Where Did Peter's Clout Come From?

In the mythicist reconstruction of Christian origins, the risen Christ is analagous to the Angel Moroni in Mormonism and Peter is analogous to Joseph Smith as the first person to experience a revelation of the heavenly being.  Smith figured out at a fairly early point, however, that being first in line wasn't sufficient to maintain control of the movement when everyone claimed to be receiving divine revelations.  Smith found it necessary to proclaim himself the supreme revelator in order to make everyone else's revelations subordinate to his.  He was able to do this by virtue of being the recipient of the Golden Plates and the seer stones from Moroni.  Although there were periodic challenges to Smith's authority and occasional splinter groups, his status gave him the clout to weather them.

In my last post, I noted how Paul claims in Galatians that he received his revelation independently of Peter, and yet, he still acknowledges Peter as his predecessor in the faith.  In both Romans and 1 Corinthians, Paul instructs the recipients of his letters to raise money for the church in Jerusalem. Under the mythicist reconstruction, the only way any of the apostles encountered Christ was through appearances, revelations, and scripture.  Nevertheless, the group in Jerusalem headed by Peter seems to have some special claim to superiority that--to me at least--is not fully explained by the mere fact that Peter was the first one to receive a revelation.

I asked Dr. Richard Carrier about this in an email and he suggested that "Peter started the cult and began the evangelization abroad that created a useful network of dues paying churches and garnered support for his cult-center long before Paul joined it."  While I think that this would explain Paul's deference, I don't think that Paul gives us enough information to determine how and when the practice of submitting offerings to Jerusalem developed or what role Paul himself may have played in that development.

I have a feeling that there is something that Paul isn't telling us that might better explain the basis for Peter's clout.  I'm guessing that it is not as impressive as Smith's Golden Plates because Peter doesn't seem to have been able to maintain as much control as Smith did, but I suspect that it is something more than mere chronological priority.

Motes and Beams: HJA (25)

I find it interesting how mythicists and historicists sometimes make the exact same criticisms of each other.

Jesus scholars continue multiplying contradictory pictures of Jesus, rather than narrowing them down and increasing their clarity--or at least reaching a consensus on the scale or scope of our uncertainty or ignorance.  More importantly, the many contradictory versions of Jesus now confidently touted by different Jesus scholars are all so very plausible--yet not all can be true.

  Richard Carrier, Proving History p.12.

The very fact that some mythicists have been able to claim that the New Testament is entirely based on pagan myths, while others have been able to claim that it is entirely based on stories in Jewish Scripture, shows that people who want to find precursors will do so, and will find diverse and even mutually exclusive ones.

James McGrath, Exploring Our Matrix.

The difference is that Carrier only infers that there is something wrong with the methods of historicists while McGrath thinks that he has put "a nail in the coffin of Jesus mythicism." 

A Bit of an Overreaction?

Why is it that mythicists who question the existence of the historical Jesus are so often compared to creationists or Holocaust deniers? Creationists deny the foundations of biology.  Holocaust deniers seek to undermine our understanding of one of the most profound events of the 20th century.  Mythicists, on the other hand, merely suggest the possibility that a heavily mythologized 1st century Palestinian peasant may in fact have been completely mythologized.  Does raising that question really pose a similar challenge to our ability to understand the world around us?

In terms of the epistemological significance of the the issue, might not a better comparison be those people who question whether Shakespeare really wrote the plays that were attributed to him?

HJ Agnosticism (22): What Would It Take to Convince Me?

I am periodically asked by some internet apologist “What evidence would it take to get you to believe in the resurrection?” I usually reply that in my knowledge and experience, miracle stories are invariably the product of human foibles like superstition, gullibility, ignorance and prevarication so I would need to personally experience a miracle in order to change the background knowledge against which I evaluate miracle claims.

The most common response I get to this is “I don’t think you would believe even then” which usually brings the discussion to a halt. In essence, the apologist seems to be saying “I don’t have good evidence for the resurrection, but since a skeptic might not accept good evidence, I am justified in believing in the resurrection on lousy evidence.” The apologist is right that I might just interpret my miracle experience as a sign that I was losing my mind, but I think the real problem is that the apologist doesn’t want to talk about the possibility that his reasons for believing in the resurrection aren’t the best ones possible.

A similar argument is sometimes made about mythists:

At one point in the interview, [Dr. Robert] Price suggests that one letter mentioning Jesus would be enough to destroy the Christ myth theory. I like Price, but this seems to betray a lack of self-awareness. He is on record as disagreeing with the consensus dating and authorship of nearly every piece of text within the New Testament. What exactly could an archaeologist find that Price could not argue is misinterpreted, interpolated or an outright forgery?

Unreasonable Faith, H/T James McGrath

This seems to be a variation of the apologetic dodge. Rather than addressing the possibility that there might be better evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus than we have, the historicist sidesteps it by asserting that the mythicist wouldn’t believe the better evidence if we had it. While it is entirely possible that Price might try to explain away better evidence, it is still worth discussing what that evidence might be in order to identify the shortcomings in the evidence we have.

I think that the problem for the historicists is a simple one. The historical Jesus was likely as not an obscure itinerant preacher who went unnoticed for most of his life beyond a small group of illiterate peasants. To the extent that he drew more attention than that, he was just another troublemaker put to death by the Roman Empire. There is no reason to expect such a man to have left a discernible trace in the historical record and there is no reason to expect that we should be able to establish such a man’s existence. As a result, there is no way for the historian to argue by analogy to any known cases.

I am doubtful that mythicism is ever going to be much more than an intriguing possibility, but I don’t see how we can hope to have anything more than provisional confidence in the existence of a man whose life we wouldn’t have expected to leave a mark in the historical record. We are never going to find the kind of evidence that usually makes us confident about the existence of someone in the ancient world because Jesus' life wasn't likely to have produced such evidence.

DJE? (11): When Did Jesus Become the Messiah?

One of the things that frustrated me so much about Did Jesus Exist? was Ehrman’s failure to discuss the mythicist implications of many of the issues he raised. For example, at one point he discusses how the the point at which Jesus was thought to have become the messiah changed from his baptism by John to his conception to the Gospel of John's doctrine that he had been the Son of God from the beginning of the universe.According to Ehrman,

There were yet earlier traditions about Jesus that did not speak of him as the son of God from eternity past or from his miraculous birth or from the time he began his ministry. In these, probably the oldest, Christian traditions, Jesus became the Son of God when God raised him from dead. It was then that God showered special favor on the man Jesus, calling him the son, the messiah, the Lord. Even though this view is not precisely that of Paul, it is found in an ancient creed (that is, a preliterary tradition) that Paul quotes a the beginning of his letter to the Romans, where he speaks of Christ as God's "son who was descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness at his resurrection. . . . It is, in other words, a very ancient tradition that predates Paul's writings. (p.111)

Ehrman raises this point as part of an argument assigning an early date to the traditions underlying Acts, but it seems to me that its mythicist implications are fairly obvious and might have been addressed.

Why would the earliest Christians, presumably the ones that Paul persecuted before his conversion, believe that Jesus became the messiah only upon his resurrection if they understood him to have been anything like the wonder working messianic claimant that we find in the gospels?  Had their been any known traditions concerning a Galilean teacher and healer, wouldn't the early Christians have believed that Jesus was the messiah and the Son of God throughout his entire earthly ministry?   Doesn't the fact that the earliest Christians thought of Jesus as becoming the anointed one only upon his resurrection at least suggest that the stories about the activities of the earthly Jesus were added sometime later.

DJE? (10): It's Not What Ehrman Read, It's How He Read It

In his review of Did Jesus Exist?, Richard Carrier suggests that Bart Ehrman didn't read Pliny and hadn't understood Plutarch. Ehrman responded that he has read Pliny many times and that he has taught seminars on Plutarch.

While I have no reason to doubt that Ehrman has read all the things he says he has read, I wonder whether the problem is that he has never tried to think about them from a mythicist perspective.  As a former fundamentalist, Ehrman has no trouble recognizing the fundamentalist implications of anything he reads in Pliny or Plutarch or Tacitus.  He knows how any source might be used by someone who believes that the Bible is inspired and inerrant. Ehrman has never been a mythicist though so I don't think that he is as adept at spotting the mythicist implications.

In a comment to a post titled The Text of the New Testament: Are the Textual Traditions of Other Ancient Works Relevant?, I asked Erhman the question I posed in a previous post here, i.e., how can our certainty about Paul thinking that James was Jesus' biological brother be any greater than our certainty about the textual integrity of Galatians? Ehrman answered that all of our manuscripts include the reference to James as "the brother of the Lord" and that "we know from other sources that the James who headed the church in Jerusalem was in fact known to be the brother of Jesus." This prompted  the following exchange between Steven Carr and Dr. Ehrman:

Carr:      Out of curiosity, which sources would they be? Luke/Acts, the Epistle of James, Jude? Does Josephus ever claim James was the head of the church?"

Ehrman:  In the NT, just Acts. But later traditions of the second century are uniform in making this claim, I believe. And they got the idea from *somewhere*!

Carr:      Acts claims that James the brother of Jesus was a church leader. Where does it say that?

Ehrman:  Ah good point. Acts does indicate that James was the leader of the church in Jerusalem, and it does differentiate this James from the disciple of Jesus, the son of Zebedee, but it never explicitly says he was Jesus’ brother.

I was rather taken aback by this as was Steven.  How can Ehrman cite Paul knowing the biological brother of Jesus as one of the key points that shows "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt" that there was a historical Jesus and not even notice that the only other New Testament book that talks about this James doesn't identify him as Jesus' brother?   I have no doubt that Ehrman has read Luke and Acts countless times, but apparently he never thought about the fact that while Mark 6:31 explicitly gives James as the name of one of Jesus' biological brothers, the author of Luke drops that reference.  Luke knows that Jesus has brothers, but he never tells us any of their names.

This is what leads me to believe that Ehrman has never thought about the mythicist implications of the things he has read.  Perhaps he simply assumed that there weren't any, but plainly if the question of Jesus' existence turns on whether the leader in Jerusalem named James was the biological brother of Jesus, it matters that the only two references in the New Testament don't say the same thing.   If you are going to rely heavily on Galatians 1:19, you need to have some explanation for why Acts doesn't corroborate.

As I pointed out to Dr. Ehrman, the simplest reading is that the James in Acts 15 and 21 is James the son of Alphaeus mentioned in Acts 1 and Luke 6, and that the author doesn't bother to mention his father in the later chapters because James the son of Zebedee had been killed off in Acts 12.  With only one James left in the story, there was no need to identify his father in order to distinguish him.  Occam's Razor would suggest that this is a simpler solution than positing that the author is introducing a third James into the narrative without bothering to distinguish him from the ones who had been mentioned earlier in the story.  This interpretation is not mandatory, but it seems to be the most natural.

Dr. Ehrman responded to this with the well known "everybody knew it" defense:

Well, if everyone knew who James was, there may in fact be no reason to identify him — especially if it is his custom to identify some other James (son of Alphaeus) with an identifying marker precisely becuase he wsa *not* well known.

I have never thought that the "everybody knew it" defense was a particularly convincing argument when used to explain why Paul is so silent about the historical Jesus, but I think it is even weaker with respect to Luke/Acts. At the beginning of his gospel, Luke says that he is writing his gospel because earlier works were unsatisfactory. I have to think that he expected his work to be the definitive account. When Luke/Acts departs from Mark, I think we have to assume that the author thought that Mark had gotten something wrong.

My good friend Dagoods is also less than impressed with the argument

“Everyone knew it” is a failed methodology. The Acts author narrows the “James” in 12:2 as “James, brother of John” and the “James” of 1:13 as “James of Alphaeus.” But this method alleges the author did NOT list “James” of 21:18 as “James, brother of Jesus” because everyone knew it? It would seem to follow, that meant no one knew who James, brother of John was. Or who James, son of Alphaeus was.

Don’t forget, Luke/Acts knew Jesus had brothers, but does not list their names. Even though his source (Mark) DOES indicate there is a brother to Jesus named James. Under a straight reading of Acts, the better argument is that James of 21:18 is James, son of Alphaeus—NOT the unknown “brother of Jesus” who never is identified by Luke/Acts.

See Also the author’s treatment of “Philip” in distinguishing between “Philip the Disciple” and “Philip the Evangelist” that equally shows a tendency to make distinctions for intended recipients.

I’ve been on the fence regarding Ehrman’s scholarship in reading these reviews, but if he really did use the method “everyone knew it” for arguing the silence on James in Acts; I find this devastating to his credibility. This is Mythical Skepticism 101 stuff.

Well, Ehrman really did use the "everyone knew it" defense and it leads me to think that he really didn't put enough effort into thinking about about the mythicists' arguments.  He shouldn't have been surprised when someone pointed out that Acts does not corroborate a biological relationship between James and Jesus, and he should have been ready with a stronger reason for discarding Acts.

Mythicism vs. Agnosticism

If you think it more likely than not that Jesus was purely mythical, you are viewed as a mythicist who has “drunk the Kool Aid” in the eyes of most of those who affirm the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth.  This tends to be true even if you acknowledge the possibility of a historical Jesus. In my experience, there are only a few historicists who frequent these discussions who will acknowledge mythicism as intellectually defensible in any form.

If you think that the evidence is insufficient to establish that either a historical Jesus or a mythical Jesus is more likely than not, “historical Jesus agnostic” is probably the most generally accepted term and it is how I describe myself.  If you profess agnosticism about a historical Jesus, you will get varying reactions from those who affirm historicity. Some historicists seem to accept agnosticism as an intellectually defensible position. Others think that agnostics may not have yet drunk the Kool Aid, but that they are definitely sniffing the fumes. Others make no distinction between people who decline to affirm historicity and they view agnostics and mythicists as equally nutty.

If you are careful to affirm your agnosticism, you will probably be generally treated with more respect by historicists, although you may periodically provoke their ire simply because it is hard to be agnostic without at least acknowledging the possibility that mythicism is true.

Why I am Agnostic About HJ (18) An Analogy

Consider the following scenario:

A man with a charismatic and dynamic personality claims to be a prophet and claims to have had an encounter with a heavenly being who reveals previously unknown spiritual truths. The man claims that the heavenly being confirmed the revelation tangibly and physically.  Some people are persuaded that the man is telling the truth while others think he is a crackpot.  Even for skeptics it is hard to be certain whether he is a deluded lunatic, a pathological liar, or a charlatan.

The prophet claims that the heavenly being had once been a flesh and blood man who walked the earth and stories are invented about the man's activities.  However, the initial focus of the earliest believers is on the new spiritual truths that have been revealed and the way in which these truths fulfill the holy writings that are already widely accepted in the culture. Some of the early believers also claim to have had physical and tangible experiences that corroborate the prophet's claims.

As time goes by, substantial numbers of people are converted to the new beliefs without the slightest bit of evidence to confirm the appearance of the heavenly being, the physical corroboration of the revelation, or the historicity of the stories about the heavenly being's activities when he walked the earth.  All they have to rely on is the claims of the prophet and his earliest followers.

Many people in the surrounding community think that the prophet is a charlatan and that his claims are utter hogwash.   These people try to persuade the believers of the foolishness of the prophet's claims.  Some are convinced and fall away, but those who remain become even more fervent in their beliefs.  The prophet tells them that the skeptics are servants of the devil who should be ignored.  He tells them that the fate of their everlasting souls depends upon unwavering commitment to the teachings of the new faith.

The believers endure many hardships on behalf of their new faith. They put their reputations, wealth, and at times even their lives at risk. They endure abuse and persecution from outsiders. This causes some to fall away, but those who remain are drawn closer together. They begin to see themselves as a separate people and they shun contact with the rest of society. Anyone who fails to maintain sufficient commitment to the teachings of the prophet is cast out as a heretic. 

The new religion continues to spread and within the course of a couple hundred years, it has millions of adherents.  Nevertheless, there is never a shred of credible evidence to support any of their supernatural beliefs.

I think that most scholars who believe that Jesus was a historical person would accept that this is a more or less reasonable characterization of the founding and spread of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  (The exception would be those historical Jesus scholars who are also Mormons.)  Nevertheless, most historicist scholars think it preposterous to suppose that any sort of similar dynamic could have been at work in the origin and early spread of Christianity rendering Jesus of Nazareth as complete a fabrication as Moroni, the Warrior-Prophet of the Nephites.  They believe it reasonable to express a high degree of confidence that there was a historical person behind the visions that Paul and others claimed to have.

I will confess that I have purposely used ambiguous language in describing Joseph Smith and the origins of Mormonism in order to highlight the parallels with Paul and the origins of Christianity while obscuring the differences.  I will also acknowledge that some of the differences may be of sufficient weight to justify belief in a historical Jesus while rejecting belief in a historical Moroni.  Nevertheless, most of the reasons I usually see given for why Christianity couldn't have grown and spread in the way that it did without a historical Jesus seem to be predicated on the idea that 1st century Christians were markedly less gullible and superstitious than 19th century Mormons.

For example, a historicist might rightly point out that early Christians believed in a heavenly being who had walked the earth as a man within living memory while the first Mormons believed in a heavenly being who had walked the earth as a man fourteen hundred years earlier.  The important point to me, however, is that the early Mormons believed in both the heavenly being and the man with absolutely no evidence whatsoever other than the word of Joseph Smith.  Is there any way to establish that the earliest Christians had any better evidence than the word of Paul who had claimed to have seen the heavenly being but seemed to know almost nothing about the man who walked the earth?

Historicists can also point out that it would have been possible to investigate claims about an actual human being named Jesus who had walked the earth within living memory and that there would be people around who could debunk false claims.  On the other hand, it was been possible to investigate many of Joseph Smith's claims as well and there were plenty of people who tried to expose him as a fraud.   However, Smith managed to convince most of his followers that their eternal destinies rested on their willingness to ignore skeptics and unbelievers.  As a result, the people who accepted Smith's claims without question were not deterred by the people who investigated them and found them wanting.  Is there any reason to think that the earliest Christians wouldn't have been just as willing to ignore evidence that contradicted their beliefs?

Another difference that might be noted is that the experiences that corroborated Joseph Smith's encounter with the Angel Moroni and the Golden Plates took place after Smith's among his followers while the experiences that corroborate Paul's experience are thought to have taken place before Paul's among his predecessors.  This might be significant, but the first account of the events that corroborate Paul's experience come from Paul himself some twenty years after they are thought to have occurred, while the   accounts that corroborate Smith's experience are much closer in time to the events themselves, and are purportedly verified by the people who experienced them.  I am not sure that this difference makes Paul's account the more credible one.

One of the differences that many scholars scholars cite as significant is the incongruity of a crucified Messiah to first century Judaism.  Dr. James McGrath describes the argument this way:

The reason that the crucifixion persuades most historians that Jesus was a historical figure is that a crucified messiah was in essence a contradiction in terms. . . . It needs to be emphasized that we are talking about a dying and rising messiah. And the messianic expectations of Judaism around the time of early Christianity are well documented. And the whole notion of messiah is “anointed one” . . . . and this goes back to the practice of anointing kings and priests in ancient Israel. And in the case of Jesus the connection of the terminology of the term messiah with the claim to his having been descended from David shows they were thinking of a kingly figure. And nothing would have disqualified someone from seriously being considered possibly being the messiah as being executed by the foreign rulers over the Jewish people. That wasn’t what people expected from the messiah. And it makes very little sense to claim that the early Christians invented a figure completely from scratch and called him the messiah and said that he didn’t do the same things that the messiah was expected. Not only did he not conquer the Romans, he was executed by them. He did not institute and bring in the kingdom of god the way the people were expecting, and in fact Christians had to explain this in terms of Jesus returning to finish the task of what was expected of the messiah.

All of this makes much more sense if one says that there was a figure whom the early Christians believed was the messiah and that the early Christians were trying somehow to make sense of those things that don’t seem to fit that belief.

According to Dr. McGrath, belief in the resurrection was most likely a result of the cognitive dissonance that Jesus' followers experienced after he was put to death by Romans who he had been expected to conquer.

My problem with this argument is that I an unaware of any objective criteria by which one would assess the probability that any particular supernatural story might be invented by a particular individual in a particular culture and the probability that the story might be believed by large numbers of his peers.   Are historians really able to accurately identify the factors that distinguish a supernatural story that might be invented and believed in 19th century upstate New York from one that couldn't have been invented and believed in 1st century Palestine?  When evaluating the probability that people of a particular culture might accept a particular story, can any evidence possibly be more significant than the fact that many of them  did accept the story?  Moreover, if it can be shown that large number of people did accept a story, how does one go about assigning a low probability to the possibility that someone might invent it?

All in all, I still see no reason to conclude that it is more likely than not that Jesus of Nazareth was a complete fabrication.  The idea that the resurrection stories were the product of the cognitive dissonance experienced by the followers of a failed apocalyptic prophet seems perfectly plausible to me.  Nevertheless, I have yet to see an argument that convinces me that there is any principled basis to assign a significantly higher probability to that than the possibility of invention by a uniquely imaginative personality.  Hence, I remain agnostic about a historical Jesus.

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 a Historical Jesus (2)

Dr. James McGrath of Butler University devoted much of his February blogging at Exploring Our Matrix to making comparisons between creationists and mythicists.  In a series of posts he argued that it is just as goofy to doubt that there was a historical as to doubt evolution.  I questioned McGrath on a few points but his chief challenger was Neil Godfrey both in his comments and in posts on his own Vridar blog.

For me personally, the biggest flaw in McGrath's analogy is in the question of the paths that lead to each conclusion.  I don't think that mainstream biology is likely to lead anyone to seriously consider creationism.   On the other hand, I had always assumed that there was a historical Jesus, but I have become less sure that I can know anything about him with any certainty as a result of reading the work of mainstream scholars like Bart Ehrman, Dale Allison, John Dominic Crossan, Geza Vermes, John Shelby Spong, Burton Mack, and even James McGrath.  The more I read of these scholars, all of whom are historicists, the more Robert Price's notion of "Jesus at the Vanishing Point" resonates for me.

One the questions I tried to raise with McGrath  was what it really meant to say that Jesus was historical or mythological:

Suppose that Paul’s Jesus was mythological or suppose that Paul’s understanding and preaching of Jesus was based entirely on the visionary experience he had of the risen Christ and had nothing to do with anything that an actual person said or did.

Further suppose that some of the things described in Mark’s gospel happened to actual people or were said by actual people, and that Mark attributed these sayings and events to Paul’s Jesus.

Would that make the Jesus of the gospels historical or mythological?

I am troubled by the argument that the mythicist position fails “[i]f even one saying of Jesus, or action by him, or something done to him such as the crucifixion, is clearly more likely to represent authentic historical information rather than something invented.” As a matter of probability, it seems likely to me that something described somewhere in the gospels happened to an actual historical human being who may even have been named “Jesus.” On the other hand, it also seems possible to me that the Christian movement sprang from the ecstatic visions experienced by the members of a cult in first century Jerusalem and that it was only coincidentally related to any actual historical person.

If it could be shown that there was an actual historical person named Arthur Pendragon, wouldn’t we still think of King Arthur of Camelot as a myth?

McGrath conceded that this was an "excellent point," and a few of the other commenters seemed interested in discussing the whether historicism and mythicism overlap.  In particular, Eric Reitan responded directly to my question by laying out sliding scale :

Contrast the following claims:

(1) There was an historic king of the Britons named Arthur, and his life was exactly as described by Sir Thomas Malory in _Le Morte d’Arthur_.

(2) There was an historic king of the Britons named Artur whose impact was sufficiently great that, after being slain by a usurper, those loyal to him would gather secretly to swear allegiance to his bloodline and share stories about him—stories said to come from Artur’s closest thanes. The earliest writings from these communities are by a priest more interested in the meaning of Artur’s life than the details of it. But after a few decades, several followers attempted to write accounts of Artur’s life and sayings based on what their respective communities had preserved. While not historically accurate, they offer clues for anyone wanting to understanding the historic King Arthur.

(3) There was an historic king of the Britons named Artur whose impact was sufficiently great to prompt storytelling about him. This storytelling became quickly severed from actual historic events, becoming interwoven with the creative fancies of bards whose interest lay more in telling colorful tales than in preserving history. Eventually these stories evolved into the legendary figure we now know as King Arthur. But the King Arthur we encounter in the inherited legends has little similarity to the historic figure that inspired the original storytelling.

(4) There was no historic king of the Britons who gave rise to the King Arthur legends. Instead, this figure was wholly an invention of bards interested in creating colorful tales—although the first bard to invent the first King Arthur story borrowed a few of his plotlines from divergent bits of recent events he’d witnessed in his travels, and decided to name his hero “Artur” because he had some vague memory that there was some king by that name who’d lived a generation ago.

Your question gestures to claim (3). As I understand it, Earl Doherty and his followers are making a claim akin to (4) with respect to Jesus. Fundamentalists embrace something akin to (1). Most biblical scholars I know are closer to (2) but allow for elements of (3). The case of (3) is interesting. If we accept it, is there a sense in which there is an “historic Arthur”? I’d say yes, but only in the sense that there is an historic figure who prompted the storytelling—and I’d be quick to add that the character in the stories bears little resemblance to the historic figure. (2) offers more room for dispute about which details are historical.

Eric expanded on this comment on his blog, and Qohelet and John Hobbins blogged about the scale as well.  I would have liked to see McGrath spend a little more time discussing the range of positions that might be said to fall within the mythicist or historicist camps, but he was intent at hammering away at the most radical mythicist position, i.e., that the first Christians actually thought of Jesus as an entirely spiritual being whose death and resurrection took place on heavenly spiritual plane.

I think Eric is probably correct about most scholars falling in neighborhood of (2), but I wonder whether this is because so many of them start out at (1).   I suspect that there are many more examples of scholars who move up the scale than down.

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.