The Minimal Facts Needed to Explain the Growth of Christianity

(1)  People want their lives to have meaning.

(2)   People are afraid of death.

Can We Be Sure About Anything that Jesus Said?

One of the reasons I remain so skeptical about the mainstream consensus of historical Jesus scholars is their propensity to express what seems to me to be absurd degrees of certainty about things that Jesus said and did. For example, last year in a blog post titled Is Historical Jesus Research Futile?, Dr. James McGrath wrote, "The fact that one can configure things that Jesus almost certainly said in different arrangements and thus different overall portraits does not mean that there are not things that he almost certainly said."  The problem is that what things a scholar thinks Jesus really said is going to depend on the overall portrait that they draw.

I've never been completely sure which things Dr. McGrath is almost certain Jesus said, but he provided one example in a recent comment.  "And given the evidence, I certainly do think that there are a small number of things which it is very probable that Jesus said - the use of abba in reference to God being a good example."  "Abba" is an Aramaic word meaning "father" that appears three times in the New Testament at Mark 14:36, Romans 8:15, and Galatians 4:6.  It is only the first passage that attributes use of the word to Jesus while he is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane.

I found the explanation for McGrath's confidence in a 2008 post titled What Jesus Said and Did: 1) Prayer in Gethsemane

Paul already seems to have associated the address of God as Father in Aramaic with Jesus’ relationship to God as son. The only appearances of this Aramaic word in the New Testament are in the earliest Gospel and in Paul’s letters. And there is no reason Paul would have used the term in writing to non-Aramaic-speaking Christians other than that the term already had some significance for them, presumably in connection with Jesus, the object of their faith and devotion.

That's a pretty big leap there.  It is perfectly reasonable to suppose that Christian use of the word "Abba" predates Paul's letters, but that doesn't give us any reason to suppose that it was Jesus who first used it.  It could have been Peter or James or any other Aramaic speaker who introduced the word into the Church's vocabulary.  It might even have been Paul himself at some time prior to writing the epistles.  There is nothing in Paul's letters that gives us a clue as to how the word "Abba" came to have significance for Greek speaking Christians.

The only thing pointing to Jesus as the responsible party is Mark 16:36, where Jesus prays “Abba! Father! All things are possible for You; remove this cup from Me; yet not what I will, but what You will.”  However, this could just be Mark attributing to Jesus a usage that was already common among Christians.  I find it interesting that Jesus' only use of the word comes in the Garden of Gethsemane when there would have been no witnesses as he was praying alone while his disciples slept.  Had tradition preserved some genuine memory of Jesus using the word, I might expect Mark to put the word on his lips in some more public setting.

Is it possible that Jesus actually used the word "Abba" to describe his relationship with God?  Sure.  Is it "very probable" based on the available evidence?  Not a chance.

Tapestry or Jigsaw Puzzle?

Try to imagine the picture of the historical Jesus that emerges from a rigorously, historical, critical examination of our surviving sources as a large tapestry. The individual threads make up the overall portrait. There are a few threads here and there that appear out of place at first glance. But you can’t take these few threads and claim that they represent the overall portrait of the tapestry. The tapestry has to be understood as a whole, looking for the major features of its portrayal (and of course the stray threads need to be fit into it somehow).

Bart Ehrman.

The quote above comes from a blog post Ehrman wrote discussing Reza Aslan's book Zealot, which argues that Jesus was actually a political revolutionary who advocated violent resistance to the Romans.  Ehrman finds Aslan's thesis unpersuasive.

The data that do seem to support the idea of Jesus as a political revolutionary are very, very few and far between. They do not comprise the majority, or even a significant minority, of the data we can establish as going back to the historical Jesus.

I can imagine the picture of the historical Jesus as a large tapestry, but I think that the analogy is terrible. I think that a better analogy is a large jigsaw puzzle for which we only have a handful of pieces--say a 5,000 piece puzzle where we only have about seventy-five of the pieces.

Now suppose that of our seventy-five pieces, sixty are green.   We might be inclined to conclude that the picture is some sort of landscape, perhaps a forest.  However, in order to justify this conclusion, we would need to know how we got those pieces.  If someone simply reached into the box and grabbed a handful of pieces, it might be reasonable to think that they are a representative sample and that 80% of the entire picture is green.  On the other hand, if someone grabbed the pieces from a single area of a completed puzzle, there would be less reason to think that green predominates in the whole.

Even if we could establish that some data goes back to the historical Jesus (which I doubt), Ehrman's argument presupposes that such data constitutes a representative sample of Jesus' words and deeds.  I cannot see  how such a presupposition can be justified.  The data we have is the data preserved by people who came to believe that Jesus was the prophesied Messiah who God had raised from the dead. They would have no reason to preserve anything about him that did not support that picture.  Had Jesus been a revolutionary Zealot, data that portrayed him as an apocalyptic preacher might still have been the only data that was preserved.  In fact, if you subscribe to the criteria of dissimilarity, those few data points that support the idea of Jesus as a political revolutionary may be the points that are most likely to be authentic as no one would have any reason to invent those.

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.

Can We Be Sure that Jesus Died on a Cross?

Apologist Michael Licona answers this question in the affirmative:

First, Jesus' execution is reported in a number of ancient sources: Christian and non-Christian. In addition to the four Gospels and a number of letters contained in the New Testament, all of which were written in the first century, Jesus' execution is even reported by a number of ancient non-Christian sources. Josephus (late first century), Tacitus (early second century), Lucian (early to mid second century), and Mara bar Serapion (second to third centuries) all report the event. The fact that these non-Christians mentioned Jesus in their writings shows that Jesus' death was known outside of Christian circles and was not something the Christians invented.

Regarding the non-Christian sources, Licona is plainly mistaken.  The fact that the story of Jesus' crucifixion became known outside Christian circles sixty years later does not in any way show that Christians didn't invent it.

Regarding the Christian sources, I am struck by a comment Licona made about Matthew 28:16 in The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach.   In that passage, the disciples go to Galilee to meet the resurrected Jesus and "When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted."  Licona suggests that one possibility is that it was not any of the disciples who doubted, but outsiders who just happened to be present:

In the back of the crowd one man says to another, "What is all the excitement about? We have heard Jesus before. What is so special this time?" The other answers, "Didn't you hear? Jesus was crucified last Friday in Jerusalem and he has risen from the dead!" The first is skeptical of the report and says, "Someone got things wrong. The Romans must have crucified someone else."

This strikes me as an eminently sensible analysis. The very fact that Jesus is walking around and talking is an excellent reason for doubting that he had been crucified. I can easily imagine that same skeptical fellow asking "Did any of you see Jesus being crucified?" The disciples might have honestly replied "No. After Jesus was arrested, we went into hiding," after which, the skeptical fellow would have been fully justified in remaining skeptical.

Did Paul Go to Jerusalem for an Endorsement or a Sit Down?

I've been wondering recently why Paul's Christian communities in Galatia didn't break away from the apostles in Jerusalem.  After all, in the first two chapters of Galatians Paul speaks of the Jerusalem gang as false brothers and hypocrites who taught him nothing and added nothing to his message.  One possibility that occurs to me is that the Jerusalem gang had a connection with the actual historical Jesus of Nazareth that Paul identified with the risen Christ of his visions.

I ran this theory past Richard Carrier in a recent comment on his blog and he didn't buy it.  He suggested other reasons why Paul wouldn't and couldn't have split off on his own

Paul’s communities were probably supporting Jerusalem because he didn’t form them. Paul doesn’t ever explicitly say he did (neither does Acts, incidentally: it mentions making converts, but never being the first to have done so, or having established communities; Paul’s letters, meanwhile, were written twenty years after Jesus is supposed to have died, and thus the churches he is writing to could well have existed half a generation before Paul came and expanded them with new converts). Thus Paul may well have just come to already-existing congregations, teaching a new gospel (just as Apollos then did, which Paul then has to accommodate, Paul then being in the same position Peter and gang were with respect to Paul).

According to Carrier, Paul needed both the support of the entire church network and the endorsement of the apostles in Jerusalem.

Although I appreciate Carrier's insights and look forward to his book outlining his theories on mythicism, I am doubtful that I will be persuaded that mythicism is more than one of a number of possible explanations for the origin of Christianity.  It may well be that rather than forming communities, Paul brought his message to existing communities, but I don't see any way to be sure.  For every "it may well be," there is an equal and opposite "it may well not be" (or at least a comparable one).

Paul may well have needed the endorsement of the Jerusalem gang to carry on his work among the gentiles, but there is a key point that makes me question that whether that was so.  Jerusalem called for the circumcision of converts and Paul didn't.   I cannot help but think that this would have given Paul a tremendous amount of leverage.  In any conflict between Paul and the gang in Jerusalem, the Galatians would have a strong motivation to take Paul's side.

Carrier imagines a relationship in which Paul is like the loan shark who seeks permission to operate within the local mob boss's territory, in return for which the mob boss gets a cut of the profits.  While that may well be, I think it is just as easy to imagine a relationship in which Paul is one mob boss having a sit down with another mob boss in order to establish that one of them gets Brooklyn and the other gets Queens. When Paul writes "they recognized that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised. . . . James, Cephas and John, those esteemed as pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me," (Gal. 2:7,9) I hear Tony Soprano and Carmine Lupertazzi divvying up turf.