your old posts again.
https://vridar.org/?s=popular+messianic
https://vridar.org/?s=trajan+messianic+cyrene
https://vridar.org/?s=thessalonians+hadrian
https://vridar.org/?s=mark+13+babylon+isaiah