Jesus as Myth: A Critique
It seems that you have found sufficient justification that defies the consensus of most scholars.
On the particular issue of Jesus' historicity, yes, I have come to believe that the scholarly consensus is mistaken.
"What justifies doubt is the fact that his existence as a human being is not unambiguously attested in places where I am convinced it would have been if he had been real."
Can you be more specific?
I have put a summary of my arguments on my Web site here:
http://dougshaver.com/christ/ahistor/ahistor1.htm. If you're pressed for time, go to the bottom of the page and click on "What wrong with this picture?"
I finally got a chance to read your thesis. I apologize in advance if I have misatated your argument, which I understand is somewhat as follows.
What we read in the gospels are essentially camp fire tales-- an accumulation of incidents and wisdom from the Jewish community and the surrounding mystery religions.
That's possible. It isn't quite what I have in mind, but it could work, too.
I have not done enough research myself to form a clear hypothesis about their origin, but I think they began as something akin to Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. The stories originally were not about Jesus as such. They were collections of teachings, and Jesus, like Gibran's Almustafa, was just a mouthpiece for those teachings.
From these stories, a Christian cult began to develop.
No, that's not my theory. I think several savior cults, one of which was Paul's, existed prior to the gospel stories. The gospels, or at least an early version of Mark's gospel, was produced independently of any of those cults.
Paul of Tarsus, a hellenized Jew, saw the light and began his missionary efforts and epistles. Paul's Jesus was essentially a Platonic Form, which in the second century merged with the camp fire tales of the earlier mystery cult . And from that came the Jesus of history.
Yes, that says it pretty well.
In your discussion, on several occasions, you invoke the principle of parsimony. It seems to me that there ise too little parsimony to make this credible. For example, what I didn't get from your essay was the motivation of the merger between the mystery cults and Paul's Platonism, an explanation of how the gospels came to be especially relative to its size-- the sheer length of the account-- and the agreement between the gospels, and also the motivation behind Paul's missionary efforts and the growth of the early Christian church.
Aside from simply giving appropriate credit, one reason I referred to Doherty's work was that I was trying to keep the essay to a manageable length and so was focusing on the basic argument against historicity, not the details of an alternative account of Christianity's origins. I was hoping that anyone interested in those details would go to Doherty's Web site for them. It's not that I think he has all the details right. I think it very unlikely that any ahistoricist has all the details of Christianity's true origins right, because most of the evidence we would need to get them all right is irretrievably lost.
Why the merger? Doherty addresses that, but very briefly and so it's easy to miss. Paul's Christ doesn't grab the average person's gut very well. It's too esoteric. Your average Joe wants something a little more (literally) down to earth. As Doherty notes, savior-gods who died and came back to life were not a new idea in those days. The notion that one of them had done it as a man of this world, and had done it very recently, was new, and would have appealed to many more people than the previous versions did.
I fail to see what it is about length of the gospel story that makes it more improbable as a work of fiction than of purported history.
Insofar as the gospels agree on anything, it is easily accounted for on the supposition that they have a common origin. The disagreements among them suggest that the common origin was something other than factual history.
You and Earl Doherty place a great deal of emphasis on what he calls the silences in Paul's writings regarding the historical Jesus. It seems to me that there is a lot of straining to make a point that doesn't appear to be especially valid to me. Take the following statement by Doherty, in which questions why the message they preached wasn't the gospel of Jesus.
1 Thessalonians 2:2
. . . we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in the face of great opposition. [RSV]
Early Christian writers like Paul are constantly referring to the message they carry as the "gospel of God." They also talk of the work of God, the saving actions of God, the call of God (cf. Romans 1:16, 3:24, 1 Cor. 1:9, Phil. 1:6, Gal. 4:7, etc.). If these apostles were preaching a message about an historical Jesus who had himself taught about God and his own relationship to him, surely they would style it the "gospel of Jesus." Why is there no mention in the epistles of an earthly ministry of Jesus? On the other hand, if Jesus is a spiritual figure, a "mystery" known only through scripture and God’s revelation of him, then Paul’s message is indeed the gospel of God (see especially Romans 1:1-4), and God is the primary "Savior" (see also Titus 1:3).
In every letter that Paul wrote, I believe without exception, Paul begins the letter invoking Jesus and God. For example:
Romans 1:1, 7-9: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all…”
Thus, from Paul's perspective, Jesus is God, the Logos of John 1:1. The apostles were not preaching about a historical Jesus but about Jesus preincarnated as God. Since Jesus, in Paul's view, was the resurrected Christ, there was no need to dwell on Jesus' earthly ministry.
Among the evidence that you purport is the silence in the letters written to Paul on Jesus as man and a distinction between secular (such as Tacitus) and non-secular writings (such as the Gospels). At least to me, neither point is especially convincing.
Paul was writing to work through theological issues informed by his Hellinistic background (like John) and the only fact that was important to him was that "Jesus died for our sins according to the scriptures(I Cor. 15:3)." For example, in the writings of Plato, even where he references Socrates as in the Apology, there is little biographical information except for the premise that Socrates lived; the emphasis is on the development of ideas. If Paul died between 64-67 AD, he would have certainly lived within the lifetimes of people that would have known Jesus, and perhaps he simply felt there was no need to expand on the obvious-- that Jesus lived. Akin to a stone dropped in a pond, Paul never saw the stone but he did feel the waves as they were just beining to radiate outward, effecting not just him but clearly many others. This begs the question as to what caused those waves-- the emergent belief in many more people than Paul. It could have been hysteria or delusion. But it seems just as likely if not more likely that it was the effect of a real person, namely Jesus, who died about thirty years before Paul was killed.
I don't buy the distinction you make between secular and non-secular writings. The book of Matthew, for example, was written between 50-100 AD, somewhat equivalent to us and the events of the Reagan to the Roosevelt presidencies. It was not written as history but as a testimony to key snapshots of Jesus' life, about no more than a month or so of his life. It was written with a point of view, as generally is all history ancient and modern. Even assuming that fables are weaved into the narrative by design or default, it is just as likely that cores of fact remain. The logical question before we dismiss the gospels is to ask not how are the gospels different but why are the gospels in general agreement. That the thrust of the narrative parallel each other suggests to me that the core factuality within the gospels are in at least some measure historically true.
Here are my summary conclusions on the question of the historical Jesus.
Did Jesus exist in the same way that we know that Abraham Lincoln existed? Or was Jesus a myth like Thor or Apollo? I raise this question to reassess for my own satisfaction what I have long assumed to be self-evident. The evidence convinces me that Jesus lived as a flesh-and-blood person. It is significant that few professional peer-reviewed historians challenge the factuality of the existence of Jesus, although I’m sure that there are some.
First, we have the record of the gospels and a small but significant part in Acts. These were written with a point of view, and in fact they only account in totality for about two months of Jesus’ life. But I believe that they are credible. They were written from about 50 to 100 AD, a relatively short time in a culture that had a strong oral tradition. By contrast, Caesar’s Gallic Wars date from 100-44 BC, but our earliest copy is from 900 AD. It would be the equivalent of writing about the events of the First World War—well within the memory of living people or their children. There are credible parallels between the gospels as well as confirmation of names of rulers and places that historians have unearthed.
Secondly, we have the testimony of perhaps a half dozen writers that were roughly the contemporary to Jesus and His apostles. External sources include Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and others. Some extra-canonical writings also provide us with insights. While some of these writings may be fictional, in totality there is enough to support the claim that Jesus lived. It is remarkable that a man of Jesus’ rank—a common carpenter—would have so much documentation.
Thirdly, we have the fact of the mass movement of Christianity that resulted in the replacement of the old gods of by Constantine the Great by the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. chose Christianity because of a vision of the Christian cross, but as a politician, I suspect he was counting noses as well. By this time, the emperor was aware of his Christian military officers and state officials as well of the popular appeal and moral force of Christianity in the face of persecution. Christianity, I believe, was a bottom-up movement. The political elite responded to the people rather than vice versa. Myths have sometimes created mass movements. But the most parsimonious and most likely explanation for this mass movement is that it started with one man who stands at the hinge of history—Jesus Christ.
My thinking on the gospels has done a lot of evolving over the years, but I've never believed that any of the writers was lying.
For most of my adult life, I thought they were just mistaken, that although much of what they wrote wasn't true, they thought it was. If you believe what you say, then you're not lying.
But are you prepared to apply the same standard to yourself? My sense is that you personally are honest. Or, to put it alternatively, I see no reason to think that you will consciously lie. Having said that, and without impugning your personal integrity, I do think that you are embracing a dishonest methodology in your search for historical truth, just as religionists of impeccable integrity nevertheless embrace a methodology to assert that the earth was created 6,000 years ago. There are people who wish to raise the bar into the clouds in testing whether or not Jesus is a myth because they hate Christianity, but their bias is cancelled out by Christian scientists who have lowered the bar so that it hits the ground because they want to prove that Genesis is fact. They are both intellectually bankrupt, although they may no know it.
What the creationists, those who assert that Jesus is myth, the revisionists who claimed that Auchwitcz was a spa, and the tobacco lobbists all have in common is a similar cast of mind that puts their conclusion before the data and cherry picks data to support their conclusion. That Jesus was a historical figure is not Xtian propaganda formented by the magisterium any more than the notion that all animals ascended frm a common ancestor is atheistic propaganda formented by the geology department of Columbia University. While it is true that the mass of the scholars can be wrong, it still behooves you to account for why this consensus exists in the face of two millennia of powerful anti-religionist voices who wish it did not exist.
A good test for intellectual honesty is to develop as strong a case as you can possibly develop contra to your hypnothesis, examine all the facts including in this case analogous documents from analogous figures during that time period, and then see if your theory is more compelling than orthodox scholarship. I doubt that the creation of a strawman and then its systematical dismantlement can prevail at any peer review no matter how much in sympathy those peers may be with your hypnothesis.
If you think my method fails to sort fact from fiction, then you can tell me what is wrong with my method.
By making, as do the creationists and the holocaust revisionists, doubt a fact. Here, for example, are arguments that go the other way:
http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/gospdefhub.html#anon
"There are excellent reasons for maintaining the traditional ascriptions of Gospel authorship, when standard tests for such determinations are applied; There is no reason to date ANY of the Gospels later than 70 AD, although such dating may be permissible in the case of John; There is no reason to suppose that the Gospel authors took creative liberties with the events they recorded, to the point of fabrication."
Consider the question of attribution. If we assume that the Gospel of Matthew was written by someone or some people other than Matthew, then lets use the same standard to attribute Tacitus' Annals. Seems fair to me.
On the particular issue of Jesus' historicity, yes, I have come to believe that the scholarly consensus is mistaken.
"What justifies doubt is the fact that his existence as a human being is not unambiguously attested in places where I am convinced it would have been if he had been real."
Can you be more specific?
I have put a summary of my arguments on my Web site here:
http://dougshaver.com/christ/ahistor/ahistor1.htm. If you're pressed for time, go to the bottom of the page and click on "What wrong with this picture?"
I finally got a chance to read your thesis. I apologize in advance if I have misatated your argument, which I understand is somewhat as follows.
What we read in the gospels are essentially camp fire tales-- an accumulation of incidents and wisdom from the Jewish community and the surrounding mystery religions.
That's possible. It isn't quite what I have in mind, but it could work, too.
I have not done enough research myself to form a clear hypothesis about their origin, but I think they began as something akin to Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. The stories originally were not about Jesus as such. They were collections of teachings, and Jesus, like Gibran's Almustafa, was just a mouthpiece for those teachings.
From these stories, a Christian cult began to develop.
No, that's not my theory. I think several savior cults, one of which was Paul's, existed prior to the gospel stories. The gospels, or at least an early version of Mark's gospel, was produced independently of any of those cults.
Paul of Tarsus, a hellenized Jew, saw the light and began his missionary efforts and epistles. Paul's Jesus was essentially a Platonic Form, which in the second century merged with the camp fire tales of the earlier mystery cult . And from that came the Jesus of history.
Yes, that says it pretty well.
In your discussion, on several occasions, you invoke the principle of parsimony. It seems to me that there ise too little parsimony to make this credible. For example, what I didn't get from your essay was the motivation of the merger between the mystery cults and Paul's Platonism, an explanation of how the gospels came to be especially relative to its size-- the sheer length of the account-- and the agreement between the gospels, and also the motivation behind Paul's missionary efforts and the growth of the early Christian church.
Aside from simply giving appropriate credit, one reason I referred to Doherty's work was that I was trying to keep the essay to a manageable length and so was focusing on the basic argument against historicity, not the details of an alternative account of Christianity's origins. I was hoping that anyone interested in those details would go to Doherty's Web site for them. It's not that I think he has all the details right. I think it very unlikely that any ahistoricist has all the details of Christianity's true origins right, because most of the evidence we would need to get them all right is irretrievably lost.
Why the merger? Doherty addresses that, but very briefly and so it's easy to miss. Paul's Christ doesn't grab the average person's gut very well. It's too esoteric. Your average Joe wants something a little more (literally) down to earth. As Doherty notes, savior-gods who died and came back to life were not a new idea in those days. The notion that one of them had done it as a man of this world, and had done it very recently, was new, and would have appealed to many more people than the previous versions did.
I fail to see what it is about length of the gospel story that makes it more improbable as a work of fiction than of purported history.
Insofar as the gospels agree on anything, it is easily accounted for on the supposition that they have a common origin. The disagreements among them suggest that the common origin was something other than factual history.
You and Earl Doherty place a great deal of emphasis on what he calls the silences in Paul's writings regarding the historical Jesus. It seems to me that there is a lot of straining to make a point that doesn't appear to be especially valid to me. Take the following statement by Doherty, in which questions why the message they preached wasn't the gospel of Jesus.
1 Thessalonians 2:2
. . . we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in the face of great opposition. [RSV]
Early Christian writers like Paul are constantly referring to the message they carry as the "gospel of God." They also talk of the work of God, the saving actions of God, the call of God (cf. Romans 1:16, 3:24, 1 Cor. 1:9, Phil. 1:6, Gal. 4:7, etc.). If these apostles were preaching a message about an historical Jesus who had himself taught about God and his own relationship to him, surely they would style it the "gospel of Jesus." Why is there no mention in the epistles of an earthly ministry of Jesus? On the other hand, if Jesus is a spiritual figure, a "mystery" known only through scripture and God’s revelation of him, then Paul’s message is indeed the gospel of God (see especially Romans 1:1-4), and God is the primary "Savior" (see also Titus 1:3).
In every letter that Paul wrote, I believe without exception, Paul begins the letter invoking Jesus and God. For example:
Romans 1:1, 7-9: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all…”
Thus, from Paul's perspective, Jesus is God, the Logos of John 1:1. The apostles were not preaching about a historical Jesus but about Jesus preincarnated as God. Since Jesus, in Paul's view, was the resurrected Christ, there was no need to dwell on Jesus' earthly ministry.
Among the evidence that you purport is the silence in the letters written to Paul on Jesus as man and a distinction between secular (such as Tacitus) and non-secular writings (such as the Gospels). At least to me, neither point is especially convincing.
Paul was writing to work through theological issues informed by his Hellinistic background (like John) and the only fact that was important to him was that "Jesus died for our sins according to the scriptures(I Cor. 15:3)." For example, in the writings of Plato, even where he references Socrates as in the Apology, there is little biographical information except for the premise that Socrates lived; the emphasis is on the development of ideas. If Paul died between 64-67 AD, he would have certainly lived within the lifetimes of people that would have known Jesus, and perhaps he simply felt there was no need to expand on the obvious-- that Jesus lived. Akin to a stone dropped in a pond, Paul never saw the stone but he did feel the waves as they were just beining to radiate outward, effecting not just him but clearly many others. This begs the question as to what caused those waves-- the emergent belief in many more people than Paul. It could have been hysteria or delusion. But it seems just as likely if not more likely that it was the effect of a real person, namely Jesus, who died about thirty years before Paul was killed.
I don't buy the distinction you make between secular and non-secular writings. The book of Matthew, for example, was written between 50-100 AD, somewhat equivalent to us and the events of the Reagan to the Roosevelt presidencies. It was not written as history but as a testimony to key snapshots of Jesus' life, about no more than a month or so of his life. It was written with a point of view, as generally is all history ancient and modern. Even assuming that fables are weaved into the narrative by design or default, it is just as likely that cores of fact remain. The logical question before we dismiss the gospels is to ask not how are the gospels different but why are the gospels in general agreement. That the thrust of the narrative parallel each other suggests to me that the core factuality within the gospels are in at least some measure historically true.
Here are my summary conclusions on the question of the historical Jesus.
Did Jesus exist in the same way that we know that Abraham Lincoln existed? Or was Jesus a myth like Thor or Apollo? I raise this question to reassess for my own satisfaction what I have long assumed to be self-evident. The evidence convinces me that Jesus lived as a flesh-and-blood person. It is significant that few professional peer-reviewed historians challenge the factuality of the existence of Jesus, although I’m sure that there are some.
First, we have the record of the gospels and a small but significant part in Acts. These were written with a point of view, and in fact they only account in totality for about two months of Jesus’ life. But I believe that they are credible. They were written from about 50 to 100 AD, a relatively short time in a culture that had a strong oral tradition. By contrast, Caesar’s Gallic Wars date from 100-44 BC, but our earliest copy is from 900 AD. It would be the equivalent of writing about the events of the First World War—well within the memory of living people or their children. There are credible parallels between the gospels as well as confirmation of names of rulers and places that historians have unearthed.
Secondly, we have the testimony of perhaps a half dozen writers that were roughly the contemporary to Jesus and His apostles. External sources include Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and others. Some extra-canonical writings also provide us with insights. While some of these writings may be fictional, in totality there is enough to support the claim that Jesus lived. It is remarkable that a man of Jesus’ rank—a common carpenter—would have so much documentation.
Thirdly, we have the fact of the mass movement of Christianity that resulted in the replacement of the old gods of by Constantine the Great by the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. chose Christianity because of a vision of the Christian cross, but as a politician, I suspect he was counting noses as well. By this time, the emperor was aware of his Christian military officers and state officials as well of the popular appeal and moral force of Christianity in the face of persecution. Christianity, I believe, was a bottom-up movement. The political elite responded to the people rather than vice versa. Myths have sometimes created mass movements. But the most parsimonious and most likely explanation for this mass movement is that it started with one man who stands at the hinge of history—Jesus Christ.
My thinking on the gospels has done a lot of evolving over the years, but I've never believed that any of the writers was lying.
For most of my adult life, I thought they were just mistaken, that although much of what they wrote wasn't true, they thought it was. If you believe what you say, then you're not lying.
But are you prepared to apply the same standard to yourself? My sense is that you personally are honest. Or, to put it alternatively, I see no reason to think that you will consciously lie. Having said that, and without impugning your personal integrity, I do think that you are embracing a dishonest methodology in your search for historical truth, just as religionists of impeccable integrity nevertheless embrace a methodology to assert that the earth was created 6,000 years ago. There are people who wish to raise the bar into the clouds in testing whether or not Jesus is a myth because they hate Christianity, but their bias is cancelled out by Christian scientists who have lowered the bar so that it hits the ground because they want to prove that Genesis is fact. They are both intellectually bankrupt, although they may no know it.
What the creationists, those who assert that Jesus is myth, the revisionists who claimed that Auchwitcz was a spa, and the tobacco lobbists all have in common is a similar cast of mind that puts their conclusion before the data and cherry picks data to support their conclusion. That Jesus was a historical figure is not Xtian propaganda formented by the magisterium any more than the notion that all animals ascended frm a common ancestor is atheistic propaganda formented by the geology department of Columbia University. While it is true that the mass of the scholars can be wrong, it still behooves you to account for why this consensus exists in the face of two millennia of powerful anti-religionist voices who wish it did not exist.
A good test for intellectual honesty is to develop as strong a case as you can possibly develop contra to your hypnothesis, examine all the facts including in this case analogous documents from analogous figures during that time period, and then see if your theory is more compelling than orthodox scholarship. I doubt that the creation of a strawman and then its systematical dismantlement can prevail at any peer review no matter how much in sympathy those peers may be with your hypnothesis.
If you think my method fails to sort fact from fiction, then you can tell me what is wrong with my method.
By making, as do the creationists and the holocaust revisionists, doubt a fact. Here, for example, are arguments that go the other way:
http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/gospdefhub.html#anon
"There are excellent reasons for maintaining the traditional ascriptions of Gospel authorship, when standard tests for such determinations are applied; There is no reason to date ANY of the Gospels later than 70 AD, although such dating may be permissible in the case of John; There is no reason to suppose that the Gospel authors took creative liberties with the events they recorded, to the point of fabrication."
Consider the question of attribution. If we assume that the Gospel of Matthew was written by someone or some people other than Matthew, then lets use the same standard to attribute Tacitus' Annals. Seems fair to me.
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