Tag: John Dickson (author)

2022-01-27

Round Two. On John Dickson’s Response

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, New Testament
Tags: , ,

As noted in a recent post, John Dickson [JD] wrote a lament over a significant number of Australians doubting the historicity of Jesus. Such a state of affairs was “bad news for historical literacy” in this country, he said. The thrust of his article suggested that more Australians should be mindful of what is found in certain major texts and fall into line if they wanted to be “historically literate” — as if historical literacy is about believing “authorities” without question. I pointed out that the sources JD referred to are not as assuring as he suggests and that they actually invite questioning. And a questioning engagement with teachers is how I would define genuine “historical literacy”.

In a follow-up post I noted that Miles Pattenden [MP] quite rightly responded to JD by noting that most classicists and ancient historians have had little (or no) reason, professionally, to take up serious research into the question of Jesus’s existence:

One of the few classicists who did do a study of Jesus was Michael Grant in his Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels. I wrote a two-part post reviewing Grant’s effort and pointed out that all he did was write a study using older theologians’ works; I further noted that some more current biblical scholars faulted Grant for doing nothing more than “outdated hermeneutics” rather than real history.

[T]he existence of a critical mass of scholars who do believe in Jesus’s historicity will almost certainly have shaped the way that all other scholars write about the subject. Unless they are strongly motivated to argue that Jesus was not real, they will not arbitrarily provoke colleagues who do believe in his historicity by denying it casually. After all, as academics, we ought to want to advance arguments that persuade our colleagues — and getting them offside by needlessly challenging a point not directly in contention will not help with that.

Today JD has responded to MP. In his rejoinder he plays a game with the above quote by throwing a double-edged ad hominem: he suggests that MP was claiming that ancient historians are sloppy and don’t do their homework if they refer to Jesus in the manner explained above. Nonsense. If the historicity of Jesus was the question other historians were addressing JD would have a point. But a historian of ancient Rome does not discuss the historical Jesus when he or she explores the rise of Christianity throughout the empire. Indeed, the historicity of Jesus is of little relevance to the larger questions historians of the ancient Roman era pursue, even “how to explain the rise of Christianity”, and in such a context there is nothing wrong with mentioning the traditional account of Jesus in passing.

JD is somewhat disingenuous when he writes (with my bolded highlighting)…

[MP] notes that the fact that secular specialists, by an overwhelming majority, accept the historical existence of Jesus does not amount to actual evidence of Jesus’s existence. That is true. Happily, I did not make such a claim. The thrust of my piece was merely to note the striking mismatch between public opinion and scholarly opinion on the matter of the historical existence of Jesus. I noted a recent survey which found only a minority of Australians believed Jesus was a real historical figure, and I thought it was worth pointing out that the vast majority of ancient historians (I said 99 per cent) reckon Jesus was a historical figure.

No statement is made “merely” to note a neutral fact. The clear point of JD’s article was to fault the view of too many Australians according to the National Church Life Survey. He twists the knife by comparing doubters of Jesus’ historicity to climate change deniers. Again, this is insulting since it presumes that people questioned in the survey are incapable of forming rational opinions on the basis of what they might thoughtfully read and listen to. Indeed, there are scholars, including historians, who have expressed the desirability that scholarship becomes more open to the question of the historicity of Jesus. Such academics have expressed some bemusement when theologians are so quick to ridicule and insult those raising the questions. A survey among academics comparable to the NCLS one of the general public might, I suspect, lower the rate of believers in academia at least a little lower than JD’s estimated 99%. Let a serious and open discussion — an essential element of “historical literacy” — begin.

JD then falls back on the supposedly reassuring evidence for Jesus. He refers to hypothetical sources “behind” the gospels such as Q. He points to the passages in Josephus and Tacitus as if those authors necessarily had first-hand knowledge of the facts and not have relied upon Christian stories extant in their own day. He even infers that ancient historians might not begin to write useful history about a figure until as much as 80 years after his death. That’s a somewhat mischievous statement given that he knows full well that such historians had a wealth of known written sources — not hypothetical sources — from the deceased’s own day to refer to.

The fact remains that ancient historians do have ways of determining who and what happened: they have primary sources (inscriptions, coins, archaeological remains) and written materials whose sources can be traced back to the times in question. For Jesus, however, historical Jesus scholars speak of hypothetical sources and the assumption of oral tradition “behind” the gospels. Classicists and ancient historians would be horrified if that’s all they had to work with and some of them have indeed expressed serious misgivings about the methods of their Bible-studying peers.

 

2022-01-18

Bearing False Witness for Jesus

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, New Testament
Tags: ,

Last month a National Church Life Survey found that only 49% of Australians believe that “Jesus was a real person who actually lived”. From NCLS Research: Is Jesus Real to Australians?

That finding (although the sample size surveyed was small — 1286) was too depressing for one somewhat prominent Christian scholar in Australia who dashed off in time for Christmas the following response: Most Australians may doubt that Jesus existed, but historians don’t

A new survey has found that less than half of all Australians believe Jesus was a real historical person. This is bad news for Christianity, especially at Christmas, but it is also bad news for historical literacy.

. . . .

This is, obviously, terrible news for Christianity in Australia. One of the unique selling points of the Christian faith — in the minds of believers — is that it centres on real events that occurred in time and space. Christianity is not based on someone’s solitary dream or private vision. It isn’t merely a divine dictation in a holy book that has to be believed with blind faith. Jesus was a real person, “crucified under Pontius Pilate”, the fifth governor of Judea, as the Apostles’ Creed puts it. It seems many Australians really don’t agree.

But, frankly, this new survey is also bad news for historical literacy. This reported majority view is not shared by the overwhelming consensus of university historians specialising in the Roman and Jewish worlds of the first century. If Jesus is a “mythical or fictional character”, that news has not yet reached the standard compendiums of secular historical scholarship.

Take the famous single-volume Oxford Classical Dictionary. Every classicist has it on their bookshelf. It summarises scholarship on all things Greek and Roman in just over 1,700 pages. There is a multiple page entry on the origins of Christianity that begins with an assessment of what may be reliably known about Jesus of Nazareth. Readers will discover that no doubts at all are raised about the basic facts of Jesus’s life and death.

(John Dickson, 21st Dec 2021. Bolded highlighting is mine in all quotations. Link to OCD is original to John Dickson’s article.)

That sounds overwhelming, right? Who can be left to doubt? Who dares to step out of line from what is found in “the famous single-volume” toolkit of “every classicist”?

Let’s follow John Dickson’s advice and actually “take” that 4th edition of the OCD and read it for ourselves. Here is the relevant section of the article of which he speaks. All punctuation except for the bolded highlighting is original to the text quoted:

Christianity Christianity began as a Jewish sect and evolved at a time when both Jews and Christians were affected by later Hellenism (see HELLENISM, HELLENIZATION). Following the conquests of Alexander the Great, some Jews found Hellenistic culture congenial, while others adhered to traditional and exclusive religious values. When Judaea came under direct Roman control soon after the death of Herod the Great in 4 BC, cultural and religious controversies were further exacerbated by the ineptitude of some Roman governors. Jesus therefore, and his followers, lived in a divided province.

The ‘historical Jesus’ is known through the four Gospels, which are as sources problematic. Written not in Aramaic but in Greek, the four ‘Lives’ of Jesus were written some time after his death (and, in the view of his followers, resurrection) and represent the divergent preoccupations and agendas of their authors. The Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke (to give their probable chronological order) differ from John in such matters as the geographical scope of Jesus’ ministry, which John expands from Galilee to include Judaea and Samaria as well; John also is more influenced by Greek philosophical thought. Through them, we can see Jesus as a rabbi and teacher, whose followers included socially marginal women (e.g. Mary Magdalen) as well as men, as a worker of miracles, as a political rebel, or as a prophet, who foresaw the imminent ending of the world, and the promised Jewish Messiah.

(OCD article by Gillian Clark, University of Bristol with Jill Harries, University of St Andrews, p. 312)

If one were inclined to be mischievous one might follow up the above by reading the entry for Heracles in the same OCD and noting that the description for him, another ancient figure who also became a god, is likewise described matter-of-factly as a real person and no less a mix of historical and mythical than Jesus. The difference is that with Heracles there are no cautious caveats about the problematic nature of the sources upon which our knowledge of Heracles is derived:

Heracles, the greatest of Greek heroes. His name is that of a mortal (compare Diocles), and has been interpreted as ‘Glorious through Hera” (Burkert 210, Chantraine 416, Kretschmer 121-9 (see bibliog. below)). In this case, the bearer is taken as being—or so his parents would hope—within the protection of the goddess. This is at odds with the predominant tradition (see below), wherein Heracles was harassed rather than protected by the goddess: perhaps the hostility was against worshippers of Heracles who rejected allegiance to the worshippers of Hera on whom the hero depended. This could have happened when Argos had established control over the Heraion and Tiryns (possibly reflected in an apparent falling-off of settlement at Tiryns late in the 9th cent, BC: Foley 40-2) Some of the inhabitants of Tiryns might have emigrated to Thebes, taking their hero with him. Traditionally Heracles’ mother and her husband (Alcmene and Amphitryon) were obliged to move from Tiryns to Thebes, where Heracles was conceived and born (LIMC 1/1. 735). However, there is no agreement over the etymology of the name, an alternative version deriving its first element from ‘Hero’ (see Stafford (bibliog.) and HERO-CULT).

Heracles shared the characteristics of, on the one hand, a hero (both cultic and epic), on the other, a god. As a hero, he was mortal, and like many other heroes, born to a human mother and a god (Alcmene and Zeus; Amphitryon was father of Iphicles, Heracles’ twin: the bare bones of the story already in Homer, Il. 14. 323—4). Legends arose early of his epic feats, and they were added to constantly throughout antiquity. These stories may have played a part in the transformation of Heracles from hero (i.e. a deity of mortal origin, who, after death, exercised power over a limited geographical area, his influence residing in his mortal remains) to god (a deity, immortal, whose power is not limited geographically) See HERO-CULT.

Outside the cycle of the Labours (see below), the chief events of Heracles’ life were as follows: . . .

(OCD, article Heracles, p. 663)

—o— Continue reading “Bearing False Witness for Jesus”

2015-01-07

Why Believers Ought Not To Get Involved in the Christ Myth Question

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Scholars, Biblical Studies
Tags: , ,

Raphael Lataster article that recently appeared in The Washington Post as well as The Conversation opened with these words:

Did a man called Jesus of Nazareth walk the earth? Discussions over whether the figure known as the “Historical Jesus” actually existed primarily reflect disagreements among atheists. Believers, who uphold the implausible and more easily-dismissed “Christ of Faith” (the divine Jesus who walked on water), ought not to get involved.

Christian evangelist scholar John Dickson saw red and responded:

No student – let alone an aspiring scholar – could get away with suggesting that Christians “ought not to get involved” in the study of the historical Jesus. This is intellectual bigotry and has no place in academia, or journalism.

I read Raphael’s words as a bit of common-sense advice. How can anyone whose faith commits them to believing in the divine Jesus who walked on water possibly approach the question with a truly open mind? One would expect from such people little more than hostility and insults. And that’s exactly how two believers have responded in print to Raphael’s article.

John Dickson has very little to say (at least honestly or accurately) in response to Raphael Lataster’s alerts to various problems with both the evidence for the historical Jesus and the methods Bible scholars have generally used to study him but he does have a lot of good old Christian and scholarly invective to vent:

“Mythicists” are the historical equivalent of the anti-vaccination crowd in medical science. They are controversial enough to get media attention. They have just enough doctors, or doctors in training, among them to establish a kind of “plausible deniability.” But anyone who dips into the thousands of secular monographs and journal articles on the historical Jesus will quickly discover that mythicists are regarded by 99.9% of the scholarly community as complete “outliers,” the fringe of the fringe. And when mainstream scholars attempt to call their bluff, the mythicists, just like the anti-vaccinationists, cry “Conspiracy!” This is precisely what Raphael does . . . . It is as if he thinks he wins the game by declaring all its rules stupid and inventing his own path.

And later we read this:

[Lataster’s article] underlines the impropriety of a student in religious philosophy, whatever his faith perspective, assuming the mantle of academic historian.

Of course Raphael nowhere even hints the word “conspiracy” nor does he “assume the mantle of an academic historian”. In fact what he does is bring to the public attention what every critical scholar knows about the state of evidence and problems with traditional methodologies in relation to the historical Jesus.

John Dickson is a Christian evangelist who attempts to argue in his various publications that sound historical methods leave the objective inquirer in no doubt about the fundamentals of the Gospel narratives about Jesus. I suppose he therefore has good reason to fear a publicizing of the the simple facts about the problems with the evidence and methods that critical scholars know only too well. As a believer he can hardly be expected to seek to argue against Latater’s article solely on a rational level.

Raphael has in fact sought to publicly debate John Dickson without success:

John Dickson surprisingly (we have always been very friendly) defriended me after he wrote a (grossly inaccurate) reply article to my own on Jesus’ possible ahistoricity, and continues to refuse to debate with me on Jesus’ resurrection (i.e. the Jesus he actually believes in). I would think that believers would relish the chance to show their courage and defend their faith. I’m not that scary… If anyone would like to see this debate happen, do let John and I know. John’s contact:

http://www.johndickson.org/contact.html

Michael Bird, too

Meanwhile a colleague of John’s, Michael Bird, (editor and co-author of How God Became Jesus, a response to Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God), joined the fray on Euangelion with Taking on the Jesus Mythicists. I didn’t think anyone could surpass JD for ad hominem, distortions and blatant inaccuracies in a response but Michael Bird certainly did.  Continue reading “Why Believers Ought Not To Get Involved in the Christ Myth Question”