Tag: Christ Myth Debate

All posts, for and against, the Christ Myth hypothesis are included here, except for posts relating in depth to Earl Doherty’s works. Posts relating in some depth to Earl Doherty’s ideas are found in the tag, Christ Myth Debate: Doherty.

2010-03-30

How (most) biblical “historians” work: a case study

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Scholars, Biblical Studies, Historical Methods and Historiography, New Testament
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Christ cleansing the Temple
Image by Lawrence OP via Flickr

James Crossley’s argument for the historicity of the Temple Act of Jesus (in The Date of Mark’s Gospel) demonstrates the hollowness of biblical historical assumptions generally. It’s not that James Crossley is any different from other biblical “historians” (e.g. E.P. Sanders, James McGrath, Craig Evans, James Dunn, Maurice Casey, Richard Bauckham, etc) in what he does. I am using here his response to David Seeley’s argument that Jesus Temple Act never happened to illustrate how biblical “historians” base their arguments for historicity on arbitrary assumption.

A surreal game

Seeley takes the view, in effect, that if Jesus had really gone into the temple and started throwing tables around and angrily shouting for the money-changers to get out, the most natural thought that would have come to the minds of onlookers was that he lost his cool on discovering he was cheated over the price of a dove. (D. Seeley, ‘Jesus’ Temple Act’, CBQ 55, 1993 pp. 263-283)

He is specifically responding to Craig Evans’ claim that Jesus was protesting against a corrupt priesthood. There are two problems with this, he argues:

  1. Jesus is giving the money-changers the hard time, not the priests.
  2. There is no evidence for such financial abuse anywhere outside the gospels.

The first thing to notice here is that Seeley does not address any evidence for historicity that Evans might have advanced. Evans is

  1. simply making an assumption that the Temple Act is historical
  2. attempting to find plausible rationales for what he assumes really happened.

Seeley responds by challenging Evans’ rationales and showing they are either not plausible or lack supporting external evidence.

This is a strange game being played here. In order to knock down one scholar’s rationale, another scholar declares that it lacks supporting external evidence. Yet neither scholar appears to notice that the absence of supporting external evidence for the very historical existence of Jesus or historical origin of any of the gospel narrative! It’s like those cartoon characters who are so preoccupied with making the most of a task at hand that they fail to see that they have run off a cliff and are standing in mid-air while continuing obliviously in myopic “reality” until they decide to look down. But these scholars never seem to look down. They are standing on nothing but tradition.

But Crossley takes Seeley to task and attempts to restore grounds for believing this Temple Act really did happen in history. Recall the first of Seeley’s points in which he discounted the rationalization that Jesus was protesting against corrupt priests:

Continue reading “How (most) biblical “historians” work: a case study”

2010-03-26

Robert Price on Earl Doherty’s new book

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by Neil Godfrey

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Following on from Professor Stevan Davies comments on Earl Doherty’s initial appearance in a Crosstalk discussion in 1999, here is Robert Price on the latest version of Earl Doherty’s argument (Jesus: Neither God nor Man) for a mythical Jesus:

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

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gouJ1_mYtDo]

2010-03-25

Another Professor’s Response to Earl Doherty

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by Neil Godfrey

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Given the hostility some mainstream biblical scholars have demonstrated (recently, again) against Earl Doherty’s argument for a mythical Jesus, I am copying here the bulk of a comment by Stevan L. Davies, Professor of Religious Studies at Misericordia University, that he made in response to the peremptory reactions of a number of his academic peers to Doherty in 1999.

Davies is not a mythicist. (Well, I am assuming he is not. I don’t really “know”. He wrote Jesus the Healer, summarized here.) His following statement is copied (with permission) from the 1999 Crosstalk discussion forum where a number of scholars and others discussed the historical Jesus and Christian origins. In the course of these discussions, the topic of Earl Doherty’s Jesus Puzzle was introduced, Earl himself joined the discussion on February 10 (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk/message/5011) and a very lively series of exchanges followed. After one of the contributors complained that he wanted to hear no more about a new  paradigm regarding the historical Jesus, Professor Davies wrote:

Continue reading “Another Professor’s Response to Earl Doherty”

2010-03-24

Introducing Doherty: his preliminary observations on ‘A Heavenly Christ’

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by Neil Godfrey

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Cosmic Christ
Cosmic Christ by Alex Grey: Image by eworm via Flickr

In between (re-)reading at least half a dozen other works I have had a chance to catch up again with Earl Doherty’s new book, Jesus: neither God nor man: the case for a mythical Jesus. My last post with reference to Doherty was my response to the introduction to this work. Here are some comments on my reading of his first chapter.

My notes do not by any means represent the extent and depth of Doherty’s work. I am merely picking out tidbits that I find easy and interesting enough to share in a few words.

The natural way to preach the message

Doherty refers to Peter’s speech in Acts 2:22-36 as being the sort of message that one might expect the early Christian evangelists to preach among new audiences. He talks about Jesus the man, his astonishing deeds on earth, and though crucified, how he was exalted to heaven where he was made Lord and Christ.

This would surely have been the most natural and inevitable way Christian discussion and preaching would proceed. The movement had supposedly begun as a response to a human man. (p.19)

It was the man Jesus who had had such a profound impact on his followers and that led them to abandon their homes and families, their old customs and livelihoods.

But it’s not how the evidence tells us it happened

But what do we find in the letters of Paul and other early writers? They start with the divine Christ, the figure of the Son in heaven, and make their faith statements about him. And there is no equation with an historical man, a human preacher and prophet who had recently lived. Paul believes in a Son of God, not that anyone was the Son of God. (p. 19)

Paul summed up the core of the message he had passed on to the Corinthians:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures (1 Cor.15:3-4)

Doherty wonders why the identity of the human incarnation of this Christ was not part of the central message — even why the incarnation itself is not central. But he grants that we may suspect Paul omitted such “preliminaries” in a summary like this. So he turns to Paul’s “definition” of Father and Son:

yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. (I Cor.8:6)

Doherty opines:

This is language very reminiscent of Greek philosophy. But it would seem that a fundamental description of the Son is not to include the fact that he was incarnated in the person of a human Jesus, the man through whom information about the Son was presumably derived. Such an idea Paul never mentions. (p. 20)

Faith is very important in Paul’s writings:

  • Faith in Jesus as the way to life
  • Faith God raised Jesus from the dead
  • (Faith that Jesus died, apparently from some passages)
  • Faith God has revealed the mystery about Christ now
  • But no reference to faith that the man Jesus of Nazareth had been incarnation of this Son, etc.

Other epistles contain “quite fantastic” descriptions of this Son:

He is the image of the invisible God, his is the primacy over all created things. In him everything in heaven and on earth was created. . . In him the complete being of God, by God’s own choice, came to dwell. Through him God chose to reconcile the whole universe to himself. . . . (Col.1:15-20 NEB)

Here is a being who is the very reflection of God, the very agent through whom God created the universe, the same one through whom he holds it all together, yet there is not a single mention in the entire letter that this same supremely exalted being was once a man on earth who had died the death of a criminal and had been exalted to become part of the Godhead. Was not faith in such a man able to find any place any such writings? Compare also the book of Hebrews.

The question that scholarship has never asked, yet is the most natural one of all

Continue reading “Introducing Doherty: his preliminary observations on ‘A Heavenly Christ’”

2010-03-23

G. A. Wells on mythical and historical Jesus’s

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by Neil Godfrey

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I have frequently encountered claims that George Albert Wells has somehow had his Damascus Road experience and now believes that there was a historical Jesus somewhere at the start of it all. It is certainly a misrepresentation of what one reads in Wells’ own writings of 1999 when he was supposed to have published the details of his conversion in The Jesus Myth.

What Wells argues is that the Jesus of Paul and most early Christians was not historical. For Wells, Paul’s Jesus was a pre-existent being who descended to earth briefly in the flesh before returning to heaven. This was the Jesus of most of the earliest Christians. He was not historical.

There was one exception, and that was a Galilean community who produced Q.

In sum, the religious community responsible for Q cultivated the memory of a Jesus as their founder figure, an authoritative teacher who should be obeyed. (p.102)

Something like the Jesus of Q, rather than the Pauline Jesus, seems to have been what minority groups of Jewish Christians — branded as heretical by the Fathers — persisted in worshipping. (p.103)

Wells goes to pains to stress that the Jesus of Paul and most early Christians was not the same as the Jesus of Q. The name Jesus means Saviour and is a natural one to apply to any figure seen to be performing this role. Paul warned vociferously against others teaching another Jesus. So there was more than one floating around.

I have treated both the Galilean and the Cynic elements less skeptically in The Jesus Myth, allowing that they may contain a core of reminiscences of an itinerant Cynic-type Galilean preacher (who, however, is certainly not to be identified with the Jesus of the earliest Christian documents). (Earliest Christianity)

Wells also suggests that the author of the Gospel of Mark fused the two in an attempt to bring the minority Galilean community over to the majority Christian view of Jesus. Unlike the Q Jesus, Paul’s Jesus was a pre-existent being who descended to earth to die a salvific death. He was modelled on Jewish Wisdom figures and influenced by pagan mysteries.

the Jesus of the early epistles is not the Jesus of the gospels. The ministry of the latter may well be modelled on the career of an itinerant Galilean preacher of he early first century; the former derives largely from early Christian interpretation of Jewish Wisdom figures, with some influence from redeemer figures of pagan mystery religions. (p.112)

The Jesus of the religion of Christianity, the one who was crucified for our sins and resurrected, is the Jesus of Paul and, according to Wells, mythical. Mark attempted to fuse this Jesus with an itinerant Jesus of Galilee who left teachings in Q. Matthew and Luke incorporated those teachings in their gospels. But Christianity was widespread quite independently of any Q teacher, and the Q followers always remained a minority sect until their extinction.

The details of Jesus’ career in the gospels are so redolent of Elijah and Elisha and other OT figures, though, that I can’t see any room for a real person behind them at all. Otherwise, why not refer also to that person somewhere in there to which one is applying all those OT types? And if Q falls, then so does this small glimmer of a historical Jesus who seems to have accidentally intruded into a historical movement, a bit like Brian did in the Monty Python film of the Life of Brian.

2010-03-22

Taking the historical Jesus for granted

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, Historical Methods and Historiography, New Testament
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The following is my own adaption from Philip Davies’ In Search for Ancient Israel, and is not to be taken as representing Philip Davies’ views on the question of the historical Jesus. In 1992 Davies argued that the scholarly search for “ancient Israel” was at the time always based on the unquestioned assumption that there was an “ancient Israel” to be found. It was always taken for granted. The research was only about deciding how much of the biblical literature was historical, and what this ancient Israel must have looked like. Since I began studying the scholarly works about Christian origins and the historical Jesus, it has struck me that the same flawed assumptions and circular reasoning lies at the heart of these studies, too.

Someone responded that the situations are completely different because the Gospels are written within the same time frame as the events they purport to describe. But it can be shown that the logic of this rejoinder is also circular. (Nonetheless, Davies’ argument about the study of “ancient Israel” is based in part on the ability to set the composition of the literature to Persian and Hellenistic times. Since this is a literature about an entire Kingdom and claims to be set within the time of that kingdom, this is necessary. The Gospels are not about a nation, but about a single person who was said by some sources to have been unrecognized in his time, and do not specifically claim any particular date for composition. They have been dated everywhere from the 30’s or 40’s to the 130’s or 140’s. But as with the Old Testament literature, most of the earlier dates are based on an assumption of the historicity of parts of the narrative itself.)

Nor do I see this as a negative or anti-Christian question. My atheism has not led me to question the Bible or God or religion. It was my questioning of these that led, rather, to my atheism. What I find fascinating is the study of Christian origins. My ongoing interest is an intellectual one and has nothing to do with finding supports for faith or reasons to reject faith. If that study uncovers a historical person at the heart of the process, then so be it. But so far I have seen no methodological or evidential reasons for positing such a person as a satisfactory explanation of the nature of the evidence.

In what follows, I have replaced Davies’ references to “Israel” with references to “Jesus” or “Christian origins”. The page references are to In Search of Ancient Israel. The following are not Davies’ views in this book. They are entirely my own adaptation of a few aspects of Davies’ argument to historical Jesus studies.

Opening up the question, not closing it

“Now let me be clear: I am not as yet saying that the literary [Jesus] must be assumed a priori to be unhistorical. What I am saying is that it is literary and that it might be historical.” (p.24)

Seems absurd

“The very raising of the question might seem absurd, deliberately provocative, programmatically negativistic. Virtually a whole discipline, after all, is predicated on the existence of an [historical Jesus]. But it is not absurd at all to ask the question. . . . It only seems absurd because scholars have never opened the question, so that it seems entirely off the agenda. It is the kind of question that threatens with a new paradigm, like the absurd idea that the earth orbited round the sun or that slavery was not  a divinely-ordained institution. The student of the Bible gets the impression that [the historical Jesus] really did exist because she or he reads about [him] all the time.  One might doubt that the Bible is not history, but one can surely not doubt a battalion of professors!” (p.25)

Compromise has ruined everything

“We have not set about arguing that the literary [Jesus] is an historical entity . . . . we have from the outset assumed it. Literary periodization becomes historical time, literary figures are transmuted into historical figures. There are some exceptions, of course: [the slaughtered babes of Bethlehem, Gabriel] and maybe even [Judas Iscariot and Joseph of Arimathea] (for the daring) are eliminated. But taking these figures out makes matters worse rather than better: the result is something that is neither historical nor biblical, but scholarly rationalisation of the literary and the historical. Literary criticism of the Bible became, for generations of students, an historical enterprise.” (p.24)

Never a hypothesis, never a reason to doubt

Continue reading “Taking the historical Jesus for granted”

2010-03-14

The most improbable history of Christian origins

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, Historical Methods and Historiography, New Testament
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Image by Graham Steel via Flickr

Perhaps the more mystery or inexplicable circumstances there are surrounding Christian origins the healthier it is for the faith business. Not that those of the faith are the only “beneficiaries”. Jesus is, after all, a central icon in the constellations of our broader cultural identities. The inexplicable is his defining asset.

The most improbable “stubborn fact”

Note what is generally presented as “the fact” of Christian origins that historians seek to explain:

Christianity appeared suddenly and spread quickly as a direct result of thousands of Jews being persuaded that a failed messiah, one crucified as a criminal by a Roman governor, was indeed a heavenly Messiah and to be worshiped as a divinity beside God himself.

Now on the face of it, this “fact” would seem as improbable as Protestants in Northern Ireland being converted by their thousands in response to Catholic missionaries proclaiming astonishing and miraculous events surrounding Mary in their midst. If I heard of conversions like that I would have to think that the Protestants really were convinced they were seeing the proof of something overwhelming.

So we would like to have some external, independent (non-Christian) witness to such an unlikely event. We have none in the case of the Christian “facts” above, but the closest we get is to a Jewish history written about sixty years after the supposed “facts” happened. This is not primary evidence that is a contemporary witness to Jesus. It is after-the-fact secondary evidence. So according to the father of modern history, von Ranke, it needs to be examined with extra care. Sometimes secondary evidence can even turn out to be more informative than primary evidence, so let’s see what we find in Josephus in support of the “facts” of Christian origins.

The most improbable testimony of Josephus

Josephus wrote to persuade readers of the superior wisdom of Mosaic customs, and who castigated all fellow Jews who strayed from those archaic customs and followed failed messianic types, but who made an exception in the case of Jesus in that:

  • he was completely unperturbed by fellow Jews proclaiming the exalted heavenly messiahship of one crucified by his Roman benefactors as a criminal;
  • he suddenly had no censure against Jews who were known to have either abandoned Mosaic customs or instigated divisions among Jews over their observance;
  • he found no reason to elaborate just a little for his readers any details of the teachings of this Jesus, even though in every other case when introducing a new Jewish sect or teacher he offers readers at least a few lines of their basic curriculum.

Is it any wonder that the general consensus among scholars before World War 2 was that the testimony of Josephus was worthless as evidence for establishing the historicity of Jesus? Has the evidence changed since then? There have been many changes since then, and many that relate to the status of Jewishness, Judas and Israel in biblical studies and the wider community, but the above inconsistencies of the Jesus testimony with Josephus’s interests and ideology have not changed.

So far we have a most improbable “fact” about Christian origins, supported by a most improbable piece of external evidence.

On Tacitus, see Doughty’s Tacitus’ account of Nero’s persecution of Christians; for the other Christ reference in Josephus, see an earlier post, That brother of Jesus who is called Christ.

But what about the internal consistency within the Christian evidence itself. Luke Timothy Johnson points to this as one of the “facts” to be explained when dealing with the question of Christian origins?

The most improbable evidence of the Epistles

Early teachers (going by the names of Paul, Peter, James, Jude and John, and others unnamed) of this heavenly messiah could write numerous letters to their followers without finding any need or interest in referring to the earthly life, sayings and deeds of this Jesus that so compelled his disciples to believe in him even moreso after his crucifixion. At best, when referring to his teachings, they generally hid them behind quotations of the Jewish scriptures or as if they were their own personal proclamations.

Perhaps it is fitting that improbable “facts” are supported by improbable supporting evidence.

So what is the evidence for this most improbable “fact” of Christian origins?

Continue reading “The most improbable history of Christian origins”

2010-03-13

How Luke Timothy Johnson Stumbles Over the Mythical Jesus

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by Neil Godfrey

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In my previous post I presented Luke Timothy Johnson‘s case against to the opening arguments of Robert M. Price in The Historical Jesus: Five Views. Price gives reasons for suspecting there never was a historical Jesus. In this post I am giving both my own views and some of Price’s own “responses” to Johnson’s criticisms. (Price does not really “respond” to Johnson’s “response” in the book. I have chosen to highlight a few of Price’s arguments that I thought Johnson was dismissing too quickly. Most of the commentary, however, is my own.)

Johnson’s evidence for the historical Jesus

So in response to Robert Price’s demolition of any evidence for Jesus, how does Luke Timothy Johnson come back with clear evidence that this Jesus did exist in history?

  1. By saying there is multiple attestation for some things about Jesus
  2. By insisting that not all Gospel stories about Jesus are very like Torah stories
  3. By asserting that one cannot find Jesus stories in the Torah just by reading the Torah
  4. By insisting that it is a fact that Christianity suddenly emerged out of Jews by their thousands being persuaded that a failed messiah crucified as a criminal was the real messiah and now in heaven to be worshiped alongside God, and that Price has not explained how “this fact” happened
  5. By pointing to “the fact” that the New Testament books all talk about the same Jesus
  6. By reminding us that Josephus, Tacitus and Lucian all write about Jesus and early Christians
  7. And by noting that Paul said Jesus was a Jew, descended from David, and took commands from him, and called him by his personal (human) name Jesus.

I said in a recent comment that it seemed those responding to Price were not really taking his chapter seriously enough to really try to muster a decent criticism. But that’s not really true. To come up with seven strands of “evidence” for the historical Jesus certainly demonstrates some serious effort. Each one may look rather flimsy on its own, but, as to be discussed in the next section, there is no denying that when multiple attestation even of insubstantial arguments can find a single point of convergence, it does at least begin to look serious.

(Johnson repeats some of these arguments in his own chapter in The Historical Jesus: Five Views. I will address some of them again in a future post when discussing that chapter specifically.)

The omission of “multiple attestation“

Continue reading “How Luke Timothy Johnson Stumbles Over the Mythical Jesus”

2010-03-12

Luke Timothy Johnson’s Response to Robert Price

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by Neil Godfrey

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In The Historical Jesus: Five Views, Luke Timothy Johnson responds to the 5 principles for historical enquiry as laid out by Robert M. Price in his opening chapter of that book. I discussed these in overview in my recent 5 more commandments post. The five are:

1. The Principle of Analogy

2. The Criterion of Dissimilarity

3. Remember what an Ideal Type means

4. Consensus is No Criterion

5. Scholarly “Conclusions” must be tentative and provisional

Johnson’s strongest criticism is for Price’s failure to include “multiple attestation” among his principles. Johnson refers to the significance of “points of convergence” here.

Of the 5 points listed above, Johnson finds #2 and #3 somewhat questionable. He argues that Price’s ideal type is really another form of the principle of analogy.

He faults Price for relying on this after dismissing #2, the criterion of dissimilarity. Johnson points to the teaching of Jesus on divorce – unlike both Greco-Roman and Jewish practice — as an example of “where dissimilarity actually yields something historically significant.”

In short, Price uses the criterion of dissimilarity to demolish any trace of specific evidence for a historically discernible figure named Jesus, and then appeals to analogy/ideal type to account for the rise of the Christ cult.

He knows that this approach has a long history of its own, and he cheerfully acknowledges that for many, it is considered one of “extreme, even crackpot, theories.” But he does not examine the reasons why such appeals to the ideal type of dying-and-rising gods came to be so regarded by sober historians. It was not, as Price intimates, out of failure of nerve among the apologetically inclined. Rather, it was the failure of such theories to adequately account for the specific character of the Christian movement and its cult figure, as well as the stubborn resistance of certain historical facts to being wished away. (pp. 90-91)

Then Johnson gets to the nub of the matter: “Two interrelated historical facts require explanation.” Continue reading “Luke Timothy Johnson’s Response to Robert Price”

2010-03-11

The mythicist seeks the historical explanation; many historicists are content with the mythical

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by Neil Godfrey

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A standard formula-problem found in historical Jesus works is that the question that needs to be explained is how or why Jesus’ disciples were able to persuade so many Jews that a crucified criminal was indeed the Christ. And of course, to explain why the disciples became convinced of this themselves.

These are indeed extremely improbable scenarios.

One “biblical scholar and historian” who is also a Christian writes:

As we have already seen, what precisely motivated [the disciples] to believe that Jesus had been raised . . . is difficult if not impossible to say from a historian’s perspective. (The Burial of Jesus: History & Faith, p. 121)

And again,

There seems to be little hope of gaining access by means of the later written sources to the actual experiences that early Christians had, the ones that convinced them Jesus was alive. Even Paul only alludes to his own direction-changing experience, and never describes it. Perhaps this is appropriate: religious experiences are regularly characterized by those who have them as ineffable, as “beyond words.” The Gospel of Mark suggested that Jesus would be seen, but doesn’t describe the experience, at least not in our earliest manuscripts. . . .

But this much can be said: the act of completely surrendering has transformed many lives. Such unconditional surrender to God seems to have been central to Jesus’ own spirituality. There would be something fundamentally appropriate if it turned out to be central to the rise in the earliest disciples of the conviction that Jesus had been raised, as it has been for Christians all through the ages since then. (pp. 115-116)

This historian is writing for his fellow-faithful. In doing so he has given away his bias that would seem to preclude him from any ability to continue his historical enquiries until he finds a truly historical explanation for the rise of the Christian faith. He is content with an explanation that opens up room to find his faith — the inexplicable, even the ineffable — in history. (And given that this particular faith is dependent upon historical events, Schweitzer’s pleas notwithstanding [- see below], this is surely an inevitable conclusion for a committed Christian.)

This is not good enough for truly post-Enlightenment historiography. History is often enough defined as an investigation into what is human, what can be naturally explained.

If our questions and models bring us up against a brick wall of “ineffability” then it is time for historians to ask new questions and try new models until they do find the natural and explicable answers.

The Gospel narratives, particularly that of the earliest Gospel of Mark, make no sense as history. Read naively they prompt silly questions like: Why did Jews come to believe a crucified criminal was their messiah? Such silly questions are embraced with utmost sober seriousness presumably for the same reasons they were a subject of boast by Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.”

They are questions grounded in faith and therefore also supportive of faith. Even non-Christian scholars embrace them because the faith narrative has become part of our very cultural identity.

The historian who is prepared to set aside assumptions and hypotheses that have been found wanting, or that are self-authenticating being found exclusively within the Christian narrative itself, will necessarily be operating from the cultural fringes. But that is the only historian who is likely to stumble upon an answer to the real historical question (how did Christianity begin?) that is completely natural, human and explicable of all the evidence. There will be no need to be content with “the ineffable” or “difficult if not impossible to say” in place of an explanation.

Granted, not all biblical historians do accept the unknown or “impossible to say” in place of a genuinely historical explanation. But they do still work within the culturally rooted paradigm and are up against  a model that has more to do with faith and myth than with human reality. This explains why there is so little in common, and much that is mutually exclusive, among the many Jesus reconstructions by  biblical historians working within the constraints of the model that remains an inheritance of faith. The wildly opposing results generated through their paradigm ought to suggest a new paradigm and new questions are timely. But how to begin with something that is so much a part of our collective identity?

And once again, as quoted here before:

Moreover, in the case of Jesus, the theoretical reservations are even greater because all the reports about him go back to the one source of tradition, early Christianity itself, and there are no data available in Jewish or Gentile secular history which could be used as controls. Thus the degree of certainty cannot even by raised so high as positive probability.

. . . Modern Christianity must always reckon with the possibility of having to abandon the historical figure of Jesus. Hence it must not artificially increase his importance by referring all theological knowledge to him and developing a ‘christocentric’ religion: the Lord may always be a mere element in ‘religion’, but he should never be considered its foundation.

To put it differently: religion must avail itself of a metaphysic, that is, a basic view of the nature and significance of being which is entirely independent of history and of knowledge transmitted from the past . . .

From pages 401-402 of The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 2001, by Albert Schweitzer.

The imaginary siblings of Jesus

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by Neil Godfrey

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Brothers of Jesus
Brothers of Jesus; Image by djking via Flickr

The Gospel narratives provide strong positive evidence for why their authors chose to write about Jesus’ siblings. They explicitly meet a clear and specific requirement for the portrayal of a man of God who is to both follow and emulate the prophets who came before him. They also serve to illustrate a moral instruction of Jesus in the Gospels. These are positive reasons for thinking the family of Jesus is most probably a creation of the narratives’ authors.

Cain killed righteous Abel; chosen Isaac was persecuted by Hagar and Ishmael; Esau threatened the life of Jacob who was forced to flee; Joseph was disbelieved, scorned and cast out by his brothers; Jephthah was rejected by his tribe; David was also mocked and dismissed by his brothers. The theme of rejection of the righteous and godly man by those close to him, including his own kin, is one of the most pervasive of themes in the Jewish scriptures, including the Psalms and the Prophets.

The dismissive family serves as a foil to enhance the image of the divine calling and godliness of the hero. It is a trope probably as old as folklore itself. There is nothing embarrassing at all about their inclusion in the narrative. The rejection of Jesus by his siblings serves to enhance the readers’ sympathies for Jesus and places him squarely in the literary tradition of the way and the fate of all the godly.

So the narrative itself contains the reasons for the inclusion of the siblings of Jesus. They are portrayed as disbelievers who isolate Jesus on account of his real (hidden) identity.

When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.” (Mark 3:21)

The Gospel authors also taught the need for a devotion to him that was so total that it excluded room for the affections of normal family relations (Mark 10:29-30). So they presented Jesus as the ideal type illustrative of such an attitude, and delivering teaching on the new affections that were to replace the old:

Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.”

“Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked.

Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3:31-35)

In all of this we can see how the authors find a narrative or theological reason for introducing the siblings of Jesus. We can say that the appearance of Jesus’ siblings is plot-driven.

The memorable scene of Jesus’ rejection in the earliest Gospel echoes several other rejection narratives in the “Old Testament”.

Jesus left there and went to his hometown, accompanied by his disciples. When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed.

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him, that he even does miracles! Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Jesus said to them, “Only in his hometown, among his relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honor.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed at their lack of faith. (Mark 6:1-6)

Again the author has explicitly stated that the reason for introducing this narrative detail about the family of Jesus is to illustrate a prophecy, or at least to place Jesus firmly within the prophetic tradition.

We cannot appeal to later traditions about the siblings of Jesus as evidence for their historicity since these most likely were born out of the Gospel narratives. (And the Josephus reference is worthless as evidence, for reasons summarized here.)

What, no James?

I think that the quick assumption that Galatians 1:19 is “proof” that Jesus had a physical brother is linked to some extent with our familiarity with the memorable (negative) role of Jesus’ brothers in the later Gospel narratives.

If the passage in Galatians referring to James “the brother of the Lord” was really written prior to the Gospels, and if this indeed spoke of a physical blood relationship, and if this same James became the head of the Church itself in Jerusalem, the Gospel authors have chosen to suppress any interest in this James or his destined conversion and future lead role.

I am tempted here to drop in the obvious argument from incredulity, “Why would they not contain a hint of any of this?”,  but I won’t say it (again). It is hardly necessary. We have no evidence at all to justify thinking there was a historical basis to the siblings of Jesus. But we do have strong narrative reasons for assuming they are literary creations.

But given the fact that the presumably later Gospel authors do not demonstrate any knowledge of a brother of Jesus destined to become the leader (or one of three leaders beside Peter and John) of the Church after the death of Jesus, and given the fact that there is no external witness to Galatians 1:19 till the time of Origen (3rd century) despite its apparent potential usefulness in arguments against Marcionites by “orthodox” representatives such as Tertullian (second century), and given the fact that Paul used ‘brothers’ most commonly metaphorically, and given the fact of demonstrated layers and intentional and accidental editings in both biblical and nonbiblical writings of the time, to insist, in the face of these facts that Galatians 1:19 alone is “proof” of the historicity of Jesus, shows more courage than discretion.

(There are other speculations about possible motives for giving Jesus siblings, and these relate to doctrinal disputes over the physical or immaterial nature of Jesus at the time the Gospels were being composed. But I have opted not to discuss these since they also stray from the evidence at hand. It is worth noting, however, that at least such conjectures are based on known evidence. The assumption of the historicity of the siblings is based on no evidence at all. It is entirely a piece of unsupported but highly charged cultural heritage.)

James & Jesus
The historical James & Jesus; Image by trixie via Flickr

2010-03-08

Further explanation concerning “mythicism”

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, Historical Methods and Historiography, New Testament
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After my earlier post on Assumptions and Historicity it appears there is still some confusion about mythical Jesus arguments and points I have raised about the need for external controls to establish the historical value of a narrative.

History, mosaic by Frederick Dielman. House Me...
History, mosaic by Frederick Dielman. Image via Wikipedia

External controls are more than just nice extras

It has been said that my discussion about absence of external controls for the Gospel narratives merely leaves their historicity “inconclusive”, and that “in order to conclude that these stories are most likely not historical, we need some further argument.”

Certainly the absence of external controls renders the historicity of a narrative “inconclusive”, but “inconclusive” in the strongest sense. That means that we cannot begin to assume historicity at all. To suggest that the absence of external controls still leaves open the possibility of the narrative being historical is obviously true. Anything is possible. What we need is a defensible justification for inferring the historicity of a narrative. It is not valid simply to say we need more than the absence of external controls to conclude a narrative is “most likely not historical”. In the absence of external controls we have no way even to begin to work with a narrative as if it were historical. We cannot justify any assumption of historicity in the absence of a justification external to the narrative itself. Continue reading “Further explanation concerning “mythicism””

2010-03-07

A Strange Critique of Doherty

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, New Testament
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There has appeared recently a blogpost critiquing Doherty’s arguments as found on his Jesus Puzzle website. This post has gained some recognition by an Associate Professor of Religion at Butler University as “worth linking to” because it brings Koester into the “debate” and illustrates “so nicely why [the argument for a mythical Jesus] is problematic.”

The blog poster, Metacrock, quotes Doherty from his website:

“Scholars such as Helmut Koester have concluded that earlier “allusions” to Gospel-like material are likely floating traditions which themselves found their way into the written Gospels. (See Koester’s Ancient Christian Gospels and his earlier Synoptische Uberlieferung bei den apostolischen Vatern.) Is it conceivable that the earliest account of Jesus’ life and death could have been committed to writing as early as 70 (or even earlier, as some would like to have it), and yet the broader Christian world took almost a century to receive copies of it? (Jesus Puzzle, part 3:Evolution of Jesus Of Nazareth”

Metacrock responds:

The problem is Koester himself says that people were writing Gospels as early AD 50.(Ancient Christian Gospels)
Moreover he’s already distorted what Koester says. Nowhere does he argue that the early Gospel traditions blew in from non Christian sources, or merely “floating traditions” that found their way in late.

This is a strange criticism. If Doherty had argued that the Gospels were written as early as AD 50 then his point about their lack of impact for such a long time would be even stronger. Metacrock is actually strengthening Doherty’s case with this criticism. Equally dismally, Metacrock has failed to notice that Doherty does indeed allow for his argument to include dates as early as 50 ce when he writes, “or even earlier, as some would like to have it”.

Secondly, Metacrock faults Doherty for apparently distorting what Koester says, and explains: “Nowhere does he argue that the early Gospel traditions blew in from non Christian sources”.

This is a most strange reading for someone who boasts that he is a PhD student. Doherty himself does not say that any “Gospel traditions”, floating or otherwise, blew in from “non-Christian sources”. That is really quite bizarre. Doherty’s whole argument is about the variety of Christian sources that went into the creation of the Gospels. (When Doherty does discuss “non-Christian sources” he identifies them as Josephus and Tacitus.) Continue reading “A Strange Critique of Doherty”

Introduction to Earl Doherty

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, New Testament, Religion and Atheism
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I recently received Earl Doherty’s new book, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man. The Case for a Mythical Jesus, and have finally caught up with a chance to begin reading it. It may take a little while since I have a vicious habit of reading several things at once and a need to attend to real life occupations at the same time. But I have made a start by reading the Introduction and have been reminded why I have in the past found exchanges with Doherty both informative and stimulating gateways to knew perspectives. We often disagree, but then again I also tend to find I disagree with myself when I take a re-look at what I wrote a year or more ago.

I cite here a few quotations from Doherty’s introduction to his new book that make me look forward to entering new explorations of the evidence with him, and no doubt in dialogue with him, as I read further.

First, however, I might remark that I do not see this particular question — the existence or otherwise of Jesus — as a historical question. It is certainly important for history, but my personal interest is in engaging with the arguments and evidence presented by Doherty with a view to seeing how they might fit in the broader (and more historical) question of Christian origins. Doherty is certainly essential reading for that question. But his focus is, naturally and justifiably, primarily on the cultural question of the origin of what is possibly our central icon.

Enough preliminaries. On to a selection of quotations with a few comments. . . . Continue reading “Introduction to Earl Doherty”