Paul as Evidence for a Historical Jesus: HJA (29)

When my earliest extant source for Alexander the Great tells me that he is relying on contemporary biographers of Alexander, I take that as some evidence that information about a historical person was remembered and passed on. I may need to consider the possibility of invention or falsehood, but it is at least some evidence.

On the other hand, when my earliest extant source for Jesus tells me that he is relying on divine revelation, supernatural appearances, and centuries-old holy writings, I do not think that I can take that as any evidence that information about a historical person was remembered and passed on. I can consider the possibility that this occurred, but I cannot say that he has given me any evidence that it did. Moreover, I may even need to ask whether he hasn't given me some evidence that the opposite is the case.

On the Multiplicity of Historical Jesuses

One of the ways I know that astrology and feng shui are bullshit is that different “experts” analyzing the same data reach widely different conclusions. The fact that New Testament scholars differ so dramatically in their portraits of the historical Jesus certainly doesn’t prove that he didn’t exist, but it seems like adequate reason to question whether their methodology is sufficient to tell us much of anything about him. That being the case, it is reasonable to take their absolute certainty about his existence with a grain of salt.

Making Things Up: HJA (27)

"Why don't the epistles discuss the things Jesus said and did during his earthly ministry?" is the question that most keeps me on the fence about the existence of a historical Jesus.

One of answers I sometimes get is that the epistles dealt with issues that they arose after Jesus' death.  Therefore, the things Jesus said and did during his earthly ministry weren't relevant to the letter writers' purposes.  For example, questions regarding the administration and practices of early Christian communities wouldn't have come up during Jesus' earthly ministry so his teachings would not have been helpful in addressing the issues facing Paul.

I find this unconvincing because it doesn't square for me with what I see the early church doing.  When an issue arose that Paul hadn't dealt with somewhere in one of his letters, people simply forged new letters in Paul's name in order to make it seem as though he had dealt with it.  If Jesus' teachings were accepted as authoritative, I would expect that people would have invented teachings to make it seem that Jesus had addressed problems that he never addressed as well.  It might have been difficult to pass off a letter as being written by Jesus, but conveniently remembering what he said as necessary wouldn't have been hard.

Perhaps Paul had too many scruples to invent things that Jesus said, but I can't imagine that the people who forged letters in Paul's name would have had any such qualms.  Moreover, the guys who wrote letters attributed to Peter surely wouldn't have hesitated to include things that Peter supposedly remembered Jesus saying if they understood him to have been Jesus' closest disciple.

What Does Paul Mean by "Received": HJA (26)

In 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, Paul writes

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.  Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles,  and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

To the historicist, this passage demonstrates that Paul was simply passing along what he had learned from Jesus' original disciples.

Mythicists, on the other hand, say "Not so fast."  Paul doesn't say where he received the information in this passage.  Moreover, in Galatians 1:11-12, Paul denies that anyone other than God himself taught him the gospel:

I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin.  I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

So the mythicist argue that the "received" in 1 Corinthians 15:3 should be read as "received by revelation" rather than "received from earlier Christians" because that is how Paul said the gospel came to him in Galatians. 

One of the things that has kept me on the fence about a historical Jesus is that Paul never says that anything he knows about Jesus came from anyone who knew Jesus personally.  The only two sources of information Paul cites explicitly are direct revelation and scripture.  Nevertheless, I think it is going too far to say that Galatians 1:3 governs the interpretation of "received" in 1 Cor. 15:3.  It seems to me that there are several reasonable arguments for thinking that "received" in 1 Corinthians 15:3 should be read as "received from my predecessors in the faith" rather than "received by revelation."

1. The former is how Paul uses "received" earlier in the same passage.  In 1 Corinthians 15:1, the word refers to the person-to-person transmission that occurred between Paul and the Corinthians.  If Paul intended the word to refer to a different type of transmission two sentences later, i.e., by divine revelation, we might reasonably expect him to make that clear


2. When Paul wants to refer transmission by revelation, he knows how to do so as he did in 1 Corinthians 11:23  where he wrote "received from the Lord." 


3. At least some of the events in 1 Corinthians 15 happened to people Paul knew personally.  All other things being equal, when someone tells such a story, the most likely explanation is that those people told others about the events and the information came either directly or indirectly from those people.  It is possible that Paul invented the stories or that they came to him in a dream, but I wouldn't think that would be our first guess.


4. Before we read Paul's claim that he was taught nothing by men into 1 Cor. 15, we should want to establish that the information in 1 Corinthians 15 is the same information that Paul claims to have gotten by revelation in Galatians.  Unfortunately, Paul doesn't tell us in Galatians what exactly was included in the revelation.  He merely refers to "the gospel I preached."  Was it just the death and resurrection? Was it also the appearances?  Maybe it was only the theology of the death and resurrection and not the events themselves that were revealed.  When he says that no man taught him the gospel, does it mean that no man ever shared any of his experiences with Paul?  


5. We should also want to establish any similarities or differences in the contexts of the two letters.  We are all familiar with political candidates who portray themselves as reactionaries when speaking to a gathering of the Tea Party and as moderates when speaking to independent voters.  If it suited his purposes, Paul might very well emphasize his independence from his predecessors on one occasion and emphasize his continuity on another.   In the case of Galatians, Paul's rhetoric was driven bya specific dispute he was having with the pillars in Jerusalem and he needed to show that his to authority to teach the gospel authority did not depend upon any man.   That dispute does not appear to be an issue in Corinth. 

None of these prove conclusively that Paul meant "received from my predecessors in the faith" rather than "received by revelation" in 1 Corinthians 15:3, but I think they may be sufficient to eliminate Galatians 1:11-12 as the kind of trump card that some mythicists try to make it.
 

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 Curious Exchange With Dr. Larry Hurtado

It is generally my policy in the blogosphere not to claim victory in an argument simply because someone declines to respond to a point that I have made.  There are any number of legitimate reasons why a person might choose not to address a particular point such as not finding it particularly interesting or feeling that it is tangential to the main issue under discussion.  Sometimes I suspect that my point was so devastatingly incisive that the person can't answer it, but I find it tiresome when comment threads devolve into "Blogger A still hasn't responded to my point" and "Well Blogger B still hasn't responded to mine."  If I suspect that someone is purposely ignoring my point because he knows it refutes his position, I simply wait for another opportunity to raise it politely again.  I figure that eventually it will become obvious that a point is being ducked.

While I don't like to comment on someone's failure to address a point I have made, I feel no such qualms when in addition to ignoring my point, they delete it. I don't ever recall anything like this happening before I visited Dr. Larry Hurtado's blog and commented on a point he made in a post titled  The "Did Jesus Exist" Controversy and Its Precedents:

So in one sense I think I’m not alone in feeling that to show the ill-informed and illogical nature of the current wave of “mythicist” proponents is a bit like having to demonstrate that the earth isn’t flat, or that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, or that the moon-landings weren’t done on a movie lot. It’s a bit wearying to contemplate!

I have never commented on Dr. Hurtado's blog before, but I was interested to see what his response would be to some of the arguments I have making recently.  Rather than respond in a separate comment, Dr. Hurtado inserted his responses into my comment.  However, he deleted what I thought were some important points which I have restored in the following quotes.  Dr. Hurtado's remarks are in italics.

 (L. Hurtado: The following comment attempts serious discussion, but is flawed with invalid claims and inferences. I print it here and respond to it, interleaving corrections below, identified as “LWH”.)

Vinny: According to mainstream scholarship, it is entirely possible that Jesus of Nazareth was an uneducated itinerant preacher who was unknown outside a small group of followers who were mostly illiterate peasants. As likely as not, he spent his life unnoticed by anyone of prominence or importance until he somehow annoyed the Roman authorities sufficiently that he became one of countless insignificant troublemakers that they put to death.

LWH: Two points in response. First, as I say to my students, almost anything is possible (and you’ll find someone asserting almost any possibility), so the task of critical historical analysis is to judge, from various possibilities, what is the most likely. Second, I take it that you’re not denying that Jesus lived, only that if he did he made no mark on history. I don’t know what “mainstream scholarship” you’re drawing on (it’s best to give citations), but what you allege is not in fact widely held. The level of Jesus’ formal education isn’t a major issue; the question is whether he circulated, attracted followers, and became sufficiently odious to authorities that he was executed. All of these things are affirmed by as near a unanimous verdict as you can get among scholars (who delight in differing with one another!). An “insignificant troublemaker” didn’t get executed, and especially not by crucifixion. Flogged maybe.

Vinny: From that starting point, we might expect it to be very difficult to prove that he existed because we would have no specific reason to expect such a person to leave the sort of mark in the historical record that would be readily discernible two thousand years later. A few such people did, but most of the people we know of in the ancient world were either literate or prominent people themselves or they accomplished something during their lives that had an impact on the literate and prominent people of their day. The overwhelming majority of people of Jesus’ social status came and went without leaving a trace in the historical record.

LWH: The impact of Jesus is rather obvious I should think (and so would virtually all historians I’ve read on the subject). He sufficiently polarized contemporaries to make some of them devoted followers, and others mortal enemies. I’d call that impact. Moreover, almost immediately after his execution, his followers were claiming him as God’s ordained Messiah and more. To be sure, that claim rested mainly on experiences that they took as encounters with the glorified/risen Jesus. But the meaning and significance of those experiences (as vindications of Jesus’ messianic status) likewise surely presuppose a prior conviction/execution of him as a messianic/royal pretender (again, as would be very widely held).

Vinny: Unlike every other person from the ancient world who left a mark as the result of the impact that they had during their lives, stories about Jesus of Nazareth were preserved as a result of his supernatural accomplishments after his death. Jesus is only known to us today because some people claimed to have encounters with a supernatural being who they believed had once been a flesh and blood human being named Jesus. While it is certainly possible that such a person existed, the appearances of the supernatural being can’t be considered any evidence that he did.

LWH: Well, yes and no. Certainly, without the rapid emergence of the conviction that God had vindicated Jesus and installed him in heavenly glory, there would have been no such religious movement that we know as earliest Christianity. But this conviction clearly motivated his followers to preserve and disseminate his teachings as well as his deeds. Virtually all scholars in the subject agree that the body of traditions extant in the Gospels distill, adapt and convey a prior body/stream of Jesus-tradition that had been used in preaching and formation over the decades between Jesus and the writing of the Gospels.

Vinny:  This is why I find comparisons to events like the moon landing so ridiculous. If the moon landings really happened, we would expect the evidence to be so overwhelming that no rational person could doubt it, and it is. On the other hand, if the secular historians’ Jesus existed, we would expect to have very little evidence and very little certainty. 

This is not to say that a historian might not reasonably conclude that the existence of a historical Jesus is more likely than not. I simply don’t think that we can ever hope to have the kind of certainty about his existence that we can have about someone like Julius Caesar whose accomplishments during his lifetime left the kind of mark in the historical record that gives us a high level of confidence that he existed in the ancient world.

LWH: Well, everyone is welcome to his/her own judgement. But the overwhelming judgement of others (of any personal stance on religious questions) is that (1) Jesus did live; (2) he did generate a following during his own lifetime; (3) he did come under the condemnation of the political (and likely temple) authorities and suffered crucifixion; (4) remarkably soon thereafter astonishing claims about him arose and a rapidly trans-local and trans-ethnic religious movement erupted and grew thereafter. I should think that by most judgements of historical impact, this one is hard to match. Not even Julius Caesar compares.

I thought it a little odd that he had deleted my paragraph mentioning the moon landing deniers since he had specifically used that analogy, but I didn't want to complain when an eminent scholar responded so thoroughly to everything else I had written.  I also thought that maybe I had been a little out of line in calling his analogy "ridiculous" so I toned that down in my next comment.

(Editor’s note: I have edited this lengthy comment, retaining essentials, and I interleave responses identified with “LWH”).

Vinny: Thank you for your detailed response. I am personally agnostic about whether Jesus of Nazareth was historical in any meaningful sense.

In The Historical Figure of Jesus (pp. 10-11), E.P. Sanders offers the following facts as being “almost beyond dispute”: Jesus was born around 4 B.C.E; He spent his childhood and early adult years in Nazareth; He was baptized by John the Baptist; He called disciples; He taught in the town and villages and countryside of Galilee; He preached “the kingdom of God”; Around the year 30 C.E. he went to Jerusalem for Passover; He created a disturbance in the temple area; He had a final meal with his disciples; He was arrested and interrogated by Jewish authorities; He was executed on the orders of Pontius Pilate. . . . . This seems to me to be pretty typical of the kinds of things that scholars like Bart Ehrman and James McGrath think we can know about the historical Jesus. None of these seem to me to be the kinds of things that we would necessarily expect to leave the kind of mark in the historical record that we would be able to discern 2000 years later.

LWH: Yes, fair enough. But as Sanders also notes, we have to allow for a Jesus (historical figure) adequate to have generated a group of followers among whom after his execution there arose the powerful conviction that God had made him messiah and lord. That conviction certainly required more than Jesus’ own earthly activities, for they ascribe to God the source of it. But it was a conviction about the historical figure to whom they had already been drawn in commitment.

Vinny: Being crucified was certainly a significant punishment, but it was typically applied to the people with the lowest standing in the Roman Empire, sometimes in huge numbers. . . e.g., the slaves of Spartacus’ rebellion and the Jews after the fall of Jerusalem. I would guess that for only a tiny fraction of its victims do we know their identities or do we have more than a general idea about why they were crucified.

LWH: You have to distinguish between crucifixions carried out in times of war/revolt (many crucified) and the crucifixion of individuals. The Romans didn’t go about crucifying people for the hell of it or on a regular basis. Yes, for hardly any do we know much about them, which makes it all the more interesting that for this one crucified man we have a lot of attention and testimony.

Vinny: [Omitted reference to George Washington] After his death, George Washington was thoroughly mythologized for propaganda purposes as the “Father of His Country.” He was put forth as the embodiment of every virtue for which the new nation wished to think it stood. Stories were told about him for the purposes of creating a sense of identity for the fledgling United States. Historians have always struggled to get behind those myths to understand who the man really was. This task is incredibly difficult despite the fact that there is a wealth of primary source material that predates the myth making.

With Jesus of Nazareth, there is nothing that predates the myth making and nothing that can be separated from its effects.

LWH: Sorry, but you’re wrong. We don’t have any textual sources from Jesus’ own lifetime, but we do have reports of his actions and teachings, which are commonly thought to preserve essentials. These point to a figure who generated considerable polarity about him.

Vinny: Our earliest sources are the letters of Paul and he knew only a supernatural being who made himself known through revelation and whose postmortem accomplishments were supposed to usher in the kingdom of God. Paul has nothing to say about a flesh and blood person interacting with people that he knew personally. Paul has nothing to say about the character in the gospels who polarized his contemporaries into devoted followers and mortal enemies. To put it crudely, Paul only knows that there was ever a man named Jesus because he saw his ghost.

LWH: Sorry, but you greatly exaggerate and so distort matters. Paul in fact refers to the human figure of Jesus more than once, e.g., specifying his Jewish birth (Gal 4:4), the claim of Davidic descent (Rom 1:3-4), his death (treated as an action of love, e.g., Gal 2:20), and other matters (see, e.g., David L. Dungan, The Sayings of Jesus in the Churches of Paul (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971). It is simply a non sequitur to take the limited references to the earthly Jesus in Paul as indicating either ignorance or lack of interest in Jesus by Paul. What, after all did Paul and Cephas discuss during their two weeks together in Jerusalem, the weather? (Gal. 18).

Vinny: Supernatural stories arose surrounding Alexander the Great even during his own lifetime, but those stories arose because of the accomplishments of a natural man. If we scrape away the supernatural stories, we still have a significant historical footprint.  With Jesus of Nazareth, the stories about his natural life were perpetuated and preserved, and often invented, in order to propagate a belief that had arisen in his postmortem supernatural accomplishments. If you scrape away the supernatural stories, you scrape away the reason that he left a mark at all. It seems to me that this creates challenges to historical inquiry that I have never seen adequately addressed.

LWH: Again, a bit of over-simplification. But, true, we know of Jesus because his followers were convinced that God had raised him to heavenly glory, vindicating his messianic status (which of course suggests that they had already entertained such a view of him). Also, in fact the problem that you mention has been discussed oooodles of times by scholars over the years, for at least a century. But most scholars don’t see the difficulties of historical inquiry about Jesus as justifying despair.

Vinny:  As I said, this is why I find comparisons to events like the moon landing inapt. If the moon landings really happened, we would expect the evidence to be so overwhelming that no rational person could doubt it—and we do. On the other hand, if the historical Jesus of scholars like Sanders existed, we wouldn’t expect to have much evidence of him. Unlike a George Washington or an Alexander the Great, he wouldn’t have left the kind of historical footprint that would give us any confidence that we could separate the myth from the reality. 

Curiouser and curiouser.  It seems to me that when you write, "I take it that you're not denying that Jesus lived," you have to allow the person to explain exactly what his position is on the question.  I have no idea why he decided to delete the sentence that mentions Ehrman and McGrath or the references to specific mass crucifixions as neither appreciably lengthens the comment.  On the other hand, I thought that deleting the references to Alexander the Great and George Washington as "non-essential" was quite presumptuous.  The reason that I am agnostic about a historical Jesus is that I don't believe that we have the kind of evidence that would allow us to separate myth from reality and the comparison to historical figures where we have such evidence illustrates the problem.

(Editor’s note: Again, I interleave responses to “Vinny”, my responses marked “LWH”. I’ve also deleted some of the unnecessary expansive statements to save space, preserving essential points.)

Vinny: I’m not at all certain what Paul and Cephas discussed during those two weeks in Jerusalem, but I have often thought that it might well have been Paul who did most of the talking. . . . . . After all, Paul was a dynamic and well educated man who had been successfully preaching his message about the region for three years while Cephas was (or might have been) an illiterate peasant who was still sitting around Jerusalem. I would guess that Paul had a very firm idea of the meaning of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus going into that meeting, and given Paul’s reputation for dealing harshly with people who disagreed with him, I can easily imagine that it was Paul’s ideas that dominated. 


LWH: Paul says (Gal 1:18) that he went to Jerusalem to obtain information from Cephas (Greek historesai Kefan), not to browbeat or propagandize him.


Vinny:  Paul does seem to be referring to a human figure of Jesus, but the sources he cites for his knowledge are revelation, appearances, and scripture. There can be no doubt that he knew things other than what he puts in his letters, but I don’t see how the historian can claim to know what those things were. Based on what Paul writes, which is the evidence we have, I don’t think we can conclude that his understanding of the earthly Jesus was particularly close to the portrait we find in the gospels. It could have been, but I don’t think that the evidence is at all sufficient to determine that it was.


LWH: No. Paul explicitly says more than once that he had access to Jesus-tradition, as the two-week interview with Cephas cited in Gal 1:18, and as reflected in his use of sayings of Jesus also reflected in the Gospels (again, Dungan’s book that I referred you to in the earlier comment). If you want to make claims about what Paul did or didn’t know or say, it’s good to have done the work of close analysis of the evidence and interaction with the scholarship on the evidence.


Vinny: I’m simply not persuaded that we do have to allow for a historical Jesus adequate to have generated the Christian movement any more than we would have to allow for a historical Moroni adequate to generate Mormonism. . . . . It was Joseph Smith’s belief that he had encountered a supernatural being that explains the origins of the Latter Day Saints. How can we determine that the beliefs of Peter and Paul that they had encountered a supernatural being would be insufficient to explain the origins of Christianity?  I certainly don’t know for sure, but I just don’t see that we know enough about what happened in those early years to determine that the growth of Christianity necessitates a historical Jesus.

By the way, while I greatly appreciate your responses, I think I might differ with you somewhat about which elements (e.g., George Washington and the moon landing) are essential to the points that I am making.


LWH: Please note carefully: As I’ve tried to indicate at some length in my book, Lord Jesus Christ (2003), pp.27-78 (“Forces and Factors”), there were multiple factors involved in the eruption of the early Christian movement and its intense Jesus-devotion. One of them was surely the impact of the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. That was a necessary factor, but, in my view, not in itself a sufficient factor to account for the eruption of devotion to Jesus as sharing in divine glory. But, to repeat, by virtual consensus among scholars, it is very hard to account for devotion to Jesus except by granting that the historical figure had a considerable impact on his followers. (I think we’ve now probably dealt with matters sufficiently for this venue.)

Now this is just getting silly. He asks me what I think about Paul's visit to Cephas and simply deletes most of my response.  He's arguing that we need a historical man Jesus as well as the claimed encounters with a supernatural being to explain the origins of Christianity, but he considers it unnecessarily expansive for me to point out another major religion that began with nothing more than the claimed encounters.

I realize that "blogging ethics" is an oxymoron, but I would really hope for better from a respected scholar.  I have no problem when people ignore my comments.  I don't mind when people delete my comments or refuse to allow them through moderation. I don't even mind when people mischaracterize my comments as long as the comment is left standing so others can make their own judgment.  It's another thing altogether to edit my comments and to respond to the edited comment without letting others see what it was that I really wrote.  That's horseshit.

Getting Behind the Myth Making

After his death, George Washington was mythologized for propaganda purposes as the “Father of His Country.” Stories like the one about the child who could not lie about chopping down the cherry tree were invented to present him as the embodiment of every virtue for which the new nation wished to think it stood.  This image helped create a sense of identity for the fledgling United States. Historians have always struggled to get behind those myths to understand who the man really was.  Even thought there is a wealth of primary source material that predates the myth making, historians have had found it incredibly difficult to get a grip on the Washington.

With Jesus of Nazareth, we have nothing that predates the myth making.  Our record starts with the letters of Paul who knew only the supernatural being who made himself known by appearances and revelation.  Paul may have thought that this supernatural being had once been a man who walked the earth, but Paul did not know that man and doesn't seem to know anything about what he said or did.  Neither is there much in Paul to indicate that he thought that any of his contemporaries had known the man.  Even if there was a historical Jesus, our record of him starts with the myth of the exalted being who was raised from the dead.

I have little patience with historicists who claim that doubting Jesus' existence is akin to doubting that man landed on the moon.  If man landed on the moon, we would expect to have evidence that is so overwhelming that no rational person could doubt it—and we do.   On the other hand, if the historical Jesus of secular scholarship existed, we wouldn't necessarily expect to have much evidence of him at all.  Such a man could easily have come and gone without leaving any trace in the historical record that would still be discernible after two millennia.  Unlike a George Washington, Jesus of Nazareth wouldn't have left the kind of historical footprint during his life that would give us any hope of being able to separate the reality from the myth making that took place after his death.

About those Parallels: HJA (24)

Suppose that a student at a religious school is assigned to write an essay upon the person in his life who best exemplifies Christian virtue.  The student submits an essay about his uncle who had been a missionary in Africa.  Upon closer examination, the teacher finds that every incident recounted in the essay has very close parallels to stories about missionaries that can be found on the internet.  What might the possible explanations for this be?

1. The student's uncle had experiences that are generally common among missionaries.
2. The student's uncle claimed the experience of other missionaries as his own.
3. The student attributed the experiences of other missionaries to his uncle.
4. The student invented the missionary uncle for purposes of the essay.

The parallels do not prove that the uncle is entirely fictitious, but they create doubts.  They raise the possibility that the stories in the student's essay came from the internet rather than from the life of his uncle.  If nothing in the essay had any parallel  in stories that were already in circulation, we would think it much more likely that they had come from a person the student had actually known. Without some reason in addition to the essay to believe that the uncle exists, we would probably need at least to remain agnostic on the question.  It is certainly possible that the student has an uncle, and it is even possible that the uncle was a missionary, but we can't consider the essay to be very strong evidence of his existence.


In the debate over the existence of a historical Jesus, much time is spend arguing about parallels between stories about Jesus and the those found in the Old Testament or in pagan mythology.  Sometimes, historicists like James McGrath feign puzzlement that mythicists consider the parallels significant at all: 

[Thomas Thompson] points out, as he does in his book, that Jesus in the Gospels is depicted using motifs and echoes from literature about earlier royal figures. It is hard to imagine that anyone could make a claim to kingship in a Jewish context without doing so. And so it is not clear why anyone thinks that the points in Thompson's book have any bearing on the historicity of Jesus.

It is hard for me to take McGrath's confusion seriously.  It is of course possible that a historical Jesus existed even if his life was not the source of all the stories told about him just as it is possible that the student had a missionary uncle even if the stories about him were lifted from the internet.  However if we have reason to believe that the source of the stories was not the actual life of the character, then we have less reason to think that the character in the story was an actual person than we would otherwise.  Therefore, the parallels have a bearing on historicity even if they are not dispositive of historicity.

Which Came First?: HJA (23)

Thanks, Vinny. Agreed that there are special problems for the historian with Jesus of Nazareth -- and that's why Historical Jesus study is a kind of industry all its own.

But the issue about "supernatural events that occurred after [he] died" begs the question. After all, what was it about his life and people's interactions with him / memories of him / traditions told etc. that gave birth to those beliefs about his post-mortem life?

Dr. Mark Goodacre.

Dr. Mark Goodacre of Duke University doesn't blog about mythicism all that often, but I always appreciate it when he does.  Dr. Goodacre is one of the leading challengers of the Q hypothesis, which posits that material common to the gospels of Luke and Matthew but not Mark came from another written source called Q.  Although Goodacre doesn't buy the mythicist argument, as one who challenges commonly held assumptions among his colleagues, he seems to appreciate the challenges they raise.

I particularly appreciated the way in which he phrased his question because I think that it really highlights the issue of Paul's silence about the historical Jesus.  Indeed, Dr. Goodacre's question begs the question that most puzzles me:  Was it something about people's interactions, memories, and traditions concerning a flesh and blood person that gave birth to the belief that he had become a heavenly being after his death?  Or was it the other way around?  Was it the encounters that people believed they had with the heavenly being that gave birth to the belief in the earthly man and the creation of stories about him?

When I look at our earliest source, I don't see much to indicate that Paul's understanding of Jesus was in any way the product of interactions, memories or traditions associated with an earthly person.  The only sources that Paul cites for his understanding of Jesus are revelation and scripture.  The only interactions Paul describes are the appearances of the risen Christ.  There are indications that Paul thinks that the risen Christ had once been an earthly person, but nothing to indicate that such a person was the source for anything Paul thought.  Paul never interacted with the earthly Jesus and he never indicates that anyone else did either.

Had it been interactions, memories or traditions concerning the life of an earthly person that gave birth to a belief in the postmortem activities of the supernatural being, I think that we would see some indication of that in the early epistles.  Even if Paul didn't know the earthly Jesus personally, sharing the deeds and teachings of such an extraordinary individual would have been a vital part of the life of early Christian communities, but there is nothing (as far as I can see) in our earliest sources to indicate that it was.

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.

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.

HJ Agnosticism (21): Why It's Hard to Know Whether a Historical Jesus Existed

Historicists are fond of point out that supernatural stories were told about many people in the ancient world about whose existence historians are confident such as Alexander the Great.  Therefore, the fact that supernatural stories arose around Jesus of Nazareth isn't any reason to think that he did not exist.

Nevertheless, I think that there is a crucial difference: the supernatural stories arose around Alexander the Great as a result of historical events that occurred within the natural world, not the other way around.  When we strip away the legendary tales that grew around Alexander, we still find a significant mark in the historical record as a result of the things he accomplished during his life.

Jesus of Nazareth, on the other hand, first enters the historical record through the writings of Paul, a man who never knew him.  Our best guess is that he was relatively unnoticed during his own life by all but a small group of illiterate peasants.  He enters the record because Paul and others claimed to have encountered him after his death in the person of the risen Christ whose coming was the beginning of the end times.  This is not the type of event which can be considered subject to historical investigation.

Some time after Paul, stories were written about an earthly Jesus who tramped about Galilee teaching about the coming kingdom of God before reaching an unfortunate end in Jerusalem.  These stories were written in order to serve the propagation of the belief in the risen Christ who ushered in the end times.  The stories of the earthly man are transmitted as a result of the belief in the supernatural event, unlike with Alexander the Great where the supernatural stories arise as a result of the accomplishments of the earthly man.

Historicists say that they use standard historical tools in order to strip away the supernatural embellishments surrounding Jesus of Nazareth in the same way that such embellishments are stripped away from the story of any ancient person.  The problem is that when you strip away the embellishments surrounding Jesus of Nazareth, you strip away the reason that any stories were told about him in the first place.  When you strip away the embellishments surrounding Alexander the Great, you still have a significant mark in the historical record that was achieved independently of the legends and myths.

"Did Jesus Exist?" (6): Is Corruption in Transmission Relevant?

I have been a fan of Bart Ehrman ever since reading Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why in which he describes how errors occurred when scribes copied the New Testament texts and how scholars go about trying to identify those errors.  This was the book that first gained Ehrman widespread attention and aroused the ire of conservative Christian apologists. However, when it comes to Jesus' existence, Ehrman dismisses this as a cause of concern:

I do not need to explicate all these problems here, as I have written about them in more detail elsewhere.  My point in this context is the for the question of whether or not Jesus existed, these problems are mostly irrelevant.  The evidence for Jesus' existence does not depend on having a manuscript tradition of his life and teachings that is perfectly in line with what the authors of the New Testament gospels really wrote. (p.180)

He goes on to say,

If we had no clue what was originally in the writings of Paul or in the Gospels, this objection might carry more weight. But there is not a textual critic on the planet who thinks this, since not a shred of evidence leads in this direction. (p.109)

This sounds pretty reasonable, but I have a hard time squaring this with what he said in a 2008 debate with Dan Wallace at the Greer-Heard Forums:

Can we trust that the copies of Galatians we have are the original copies. No. We don’t know. How could we possibly know? Our earliest copy of Galatians is p46 which dates from the year 200. Paul wrote this letter in the 50’s. The first copy that we have is 150 years later. Changes were made all along the line before this first copy was made. How can we possibly know that in fact it is exactly as Paul wrote it. Is it possible that somebody along the line inserted a verse? Yes. Is it possible that someone took out a verse? Yes. Is it possible that somebody changed a lot of the words? Yes. Is it possible that the later copies were made from one of the worst of the early copies? Yes. It’s possible. We don’t know.
. . . .
What I have said to my colleagues is that we are as close as we can hope to be to what we might imagine as the earliest text. What I have said in popular audiences is we don’t know if we can get back to the original text. And I stand by both statements. We don’t know what Paul originally wrote to the Galatians, and we no hope of getting any closer in the future than we are already now. We have no evidence that can get us any further back than we have already gotten and our earliest evidence is from the year 200, 150 years later. So can we know for certain? No. We can’t know for certain that the text is reliable. You might want to think it is. You might want to hope it is. You might want to say there are intelligent people who say it is so probably it is. But think about it. There are people copying these texts year after year, decade after decade.

Recall that it is in Galatians 1:19 where Paul says that he saw James "the brother of the Lord," which Ehrman says proves that Jesus was a historical person "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt." (p.144) How can we possibly have that kind of certainty if "[w]e can’t know for certain that the text is reliable"?   If it's possible that someone changed a lot of words in Galatians, then it has to be possible that "the brother of the Lord" was added by some scribe to identify which James Paul was talking about and that it wasn't written by Paul himself.

I cannot help but think that there is a bit of inconsistency here.  When debating a conservative Christian apologist, Ehrman insists that everything in Galatians is subject to at least some degree of doubt due to uncertainties about its transmission.  However, when arguing against mythicism, Ehrman insists that we can be certain "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt."

It's very disappointing to see Ehrman argue that way.

"Did Jesus Exist? (5): Nazareth

Another concern I have with Did Jesus is Exist? is how quick Ehrman is to label an argument irrelevant to whether Jesus existed when the worst that can be said about it is that it's not dispositive of whether Jesus existed.  One of the most frustrating examples of this is his discussion of the argument that Nazareth did not exist at the time Jesus is claimed to have lived there (an argument about which I have no strong feeling).  Ehrman writes: 

I could dispose of this argument fairly easily by pointing out that it is irrelevant.  If Jesus existed, as the evidence suggests, but Nazareth did not, as this assertion claims, then he merely comes from somewhere else.  (p.191)

This sounds quite logical except for one thing: Nazareth is frequently cited as one of those things that can be known with relative certainty about the historical Jesus.  Ehrman makes this very point a couple of pages earlier:

Nazareth was a little one-horse town that no one had ever heard of, as far as we can tell before Christianity.  The savious of the world came from there?  Not from Bethlehem?  Or Jerusalem? Or Rome?  How likely is that?  And so we have a multiply attested tradition that passes the criterion of dissimilarity.  Conclusion:  Jesus probably came from Nazareth. (p.189)

Now technically I suppose that Ehrman isn't claiming in this passage that Nazareth constitutes evidence Jesus existed.  If he were, his earlier quoted claim would boil down to the self-refuting "If Jesus existed, as the existence of Nazareth suggests, but Nazareth did not, the he merely comes from somewhere else."   Nevertheless, he is citing it as something that we can know about the historical Jesus.  It seems like more than a little smoke and mirrors to claim that the validity of the things that we think we can know about Jesus are irrelevant to whether we can know that he existed.

I will concede that the non-existence of Nazareth would not be dispositive of Jesus' existence, but surely it is relevant.

Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?" (4): Does Paul Quote a Historical Jesus?

There are three passages that are usually cited as proof that Paul knew the teachings of a historical Jesus of Nazareth and they all come from his first letter to the Corinthians.

Don’t you know that those who serve in the temple get their food from the temple, and that those who serve at the altar share in what is offered on the altar? In the same way, the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should receive their living from the gospel. 1 Cor. 9:13-14.

This teaching is reputed to be based on a passage in Luke

“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you. Stay there, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house. Luke 10:5-7

Next is Paul's teaching about divorce.

To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband.  But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.  To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. 1 Cor 7:10-12

This is thought to be based on a teaching found in Mark.

Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”      “What did Moses command you?” he replied. They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.”  “It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied.  “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh.  Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this.  He answered, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her.  And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.” Mark 10:2-12

Finally Paul's description of the institution of the Eucharistic meal:

For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread,  and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.”  In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.”  For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. 1 Cor 11:23-26

The parallel passage is found in Luke:

And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.”  In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.  Luke 22:19-20  

The first one strikes me as particularly unimpressive.  I think that almost any preacher can independently come to the conclusion that his congregation should support him and that it is the God's will that they do so.  I don't think that Paul needed to have heard an actual saying of a historical person to think that this was what the Lord was commanding.  The second one is more interesting because Paul attributes some of the teaching to the Lord and takes credit for some of it himself.  This suggests that there was some independent tradition concerning divorce that was already known to the Corinthians.

I question whether the tradition Paul knows concerning divorce is necessarily the same one attributed to Jesus in Mark.  Paul's teaching is driven by a couple of elements that aren't found in Mark.  First, he thinks that believers would be better off not marrying at all since the time is short and they should be focusing on the Lord "[f]or this world in its present form is passing away." 1 Cor. 7:30.  He is also addressing the question of whether believers should remain married to unbelievers which isn't found found in Jesus' teaching.   It is certainly possible that Paul's teaching is in some way dependent upon Jesus', but it doesn't seem obviously to be so.

Ehrman also mentions the possibility that someone within one of Paul's communities may have claimed to have received a divine revelation or prophecy which Paul and the community accepted as a valid commandment from the Lord.  Ehrman thinks that this is a reasonable hypothesis for the rapture passage in the first letter to the Thessalonians.

According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. 1 Thes. 4:15-18.

However, Ehrman rejects this as an explanation for the teachings on divorce and support of religious leaders for a very curious reason.  "When Paul claims that the Lord said something, and we have a record of Jesus saying exactly that, it is surely most reasonable to conclude that Paul is referring to something that he believed Jesus actually said."  (p. 129)  This seems very circular to me.  Isn't this only the most reasonable conclusion if we have first concluded that Paul actually believed that he knew things the historical Jesus said?  Isn't that what we are trying to figure out here?  Surely we cannot use the assumption that Paul knew the sayings of a historical Jesus in order to prove that Paul knew the sayings of a historical Jesus.

One of the reasons the revelation explanation makes sense to me on the divorce teaching is that Paul ends the discussion with "and I think that I too have the Spirit of God."  I'm just spit-balling here but that sounds to me like the kind of thing you might write if someone else in the community was claiming to receive prophecies or revelations.

With the description of the Last Supper, there can be little doubt that Paul and Luke are part of the same tradition, but there is still a question of which way that tradition flows.  If Paul indicated that he heard about this event from someone who was there, there would be little doubt that he understood himself to be quoting the words of a historical person.  Unfortunately, that's not what Paul says.  Paul says that this was "received from the Lord," i.e., Paul knows this by divine revelation.  While we cannot take such a statement at face value, I think we at least have to allow for the possibility that Paul sincerely believed it to be true.  If the Christian cult practiced some sort of ritual communal meal before Paul came along, he might have believed that its true meaning had been revealed to him and he could have added elements to the tradition that were later picked up by Luke when he wrote his gospel.

In sum then, I don't think that there is any conclusive reason to think that Paul viewed the teachings on divorce or supporting religious leaders as the words of the itinerant preacher described in the gospels.  He does seem to think that is was an actual historical person who instituted the Eucharistic meal, but I think some uncertainty is created by the fact that he claims not to have come by his knowledge of the event in the way that we think people normally come by their knowledge of actual historical events.  I think it's possible that Paul all three passages reflect actual memories of a historical person, but I also think that it's far from the slam dunk that Ehrman makes it out to be.

HJ Agnosticism (20): On the Scholarly Consensus

Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, many of the finest minds in the field of finance and economics thought that they knew a lot more about how things worked than it turned out that they actually knew. Sadly, many of them still think they do. One of the problems is that the portion of known economic history for which testable data exists is really quite small. So you have lots and lots of experts combing over the same forty to fifty years worth of data and extrapolating all sorts of models and predictions. I think this creates an echo chamber effect which convinces the experts that they understand a lot more than they really do.

I can see a similar problem in the field New Testament studies. We only have a handful of pieces to the puzzle that is the origin of Christianity and no matter how many scholars comb over those pieces and how many times and how finely they comb over them, there is no way to overcome the problem of the missing pieces. However, they may succeed in convincing themselves that they know more than they really do. Happily, if they are wrong, it probably won't lead to the collapse of the international banking system.

Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?" (3): Were Jesus and James Biological Brothers.

Bart Ehrman writes that "two points are especially key.  I think that each of them shows beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt that Jesus must have existed as a Palestinian Jew who was crucified."  (p. 144) One of those points was that no Jew would ever invent a crucified messiah.  As I noted in an earlier post, I don't find this argument convincing.  Ehrman's other key point is that our earliest source Paul claims to have known Jesus biological brother James.  I think that this argument is stronger, but "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt" is really over the top and I am surprised and disappointed that Ehrman would ever claim that it yields such certainty.


One of the things that bothers me about Did Jesus Exist? is how imprecise Ehrman is at times.  He is often accused of giving misleading impressions by Christian apologists, but I have always found him to be very careful to be accurate about the evidence.  However, in Did Jesus Exist? he writes  "Paul knew Jesus' brother, James, and he knew his closest disciple, Peter, and he tells us that he did." Although this post is going to discuss the question of James, I want to note how inaccurate this statement is concerning Paul and Peter.  Paul never tells us that Peter was Jesus' closest disciple or that he was Jesus' disciple at all or that he even knew Jesus or that Jesus even had disciples.  All we know from Paul is that Peter witnessed an appearance of the risen Christ. 

Moving on to James, lets look at what our first century sources tell us:

• Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55 both say that Jesus had several several brothers, one of whom was named James.  However, James was a common Jewish name and neither Mark nor Matthew give us any information that would help us identify a James mentioned by anyone else as being the same person.

• Luke indicates that Jesus had brothers, but he doesn't name any of them.  Luke identifies two men named James as being among the twelve apostles, James the son of Zebedee and James the son of Alphaeus.  The son of Zebedee is killed in Acts 12 and the name James comes up again in Acts 15:13 and Acts 21:18 referring to a man who is a leader among the Christians in Jerusalem.  The father of this James is not identified.  The most natural reading of Luke-Acts is that this is the earlier mentioned son of Alphaeus whose father is not identified because there is only one James still in the story.  There  is no obvious reason to think that Luke would introduce a new James into the narrative without distinguishing him somehow from the one already mentioned.

• In Galatian 1:18-19, Paul writes "I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas [Peter] and stayed with him fifteen days. I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord’s brother."  This occurred three years after his conversion.  In Galatians 2:9, Paul refers to James as a "pillar" of the Jerusalem community.  Since Paul is perfectly clear that every Christian is a brother (or sister) of the Lord, there would be no reason to call this particular James the brother of the Lord unless Paul thought that he had some unique relationship to the Lord, e.g., he was the biological brother of Jesus.  Although it is hotly contested by mythicists, for the sake of this discussion let's accept that the most natural reading of Galatians is that this James is the natural brother of Jesus in addition to being a spiritual brother.

• Around 90 A.D., the Jewish historian Josephus wrote: 

  And now Caesar, upon hearing the death of Festus, sent Albinus into Judea, as procurator. But the king deprived Joseph of the high priesthood, and bestowed the succession to that dignity on the son of Ananus, who was also himself called Ananus... Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned.

  Antiquities of the Jews 20-9.  Josephus doesn't say anything about James being a Christian or leading the Christians in Jerusalem.

The issue then is whether we have reason to think that the James who was a leader of the Church in Jerusalem was the biological brother of Jesus referred to by Mark and Matthew. The relevant considerations would seem to be:

• The most natural reading of Paul is that the pillar of Jerusalem was Jesus' natural brother.

• The most natural reading of Luke-Acts is that the James in Acts 15 and 21 was not the same person as the James in Matthew and Mark.  Rather, he was the son of Alpheaus.

• Josephus doesn't help much as he doesn't give us any information that would allow us to identify his James as a leader of the Christian community.  His James could be the James mentioned by Mark and Matthew without being the same one mentioned by Luke and Paul.

The next issue is what the less obvious readings of Luke-Acts or Paul might be.  For Luke-Acts:

• Luke didn't know that the James he described was Jesus biological brother.  This is possible of course but I don't think it helps the historicists' case.

• Luke omitted the fact that James was the biological brother because he wanted to downplay James' authority for essentially political reasons.  This is plausible, but I'm not sure we can have any certainty on the point.

• Luke didn't bother mentioning that James was the biological brother of Jesus because he assumed that everyone knew it.  This is not impossible, but I don't find it very convincing.

We can also imagine alternative readings of Paul:

• Paul was merely referring to James as the brother of the Lord in a spiritual sense.  Certainly plausible even if not most likely.  Richard carrier thinks that this is the most probable although I don't completely follow his argument on this point.

• Paul is using "Brother of the Lord" as a title.  Even though all Christians are theoretically saints because they are all sanctified, sometimes saint is used in titular way to designate someone who particularly exemplifies sainthood, e.g., Saint Paul, Saint Theresa, Saint Vincent de Paul.  By the same token, it is possible that some group of early Christians were designated "brothers of the Lord" based on their spiritual qualities.  Possible, but I don't see how we can ever confirm it.

• Paul simply used "the Lord's brother" to distinguish James from other people who had the same name.  For example one James might have been known "James the Lord's brother" and another might have been "James the Lord's servant" even though everyone in the community was both a servant and a brother (or a sister) of the Lord.   After all, this same James later became known as "James the Just" even though every Christian had been justified by faith.  Perhaps one of the James in the early Christian community had gone rogue and been cast out.  Writing to the Galatians many years later, Paul simply wanted them to know that the James he had met was the good one, i.e., "James the Lord's Brother" rather than "James the Heretic."  Plausible but of course there is no evidence to establish this.

• Paul didn't write "the Lord's brother."  It was an interpolation by a later scribe who wanted to clear up any confusion about which James was being referred to.  Plausible but unverifiable.

Weighing all the evidence, perhaps we want to favor James being the biological brother of Jesus.   Paul is the earlier source.  Maybe we think that the alternative readings of Paul are less plausible than the alternative readings of Luke.  I can see this as a reasonable conclusion.

What I cannot see is anyone thinking that the issue is settled "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt."  That's just crazy talk.  That would suggest that we are as confident as we could possibly be and that we cannot imagine any evidence that would make us more confident.  Personally, I can think of several things.

• Luke could have referred to the James in Acts 15 and 21 as "the brother of Jesus."

• Luke could have named James as one of the brothers of Jesus who was with the apostles in the upper room in Acts 1.

• Paul could have referred to James as "the brother of Jesus" rather than "the brother of the Lord" and he could have done so several times.

• Paul could have referred to other brothers named by Mark or Matthew as "brothers of the Lord."

• Matthew and Mark could have indicated that James became a follower of Jesus.

If any of these things would make us more confident--and I believe that all of them would--then I don't see how we can possibly claim to be sure beyond a reasonable doubt now.  Their is a lack of perspective in Ehrman's assertion of confidence that I find troubling.

Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?" (2); Why would he make that up?

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In the classic South Park episode All About Mormons, Joseph Smith tells various people about the supernatural comings and goings in his life. Not everyone believes him, but those who do say "Sure. Why would he make that up?" I think that the most disappointing thing in Did Jesus Exist is that Bart Ehrman resorts to a similar argument:

Before the Christian movement, there were no Jews who thought that the messiah was going to suffer. Quite the contrary. The crucified Jesus was not invented therefore to provide some kind of mythical fulfillment of Jewish expectation. The single greatest obstacle Christians had when trying to convert Jews was precisely their claim that Jesus had been executed. They would not have made that part up. (Did Jesus Exist? p. 173)

To illustrate the problems with this argument, let's recast it:

Before the Mormon movement, there were no Protestants who thought that there might be undiscovered books of scripture that were every bit as inspired, inerrant, and authoritative as the books of the Bible. Quite the contrary. The single greatest obstacle Mormons had when trying to convert Protestants was precisely their claim that Joseph Smith had found another New Testament of Jesus Christ buried in western New York state written on Golden Plates. They would not have made that part up.

If we must believe that there was a historical reality behind the concept of a crucified messiah because we think the idea would have been absurd and offensive to most Jews of the time, why shouldn't we believe that there was a historical reality behind the Golden Plates?

According to Ehrman this is one of the especially key points that "shows beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt that Jesus must have existed as a Palestinian Jew who was crucified."  (P. 144)  I'm sorry Dr. Ehrman.  I love your stuff, but this can't be a good argument.

In support of this claim, Ehrman makes the very same kind of argument from silence for which he berates the mythicists.  "We do not have a shred of evidence to suggest that any Jews prior to the birth of Christianity anticipated that there would be a future messiah who would be killed for sins--or killed at all--let alone one who would be unceremoniously destroyed by the enemies of the Jews."  (p. 170)  Should we expect to have evidence of what every single Jew prior to the birth of Christianity anticipated?  How could we possibly know such a thing.

Let me suggest what seems to me to be a perfectly plausible scenario. 

There is a devout Jew named Saul living in the first century who really really wants a messiah to come and overthrow the Romans.  Every time he hears about someone claiming to be the messiah, he gets his hopes only to have them dashed when the Romans crush the troublemaker.  He struggles to understand why this keeps happening again and again.  Then one day, a thought pops into his head, "Maybe this is part of God's plan."  He searches through the scriptures and he finds all those same verses that Christians always cite as prophecies of Jesus' passion.  One night he has a dream in which he sees an exalted heavenly being who tells him "I had to suffer for Israel's wrongdoing but now God has raised me up and I'll be coming back to kick some Roman ass."

Voila!  There's your crucified messiah without there having to be any specific historical person behind it.

Do I think that's what happened?  I don't know, but I don't see how we can possibly know beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt that it couldn't have happened.  The scenario that Ehrman and others lay out basically amounts to Jesus' followers stumbling onto the idea of a crucified messiah as a result of grief induced hallucinations that they experienced after his crucifixion.  I find that perfectly plausible.  What I find implausible is the idea that historians can be so sure of what every first century Jew thought as to be certain that no one could have possibly stumbled on the idea in any other way.

Bart Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?" (1)

I got my copy of Did Jesus Exist?:  The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth yesterday and I'm enjoying it a lot.   I am happy to say that the article Bart Ehrman wrote for the Huffington Post two weeks ago does not fairly reflect the arguments in the book.  Although he is convinced that Jesus was a historical person, the book does not paint all doubters with nearly as broad a brush as the article.  More importantly, while the article made it sound like historians have a lot more evidence for the existence of Jesus than they really do, I think the book fairly describes the evidence and arguments upon which Ehrman at least is actually relying.  

One of the things I have admired most about Ehrman's books is the way that he lays out the evidence upon which he bases his conclusions.  Even if you disagree with those conclusions, you come away with a good overview of the main points of contention and the arguments that each side is making.  After reading Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, I found that I was able to follow debates between scholars of textual criticisms and ask reasonably intelligent questions.  I think that anyone who reads  Did Jesus Exist? will get similar insights into the historicist/mythicist debates.

Despite my appreciation of the book and Ehrman, I don't think it is going to be enough to push me off the fence of historical Jesus agnosticism.  While Ehrman is reasonably respectful of Robert Price, G.A. Wells, and Richard Carrier, he does make a lot of mythicism look very foolish.  My problem is with his positive arguments for Jesus' existence.  They seem to me to rely far too much on hypothetical reconstructions of the sources behind the gospels using techniques which scholars invented for the specific purpose of reconstructing the sources behind the gospels.  The evidence still seems awfully speculative and conjectural and the arguments somewhat circular.

Ehrman honestly acknowledges that we do not have the kind of sources for Jesus that historians would like to have and he points out correctly that the absence of these sources doesn't disprove Jesus' existence because we wouldn't reasonably expect to have such sources for a person of Jesus' social status.  The upshot of this according to Ehrman is that historians need to find other ways of establishing Jesus' existence.  To me, however, the upshot of not having the kind of sources historians like and not expecting to have them is that we probably shouldn't expect to have a great deal of certainty about the question.  If there is a problem with the application of techniques that are generally accepted as reliable when considering historical questions, how much confidence can we have in techniques that are developed specifically for determining the historicity of stories about Jesus?

There are many mythicists who have been quick to accuse Ehrman of selling out or knuckling under to religious orthodoxy, but I don't see any reason to question his integrity.  I don't think that his conclusions are driven by a vested interest in the existence of a historical Jesus.  I do think, however, that he may be said to have a vested interest in the methodology of New Testament studies and I think he may be overestimating the degree of certainty that can be achieved by the application of those techniques.  I hope to look at some of those techniques in upcoming posts.

HJ Agnosticism (19): A Very Silly Claim

The blogosphere is buzzing over Bart Ehrman's new book, Did Jesus Exist?:  The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth.  Historicists are crowing and mythicists range from disappointed to outraged.  Unfortunately, my copy hasn't arrived yet so my ability to comment on Ehrman's arguments is limited.  From what I have seen, however, I doubt that Ehrman will push me off the fence of historical Jesus agnosticism.

There is one claim that I see repeatedly in comment threads that I can address though.  It goes like this:  "There is much more evidence Jesus existed than just about any other historical character from that period."  I hope that Ehrman doesn't make this claim in his book because it is profoundly silly.

Consider for a moment the kinds of people that you would typically find discussed in a book about the history of ancient Rome.  There would be emperors and kings and generals and senators.  There would be people whose activities had a widespread impact on prominent and literate people of their day.  They would be people who were well known to prominent and literate people of their day.  These are certainly not the only people who lived in ancient Rome, but they are the kinds of people who leave a mark in the historical record.  You are far less likely to find discussions of particular slaves or peasants unless it is someone like Spartacus who attracted the attention of the prominent and literate people of his day by leading a rebellion.

The kind of people you are least likely to find discussed are people who passed their lives unnoticed by anyone outside a relatively small group of illiterate peasants.  There can be no doubt that many such people existed, but they tend not to have left individual or unique marks in the historical record.  When it comes to such people, we tend to be limited in our knowledge to the general conditions under which they lived.  We tend to be ignorant of the specific things that particular people said and did. That's the problem with our evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus.  To the extent that historians think he existed, they think that he hung out with a group of illiterate peasants.  To the extent that he attracted any attention during his life from anyone in a position of prominence, he was just another troublemaker put to death by the Roman Empire.

When Jesus first enters the historical record, it is because--to put it crudely--his ghost appeared to someone.  The man who first puts Jesus in the record didn't know him, didn't say where or when he lived or died, and said little to nothing about what he said or did during his life.  Paul's sole concern was with the theological significance of supernatural events that occurred to Jesus after his death.  I can't think of anyone else who made that kind of initial mark in the historical record about whose existence I would be confident 

Historicists like to point out that the earliest extant writings about Jesus were composed nearer to the time he lived than those for other people about whose existence we are confident.  While its true that the earliest biographies that we have for Alexander the Great were written hundreds of years after his death, their authors tell us that the got their information from biographies that were written by Alexander's contemporaries.  Where does our earliest extant source for Jesus say that he got his information?  Divine revelation.  Where do the subsequent sources tell us they got their information?  They don't say.

Does any of this provide proof that Jesus didn't exist?  Of course not.  But it should be enough to deter those who believe he did from making glib claims about how much more convincing the evidence is than for others of that time.