Why I am Agnostic About a Historical Jesus (9)

Dr. James McGrath of Butler University has once again trotted out his mythicist-creationist analogy at Exploring our Matrix, stirring up the usual response from those who doubt and/or deny the existence of the historical Jesus.  In a recent comment he wrote the following:

In the case of Jesus, we have someone writing about him as a human being, born of a woman, born as a Jew ("under the Law"), descended from David according to the flesh (one mythicist I spoke to recently resorted to calling that "allegory" in order to avoid Paul's obvious meaning), and crucified. And the last point is crucial, since the idea that someone would invent Jesus and proclaim that he was the Davidic anointed one, expected to restore the kingship to David, but was crucified by the Romans and yet you should believe in him anyway boggles the imagination. Could someone have done it nevertheless. Of course - anything is possible. Is it more likely than not that someone did this, rather than the early Christians engaging in post facto theologizing to try to make sense of why the person they believed was the Messiah was crucified? No, definitely not.

All of this has been discussed here before, hence my tendency to get somewhat frustrated when asked to cover the same ground for the umpteenth time. :)

I can appreciate Dr. McGrath's frustration because I still can't figure out how Paul helps the historicists' case.

Suppose that our earliest source for the Sioux chief Sitting Bull did not know when or where Sitting Bull lived, did not know much of anything that Sitting Bull said or did during his life, claimed that what he did know he learned from Sitting Bull's ghost, and claimed to know others who had encountered this ghost.  Suppose that he never claimed that anyone he knew had ever met Sitting Bull during his life, but did refer to certain people as Sitting Bull's brothers.   Suppose that this source's interest in Sitting Bull is limited to the activities of his ghost and the only importance he attaches to Sitting Bull is the influence that his ghost has upon the living.  Would we consider this source particularly good evidence that Sitting Bull was a historical person rather than merely legendary?

I think this pretty well captures the problems that Paul poses for historicists.  His letters don't prove that Jesus didn't exist, but most of what Paul has to say about Jesus sounds much more mythical than historical.  When he does describe something about Jesus that can be characterized as historical,  Paul does not indicate any source for the information that can be characterized as historical.

Historicists often claim that Paul would have learned about the historical stuff about Jesus from Peter and James or from the cult that he persecuted prior to his conversion.  However, this is only true if we have already concluded that Jesus was a real historical person.  If Peter and James did not know an actual person, Paul would have learned that.  If the cult that he persecuted had worshiped a mythical Messiah, Paul would have learned that.  We can't use the assumption that Paul knew whether Jesus was historical as evidence that he was historical.

Perhaps the most frequently cited proof that Paul considered Jesus historical is his reference to James as "the brother of the Lord."  In my Sitting Bull example, this probably wouldn't carry any weight at all since the Sioux used "brother" to describe many relationships other than biological ones.  Given the rest of the information, we might well conclude that "brother" referred to a relationship with Sitting Bull's ghost. I am not aware of such an expansive use among first century Jews, but Paul does use "brother" frequently enough in referring to spiritual relationships that I think the possibility has to be allowed.

What I think I find most puzzling is the argument that the invention of a crucified Messiah is so mind boggling that a real historical Jesus who was really crucified is definitely more likely.  Is their anything more mind boggling than the claims of Joseph Smith or L. Ron Hubbard? History provides plenty of examples of people making mind boggling claims which they attribute to supernatural sources.  Sometimes these claims are believed by large numbers of people.   In each and every case where it has happened, we would have to assess the likelihood of inventing such a story and having it believed as small a priori, but it happens often enough that I don't see how we can assess the probability that it happened with Paul as definitely less than that of any other scenario. If this is really a crucial point in the case against mythicism, I think Dr. McGrath is going to be frustrated for a long time.

Historians may have perfectly valid reasons for thinking that Jesus was a historical person.  I just don't see that Paul helps their case.

Why I am Agnostic About a Historical Jesus (8)

When discussing the historical Jesus, I am often accused of “speculating” by someone who claims to be basing their conclusions on “the evidence we have.” It seems to me, however, that the fact that a theory is based on the evidence we have does not necessarily make it any better than any other theory. The theory must also be supported by the evidence we have.

Suppose for example, that I wanted an explanation for why Tom Cruise became a Scientologist that goes beyond the fact that he is batshit crazy. I would need information about his background, his education, his prior religious experience. I would want information about his emotional makeup, his fears, his anxiety, and his narcissism. I would want detailed information about his exposure to Scientology and the process by which he became a member. I would want the analysis of experts in the field of psychology. Even then, given the complexity of the human psyche, I would never think that any conclusion I drew would be much more than provisional.

Suppose, however, that the only pieces of evidence I had were a VHS tape of Top Gun and a copy of Dianetics. I suppose I could attempt to develop a psychological profile of Cruise based on his body language and the way he seemed to respond to the emotional changes that his character went through. Then I could look through Dianetics for elements that fit my psychological profile of Cruise. Any conclusion I reached could be said to be based on the evidence we have, but I don’t think anyone in their right mind would claim that is was supported by the evidence we have.

Many Christian apologists claim that the reality of the resurrection is the best historical explanation for certain “minimal facts” which are usually deemed to include the conversion of James the brother of Jesus and the conversion of Paul. We know nothing about how or why James came to believe in his brother and very little about what was going through Paul’s head. We don’t have the kind of information we need in order to answer our questions.

The same problem holds true when it comes to group dynamics. Suppose I wanted to explain why the members of the People’s Temple followed Jim Jones to Guyana and drank the grape Kool-Aid. I would want the same kind of psychological information on all the Temple's members that I would want to explain any individual conversion, but I would also want all sorts of information about the group dynamics that influenced the members after they converted. I would want the analysis of experts in both psychology and sociology.

As I noted in my last post, historicists criticize the mythicists for failing to explain how and why so many first century Jews came to accept that a crucified criminal was the Messiah. Unfortunately we know next to nothing about how the early church grew and spread. We have some general knowledge of the expectations that Jews had concerning the Messiah in the first century, but little knowledge about the specific individuals who first preached a crucified Messiah. We also have no information about the specific individuals who first accepted that preaching or the dynamics of the first communities. It seems rather silly to suppose that our understanding of how the Christian religious movement spread is actually enhanced by positing a few general facts about a particular crucified criminal.

Why I am Agnostic About a Historical Jesus (7)

Historicists often criticize mythicism because it fails to adequately answer the question of how Jesus’ disciples were able to convince large numbers of Jews that a crucified criminal was actually the Messiah. The mythicists sometimes respond by pointing out that this assumes the historicity of a crucified criminal, but I have another problem with the question. Is it the kind of question that we can even expect a historian to answer? Isn’t it really a question more properly with the realm of psychology, sociology, or perhaps anthropology?

If we were to seek an explanation for why large numbers of people came to believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet and why they uprooted their lives to follow him across the country, would we even think to ask whether there was some historical basis for his claim that he had translated the book of Mormon by sticking his head in a hat and reading off golden plates with seer stones? Wouldn’t we first look to sociology and psychology in an effort look to understand the circumstances under which the religious manias arise? Wouldn’t we try to figure out what was going on during that particular time that made so many people susceptible to a charlatan like Smith.

When investigating the origins of Christianity, the historian must take into account a phenomenon that has been observed to occur repeatedly throughout recorded history, i.e., gullible people who want to believe in a supernatural meaning for their lives can be taken in by a charismatic person who fills their heads with fantastic stories and ideas that he claims were revealed to him by God. They do so because the religious experience meets some psychological or sociological needs, not because of the historical basis for the stories they are told.

I don’t doubt that the idea of a crucified Messiah would been contrary to Jewish expectations in first century Palestine (although the fact that so many Jews did accept it would seem to suggest that it was no bigger stumbling block to belief than the idea of the Messiah making a trip to America was to Joseph Smith’s followers). However, I would think that almost all religious movements are characterized by some elements that would have violated the prior expectations of the people who became persuaded. I would also think that the explanation for why that element came to be accepted is much more likely to lie in the psychological need it met in the people who accepted it than in the historical basis for the element

Why I am Agnostic About a Historical Jesus (6)

For some reason, Dr. James McGrath thought the following quote was worth passing along:

Indeed, to assume from silence that Paul did not know the Jesus tradition because he does not cite it more explicitly and more often is almost analogous to assuming that the writer of 1 John was unaware of the Johannine Jesus tradition because the document presupposes rather than cites that tradition.

Craig Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels

To me, this is just typical apologetic claptrap. Keener accuses the skeptic of assuming that Paul doesn't know about the Jesus tradition (whereas I would argue that the skeptic infers it as the best explanation for Paul's silence). But what does Keener offer in response? A presupposition!  There is something wrong with concluding that Paul doesn't know things that he doesn't mention, but it is apparently perfectly reasonable for Keener to affirm Paul's knowledge of things that he doesn't mention based on presupposition.

I don't see any reason to view Keener's statement (and McGrath's quotation) as anything more than a smokescreen.  Even if I cannot infer Paul's lack of knowledge, I am still left with no evidence of what Paul knew about things that he does not mention, which leaves most of the historical core uncorroborated by the earliest source.  I am still left with Mark as the earliest source for the traditions.

Why I Am Agnostic About a Historical Jesus (5)

Dr. James McGrath continues to bash away at mythicists over at Exploring Our Matrix, although now he divides them into two categories: those who “do not hesitate to offer an 'explanation' of sorts: Christianity began when people borrowed motifs from myths about Horus, Osiris, Mithras and various other figures to create a new dying-and-rising deity” and others who “are aware that such a scenario makes little historical sense and yet have nothing better to offer in its place.” The former group would I suppose include Earl Doherty, while the latter would include Neil Godfrey.  Concering some of Godfrey's arguments,McGrath writes that even if he found them persuasive, “all they would have accomplished so far is to indicate that the evidence is inconclusive regarding the historicity of these particular incidents and sayings. In order to conclude that these stories are most likely not historical, we need some further argument.”

McGrath goes on to explain why further argument is necessary:

Historians are interested in literature that doesn't actually relate historical stories. A historian of early Christianity will be interested in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, or the Acts of Paul and Thecla, even if they are persuaded that they do not contain any genuine historical information about Jesus or Paul or Thecla. Because when we situate them in their historical context, they tell us about the time in which they were written, the views and beliefs that Christians had in that period. And that contributes to our understanding of history.

If the Gospels were pure fabrication, I would still want to understand when they were written, and what sorts of communities produced them. Historians don't just look at texts to get information from the details of the story about the time in which the story is set. Even when historians feel there is little or no valuable historical information in a story, they still study it carefully to learn about the author (even if we don't know his or her name) and the time in which it was written.

I will admit that I do not hold a doctoral degree in either history or New Testament studies, but it seems to me that if the evidence is inconclusive, there should be no shame in saying that the evidence is inconclusive. In fact, no matter how much one wants to resolve a question, intellectual and academic integrity might demand agnosticism.

Rick Sumner at The Dilettante Exegete made what I thought were some excellent points about the unwarranted surety that New Testament scholars are inclined to express:

Even if we agreed there was an historical Romulus, for example, if you started telling me a specific act he did in the founding of Rome, with details about his consciousness while he did it, I'd laugh in your face. It seems preposterous everywhere but here. And even if we let you get away with it, your statement would be a lot more provisional. If someone replied that they doubt Romulus even existed, you would doubtlessly allow for the possibility, and acknowledge that your later conjectures were based on an earlier conjecture: That Romulus was real.

When we deal strictly with textual evidence elsewhere, we recognize the limits of our conjectures. But here we have none . . . . Not only do we not have to be provisional, we can suggest that all the gospels fundamentally misunderstood Jesus' message, and we know even better than they do what it was. While many critics would disagree with those sorts of efforts, we don't deprive them of dialogue, while virtually anywhere else we wouldn't deem to treat such speculation with a grain of seriousness.

It has always struck me the way that Christian apologists (and I do not put McGrath in that category) claim to be applying the same techniques as other scholars who study ancient sources, and yet think they can know details about what Jesus said and thought and did at precise moments with much greater specificity than any historian would ever claim about Julius Caesar or any other figure from the ancient world.  


It seems to me that expressing warranted agnosticism in an academic inquiry is a positive good.  In the field of textual criticism, scholars like Bart Ehrman have noted the futility of talking about the "original manuscripts" of the New Testament given the paucity of early manuscript evidence. They choose instead to talk about the manuscripts that survive and what they can tell us about the communities that produced them and used them. They profess agnosticism about the original texts because they are effectively irretrievable, however this does not stop them from reaching meaningful conclusions where data exists.  I don't see how admitting agnosticism on historicity would do anything but enhance the exploration of those further arguments that McGrath thinks are so important.

Why I am Agnostic About a Historical Jesus (4)

As Robert Oerter of Early Christian Religion has pointed out, Paul is not our only source for information about the historical Jesus.  He is just our earliest source, and in my opinion, he leaves a lot of questions unanswered.  So for me, the best argument for a historical Jesus would be one that showed that the gospels were not simply an attempt to historicize Paul's possibly ahistorical Jesus.  I know that people who know a lot more than the subject than me have been persuaded that "Q" is something that points to an independent source supporting the historical Jesus hypothesis.  So while historicists like Dr. McGrath may be convinced that anyone who questions the historicity of Jesus has simply made up their mind to be irrationally skeptical, I don't think that is where I am at all.


I do agree with Neil Godfrey that historicists sometimes have a tendency to overlook the circularity that creeps into their arguments.  One place where I noticed this was on the question of whether Paul meant to designate a biological or symbolic relationship when he referred to James as "the brother of the Lord."  McGrath said of this argument,

If Paul only made vague references to "the brothers of the Lord" of course it might be a viable option to consider it Paul's generic use of "brothers." But Paul's reference to "James the Lord's brother" coupled with the fact that there is no other evidence for "brother" as an honorific title in early Christianity, and later authors either understood it as biological brother or made strenuous attempts to argue it meant "cousin" or "half brother" so as to support the perpetual virginity of Mary, the evidence seems clearly to favor taking it in its straightforward sense.

I cannot help but wonder where in early Christianity other than Paul we would be able to look  for evidence of the use of "brother" as an honorific.  Isn't the conclusion that we have no such evidence based on the assumption that Paul was using "brother" in the biological sense?  And if the theory is that Mark historicized Paul's mythological Jesus, can we really refute it with the fact that Mark and later Christians treated James relationship to Jesus' as biological?

Overstated Analogies in the Mythicist-Historicist Debate

Historicist to Mythicist:  You might just as well doubt the existence of George Washington and Napoleon!

Mythicist to Historicist:  You might just as well believe in the reality of Romulus and Odysseus!

Speaking only for myself:  If our first records of George Washington and Napoleon came two decades after their deaths from men who only claimed to know of them by divine revelation, I would probably not be as confident that they existed.  On the other hand, if I had accounts of the lives of Romulus and Odysseus written within fifty years of their deaths by men who purported to know stories told by eyewitnesses, I would feel like I had to take the possibility of their existence more seriously.

Why I am Agnostic About a Historical Jesus (3)

I am certainly open to the possibility that there was a historical Jesus, however, I am puzzled that our earliest source, Paul, doesn't seem to confirm it.  Whenever a scholar like McGrath gives a list of facts that can be known about Jesus, they seem to be facts that aren't found in the undisputed Pauline epistles.  For example, at one point, McGrath listed the following six facts as being part of a "historically reliable core":

1. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.
2. Jesus called disciples.
3. He preached “the kingdom of God”.
4. Jesus engaged in a controversy about the temple.
5. Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem by the Roman authorities.
6. After his death, his followers continued as an identifiable movement.

Paul does not seem to know any of these facts.  He never mentions John the Baptist. He never mentions Jesus' interaction with any of his disciples. Paul discusses "the kingdom of God" but he never identifies it as something that Jesus preached during his earthly ministry. Paul never mentions Jesus engaging in a a controversy about the temple. He never says where Jesus was crucified. Finally, Paul does not indicate that any of his contemporaries in the movement had been followers of Jesus prior to his death.

There are plenty of references in Paul that could lead to the conclusion that he saw Jesus as a real flesh and blood human being who actually walked the earth.    I don't think that is enough to make his Jesus historical though.  After all, Paul seems to indicate that he considered Adam a real flesh and blood human being who walked the earth and .

The first response I usually get when I question the historicity of Paul's Jesus is that Paul met with the original apostles.  This may be true, but according to Galatians, Paul had already been out preaching his gospel for three years before he went to Jerusalem to meet Peter and James.  Paul's understanding of who Jesus was and what he had done must have had some other source.  What was it?

The only source that Paul acknowledges seems to be direct revelation from God.   "I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. 12I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ." Gal. 1:11. "For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you . . ." 1 Cor. 11:23. After Paul had been preaching the gospel to the Gentiles for seventeen years, he finally went to Jerusalem to set it before the other apostles, but he is quite adamant that "those men added nothing to my message." Gal. 2:2,6.

McGrath points out that it unreasonable to accept Paul's claims to divine revelation at face value and that that Paul was simply unwilling to acknowledge any dependence on others for information because he was trying to establish his own apostolic bona fides.   That seems sensible.  However, determining who those others might have been is still a problem since Paul denies that he even met Peter and James until he had been preaching for three years.  The only source would seem to be the Christians that Paul was persecuting prior to his conversion, but how likely is it that such information can be deemed historically reliable.

McGrath also thinks that Paul's persecutions are the logical place to look for his human sources of information about the historical Jesus and he asked what I think is a very revealing question: "Don't you think that it is a priori likely that Paul was led by things he knew about Christianity to persecute it, and thus had some knowledge about it even before he himself became a Christian?"

My response to this question is (and was) that a priori it is likely that Paul was led to persecute the early church by misunderstandings of their beliefs as much as by any accurate information he had about them.  I think that this is the lesson of history.  The pogroms and the Holocaust were not carried out because a sound and rational understanding of Judaism convinced someone that it posed a threat to Russian civilization.   Persecution of the Jews was based on nonsense like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I don't think there is any reason to think that Paul began persecuting Christians because he had an accurate understanding of their beliefs.

Nor do I think there is any reason to think that Paul would have gained an accurate understanding of the early church's beliefs while he was persecuting it.  Paul could very well have used paid informants to identify heretics and he might well have used torture to elicit confessions from his victims.  In either circumstance, Paul was likely to have heard stories that were shaped by a desire to tell him what it was thought he wanted to hear rather than a desire to give him a fair and accurate understanding or theological beliefs.  I would think it quite likely that when Paul had his vision on the road to Damascus, his understanding of early Christian beliefs was likely to contain plenty of misinformation.

John Loftus of Debunking Christianity is also convinced that the link between Paul and the historical Jesus runs through Paul's persecutions:  He commented:

Vinny, in my opinion there is only one way to deny there was a historical founder of the Jesus cult and that is to reject the whole NT tradition in total. Paul said he was persecuting the church in Galatians chapter one so the church was already in existence in some form or another when Paul was converted by his vision. Paul was not the original founder to this original movement, although he did hijack it. So you must deny that Paul is the actual author of the seven letters usually attributed to him, or deny that he existed too, and I find such an utter skepticism unjustified.

I don't think my agnosticism about a historical Jesus constitutes utter skepticism at all.  I simply don't see how we can determine the degree of theological continuity between the gospel that Paul preached and the beliefs of the early church that he persecuted.  We don't know much about what Paul thought Jesus said or did during his time on earth.  Since he does not credit any human sources for his understanding of Jesus, we cannot say how much of his gospel might have been the product his own imagination or creativity, which he then identified as his revelation and we don't know how much was part of some ecstatic visions.  We don't know how much Paul's gospel varied from earlier beliefs as the result of misinformation.  As Loftus pointed out apocalyptic prophets were a dime a dozen in first century Palestine so Paul's gospel even could have been an amalgamation of messianic beliefs that were in the air.  In short, since we don't know how much Paul hijacked the original movement, I think it makes sense to be agnostic about the extent to which Paul's gospel goes back to an earlier historical person.

Why I Am Agnostic About the Historical Jesus (1)

It seems to me that any historical inquiry should start with the earliest source.  For Jesus, the earliest source is the letters of the apostle Paul, written some twenty or more years after the time that Jesus is thought to have lived and died.  These letters strike me as problematic for a couple of reason:

1. Paul doesn't seem to know very much about Jesus;  and
2. What Paul does know he claims to know by divine revelation. 

Neither of these points disprove the hypothesis that Jesus was a real person, but I think that both of them justify careful scrutiny of later sources.