In the first post we presented a case that there is no evidence to support the common and longstanding claim among scholars of Christian origins that Jews of the Palestinian region, whether Judaea or Galilee, were agonizing for liberation from the Roman yoke and the promise of God’s rule to punish the oppressors and exalt the oppressed and as a result were a ready audience for any apocalyptic prophet who came along to declare such an event was imminent.
In the second post we attempted to argue that it is unsafe for a historian to place strong confidence in one particular interpretation of a disputed Greek term and to take sides in an ongoing debate among theologians.
In this post I want to zero in on the most fundamental flaw that lies at the heart of all attempts to decipher the historical nature of person Jesus through the canonical gospels. They all work from the assumption that the gospels are indebted to oral reports or memories about the historical Jesus, at least to some extent, for their narrative portrayal of Jesus.
I cannot resist making a contribution to the recent spate of exchanges between scholars about the existence of Jesus — these mostly on the internet and blogosphere, and so confined to a few addicts, but the issue has always been lurking within New Testament scholarship generally. Shortly before his death, Robert Funk had approached me about the possibility of setting up the equivalent of a ‘Jesus Seminar’ for Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, perhaps a ‘Moses Seminar’? I couldn’t see any scope for such an exercise (and still can’t), but have often thought how a ‘minimalist’ approach might transfer to the New Testament, and in particular the ‘historical Jesus’, who keeps appearing to New Testament scholars in different guises. . . .
Philip Davies
I don’t think, however, that in another 20 years there will be a consensus that Jesus did not exist, or even possibly didn’t exist, but a recognition that his existence is not entirely certain would nudge Jesus scholarship towards academic respectability. In the first place, what does it mean to affirm that ‘Jesus existed’, anyway, when so many different Jesuses are displayed for us by the ancient sources and modern NT scholars? Logically, some of these Jesuses cannot have existed. So in asserting historicity, it is necessary to define which ones (rabbi, prophet, sage, shaman, revolutionary leader, etc.) are being affirmed — and thus which ones deemed unhistorical. In fact, as things stand, what is being affirmed as the Jesus of history is a cipher, not a rounded personality (the same is true of the King David of the Hebrew Bible, as a number of recent ‘biographies’ show).
I suggest that another gospel Jesus we can throw on the table for consideration is the only Jesus we have, the literary one created for readers of the very late first century to early and mid second century CE. With that Jesus we can assuredly identify many of the clear literary figures in the Jewish Scriptures as the raw material from which he was shaped.
We can vicariously enter the story world of the gospels and try to imagine what the characters we meet were really like in their narrative settings in Galilee and Jerusalem in the days of Pilate. Or we can pick up the gospels and try to imagine the story world ultimately deriving from real events and persons, the way a child likes to imagine a lovely story was true to some extent, and then imagine ourselves to be archaeologists digging beneath the narrative layers to try to identify something real beneath it all. But we have no evidence that allows us to justify either of those ways of reading.
But one thing we do know. We can know the gospels were written some time between around 70 CE and 130 CE. We know they were written for audiences in their own day, and it is reasonable to think they carried meaning for those audiences. The words of Jesus that those authors penned had meaning for their audience of the late first and early second centuries. It turns out that generations of believers have found meaning in those same words ever since. So if we read a passage that we think did not have meaning for its contemporary readers, that it was a failed prophecy that surely must flown against any significance or meaning for the first readers of the gospels, then I suggest we should first question our interpretation of that passage. What is more likely? That the authors wrote about Jesus as a failed prophet or that our interpretation and understanding of what the passage meant for the original audience is mistaken?
O’Neill argued that many well-known passages in the gospels carried a special meaning for a pre-narrative world where peasants were animated with apocalyptic hopes. That may or may not have been the case, but one thing certainly is true: those passages have always held a universal appeal for all time. They certainly lost none of their meaning for the first audiences in late first and early second century worlds. Recollect a few that I copy straight from O’Neill’s essay:
O’Neill places such passages in the context of a message of immediate doom but I think they rather have had a universal appeal to all generations in times of both peace and destruction.
Similarly O’Neill suggests that Jesus’ many healings and exorcisms were performed as “a sign of the imminence of the coming apocalypse” but I don’t recall any of those healings or exorcisms being explicitly said to be a warning that great cosmic and military destruction was about to befall the witnesses. Yes, they certainly were presented as signs of the presence of the Kingdom of God and/or its messenger, but that is not necessarily the same thing. The demons certainly knew that “their time was up” as they found themselves sent packing into herds of pigs or the wilderness, but O’Neill’s attempt to draw in the testimony of Paul to back his view of total chaos and suffering preceding the coming of God’s judgment falls flat with his only citation, that of 1 Thess. 4:14-17:
That is clearly NOT the same message of wars, famines, abomination of desolation, collapsing heavens and continental upheavals. It is a message of sudden appearance without warning signs. The reason for people to be alert is that there will be no warning signs. Paul taught the coming of the Christ without warning, some time in his generation no doubt, but even if not, it would be certain to come, and that message has inspired scores of generations of Christians from then till today.
A common sophistic rhetorical device some cults and other fundamentalist preachers have deployed to win converts is to present a false dichotomy that is meant to confront hearers with a dilemma whose only resolution is joining the arms of the preacher in the middle. So it is somewhat disconcerting to see O’Neill fall back on the same device to claim possession of the only truly informed ground: conservative Christians, he says, find the apocalyptic Jesus uncomfortable so they resort to all sorts of tricks to try to avoid him; liberal Christians, he adds, also find the apocalyptic Jesus uncomfortable and they, too, resort to all sorts of rationalizations to avoid him. Dispense with a few embarrassing “fringe atheists” who deny any historical Jesus at all and who is left standing in the light of the only reasonable conclusion: why, Tim O’Neill and those with whom he agrees, of course.
Obviously, a Jesus who was an apocalyptic prophet who proclaimed the kingship of God as coming in his lifetime or that of his listeners does not fit well with orthodox Christian beliefs, so conservative scholars have to work to explain all the evidence above in a way that somehow maintains the idea that Jesus was “God the Son” and a deity in human form – no small task. Others who want to see Jesus as a wise teacher and preacher of social justice or personal transformation also have a problem with the apocalyptic Jesus, as a message of coming judgement and hellfire does not fit well with their conception of him either. And the current crop of fringe Jesus Mythicists also dislike the idea of Jesus as an eschatological prophet, as this makes him rather too much a man of and in his time and so makes his historicity uncomfortably likely for these contrarians. Now, as in Schweitzer’s time, almost all historical Jesus studies is either an endorsement of or a rear-guard action against the unavoidably powerful idea that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet.
So that’s it. Everyone who does not step over to the side of Schweitzer and O’Neill is following his “likes” and things that “fit well with current beliefs”. No intellectual integrity can be afforded to anyone but those who side with Schweitzer and O’Neill. And as we saw in an earlier post, O’Neill uses the language of warfare and violent combat when speaking of those who do not fall in line behind his interpretation.
An Alternative View of Jesus
But even the earliest Gospel, that attributed to Mark’s view, narrates sayings of Jesus that, if read literally, clearly failed to come to pass at the time of his writing. (Recall his account of the high priest being alive at the time of Jesus’ coming on the clouds of heaven.) The Gospel of Mark was written for an audience of the late first century or early second century. All of his sayings attributed to Jesus were directed to that audience, “Mark’s” audience. If we think that that original audience must have responded with, “Oh, Jesus was wrong about that, wasn’t he; that high priest certainly did not live to see Jesus descend in the clouds of heaven”, if we think that is an improbable reaction, then I suggest we need to rethink our understanding of the author, his audience, and his sources and meaning. We need to do that rethinking not with some idiosyncratic interpretation that bears no relationship to similar Jewish literature known at that time, nor by pushing the dates of the gospels back to an unrealistic and even more problematic earlier time, but with an informed understanding of “how such literature worked”.
The authors of the canonical gospels drew upon Jewish Scriptures to create another apocalyptic Jeremiah, another Elijah and another Elisha who raised the dead, another Moses who called and ordained his people, another rejected Joseph, another suffering and persecuted David, another Isaac who shed his blood and gave his life for the salvation of all.
We need to avoid simplistic solutions, and we need to avoid solutions that lazily and crudely toss all alternative arguments into the bin of “wish fulfillment” and intellectual dishonesty simply because we can.
I conclude with a pertinent comment made elsewhere by one of our readers, proudfootz:
I find this distinction between ‘historically true’ and ‘confessionally true’ to be a very succinct statement of the problem I find with the sorts of arguments that are put forward along the lines of the embarrassment criterion or statements against interest. The notion that among communities of faith there exists a devotion to what we might call material facts that endangers dogma flies in the face of everything I have ever encountered.
AFAICT early christian literature is not aimed at people who would have any clue about conditions in Judea at the time the story of Jesus’s ministry on Earth is set. How do people living in Syracuse, Thessalonika, or Ephesus know John baptised Jesus independent of what a christian missionary tells them? These allegedly embarrassing undeniable facts are being spread by the christians themselves. It stands to reason that these story elements serve a purpose in the narrative.
Oh, and merry christmas and/or happy holidays, everyone!
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5 thoughts on “Final (#3) post responding to O’Neill’s Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet”
Yes, good post. Personally, I find no existential need to deny the existence of Jesus. Like Carrier, I assumed Jesus was real all along and that claims against his existence were nonsense. Of course if Jesus were some apocalyptic preacher it would do nothing to affirm the truth of Christianity, and I had no doubts about the untruth of Christianity when I thought Jesus was a real person.
It’s just a matter of the evidence, and to me the evidence makes the most sense starting from a celestial messiah who was “revealed” by the prophets. I think that the cult of Jesus likely started in much the same way as the worship of Melchizedek that we see from the writings in Qumran. Clearly Melchizedek was a heavenly messiah that they were “discovering” via reinterpretation of older scriptures and perhaps some prophetic visions. The exact means by which they recast Melchizedek as a heavenly war messiah we may never know, but in the case of Melchizedek it’s clear that Melchizedek the messiah was not based on a real person.
Obviously Jews at this time were envisioning many imaginary deities and messiahs. Jesus is just one among many. That is a far simpler and more direct explanation of the evidence that all the contortion you have to go through to explain that there was an oral tradition that accurately preserved sayings and deeds of this person, but no one wrote about the person until later, though they wrote a bunch of other stuff about his “heavenly form”, and when they wrote the story of him they re-cast everything through literary references, but still the true nature of the real person shines through, and every slight deviation from the first narrative is evidence of a separate independent source, etc., etc.
People don’t realize just how convoluted the “Jesus was a real person” explanation has to get to account for the evidence, and it seems it requires greater convolution by the year as more evidence and clarity comes forward.
I had never connected the dots on the Qumran/Melchizedech parallel. I think you do make a case that celestial origins hypotheses provide the most parsimonious explanations.
Melchizedek is an example of exactly the type of figure that Doherty and Carrier propose Jesus was. And there are actually two aspects to the Melchizedek writings as Qumran. #1 Melchizedek is a heavenly apocalyptic type figure himself, but #2 there is also a section that talks about a divine “messenger” for Melchizedek which will known as the Anointed One, the messiah, who will be killed. Unfortunately the text is not well preserved enough to get much detail or know what happens after the messiah is killed.
So we have in Melchizedek an example of how at least some Jews were reinterpreting the Jewish scriptures to “discover” secret information about powerful divine being whose role was to judge the world at the end of days. These are figures whose actions took place in the heavens, and whose “coming into the world” was being predicted to happen at some imminent point in the future.
The way that Melchizedek is described is almost exactly like how Paul and Hebrews describe Jesus, the only difference being that in the case of the Melchizedek writings, Melchizedek himself does not die, his messenger the messiah does.
So, some groups could have conceived of Jesus as Melchizedek’s messenger, or Jesus could just be another figure similar to Melchizedek, derived in much the same way, or Jesus could be seen as a successor of Melchizedek, which is how the letter to the Hebrews describes Jesus. In any event, we know from the Melchizedek writings that Jews were “inventing” powerful heavenly deities through prophetic interpretations of Jewish scriptures.
Should we call Melchizedek an: angel, second-god, celestial Messiah/Christ?
Cf. Van de Water, Rick (31 July 2016). “Michael or Yhwh? Toward Identifying Melchizedek in 11Q13”. Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha. 16 (1): 75–86. doi:10.1177/0951820706069186.
Scholars are still divided over the identity of the figure Melchizedek in 11Q13. Is he an angel, or is ‘Melchizedek’ simply another title for Yhwh? This article argues that these two opposing views can be reconciled by seeing the figure Melchizedek as an expression of what the early rabbis called belief in ‘two Powers in heaven’.
The is just One of the reasons why I am a Mythicist regarding Jesus.
The famous Testimonium of Flavious Josephus is a 4th Century Christian fraud. We have no record of anyone reading Josephus prior to the 4th Century (and several early Church Fathers did) who ever claimed Josephus mentioned their Jesus (in fact, Origen, circa 250 CE expressly denies it).
Josephus was Governor of Galilee for almost a decade. During that time he traveled all around Galilee recruiting fighters for the rebellion against Rome. Apparently is all his travels and conversations, no one ever mentioned Jesus of Nazareth (or the town of Nazareth for that matter) – (or, if they did, Josephus didn’t think the stories were credible enough to report). Yet, according to the Synoptic Gospels (“John’s Gospel” has Jesus’ ministry centered around Judea – go figure), Jesus spent the majority of his ministry traveling and preaching around Galilee.
In the first post we presented a case that there is no evidence to support the common and longstanding claim among scholars of Christian origins that Jews of the Palestinian region, whether Judaea or Galilee, were agonizing for liberation from the Roman yoke and the promise of God’s rule to punish the oppressors and exalt the oppressed and as a result were a ready audience for any apocalyptic prophet who came along to declare such an event was imminent.
Yes, good post. Personally, I find no existential need to deny the existence of Jesus. Like Carrier, I assumed Jesus was real all along and that claims against his existence were nonsense. Of course if Jesus were some apocalyptic preacher it would do nothing to affirm the truth of Christianity, and I had no doubts about the untruth of Christianity when I thought Jesus was a real person.
It’s just a matter of the evidence, and to me the evidence makes the most sense starting from a celestial messiah who was “revealed” by the prophets. I think that the cult of Jesus likely started in much the same way as the worship of Melchizedek that we see from the writings in Qumran. Clearly Melchizedek was a heavenly messiah that they were “discovering” via reinterpretation of older scriptures and perhaps some prophetic visions. The exact means by which they recast Melchizedek as a heavenly war messiah we may never know, but in the case of Melchizedek it’s clear that Melchizedek the messiah was not based on a real person.
Obviously Jews at this time were envisioning many imaginary deities and messiahs. Jesus is just one among many. That is a far simpler and more direct explanation of the evidence that all the contortion you have to go through to explain that there was an oral tradition that accurately preserved sayings and deeds of this person, but no one wrote about the person until later, though they wrote a bunch of other stuff about his “heavenly form”, and when they wrote the story of him they re-cast everything through literary references, but still the true nature of the real person shines through, and every slight deviation from the first narrative is evidence of a separate independent source, etc., etc.
People don’t realize just how convoluted the “Jesus was a real person” explanation has to get to account for the evidence, and it seems it requires greater convolution by the year as more evidence and clarity comes forward.
I had never connected the dots on the Qumran/Melchizedech parallel. I think you do make a case that celestial origins hypotheses provide the most parsimonious explanations.
Melchizedek is an example of exactly the type of figure that Doherty and Carrier propose Jesus was. And there are actually two aspects to the Melchizedek writings as Qumran. #1 Melchizedek is a heavenly apocalyptic type figure himself, but #2 there is also a section that talks about a divine “messenger” for Melchizedek which will known as the Anointed One, the messiah, who will be killed. Unfortunately the text is not well preserved enough to get much detail or know what happens after the messiah is killed.
So we have in Melchizedek an example of how at least some Jews were reinterpreting the Jewish scriptures to “discover” secret information about powerful divine being whose role was to judge the world at the end of days. These are figures whose actions took place in the heavens, and whose “coming into the world” was being predicted to happen at some imminent point in the future.
The way that Melchizedek is described is almost exactly like how Paul and Hebrews describe Jesus, the only difference being that in the case of the Melchizedek writings, Melchizedek himself does not die, his messenger the messiah does.
So, some groups could have conceived of Jesus as Melchizedek’s messenger, or Jesus could just be another figure similar to Melchizedek, derived in much the same way, or Jesus could be seen as a successor of Melchizedek, which is how the letter to the Hebrews describes Jesus. In any event, we know from the Melchizedek writings that Jews were “inventing” powerful heavenly deities through prophetic interpretations of Jewish scriptures.
r.g.price,
Should we call Melchizedek an: angel, second-god, celestial Messiah/Christ?
Cf. Van de Water, Rick (31 July 2016). “Michael or Yhwh? Toward Identifying Melchizedek in 11Q13”. Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha. 16 (1): 75–86. doi:10.1177/0951820706069186.
The is just One of the reasons why I am a Mythicist regarding Jesus.
The famous Testimonium of Flavious Josephus is a 4th Century Christian fraud. We have no record of anyone reading Josephus prior to the 4th Century (and several early Church Fathers did) who ever claimed Josephus mentioned their Jesus (in fact, Origen, circa 250 CE expressly denies it).
Josephus was Governor of Galilee for almost a decade. During that time he traveled all around Galilee recruiting fighters for the rebellion against Rome. Apparently is all his travels and conversations, no one ever mentioned Jesus of Nazareth (or the town of Nazareth for that matter) – (or, if they did, Josephus didn’t think the stories were credible enough to report). Yet, according to the Synoptic Gospels (“John’s Gospel” has Jesus’ ministry centered around Judea – go figure), Jesus spent the majority of his ministry traveling and preaching around Galilee.