Historical Jesus Is Here!

R. Joseph Hoffmann has issued the The Jesus Process, a series of essays (one by him) discussing the historicity and non-historicity of Jesus, and the processes of scholarship used to adjudicate between historical arguments on Jesus.

This is a moment of supernova-esque importance because, for the first time that I know, the public (indeed, the world) has quasi-direct access to academic scholars in the process of making scholarly arguments. This is not a journalist's report of an academic conference or paper. This is not a mass-market book made by an academic. This is not a non-academic book challenging academic scholarship.

This is the academy on the "home turf" of the public. This is the opportunity for the academy to show how and why its professionalism serves the world better than amateur scholarship in books and blogs. Now, alert readers may note that one of the three essay writers, Stephanie Louse Fischer, is a graduate student and not yet a professional academic.

Nevertheless, professionalism is what is at stake in this academic volley against prominent mythicist bloggers. This essay series puts professionalism at the center of its concerns. The facts, the knowledge, the inferences and interpretations all serve the application of professional methodologies and techniques. The final outcome of these essays and their aftermath will be both the definition of professionalism and the professional viability of mythicism. This is why the moment is so fascinating.

I am very excited about this moment and these essays. I plan to read and analyze every one. I encourage others to do so, too. From there, we on the sidelines will await what I am sure will be an equally momentous reply from Richard Carrier. There may be other mythicists, academic and non-academic, who chime in on The Jesus Process essays, but now that the essays are out, Carrier is the man. Initially, no reply will matter more than his.

Indeed, the credibility and reputation of non-academic scholarship may rest on what Carrier does with this opportunity. If Carrier can make a strong scholarly case in favor of both his use of Bayesian techniques and his mythicist position, he will have achieved something very significant and unique in modern scholarship.

But Hoffmann's essays are determined, make no mistake about it, to go after Carrier and expose his mythicism as less than professional grade. One of the essays of The Jesus Process is by Hoffmann, a long piece called "Controversy, Mythicism, and the Historical Jesus." In it, he promises that the weight of history is "decisive" in favor of the historicity of Jesus. On this point, Hoffmann offers his thesis as follows:

It is my view, simply stated, that while facts concerning the Jesus of history were jeopardized from the start by a variety of salvation myths, by the credulity of early believers, by the historiographical tendencies of the era, and by the editorial tendencies of early writers, the gospels retain a stubbornly historical view of Jesus, preserve reliable information about his life and teachings, and are not engulfed by any of the conditions under which they were composed. Jesus “the Nazarene” did not originate as a myth or a story without historical coordinates, but as a teacher in first century Roman Palestine. Like dozens of other Hellenistic teachers, but lacking sophisticated “biographers” to preserve his accomplishments, Jesus is distinct only because the cult that formed around him perpetuated his memory in ritual, worship, and text, while the memory of other attested personalities of antiquity, even those who enjoyed brief cultic popularity like Antigonus I, Ptolemy I and Demetrius of Macedon are known to us mainly through literary artifacts.

You'll have to read the rest of the article to see how Hoffmann defends the thesis. Let me note, however, that Hoffmann's use of the gospels in his argument may have similarities with the narrative-based methodology employed by Joel S. Baden for the Pentateuch. Both Hoffmann and Baden are interested in immediate sources of religious texts. Hoffmann argues that a person, the subject of the texts, is probably a source for his texts; Baden argues that earlier, separate versions are the sources for his.

In addition to the positive case for the historical Jesus, Hoffmann holds the mythicist position "as fatally flawed and subject to a variety of objections." Here, Hoffmann's thesis is, well, devastating:

The attempt of “mythicists” to show that Jesus did not exist, on the other hand, has been largely incoherent, insufficiently scrupulous of historical detail, and based on improbable, bead-strung analogies.[1] The failure of the myth theory is not the consequence merely of methodological sloppiness with respect to the sources and their religious contexts; that has been demonstrated again and again from as early as Shirley Jackson Case’s (now dated) study, The Historicity of  Jesus (1912). It is a problem incipient in the task itself, which Morton Smith aptly summarized in 1986: The myth theory, he wrote, is almost entirely based on an argument from silence, especially the “silence” of Paul. “In order to explain just what it was that Paul and other early Christians believed, the mythicists are forced to manufacture unknown proto-Christians who build up an unattested myth . . . about an unspecified supernatural entity that at an indefinite time was sent by God into the world as a man to save mankind and was crucified… [presenting us with] a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the Gospels.”[2]

As I said, Hoffmann's essay is long, yet it's well worth careful reading and re-reading.

So, grab your popcorn and read up. I won't say "This is gonna be good," because it already is good.

A Jesus Fight...And What It Means for the Jews

Religious historian and humanist R. Joseph Hoffmann has declared war on Jesus mythicists:

This little rant (and it is a rant, I acknowledge and I do not apologize for it: somebody’s got to do it) will be followed  next week by three essay-length responses to Richard C. Carrier’s ideas: The first by me, the second by Professor Maurice Casey of the University of Nottingham, and the third by Stephanie Fisher a specialist in Q-studies. We will attempt to show an impetuous amateur not only where he goes wrong, but why he should buy a map before starting his journey. Other replies will follow in course, and we invite Carrier, his fans, and anyone else interested in this discussion to respond to it at any stage along the way.

As you can see, Hoffmann's main target is Richard Carrier, a Ph.D. in ancient history, author/speaker, atheist, and mythicist. Hoffmann aims to show both Carrier and his atheist applauders that the Jesus-as-myth view is probably untenable.

But it's important also realize everything that's at stake in this war on mythicism:

• What are viable ideas in scholarship versus crankery and crack-pottery?
• Who are scholars and what does it mean to practice responsible scholarship?
• What authority do consensus views have?
• What consideration should be given to marginal and fringe views?
• What status is given to non-professionals, hobbyists, and scholars in outside disciplines?
• What roles do tradition, bias, ignorance, innovation, and personal ideology have in scholarship?
• What methods work in historical and humanities scholarship, and how do we know they work?
• Where should scholarly debates be conducted, and in what forms?

I don't know this list is exhaustive, but it is accurate and reflects a timely angst about today's hyper-traffic in ideas and opinions.

I look forward to Hoffmann and cohorts bringing in solid data and arguments. I also eagerly await Carrier's replies. I hope we'll get to see whether mythicism withstands scrutiny or not. Most of all, I hope to see how all sides of the debate directly and indirectly wrangle with the issues I've listed.

This is, folks, an important moment.

Yes, you might say, but is it good for the Jews? (i.e., we begin the humorous part of the post.) Consider this:

• The outcome of the debate will not likely stir up antisemitism, unless people walk away thinking Jesus was a myth perpetrated by the Jews to make them look foolish.
• The debate may turn out to be high impact. American and world evangelicals could get stirred up regardless of mythicism's standing afterwards.
• The Jewishness of Jesus and his first followers should be one recurring item. Some, of course, will repress the idea.

Therefore, this debate may turn out not so good for the Jews. The best case scenario for the Jews is that Jesus is concluded to have probably existed and we all return to our regularly scheduled fantasies.

Speaking of Resurrection

I'm back, baby. This is my time of year!

With Easter coming, there's been the unsurprising uptick of historical Jesus talk. This year's chatter brings popular attention to mythicism, the position that Jesus Christ was not a person in history.

The occasion for this development is a Huffington Post article by Bart Ehrman, a very good biblical scholar and former-evangelical-turned-agnostic. Ehrman writes:

In a society in which people still claim the Holocaust did not happen, and in which there are resounding claims that the American president is, in fact, a Muslim born on foreign soil, is it any surprise to learn that the greatest figure in the history of Western civilization, the man on whom the most powerful and influential social, political, economic, cultural and religious institution in the world -- the Christian church -- was built, the man worshipped, literally, by billions of people today -- is it any surprise to hear that Jesus never even existed?

That is the claim made by a small but growing cadre of (published ) writers, bloggers and Internet junkies who call themselves mythicists. This unusually vociferous group of nay-sayers maintains that Jesus is a myth invented for nefarious (or altruistic) purposes by the early Christians who modeled their savior along the lines of pagan divine men who, it is alleged, were also born of a virgin on Dec. 25, who also did miracles, who also died as an atonement for sin and were then raised from the dead.

Few of these mythicists are actually scholars trained in ancient history, religion, biblical studies or any cognate field, let alone in the ancient languages generally thought to matter for those who want to say something with any degree of authority about a Jewish teacher who (allegedly) lived in first-century Palestine. There are a couple of exceptions: of the hundreds -- thousands? -- of mythicists, two (to my knowledge) actually have Ph.D. credentials in relevant fields of study. But even taking these into account, there is not a single mythicist who teaches New Testament or Early Christianity or even Classics at any accredited institution of higher learning in the Western world. And it is no wonder why. These views are so extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology.

Why then is the mythicist movement growing, with advocates so confident of their views and vocal -- even articulate -- in their denunciation of the radical idea that Jesus actually existed? It is, in no small part, because these deniers of Jesus are at the same time denouncers of religion -- a breed of human now very much in vogue. And what better way to malign the religious views of the vast majority of religious persons in the western world, which remains, despite everything, overwhelmingly Christian, than to claim that the historical founder of their religion was in fact the figment of his followers' imagination?

The view, however, founders on its own premises. The reality -- sad or salutary -- is that Jesus was real. And that is the subject of my new book, "Did Jesus Exist?"

Readers can decide how solid Ehrman's argument is (hint: it's decent but hardly unproblematic or iron-clad), but at least one scholar finds Ehrman's piece wanting. Richard Carrier is a scholar and mythicist; his book on the subject is due out soon. Carrier argues that the historical position has nothing substantial enough to warrant confidence:

To say that the Gospels contain a lot of myth, therefore they “can’t” be entirely myth, is not valid reasoning. They might contain a historical core, they might not. That has to be determined, and is at least an honestly debatable question. As Dr. Thompson admitted. I think on full analysis they come out as completely mythical (most of the attempts to argue otherwise fail on basic logic, as I demonstrate in Proving History, chapter 5). That should at least be a respectable position, even if Ehrman or anyone disagrees with it.

The second century references, meanwhile, cannot be shown to be independent of the Gospels (e.g. the reference in Tacitus, even the Testimonium Flavianum, even if it were completely genuine–and it’s not–says nothing that could not have simply been read out of a Gospel or gotten from any other Christian source relying on one), or to derive from any real source at all (e.g. the Infancy Gospels). And like any other mythic being, the Gospels would not be the earliest versions of the creed; many mythical demigods “died and were resurrected,” some were even “buried” or hung or burned or cut to pieces; that doesn’t make them historical. Thus, in Paul, that Jesus was created out of the “seed of David” (in fulfillment of prophecy) and “born of a woman” are claims that could just as easily be made of any mythical demigod (all of whom were born of a woman, and some of whom were “magically” born from the seed of their fathers, like Perseus, or even, as in the case of Dionysus, their previous corpses). They also said things–none of which were historical. Paul himself only identifies two sources for his sayings of the Lord: scripture and revelation (e.g. 1 Corinthians 11:23 in light of Galatians 1:18-20). No historical Jesus is needed there.

That leaves nothing.

James McGrath, on the historicist side, engages Carrier's piece. McGrath's thesis is that Carrier's "is a disappointing and ineffective response that will only carry weight with people who desperately want there not to have been a historical Jesus, so much so that they cease to care about historical methods and evidence." McGrath ably defends the argument and closes with this:

Ehrman did not make mistakes in his piece, and if there is infelicitous or ambiguous wording, one should not try to use that against him any more than one should accept the use of ambiguous statements by scientists in an attempt to undermine their credibility. It remains the case, Carrier’s lengthy blog post notwithstanding, that the evidence available leads most naturally to the conclusion that a historical Jesus more likely existed than not. The attempt to manufacture controversy about this is one of the reasons why mythicists are rightly compared to creationists and other denialists.

We could go on with the back-and-forth, but instead let's make some general points about the discussion as a whole:

• Mythicism is gaining more public credence and notoriety.
• Some mythicists adopt the position for personal reasons.
• The mythicist position can be made reasonably (in academic terms), yet this doesn't automatically make it a preferable or even very good position.
• On the other hand, the historicist position may seem more "natural" (due perhaps to centuries of assuming its truth), but this in itself doesn't make it correct.
• The historicist position may be better than the mythicist one, but the margin of superiority seems not to be as wide as historicists have traditionally thought.
• The historicist question, we must remember, is entirely separate from many other questions related to Jesus and Christian belief, such as the resurrection.

Personally, I am a historicist who thinks historicism is legitimately questioned. I also recognize that the historicity question is hardly as interesting as the development of actual Christian beliefs and practices. See, for instance, Larry Hurtado's points on the resurrection,which suggest Jesus was at first believed to have been raised to life in the world to come, not to physical life on earth:

• The conviction was that it was Jesus of Nazareth who had been raised.  That is, there was a direct connection between the crucified figure who had been active in Roman Judea and the figure of earliest Christian faith.
• This was not a claim that Jesus had been resuscitated and brought back to life of this world, but instead that God had catapulted Jesus forward into life of the world to come.
• One immediate implication of this claim was that God had vindicated Jesus against the death-penalty imposed by the earthly authorities.  That is, in the earliest setting, Jesus’ resurrection was very much divine vindication.
• The likelihood that Jesus had been executed as a messianic/royal claimant meant that God’s resurrecting him vindicated this claim.  That’s probably why the messianic claim about Jesus seems to have been so central in earliest Christian preaching.
• Resurrection of the righteous was, for many Jews (but not all), a central hope and expectation.  That is, “resurrection”, the personal vivification of people by God was by Jesus’ time already a familiar concept.  This hope seems to have emerged sometime in the “post-exilic” period, and in the time of Jesus was still under debate, the Sadducees the main Jewish party portrayed as denying this belief.
• The unusual thing about the claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead was that he had been singled out in advance of the resurrection that was to be given to all the righteous.  This immediately meant that Jesus was somehow special, that God had chosen to favor him apart from and in advance of the vindication to be given to the righteous (such as Moses, Abraham, David, etc.).
• The references to Jesus’ resurrection include the claim that this involved also his exaltation to heavenly glory “at God’s right hand” (the phrase lifted from Psalm 110).   So “resurrection” in Jesus’ case must be understood as connoting his vindication and glorification.  That is reflected in the “post-Easter” references to Jesus as Messiah and as “Lord”, and the assertion that he now shares in the name and glory of God.
• In short, the conviction that God had raised Jesus from death was central in earliest Christian faith, and also was powerful in generating attendant convictions as well.

As always, the historical and epistemological questions are more interesting and productive. Who cares whether Jesus would vote for Mitt Romney, or whether he died for someone's "sins"? The whole suffering savior stuff could hardly be more boring, as far as I'm concerned.

Kugel's HTRTB [Part 12]: Only One Bible

We continue to read Chapter 36 in James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. This twelfth installment covers the last section. 

In this final section, Kugel cautions against misrepresenting Chapter 36 or giving it greater importance than all of How to Read the Bible before it:

My subject has been not the ruin of the Bible but the Bible itself--its highways and byways, heroes, brigands, walk-ons, and also-rans, its mysteries and its ineffables, as well as its sometimes treacherous little details. Beyond these, this book is about two extraordinary sets of interpreters, and I have made no effort to disguise my admiration for both. Their approaches, however, are quite irreconcilable.

Reminding us of his main subject and aims, Kugel also describes a particular use for the book: "I hope that this book may at least offer some help in finding an escape from the box of original meaning." This specific help is very important; it's the key to everything Kugel has done:

• Defined two different sets of biblical interpreters: the first interpreters (ancient period) and modern interpreters (post-DH scholars).
• Showed that the approaches of the two sets are irreconcilable. One cannot read the bible as one set and accept the interpretations of the other set at all.
• Argued, moreover, that modern biblical criticism is not criticism of the (real) Bible.

The third bullet point requires explanation. To do this, let me first refer back to the previous installment of our series, where I quoted Kugel on reading the Bible properly.

The texts that make up the Bible were originally composed under whatever circumstances they were composed. What made them the Bible, however, was their definitive reinterpretation along the lines of the Four Assumptions of the ancient interpreters--a way of reading that was established in Judaism in the form of the Oral Torah. Read the Bible in this way and you are reading it properly, that is, in keeping with the understanding of those who made and canonized the Bible. Read it any other way and you have drastically misconstrued the intentions of the Bible's framers.

My earlier analysis did not appreciate that Kugel’s point was eminently bold. In the quote, Kugel says that the Bible is only the Bible when approached as it was by the ancient interpreters. Implicitly, therefore, the approach of modern scholars makes the Bible not the Bible but rather a set of texts with disparate “original meanings.” These meanings thus have nothing to do with the Bible as Bible!

To illustrate further, you can read modern biblical scholarship. You can follow its arguments and even come to agree with its conclusions. The point is that these conclusions don’t affect you when you read the Bible properly. Reading properly takes you beyond the conclusions, and this is how you “escape the box of original meaning.”

With some personal pride, I say that this approach--separating the belief-based context from the historical--was one that I myself adopted when tried to retain a semblance of Jewishness. In those days, I reasoned that when I prayed at shul, it was as if Judaism was true. Judaism didn’t need to be true outside or in reality, but it could be and would be when I was playing the part of observant Jew. Shul was a theater and I a player.

In those days, I would have happily agreed with Kugel’s description:

Scripture in different religious traditions always seems to have the remarkable ability to become the locus of people’s deepest inner fumblings and mumblings: those words suddenly contain so much--their quality of Scripture gives them that right--and they fill up with all that is most important: they become the theater of the soul.

Similarly, I have argued that the Hebrew Scriptures are a different Bible to a Jew and a Christian:

The Old Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures are different texts because the Old Testament is already rendered throughout as a translation that prefigures Jesus. People don't simply open the Old Testament and on their own start seeing Jesus parallels. Rather, the Old Testament has been translated with Christology in mind and the resulting text is available expressly to support Christian theological interpretations.

Read the Hebrew Scriptures as pre-figuring Jesus and you are not reading them as a Jew. For Kugel, the Bible really is the Hebrew Bible; there really is no other Bible. Neither the box of original meaning nor the box of Christian meaning ultimately affects the Bible, for the Bible only happens through a single set of approaches now associated with rabbinic Judaism.

I see wisdom in most everything Kugel says, and although I rarely disagree with him, I depart from him significantly. I depart when he contains the Bible to the approach of its first interpreters. I depart again when he connects belief and behavior, as when he discusses what it means to be an observant person. Kugel means religiously observant, Jewish particularly, but I don’t. He describes the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Jewish religious prohibition against approaching the area, "lest by accident [pious Jews'] foot defile the place where once the Holy of Holies stood, the place of God’s presence on earth (which could be entered only once a year, and only by one man, the high priest)." Kugel believes the Holy of Holies sat in an entirely different place from the current Temple Mount. Nevertheless, he follows other observant Jews and does not approach the Temple Mount.

Were the opportunity ever to come for me to ascend the Temple Mount, I probably would. How could I not? This, then, is where I depart from Kugel again.The tenets of my observance would encourage me to ascend, to see, to learn, to consider.

The departure continues. Kugel suggests that even if the rabbis are sometimes wrong, what matters is their project to record and represent God’s intent for His people. Their project to help His people live out God’s will. For Kugel, though, there is such a thing as God’s intent. There is a Holy of Holies somewhere in the textual archaeology of the Bible. There is a continuity between God's intent for His people and "the intentions of the Bible's framers."

Kugel says he "could not be involved in a religion that was entirely a human artifact." Neither could I. The difference is that I no longer see any reason to believe there is a Holy of Holies in the Bible. I cannot justify viewing the Bible as anything other than an entirely human artifact. And here's the most amazing thing of all: accepting that God and the Bible are man-made has brought me intellectually and personally closer to them than ever before.

Richard Carrier on Ancient Judaism's Suicide Messiahs

I am Joshua. I shall redeem you through terrible films.
Do not despair ye, for each movie will offer my hot-hot young wife
being all kinds of naked.

I recommend everyone to Richard Carrier's recent post, "The Dying Messiah." Carrier here lays out a case some Jews in pre-Christian times held beliefs that the messiah would come and be killed. It's an interesting and important case because the popular wisdom holds that Jews expected the messiah to come and liberate Israel from the yoke, thereby ushering in a new and perhaps final world era. They did not expect the messiah to be tortured and executed, a la Jesus of Nazareth, as a low criminal; indeed, their expectation later blinded them to the "truth" of Jesus's messiahship.

Carrier argues the popular wisdom is inaccurate. In the time of Christianity's beginnings, he says,

Jewish beliefs were remarkably diverse, open to innovation, and not as conservative as later Rabbinical Judaism would become. In fact many an expert on ancient Judaism has called attention to the repeated mistake of assuming first century Judaism was "just like" medieval Rabbinical Judaism. So it would be more than safe to propose as a hypothesis for the origin of Christianity that some Jews did see these connections and did expect a dying messiah and that it is from their movement (or its influence) that Christianity arose.

Feeling "safe" enough, Carrier hypothesizes that one possible explanation for the emergence of Christian beliefs is that they had already been formulated to some degree within Judaism. Carrier concludes:

Seen in its actual context, there really isn't anything all that novel about Christianity's basic claims. The way it assembled the parts is unique, as every religion was and is, but the parts were already there for the taking.

Carrier leads us through the evidence very well. See, for example, how he introduces a key passage from the Dead Sea Scrolls:

A fragmentary pesher among the Dead Sea Scrolls explicitly identifies the servant of Isaiah 52-53 with the messiah of Daniel 9. This decisively confirms that this specific equation had already been made by pre-Christian Jews, as it exists not just in a pre-Christian text, but in this case a pre-Christian manuscript. The passage in question is in 11QMelch ii.18 (aka 11Q13). A pesher is an interpretive commentary on the OT that operates on the assumption that the OT text has hidden, second-level meanings (a view Christians shared, e.g. Rom. 16:25-26). Thus some pre-Christian Jews were already finding hidden "secrets" in the OT that basically are the Christian gospel: that Isaiah 52-53 is about the messiah whom Daniel 9 predicted will be killed (this same pesher also identifies Isaiah 61 as being about this same messiah, thus proving again that the Christians did not come to this conclusion post hoc either).

Carrier links to, but does not give, the passage in question. So, I offer the text here:

(...) And concerning what Scripture says, "In this year of Jubilee you shall return, everyone of you, to your property" (Lev. 25;13) And what is also written; "And this is the manner of the remission; every creditor shall remit the claim that is held against a neighbor, not exacting it of a neighbor who is a member of the community, because God's remission has been proclaimed" (Deut.15;2) the interpretation is that it applies to the Last Days and concerns the captives, just as Isaiah said: "To proclaim the Jubilee to the captives" (Isa. 61;1) (...) just as (...) and from the inheritance of Melchizedek, for (... Melchizedek), who will return them to what is rightfully theirs. He will proclaim to them the Jubilee, thereby releasing them from the debt of all their sins. He shall proclaim this decree in the first week of the jubilee period that follows nine jubilee periods.

Then the "Day of Atonement" shall follow after the tenth jubilee period, when he shall atone for all the Sons of Light, and the people who are predestined to Melchizedek. (...) upon them (...) For this is the time decreed for the "Year of Melchizedek`s favor", and by his might he will judge God's holy ones and so establish a righteous kingdom, as it is written about him in the Songs of David; "A godlike being has taken his place in the council of God; in the midst of divine beings he holds judgement"

(Ps. 82;1). Scripture also says about him; "Over it take your seat in the highest heaven; A divine being will judge the peoples" (Ps. 7;7-8) Concerning what scripture says; "How long will you judge unjustly, and show partiality with the wicked? Selah" (Ps. 82;2), the interpretation applies to Belial and the spirits predestined to him, because all of them have rebelled, turning from God's precepts and so becoming utterly wicked. Therefore Melchizedek will thoroughly prosecute the vengeance required by God's statutes. Also, he will deliver all the captives from the power of Belial, and from the power of all the spirits destined to him. Allied with him will be all the "righteous divine beings"(Isa. 61;3).

(The ...) is that whi(ch ...all) the divine beings. The visitation is the Day of Salvation that He has decreed through Isaiah the prophet concerning all the captives, inasmuch as Scripture says, "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion "Your divine being reigns"." (Isa. 52;7) This scriptures interpretation: "the mountains" are the prophets, they who were sent to proclaim God's truth and to prophesy to all Israel. "The messengers" is the Anointed of the spirit, of whom Daniel spoke; "After the sixty-two weeks, an Anointed shall be cut off" (Dan. 9;26) The "messenger who brings good news, who announces Salvation" is the one of whom it is written; "to proclaim the year of the LORD`s favor, the day of the vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn" (Isa. 61;2)

This scripture's interpretation: he is to instruct them about all the periods of history for eternity (... and in the statutes) of the truth. (...) (.... dominion) that passes from Belial and returns to the Sons of Light (....) (...) by the judgment of God, just as t is written concerning him; "who says to Zion "Your divine being reigns" (Isa. 52;7) "Zion" is the congregation of all the sons of righteousness, who uphold the covenant and turn from walking in the way of the people. "Your divine being" is Melchizedek, who will deliver them from the  power of Belial. Concerning what scripture says, "Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; in the seventh month . . . " (Lev. 25;9)

For Carrier, the text's connection between Isaiah 52-53 and Daniel 9 is particularly important:

Connecting Isaiah 53 with Daniel 9 proves that some Jews were already thinking this before Christianity even began. In fact Daniel 9:24 also says the messiah's death would atone for the sins of Israel and thereby bring about the end of the world (9:27), and this after a long preface complaining that those sins had been getting in the way. Should we be surprised that some Jews would come to believe that this had at last happened? For them, the death of the messiah, setting up the subsequent end of the world, was expected. That Christians taught all these things (their messiah had died, his death atoned for all sins, and the end was therefore nigh) is unlikely to be a coincidental reinvention of ideas the Jews were already getting on board with. No, the first Christians most likely came from these very Jews, or were directly inspired by their teachings.

Carrier makes an impressive and persuasive case, although I have only presented the first part of it. Why, though, is it important that specifically Christian beliefs emerged more or less directly from Jewish ancestors?

Wisely, he avoids trying to use his one case as the basis making another, different case. In a comment, he addresses whether the dying messiah in pre-Christian Judaism sheds light on one or more historical Jesuses/Joshuas:

This blog post takes no position on that and makes no argument either way. It is solely about this one fact, which can fit both mythicist and historicist hypotheses of the origins of Christianity. Indeed, in isolation, one could use what I establish here to argue in favor of historicity, since the other Jesus Christs were historical (Jesus is then just another historical figure posing as the Joshuan Messiah and trying to get himself killed). But one cannot argue from isolated items of evidence. A conclusion must come from a survey of all the evidence together.

I am not so wise as Dr. Carrier, so I'll take his case to make another of my own.

We make so much of religious beliefs, political beliefs, social beliefs, and beliefs generally. We take them as monolithic things. We discuss them and examine them as themselves and for themselves.

This is often how literature is taught and studied.

We cannot forget, however, that beliefs are like everything else: they have precedents and antecedents. They are real and palpable as subjects of discussion, writing, and dispute.

We therefore err to talk about beliefs--be they modern or ancient--only in terms of their content and personal use. If we only focus on beliefs in this or that god, and about how we should apply beliefs to our daily lives, we miss the most interesting stuff: the origins and development of the beliefs themselves.

We don't fully understand something if we only interpret what it is and what we can do with it. To understand, we must also pursue material origins.

I should footnote that Carrier's argument does not necessarily affect the point I make in a previous post, namely that the Christian understanding of Jesus's sacrifice appears to many of Jewish background--like me--as a "left turn" from Judaism. The Jewish dying messiah and the Christian dying messiah remain leagues apart, and they presuppose two very different gods.

Good Friday, Depending on Perspective

The Judenplatz (Jewish Square) in Vienna was the heart of the Jewish ghetto from the 13th to the 15th centuries.

While I wish to take nothing away from Christian observance of a central holiday, I also hope to remember how a dubious story has been used to sanction very real bloodshed. The lesson here is not about the blood. Neither is it about the sins of the past. Rather, the lesson is about dangerous credulity and literalness. It's about adulation of the absent. It's about the desperate wish to make nature hear, if not obey, our cries. Perhaps we today are relatively safe from religious warriors. Perhaps not.


Today is called "Good Friday" by some. The story goes that a controversial, itinerant Jewish preacher was tortured and executed by the Roman authorities. What's more, this was no mere man but the Jewish god incarnate, born to sacrifice himself for the sins of a humanity he had created long before. Some traditions maintain that through this sacrifice, the god-incarnate-as-man thereafter allowed those who believed in him to gain entry into an eternal afterlife of happiness--provided those people also performed the proper sacraments.

I cannot hide my skepticism toward the story. I have no reason to doubt that anyone was murdered, but I'll need more solid evidence on the man-is-god, died-for-sins, and eternal afterlife parts. Nevertheless, I am not alone in questioning the story's veracity. Plenty of others have found ample reason to think the written accounts and subsequent traditions were somehow different from what might have actually happened. To illustrate, I want to quote two paragraphs from Colin J. Humphreys, a physicist at the University of Cambridge:

Bible scholars have puzzled for centuries over apparent discrepancies in the Gospel accounts of the last week of Jesus, and this often leads people to question the Bible’s veracity entirely. For example, Matthew, Mark and Luke all state the Last Supper was a Passover meal. John, by contrast, says that it took place before the Passover began. Whatever you think about the Bible, the fact is that Jewish people would never mistake the Passover meal for another meal, so for the Gospels to contradict themselves about this is really hard to understand. The eminent biblical scholar, F. F. Bruce, once described this problem as “the thorniest problem in the New Testament.”

The Gospels also do not seem to allow enough time for all the events they record between the Last Supper and the Crucifixion, whilst indicating that Wednesday was a “missing day” on which Jesus did nothing. Scholars have literally rushed around Jerusalem with a stop-watch to see how the large number of events recorded in the Gospels could have occurred between the Last Supper on Thursday night and the Crucifixion on Friday morning. Most conclude that it is impossible. In addition, the Mishnah (a compendium of regulations attributed to about 150 rabbis who lived from about 50 BC to about AD 200) states that the Jewish Court called the Sanhedrin, which tried Jesus, must not meet at night, on a feast day or on the eve of a feast day, and in capital cases a verdict of conviction must be reached the day after the main trial. If these rules applied at the time of Jesus then the trials reported in the Gospels blatantly flout Jewish legal proceedings, yet although the gospels claim there were many false witnesses they implicitly accept the legality of the trials. However, it turns out that there is a very simple solution to these problems: if you move the Last Supper to Wednesday, instead of Thursday, the Gospels are actually in remarkable agreement. In addition, the Bible nowhere states that the Last Supper was on the evening before the Crucifixion, contrary to the claims in many biblical commentaries that it does!

Now, Humphreys believes that the inconsistencies in the Gospels are apparent rather than real--which of course puts him in a long, long line of scholars and theologians who have sought to reconcile believers with a collection of narratives that often violate both one another and common sense.

However, while it's fun to argue over the story's historicity, we know that the story has had real consequences in history. Today, the Christian world sees the death of Jesus as something to be commemorated, if not celebrated. But the Jewish world sees the story in the way it often acted in Europe: as a pretext for pogroms against Jewish communities. From the High Middle Ages through the mid-20th century--roughly 900 years--Holy Week could be a dangerous time for European Jews. Here is but one example, from the Austrian city of Vienna:

The Easter 1420 pogrom, during which Jews from throughout Austria were rounded up and imprisoned, was sanctioned by Duke Albrecht V, a member of the Hapsburg dynasty and then-leader of Austria, who was heavily indebted to Jewish money lenders. Many Jews committed suicide while in captivity and their children were forcibly converted to Catholicism. The remainder were burned alongside the river outside Vienna.

Over 200 people were burned at the stake because unfounded rumors circulated that Jews had desecrated Eucharist wafers.

But these incidents--the violence, accusations, and destruction--were not just local in time and space. Jews could not just settle back into "normalcy" and security following a pogrom:

For years after the medieval pogrom, those Jews who managed to escape and resettle in other areas of Central Europe sang a lamentation recounting the obliteration of a once proud Jewish center. This elegy referred to Vienna as the "city of blood." It wasn't until the early 1600s that Jews were allowed to return there in significant numbers, only to face another expulsion in 1669.

Following the 1420 incident, the Jewish synagogue was destroyed in 1421, with its stones used to help build the University of Vienna.

So, while I wish to take nothing away from Christian observance of a central holiday, I also hope to remember how a dubious story has been used to sanction very real bloodshed. The lesson here is not about the blood. Neither is it about the sins of the past. Rather, the lesson is about dangerous credulity and literalness. It's about adulation of the absent. It's about the desperate wish to make nature hear, if not obey, our cries. Perhaps Jewish and other communities today are relatively safe from religious warriors. Perhaps not.

Around the Web

Lots of great news and information around today:

• A healthy proportion of students at American colleges and universities aren't gaining much knowledge in the first two years. Let the blame games begin. [But see here for another take.]
• The tree octopus fabrication shows that people may give too much credence to websites.
• Roger Rosenblatt gives four reasons to write.
• Jerry Coyne talks about the green heron, a tool-using bird.
• How to bind a 10,000 page book.
• The Shroud of Turin: Yes, it's a fucking fake. Don't miss the litigious commenter.
• On the Colbert Report, Sean Dorrance Kelly advises us to embrace "the polytheistic pantheon of Homeric literature."

Historical Jesus: As Long as You're Looking . . .

Anyone seen a carpenter?

As the Christmas season rolls in, I think it’s fitting to re-visit a favorite theme of this blog, the historical Jesus.

This year, I see more scholars focusing attention on the question of the historical Jesus. Interestingly, it’s precisely the question aspect that is being considered seriously. This has not always been the case. Indeed, scholars and amateur theologians alike have by and large simply assumed that there was a historical Jesus, even if, as R. Joseph Hoffmann has said, “[T]he sources we possess do not establish the conditions for a verdict on the historicity of Jesus.”

In this post, I’ll provide four quotes from the introduction (a draft, I presume) of a book coming out next year from Equinox Press, Is This Not the Carpenter: A Question of Historicity?, a collection of essays on the subject edited by Thomas L. Thompson and Thomas S. Verenna.

“The Quest for the Historical Jesus” is a section within the introduction. The editors remark there that scholarly aversion to the question of the historicity of Jesus has ultimately been bad for the discipline:

For some time, New Testament scholarship has avoided direct questions regarding the historicity of Jesus. Their assumption of an historical Jesus has been secured within a debate about the sayings of Jesus and the events of his life, as referenced in the New Testament, reflect either Jesus’ own life and teaching or a construction of early Christianity. The dichotomous structure of this debate has typically made alternative explanations for the ubiquitous allegorical interpretations and narrative reiterations and allusions of a wide variety of both ancient Near Eastern and biblical motifs, themes and tropes irrelevant in the eyes of many scholars, in spite of the fact that an unquestioning acceptance of the New Testament figures of Jesus, Paul and the disciples as historical can at times be shown to ignore and misunderstand the implicit functions of our texts.

In this quote, several important themes in New Testament scholarship emerge: avoidance of the question, assumption of the historicity of Jesus, bifurcated scholarly debate emerging from this assumption, and problems related to the functions of the texts of early Christianity.

The editors continue:

The question of historicity, itself, however, remains unaddressed and there is, accordingly, little discussion of the central questions regarding the significance and function of our texts. One has begun with the unwarranted assertion of a “probability” of an historical Jesus existing in ancient Palestine and freely presented one or other of such a possible figure as a viable alternative to the only known Jesus--the mythic one of our texts. Jesus has become a "concrete entity with recognizable parameters."

If I read this passage correctly, the editors are stating that the Jesus of the early Christian library is definitely mythical. Although scholars might generally agree that there was some Jesus sometime in history, the very same scholars also generally agree that the “real” Jesus was not the one portrayed in the early Christian texts. From this agreement numerous “real” Jesuses have sprung, from itinerant preacher to prophet and exorcist.

Unfortunately, none of the “real” Jesuses are any more historical than the textual Jesus. The quest for the real Jesus was based from the start on flawed assumptions:

Historical Jesus research did not come about through the discovery of an actual historical Jesus as focus for such research. Despite what many have suggested, the data we have is no more useful for an understanding of an historical Jesus today than it had been a century ago. Even what little had been understood as known to scholars of the nineteenth century--such as the existence of widespread Jewish expectations for an apocalyptic messiah--has been found wanting. The ancient world’s many mythic and theological representations of a figure comparable to the Jesus of New Testament texts are not alone decisive arguments against historicity, but they are part of the picture, which needs to be considered more comprehensively. Literarily viable figures have been represented—historically--in many clarifying ways.

The editors close this section by stressing the legitimacy of the skeptical approach to the question of the historical Jesus.

An historical Jesus is a hypothetical derivative of scholarship. It is no more a fact than is an equally hypothetical historical Moses or David. To the extent that New Testament literature was written with literary, allegorical and, indeed, theological and mythic purpose, rather than as an account of historical events, there is significant need, not to speak of warrant, to doubt the historicity of its figures to the extent that such figures owe their substance to such literature. The best histories of Jesus today reflect an awareness of the limits and uncertainties in reconstructing the story of his life. Abraham, Isaac, Moses and Sarah, Ruth and Boaz, Jonah and his big fish are but a handful of characters found in the Bible, without the slightest historicity. They are literary creations. The figures of New Testament discourse must also be critically examined in the same light, for the New Testament is to be defined neither as a history of the early Christian church nor as an account of the life of a man named Jesus and of that of his followers. (emphasis added)

So, where is Jesus this year? Well, we’re not sure. He’s not in the New Testament and he’s so far not been in scholarship. I’ll look under the tree. . . .

Let the Dead Bury Jesus

[Jesus and Mo]

The last time I talked about historical Jesus, I concluded:

[W]e don’t know much of anything at all about the historical Jesus. All we can say for certain is that the New Testament reports on him as a teacher, executed rebel, and religious icon.

Biblical scholar R. Joseph Hoffmann, whom I admire, seems to be of the same opinion. His years of scholarship on the matter and involvement with the relevant sources lead him to conclude that --

[T]he sources we possess do not establish the conditions for a verdict on the historicity of Jesus.

This statement from Hoffmann's important essay on historical Jesus scholarship declares that there's not much we can know about the historical Jesus. But the picture gets even more complicated because what we know has often been wrapped tightly in what we believe. To Hoffmann, we need to reality check both the content of our knowledge and the emotional investment we often make in that knowledge:

I accept that most of what we have learned about Jesus is “wrong” in one sense or another. Almost all of what the churches have taught about him--the christology that undergirds the doctrines of the Christian traditions, for example--is wrong at a literal level. It has to be because it is based on doctrines derived from a naive supernaturalist reading of sacred texts whose critical assessment had not even been contemplated before the eighteenth century.

But so too, the critical assessment is wrong, because it has been motivated by a belief that by removing the husks of dogmatic accretion--a process initiated by Luther’s liberal scholastic predecessors, in fact--a level of actuality would eventually be reached. There would be an assured minimum of truth (often assumed by the end of the 19th century to be primarily ethical rather than Christological, as doctrines like ascension and virgin birth were sent to the attic) which some historians on both the Catholic modernist and Protestant side thought would be unassailable.

In both church and school, our understanding of the historical Jesus has traditionally had more to do with ideology than reality. But if I understand Hoffmann, the historical Jesus is also a decidedly modern phenomenon in the West:

Odd...that the historicity of Jesus should be of any concern at all in relation to a person whose humanity, in the letters of Paul and in the gospels (to a lesser extent, perhaps) is of no consequence to the core tradition. The battle of the post-New Testament period in the early Church, as Harnack recognized, was not to define the divinity of Jesus but to defend his humanity.

Hoffmann notes that in the formative centuries of Christianity, the humanity of Jesus (which is not quite the same thing as his historicity) was actually de-emphasized in favor of his divinity--so much so that keeping hold of the idea that he was a walking and talking person at one time was a struggle. By comparison Hoffmann discusses a bit of the Islamic tradition, in which the humanity (again, not the same as historicity) of Jesus was cherished:

Love, fear, joy, pleasure, mother-love, and compassion equally have their origins in emotion and human evolution and are nonetheless “real” in daily life–indeed, shape daily life–constantly expressing themselves in thought and action. Religion consolidates these aspects of existence in a way that simple curiosity and information does not. It roots them not in the self but in something external, like God, or incarnates them in messengers like Jesus and metaphors like sin, forgiveness and redemption. That is what is going on in the New Testament, not an episode of To Tell the Truth.

For this reason–starting with a certain lack of profundity—it is difficult not to find the musings of (many) myth-theorists frankly ridiculous. The early church found the historical Jesus all but unnecessary: that is the story. They found his humanity necessary as a theological premise, because they could not quite grasp the concept of disembodied divinity. Besides, a god without humanity could scarcely be expected to comprehend human suffering, or desire to do anything about it. History did not require Jesus; emotion did. It required as well the incredible and fantastic aspects of his personality. History required Muhammad and the non-divinity of Muhammad for other reasons. That is why the two traditions are different.

What Hoffmann is trying to do here is establish a positive space for religion and religiosity. That first paragraph above stakes out the battery of intense human passions for which religion allows such expressive power. Religion--not Christianity, Islam, or any other major religion--has never been about relaying information but rather about presenting all experience as holding overarching significance and connectedness. That second paragraph challenges mythicists who dismiss religion out of hand as superstition and fantasy. Hoffmann defends Jesus and religion against the mythicists: it's not entirely fair to crow about the lack of evidence for the historical Jesus, he says, because early Christianity didn't realize it would ever need it (assuming there was evidence).

Instead, Jesus-as-God-incarnated was very much shaped by early Christianity's battles among believers and believers-to-be:

Stuck with the Bible, the gospel, a growing body of doctrine, necessitated by struggles with heretics, and the religious demands of a growing community–a lot of weight to carry–Christianity could not very easily take the turn toward disembodied and denatured divinity. If, for the pagans, the resurrection of the flesh was a nauseating idea, for the Christians it became a useful absurdity and the prelude to two millennia of “paradoxical” theology.

Hoffmann thus seems to be heading toward an idea that we are captive today to the sources available, and those sources emphasized the divinity of Jesus while subduing his human aspect. We cannot know if there was a "real" Jesus, but we can perhaps filter out the semblance of a human being from early Christian beliefs about who Jesus was:

If, as I think, the church was largely successful in subduing the humanity of Jesus while insisting as a strictly dogmatic matter that he was both fully human and fully divine (historical and unhistorical, as in John 1.1-15?), why still bother to ask about whether he “really” existed. Shouldn’t the question really be who or what existed? It is not the same as asking whether Muhammad existed since nothing but one kind of reality has ever been claimed for him, and that is historical.

My defense of debates and discussion of the historical Jesus is not based on any confidence that something new is going to be discovered, or some persuasive “template” found that will decide for us a question that the early Christian obviously regarded as irrelevant. Still less is it based on some notion that the Church will retract the doctrine of the trinity or the hypostatic union, clearing the way for an impartial investigation into the life of Jesus. That is already possible, and as always before the journey gets us to the front door of the Church. Nothing has been more depressing than the search for the Jesus of history, and nothing more hollow than the shouts of scholars who have claimed to find him. Except the shouts of scholars who claim there is nothing to find.

Not that the shapers of the Jesus tradition, whatever their real names were, should have the final say, but they did draw the map and bury the treasure. We are the victims of their indifference to the question.

Hoffmann argues that just because early Christianity made Jesus a magical, fantastical being doesn't mean that Jesus was all magic and fantasy. So, he's calling for measured applications of skepticism--agnosticism, even.

As I said, Hoffmann is one of those scholars I admire. I like his knowledge and his application of reasoning. However, I only find a weak case here against the mythicist position. Hoffmann appears simply to dislike the attitude of mythicists--maybe they seem too biased or too gleeful at the prospect of what a 100% no-Jesus would mean. I see Hoffmann as suffering from the same problem that many smart people have when it comes to religion:

On the one hand, religious beliefs are false and wrapped up in so much of what has been both immoral and tyrannical in world history. On the other hand, many people--including those we love--have drawn strength from their religious beliefs and have powerful personal ties to religious celebrations and rituals.

The problem is one of how to let go of religious beliefs, how to finally release them into the air.

Hoffmann seems not to want traditional belief. Yet he also wants to retain some appreciation, veneration even, of religion. I agree that it's important to have a a clear and unfiltered understanding of both religion generally and religions specifically. It's important to know their beliefs, their history, and their impact on cultures and individuals.

But we also have to accept that so much in religion describes stories which rise to the level of the impossible: the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, the Exodus, the Annunciation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Assumption, and so on.

It really is OK that these are just stories. It's alright that they did not actually occur as reported. We can appreciate the stories, and we can listen to them and even learn from them. They just aren't true, and they are not stable pillars of a life.

The Best Case for Atheism, Christianity Edition

I recently laid out what I think is the best case for Atheism. In that essay, I summarize the concept of God this way:

It cannot really be explained, it cannot be proved, it fits nicely into a human strength for creating imaginary characters, it is deeply undermined by the problem of indiscriminate evil, it is not the best explanation for anything, and it’s the most improbable cause of observed reality.

Any one of these flaws is devastating on its own, but the collective effect of them all makes it very plain that God is almost surely a human invention.

However, as decisive as the case is against God, the story does not end here because Christians don't believe in this God. I have argued before that Christians pray to a different God than the God of the Hebrew Scriptures (see this also). They don't like the God of the "Old Testament." No one does. Before Richard Dawkins gave the definitive summation of this character, everyone already gave ol’ “I am that I am” the more pleasant sounding euphemism of being “jealous.”

My point is that Christians have always been embarrassed with the old God, and they aren’t all that bothered by dismantling him. For Christians, all roads to the True God™ run through Jesus. If Jesus is right, they believe, then the true nature of God is known only through Jesus. Indeed, the real significance of the character Jesus is not to redeem humanity for its sins but to redeem God for his. Those silly, spiritually blind Jews just got God horribly wrong.

For the Christians, then, let’s talk now about Jesus. Let's sum up what we really know about this character and how we know it.

(1) The very existence of a real Jesus corresponding to the person described in the Gospels is highly questionable--no one can assert with certainty that a real Jesus ever walked the earth.

(2) The Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John are our only canonical sources of information about the events of Jesus’ life.

(2.1) Mark, the earliest Gospel, is generally agreed by biblical scholars to have been composed around 65 CE. That’s about 30-65 years after the described events are supposed to have happened.

(2.2) None of the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses, and none were written by the disciples Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.

(2.3) The writers of the Gospels heard the stories of Jesus from others; we don’t know how many or how few others there were.

(2.4) Other, apocryphal gospels are presumed to have less historical value than the canonized texts. All of these, so far as I know, date to much later than the putative time of Jesus. In particular, I am thinking of the gospels of Peter, Mary, Judas, Philip, and Thomas. However, these "other" gospels indicates that several different Jesus traditions were around, possibly from very early on. This must lead us to ask why the orthodoxy is the orthodoxy; put differently, we cannot just assume the orthodoxy is most accurate, or accurate at all, simply because it's the orthodoxy.

(3) The story of Jesus’ empty tomb--perhaps the single most significant event of the Gospels--is different, even contradictory, across each Gospel.

(4) Before the Gospel stories, there is no evidence of any knowledge of a tomb of Jesus (empty or occupied).

(5) We have not one single writing from or about Jesus during his supposed lifetime (see here).

(5.1) We know of several people who lived during or very near the supposed lifetime of Jesus but who mention nothing about him, which would be strange for an influential healer, teacher, and political rebel. These people include Justus of Tiberias, Philo of Alexandria, Pliny the Elder, Seneca the Younger, Valerius Maximus, and Velleius Paterculus.

(5.2) Philo, a Jewish writer who lived from 20 BCE to 50 CE, never once wrote anything about Jesus, even though he did write about political conflicts between the Jews and Pontius Pilate in Judea.

(5.3) All non-Christian references to Jesus can be shown to have either been introduced later by Christian scribes or originally based on Christian claims.

(6) In the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd centuries, there were many conflicting beliefs about who Jesus Christ was, including beliefs that he had never existed on earth "in the flesh."

(6.1) In Marcionism, for example, Christ was a purely spiritual entity. Other schools of thought in the first three centuries of Christianity included Nestorianism (Jesus and Christ were two different entities), Docetism (Jesus appeared physical, but he was really incorporeal), Apollinarism (Jesus had a human body and human soul, but a divine mind), Arianism (Jesus was the son of God, not God himself), and Catholicism (Jesus was fully human and fully divine, both God and the son of God).

(7) In light of modern understanding of reality and of supernatural claims, it’s irrational to believe that the supernatural claims made for Jesus would be true.

(7.1) We already reject supernatural claims that have more evidence than the Jesus claims. For example, we don’t believe that the women of 17th century Salem, Massachusetts, were actually witches. But we have more historical evidence that they were witches than we have evidence of Jesus actually being a real person.

(7.2) People 2000 years ago were more ignorant about the natural causes of events than we are today. They were less educated in critical thinking and philosophy, with virtually no access to diverse views.

As in the earlier case for Atheism, I'm seeking here to compile a list of incontrovertible statements. I don't see how much contest one can make, for example, out of statement #1. The seven basic statements above tell us that we have hardly any serious evidence at all for the existence of Jesus, let alone for the supernatural claims about him. Our textual sources are self-interested and contradictory. The idea of a historical Jesus seems to have emerged and evolved amidst other competing ideas about Jesus over the course of Christianity’s first three centuries. We make special allowance for the existence and divinity claims for Jesus that we would never give to another figure.

So, we don’t know much of anything at all about the historical Jesus. All we can say for certain is that the New Testament reports on him as a teacher, executed rebel, and religious icon. Given that the case for God is so weak, it makes little sense to grant any credibility at all to supernatural claims with respect to Jesus.

If there was a real Jesus, he was born and died as a human being, and that's it. He’s gone.

Best Posts of 2009

To close out the year, I want to link to ten posts that present substantive content and best represent the development of my thought:

1. In January, I posted the first of two musings on the music and import of the Rolling Stones.

2. In April, I responded to a complicated formulation of the Argument from Ontology. I rejected God's existence on the basis of the argument because I found the initial premise flawed.

3. Also in April, I returned to one of my favorite themes, Atheism and morality. This time, I critiqued what I felt was a silly and wrongheaded post from one of the UD non-scientists.

4. In July, I expanded on a response to a book reviewer. The reviewer was squealing for joy over Paul Moser's The Elusive God. I found the review and the book's central argument to be based on an unreasonable condition: believe in God and be willing to transform yourself through God, and the evidence of God's existence will be made clear. (Posts 8, 9 and 10, below, also touch on matters that relate to why Moser's condition is unacceptable.)

5. In October, I wrote about Bob Dylan and why I think he's (still) so great.

6. Also in October, I pointed out how atheists are cast as the Other by the religious, allowing them to avoid dealing with the intrinsic contradictions and evils that ground belief.

7. In November, I returned to a subject that fascinated me this year: the historicity of Jesus. In this post, I used an article on the subject to delineate my thoughts. I lean toward the idea that Jesus was mythical but I recognize that the case is not strong and that the Jesus-was-historical argument is only slightly weaker. New evidence could easily change my mind.

8. Also in November, I made what I think is one of the more important statements I have ever made. The statement was on interpretation and how even a great and plausible interpretation need not be grounded in anything like reality. The frame is more important than the interpretation.

9. November also saw another important post, this time on the impossibilities presented in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. I focused on things that were outright unable to happen in the known universe. For some reason, we don't have high demands for independent corroboration of these impossible things. This post resulted in the best discussion of the year.

10. In December, I have posted lots. Yet, I feel that my comments on science and consistent standards of skeptical inquiry deserve most to be listed here.

This was a productive year. Much more so than I expected. As 2010 arrives, I wish to pursue many of these themes in more depth and I hope to introduce new ones, too.

Historical Jesus: No Clear Picture

I think it’s absolutely critical to have religions and religious belief put into a proper perspective. When we do this it becomes quite clear that religion establishes itself not on historicity and data, but on narration and authority. Is this necessarily a bad thing? No, but it’s important to bear in mind because we have little rational basis for asserting the truth of a religion. Yet, many people accept that their adopted religion is true.

Let’s consider Christianity for an example of how attempts to assert historicity fail. It is December, after all, and Christian groups and believers are working overtime to repeat their message, "Our religion is true! Jesus was born, lived, died, and lived again!" I also want to state a hypothesis that I do not have enough evidence to verify (yet): Belief in Christianity being true does not depend on either the Hebrew Scriptures or the Old Testament being historically/factually true. I know, I know, the Hebrew Scriptures and the Old Testament are supposed to be the same thing. But they are not. I have a quote later by Gerd Lüdemann that indicates some of the difference. The point of my hypothesis, however, is that Christianity considers its own claims as unimpeachable and only secondarily concerns itself with defending texts outside of the New Testament. Beyond the hypothesis, my point is that Christianity's own historical and factual claims become highly problematic under scrutiny, and this is a fact that ought to be emphasized more.

For this consideration, we can do much worse than listening to someone like R. Joseph Hoffmann, who is Distinguished Scholar at Goddard College and head of the Goddard Program in Human Values. He is also Former Chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER) and Co-chair of The Jesus Project (2007-2009).

Hoffmann explains that our sources of information – including the New Testament itself – do not give a clear answer to whether a discernibly historical Jesus existed. The methodologies we use to evaluate sources also do not yield this clear answer.

[N]either the sources we possess nor approaches to them developed over the last two centuries yield any resolution of the question of his [i.e., Jesus’s] actual existence and that the Church’s description of his reality has never depended primarily on the status of such a question.

In other words, there simply is not enough evidence to establish the historical existence of the New Testament’s Jesus. We have reports by people invested in the stories they tell, but we don’t have the historical records we need to say “Yes, this person existed.”

Historically, the existence of Jesus to be indubitable would need to be demonstrated in the same way the existence of any other human being can be shown. The standard of proof is fairly high, making allowance for the age in which the person lived or is thought to have lived. Normally we would expect records, reports, artifacts (bones are best), or the writings of people who mention Jesus in their reports of other events. For example, a chronicle of the Roman administration of Pontius Pilate in Palestine with a mention of the crucifixion of an outlaw named Yeshu, a Galilean, would be very helpful. But we do not possess such a record. Instead, we possess reports written by members of a religious group that had very specific and self-interested reasons for retelling his story. And the way in which it is told differs so markedly from the sorts of histories the Romans were writing in the second and third century CE that scholars have acknowledged for a long time the “problem” of deriving the historical Jesus from the Gospels—and even more the problem of deriving his existence from the letters of Paul or any other New Testament writings.

Religion and religious belief only complicate matters. In the case of Christianity, the Christ figure that emerges by the 4th century bears little resemblance to anything of historical or physical reality.

To accept the “reality” of Jesus after the fourth century is to accept the rather bizarre figure immortalized in the icons, the Jesus of the fertile Christian imagination. This Jesus is a myth cobbled together from other myths—imperial, soteriological, apocalyptic and messianic, priestly, gnostic, stoic with a healthy dash of byzantine splendor tossed into the mix. To the extent that every Jesus is a composite of culture and theology, the Jesus of Nicaeo-Chalcedonian orthodoxy would have been quite impossible in a first or second century context, and for the same reasons–though his image is emblazoned on cathedral walls from London to St Louis in tribute to the famous “original” in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople—impossibly exotic to later generations. The rate of change in reframing the reality of Jesus between the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and since the Reformation is enough to suggest that theological definitions of reality relate more to love than to chairs; that is to say, they are impressions of interpretation rather than interpretations of fact.

Let me depart from Hoffman now and go to Gerd Lüdemann, Professor of History and Literature of Early Christian at Georg-August-University, Director of the Institute of Early Christian Studies, and Director of the Archive "Religionsgeschichtliche Schule." In the quote below, Lüdemann observes that the New Testament and the orthodox understandings of it not only affect our view of Jesus but also re-frame our view of the Hebrew Scriptures. In other words, the New Testament actually conjures and creates an “Old Testament,” a fictional/ized version of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Historical criticism has effectively undermined the validity of the great majority of Old Testament citations by the authors of the New Testament; indeed, it is seldom possible even to imagine that Old Testament writers can have had in mind the persons and events that New Testament writers claimed they did. The oft-proposed thesis that this issue cannot be resolved either negatively or positively does not hold. The long and short of it is that New Testament authors have systematically mistaken or distorted the meaning of Old Testament texts in the service of polemical and doctrinal agendas. Matthew’s five citations of prophecy in his nativity account are among the best-known examples of the practice, and perhaps the most comically inapposite. In the interest of honesty and better communication with the public, academic theology needs to demonstrate the same kind and degree of intellectual honesty that long ago led natural science to disavow the Ptolemaic world picture.

These are points that all relate to arguments I have made before on interpretation and religion-as-interpretation. As I see it, modern religions are interpretations promoting themselves and always referring back to themselves. Is this necessarily a bad thing? No, but it’s important to bear in mind because the personal wonders we often ascribe to religion are often the product of practicing a religious interpretation and not the result of the religion’s status as truth or falsehood.

No Historical Jesus?

A modern American person cannot escape Jesus. That name, that imagery and iconography, the followers - Jesus is everywhere. If one is not a Christian, life can feel like a constant argument against a steady barrage of Jesus 'facts' and 'theology.' Just to get some peace from the world, many Jews tend to take the position that "Jesus was a good guy, a Jew like me who had some great ethical teachings."

Unfortunately, many who profess to be Christian know very little about the history of Christian beliefs or about the many serious questions surrounding the historicity of Jesus. They rarely seek to know if any physical and historical evidence actually supports the hypothesis that Jesus existed as a person in the world.

The rarity may seem strange since, presumably, Jesus is the central figure of Christianity. Except that often the centrality of Jesus seems not to be the case. In the beliefs and practices of even major holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, Jesus is not so much a person as the person that stuff happened to. Someone was miraculously born of a virgin (who was herself born of a virgin) in a stable? Oh, it was Jesus. Someone was crucified and later rose from the dead? Oh, it was Jesus.

I've always been struck at the emptiness of Jesus, and I think this emptiness may actually contribute to keeping people in the churches. All the shit happened to Jesus, but he doesn't ask anything of you directly. His emissaries in church ask, but you know them and they're OK. Go to church and celebrate the shit that happened, and then pass the money over to the emissaries.

It's about being together in a community and affirming that shit happens. It's not about Jesus; it's about the shit that happened. It's not about Jesus; it's about Christianity.

And so we come to Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, authors of The Jesus Mysteries, who offer a different view of Jesus and Christianity. As I see it, they hypothesize that modern Christianity is based around one big misunderstanding about Jesus. They say:

The traditional history of Christianity is hopelessly inadequate to the facts. From our research into ancient spirituality it has become obvious that we must fundamentally revise our understanding of Christian origins in the most shocking of ways. Our conclusion, supported by a considerable body of evidence in our book, The Jesus Mysteries, is that Christianity was not a new revelation. It was a continuation of Paganism by another name. The gospel story of Jesus is not the biography of an historical Messiah. It is a Jewish reworking of ancient Pagan myths of the dying and resurrecting Godman Osiris-Dionysus, which had been popular for centuries throughout the ancient Mediterranean.

The similarity of the Jesus narrative to pagan myths is well known. In modern times, however, we tend to equate myths with lies. This is not how the ancient world understood myths.

It is hard for us today to imagine the Jesus story being consciously created, but this is because we have misunderstood ancient spirituality. Myths were not seen as untruths as they are now. They were understood as allegories of spiritual initiation, which encoded profound mystical teachings. Reworking old myths to create new ones was a standard practice in the ancient world.

These are serious and high-impact claims being made. It should be noted that neither author is, so far as I know, an academic researcher. But folks such as G.A. Wells, Gerd Lüdemann, and many others have done real work that makes a "Christ-myth" theory not only viable but very likely. After all, according to the myth, a man comes to life after being dead three days. That man then ascends to heaven. It's a nice story, but let's not forget that such an occurrence would go against the way the world actually works. We need to employ the reality principle every now and again.

So, having taken a several grains of salt, we hear more from Freke and Gandy:

The conquests of Alexander the Great had turned the Mediterranean world into one culture with a common language. This created an age of eclecticism, much like our own, in which different spiritual traditions met and synthesized. Jewish mystics of this period, such as Philo Judeas, were obsessed with synthesizing Jewish and Pagan mythology. In light of all this, it is actually no surprise that some group of Jewish mystics should synthesize the great mythic hero of the Jews, Joshua the Messiah, with the great mythic hero of the Pagans, Osiris-Dionysus.

At the time, both Pagans and Christians were well aware that the Jesus story was a myth. The early Christians, known as Gnostics, understood the Jesus story as allegory, not history, and even called Jesus by the names of the Pagan Godman. The Gnostics were brutally eradicated by the Roman Church in the 4th and 5th centuries, and since then we have believed the official propaganda that these Christians were dangerous heretics who had gone Pagan.

Actually the evidence suggests the opposite is closer to the truth. The Gnostics were the original Christians, just as they themselves claimed. They had synthesized Jewish and Pagan mythology to produce the Jesus story and many other extraordinary Christian myths largely unknown today. The Roman Church was a later deviation, which misunderstood the Jesus story as history. It was, as the Gnostics said at the time, an imitation Church teaching a superficial Christianity designed for the masses.

The authors clearly make a target of the Roman Catholic Church's brand of Christianity, as well they should. But I part ways with the authors when they obviously sympathize with the Gnostics:

Roman Christianity, and all its subsequent offshoots, is based on the idea that if you believe in the existence of an historical Jesus you will go to heaven when you die. For the Gnostics, however, Jesus is an everyman figure in an initiation allegory. They taught that if you yourself go through the process of initiation symbolized by the Jesus myth, you would die to your old self and resurrect in a new way. The Greek word we translate as resurrect also means awaken.

For the Gnostics, Christianity was about dying -- the idea of giving up your mortal body and awakening to your immortal essence as the Christ within -- the One Consciousness of the Universe. This mystical enlightenment was not something that happened after death, but could happen here and now.

I am intrigued by the different picture of Jesus that the authors paint, clean-shaven and such:

The historical figure of Jesus has been so central to Western culture that it is hard to question his existence. As soon as we hear his name we can see him in our mind's eye, in his flowing white robes, with long hair and a beard. Yet this picture of Jesus was not created until the 8th century. Early portrayals of Jesus show him clean-shaven with short hair and wearing a Roman tunic. St Paul says that long hair disgraces a man, so presumably his image of Jesus was not the same as ours.

In the next passage, the authors err by going all sensationalist on us - "everything you thought you knew is WRONG!!!" If anything makes me think these folks are snake-oil salesman, this is it. However, their points about the paucity of physical evidence for a historical Jesus are legitimate. I wish more Christians would ponder these ideas a bit more.

The fact is that everything we think we know about Jesus, like this romantic picture of the bearded savior, is a creation of the human imagination. Actually there is barely a shred of evidence for the existence of an historical Jesus and this dissolves on closer inspection. Paul, the earliest Christian source, shows no knowledge of an historical man, only a mystical Christ. The gospels have been thoroughly discredited as eyewitness reports. Other bits of traditional evidence, such as references to Jesus by the Jewish historian Josephus, have been shown to be later forgeries. If solid evidence had existed, there would have been no need to have created such fabrications.

The authors try to close out with a statement that basically they are helping people be even more spiritual. They somehow have the secret to help people be happier and more personally in touch with the divine. This is voodoo mystical shit. It's the same old story: there's something better, somewhere, out there, "beyond" this reality. I don't understand why people repulse themselves from reality.

A little over a century ago most people believed the story of Adam and Eve to be history. To most thinking people today its is obviously a myth. We predict that within a generation a similar revolution will have taken place in our understanding of the gospels. People will look back at the beginning of the 21st century and be amazed that a culture with the technology to travel to the moon could see the fabulous story of Jesus as anything other than a myth. However, we do not want to dismiss the Jesus story as nonsense. For us it is truly the greatest story ever told, because it has been thousands of years in the making. It is a perennial tale that has fascinated the human soul since the dawn of time.

Whilst our ideas clearly rewrite history, we do not see ourselves as undermining Christianity. On the contrary we are suggesting that Christianity is in fact richer than we previously imagined. According to the original Gnostic Christians, the Jesus story is a perennial myth with the power to impart the mystical experience of Gnosis, which can transform each one of us into a Christ, not merely a history of events that happened to someone else two thousand years ago.

So, this is interesting stuff unfortunately packaged in sensationalism. Interested readers will be better served by reading the excellent review by Richard Carrier of Earl Doherty's book, The Jesus Puzzle.