Category: Biblical Scholars

One reader asked for an easier way to review the various posts on Thomas Brodie’s Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery. So here it is. Posts directly dealing with a chapter by chapter overview of the book, those in the “Making of a Mythicist” series, are in bold font. Other posts in which the same book had a key focus are right-aligned. All are in chronological order of posting.

I have not included here several other posts on Brodie’s ideas that have been posted on this blog. These can be found through the “Index of Topics / Select a Category” button in the right hand margin.

“Jesus did not exist as an historical individual”: Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus

Quest for History: Rule One — from Brodie’s Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus

Mythicism and Positive Christianity

Thomas Brodie’s Review of Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist?

Sowing Doubt That An Emotional Paul Authored Galatians

What Did Luke’s Eyewitnesses See?

Questioning Paul’s Letters. Were they really “occasional”? Or rhetorical fictions?

The Inevitable Catches Up With Thomas L. Brodie

Thomas L. Brodie: Two Core Problems with Historical Jesus Arguments

What They Are Saying About The Brodie Affair

1. The Making of a Mythicist, Act 1, Scene 1 (Thomas Brodie’s Odyssey)

.

2. Making of a Mythicist, Act 1, Scene 2

McGrath’s Review of Brodie’s Memoir: Incompetent or Dishonest?

Ongoing Disregard for Facts and Denials of Old Criticisms (yes, McGrath again, sorry)

Brodie’s Argument that Jesus Never Existed

What Do We Mean by “Incompetent”?

Joel Watts Acclaims Thomas Brodie a Scholarly “Giant” and His Work “A Masterpiece”

3. Making of a Mythicist, Act 2, Scene 1 (Brodie’s Odyssey)

.

4. Making of a Mythicist, Act 2, Scene 2 (The Verdict Falls)

.

5. Making of a Mythicist, Act 2, Scene 3 (“That is an important thesis”)

Brodie’s Mythicist Case: The Facts

6. Making of a Mythicist, Act 3, Scene 1 (Too Strange!)

Thomas Brodie Illustrates The New Testament’s Dependence On the Old

Parallels, Drum Majorettes and Brodie

7. Making of a Mythicist, Act 3, Scene 2 (Discovering the Crucial Bridge) — With a note on “Parallelomania”

.

8. Making of a Mythicist, Act 3, Scene 3 (“It is original, but not off the wall”)

.

9. Making of a Mythicist, Act 3, Scene 4 (The Dominican Biblical Institute, and its Research)

.

10. Making of a Mythicist, Act 4, Scene 1 (“We need a gentle funeral”)

.

11. Making of a Mythicist, Act 4, Scene 2 (“What Is Rule One?”)

.

12. Making of a Mythicist, Act 4, Scene 3 (Deeps Below, Storms Ahead)

.

13. Making of a Mythicist, Act 4, Scene 4 (The Crumbling Evidence for Paul)

.

14. Making of a Mythicist, Act 4, Scene 5 (How Paul Was Made)

.

15. Making of a Mythicist, Act 4, Scene 6 (Two Key Problems with Historical Jesus Studies)

.

16. Making of a Mythicist — ch 17 . . . Unreliable Criteria

.

17. Making of a Mythicist — ch 17 . . . Did Jesus Model Himself on Elijah?

.

18. Making of a Mythicist — ch 17 . . . Was Jesus a Carpenter?

.

19. Making of a Mythicist — ch 17 . . . The Evidence of Josephus

.

20. Making of a Mythicist — ch 17 . . . Jesus in Greco-Roman Sources & General Conclusions

.

21. Making of a Mythicist, Act 5, Scene 1 (Explaining Christian Origins Without Jesus)

.

22. Making of a (Christian) Mythicist, Act 5, Scene 2 (Staying Christian With a Symbolic Jesus)

.

23. Making of a (Christian) Mythicist, Act 5, Scene 3 (What Christianity Can Mean If Jesus Did Not Exist)

.

24. Making of a (Christian) Mythicist, Act 5, Scene 4 (To Believe Or Not To Believe the Parable) — Conclusion

Theology and the Historical Jesus

Brodie’s final chapter* is essentially an attempt to justify religious faith or belief. How can one believe in the New Testament (or God)? (This is the final post on this book: the complete series is archived here.)

He begins by suggesting it is quite possible to believe the New Testament’s message “as a parable”. One can “believe a parable”, he writes. He means that one can believe that its story conveys “an ultimate truth”. The details of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son stories are not true but “we believe” their message. One can even accrue some reassurance from reflecting upon all the witnesses of countless others who have believed through the ages.

Recall John Dominic Crossan’s The Power of Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus. As pointed out here over three posts Crossan argues that the Gospels are not historical reports but theological “parables” about the meaning of Jesus. One may wonder if he is stretching the meaning of “parable” to breaking point, but larger argument is really not very distant from Brodie’s. Naturally readers will ask themselves whether Jesus himself is a parable if all the stories about him are parables, so Crossan reassures readers that yes, Jesus was historical nonetheless. Indeed, it was his remarkable character that inspired all the parables about him. John Shelby Spong argues the same (Liberating the Gospels and Jesus for the Nonreligious). No doubt Crossan and Spong are not the only scholars to have settled upon such a view.

Virtually all the stories about Jesus are judged to be adaptations of Old Testament narratives in the judgment of Crossan and Spong (not too far from Brodie’s own argument) but Jesus himself was real. Jesus is real even though he is the central character of “parables” and “theological fictions” and his own name is itself a pun on his role in those “Gospel myths”.

Unlike Crossan and Spong, Brodie has concluded that the character Jesus is just as “parabolic” as any other person in the Gospels. (Even the historical Pilate was turned into a fictional character of “parable” in order to fit the theological agendas of the different evangelists.) In the same sense that he can “believe” the parables of the Good Samaritan and Prodigal Son he can “believe” the parable of Jesus Christ.

What good is Reason?

Brodie acknowledges the “struggle” many have with believing in a deity or spiritual dimension and this leads him into a discussion of belief and reason. Of course we know reason alone is not enough to create a good society, but Brodie appears to assume that what is missing is a spiritual dimension. For Brodie, the big questions revolve around reason and belief. Continue reading “Making of a (Christian) Mythicist, Act 5, Scene 4 (To Believe or Not to Believe the Parable) — Conclusion”

Continuing the series on Thomas Brodie’s Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery, archived here. This post addresses the next to last chapter. It gives Brodie’s answer to the question: What can a Christian still believe in if Jesus never existed but was entirely a literary-theological creation?

In Thomas Brodie’s view Jesus was an imaginative literary creation of the New Testament writers. But that does not lessen his religious and spiritual significance for anyone who believes in and seeks to deepen their understanding of God. The Jesus figure was “not a petty literary exercise” but a vehicle for a new revelation or vision of the nature of God. Not just one but several people contributed their own inspirations to what this figure represented and that’s why we have diverse views of Jesus in the New Testament writings.

The name “Jesus” was the natural one given that it is the Greek form of the name of Moses’ successor, Joshua. He encapsulated a new understanding of God that succeeded the Mosaic revelation. He emulated and surpassed the old figures of Moses, Elijah, the Anointed One (Christ) and, being identified with the Yahweh of old, widened and deepened “for all time” the believer’s vision of the nature of God.

Brodie’s conceptualization of this vision of Jesus as “the heart of reality . . . the measure of reality; and . . . the enigmatic form of reality — shadowed beauty” surpasses my own naturalistic comprehension and view of reality so I can only leave it to those more mystically minded than I to read Brodie’s explanation for themselves. (Brodie himself says he does “not have a clear sense of what Jesus Christ means”, so I suspect I should not feel embarrassed for failing to understand some of his attempts to explain.) I think I can grasp some of the details, however.

Brodie might complain that I attempt to reduce the points to comprehensible brevity here and miss the “inexpressible” nature of what he wishes to express, but I will object to Brodie’s failure to comprehend the alternative vision of reality as found among the likes of naturalists like Dawkins (whom he appears either to have had no interest in reading for himself or to have misunderstood). I hope to give a reasonably fair idea of Brodie’s position here, however brief.

Symbol of “Heart of Reality”

Christ died for our sins and rose to save us:

These words are beyond full comprehension (how does someone’s death actually redeem others from sins?) but they convey “a vision of reconciliation with fresh strength and clarity, so fresh that the revealing of the figure of Christ brings creation to a new level and inaugurates a new covenant. . . . It brings life to a new level.”

The idea of reconciliation with the divine is itself old. Contrast the Christ method with one of its earliest images, that of God “repenting” or “regretting” having wiped out all sinners in a great flood. Continue reading “Making of a (Christian) Mythicist, Act 5, Scene 3 (What Christianity Can Mean If Jesus Did Not Exist)”

Continuing the series on Thomas Brodie’s Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery, archived here. This post begins with the final section of Brodie’s book, Part V, Glimmers of Shadowed Reality: Some steps towards clarifying Christianity’s origin and meaning.

In this final section Thomas Brodie attempts to offer an explanation for Christian origins without an historical Jesus. He then shares his own reflections on what it means to be a Christian and to abide in a deep faith in God even though he no longer believes Jesus walked this earth. For Brodie, Jesus becomes a profound symbolic expression of the nature and character of God.

Chapter 18, “Backgrounds of Christianity: Religions, Empires, and Judaism”

Brodie opens with a panoramic sweep of the worlds major religions and laments that in all cases we are left without answers to the questions of exactly how and through whom they originated.

Nonetheless, Brodie finds cause for some optimism from our ability at least to know something of the world from which Christianity emerged. So he covers here the usual story of ancient empires — Persian, Hellenistic, Roman — and the way they led to the concept of a universal imperial peace and more effective bonds of communication, culture, language, law, and so forth.

Add to this the diversity of Judaism and even the chaotic disunity of the Jews politically, culturally and geographically, and the catastrophic consequences of the Jewish War of 66-73 CE.

The destroying of the temple meant that for Judaism the institutional centre was not merely in trouble; it was gone, and with it the traditional priesthood — a numbing moment for many, but for others a time to build something new. (p. 181)

And so we have many Jews eventually falling in with rabbinical traditions — with new writings coming to form the Mishnah and eventually the Talmud, while some others followed a new way of a new Joshua (=Jesus) . . . .

Chapter 19, Christian Origins: Writing As One Key

Not that Brodie sees the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple as catalysts for the birth of Christianity. Critical though the events of 70 CE were, Brodie believes that the letters of Paul are sure evidence that

a role should also be given to the inspirations and divisions that existed within Judaism prior to 70 CE. (p. 182)

Brodie suggests that Christianity’s gestation will be found to be closely associated with a well developed process of writing from its beginning. He brackets this possibility with a similarly critical role for writing in other major historical events, such as the Magna Carta, the Reformation, the US Constitution, the Communist Manifesto, and so forth.

But what is certain is that, while the Jewish people became known as the People of the Book, the Christians became de facto the primary developers of the codex, the bound book which replaced scrolls, and which, whatever its origin, emerged energetically about the same time as Christianity. (p. 182)

The bottom line for Brodie is that coordinated writing played a significant part in Christianity’s origin. To support his claim he addresses six points. Continue reading “Making of a Mythicist, Act 5, Scene 1 (Explaining Christian Origins Without Jesus)”