Doherty also objects to the idea that Josephus could call Jesus “wise” and one who appears to have taught the “truth.” If Josephus knew the teachings of Jesus—with which he surely would have vehemently disagreed—then he never could say any such things. To this it can easily be objected on one hand that there is no reason for thinking that Josephus knew any of the things that Jesus taught, and on the other that many of the things Jesus taught were in fact what many other famous teachers of Judaism taught: for example, that followers of God should love God above all else; that they should love their neighbors as themselves; that they should do good unto others; that they should feed the hungry and care for the poor and oppressed; and, well, lots of other things that have seemed through the ages to Christian believer and unbeliever alike as both wise and true.
Doherty makes many other points, but most of them, frankly, are even weaker than these and do not need to be given serious attention here. In the revised edition of his book, however, he does devote an extended discussion to summarizing the views of Ken Olson, a graduate student at Duke University, who argues that the language of the Testimonium does not appear to be stylistically consistent with the language Josephus uses throughout his other works. Olson has been a student of mine (taking some of my graduate seminars at UNC) and is a very sharp fellow. For what it is worth, he is not a mythicist. Olson’s Ph.D. dissertation is devoted to the Testimonium, and many of his key arguments are summarized in an article that he published in the academic journal Catholic Biblical Quarterly in 1999.20 In this article Olson argues that the first author to mention the Testimonium, the Christian church father Eusebius (who was writing before any of our manuscripts of Josephus was produced), was in fact the one who forged it and so was ultimately responsible for its being inserted into Josephus’s writings. The basis for the argument is a very careful analysis of the words and phrases used in the Testimonium. Olson argues in case after case that the wording and phrasing of the passage has numerous parallels with Eusebius’s writings but not with those of Josephus. In other words, the vocabulary and style of the passage suggest that it was written by Eusebius.
Olson has made an intriguing case in his article, but I am afraid—as impressed by him as I am—that it has not held up under critical scrutiny. The responses to it by such scholars of Josephus and of early Christianity as J. Carleton Paget and Alice Whealey have been compelling.21 There is in fact little in the Testimonium that is more like Eusebius than Josephus, and a good deal of the passage does indeed read like it was written by Josephus. It is far more likely that the core of the passage actually does go back to Josephus himself.22
An additional reason for thinking so is this: if a scribe (or Eusebius or anyone else) wanted to insert a strong testimony about the virtues of Jesus into the writings of Josephus (so that the Testimonium is a later interpolation), he surely would have done so in a much more glowing and obvious way. Those who wrote apocryphal stories about Jesus are flamboyant both in what they relate (recounting lots of Jesus’s miracles, for example) and in how they say it (stressing his divine nature, not simply that he was the messiah). The Testimonium is so restrained, with only a couple of fairly reserved sentences here and there, that it does not read like a Christian apocryphal account of Jesus written for the occasion. It reads much more like what you get elsewhere throughout the manuscript tradition of ancient writings: a touch-up job that a scribe could easily do.
The payoff is that most scholars continue to be convinced that Josephus did indeed write about Jesus, probably in something like the pared-down version that I quote above.
But that is not the main point I want to make about the Testimonium. My main point is that whether the Testimonium is authentically from Josephus (in its pared-down form) or not probably does not ultimately matter for the question I am pursuing here. Whether or not Jesus lived has to be decided on other kinds of evidence from this. And here is why. Suppose Josephus really did write the Testimonium. That would show that by 93 CE—some sixty or more years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death—a Jewish historian of Palestine had some information about him. And where would Josephus have derived this information? He would have heard stories about Jesus that were in circulation. There is nothing to suggest that Josephus had actually read the Gospels (he almost certainly had not) or that he did any kind of primary research into the life of Jesus by examining Roman records of some kind (there weren’t any). But as we will see later, we already know for lots of other reasons and on lots of other grounds that there were stories about Jesus floating around in Palestine by the end of the first century and much earlier. So even if the Testimonium, in the pared-down form, was written by Josephus, it does not give us much more evidence than we already have on the question of whether there really was a man Jesus.
If, by contrast, the Testimonium was not written by Josephus, we again are neither helped nor hurt in our quest to know whether Jesus lived. There is certainly no reason to think if Jesus lived that Josephus must have mentioned him. He doesn’t mention most Jews of the first century. Recent estimates suggest that there were possibly up to a million Jews living in Palestine at any one time in the early first century. (If you add up the different persons living in any given year, as new people are born and others die, the total numbers of Jews living throughout the period are obviously much higher.)23 Josephus does not mention 99 percent of them—or rather, more than 99 percent. So why would he mention Jesus? You cannot say that he would have mentioned Jesus because anyone who did all those amazing miraculous deeds would surely be mentioned. As I pointed out earlier, the question of what Jesus actually did has to come after we establish that he lived, not before. As a result, even though both the mythicists and their opponents like to fight long and hard over the Testimonium of Josephus, in fact it is only marginally relevant to the question of whether Jesus existed.
Rabbinic Sources
In order to complete my tally of early references to Jesus, I need to say a few words about the Jewish Talmud. This is not because it is relevant but because when talking about historical references to Jesus, many people assume it is relevant.24 The Talmud is a collection of disparate materials from early Judaism: legal disputes, anecdotes, folklore, customs, and sayings. Most of the material relates directly to teachings of and stories about the early rabbis, that is, Jewish teachers. The collection was put together long after the days of Jesus.
The core of the Talmud is the Mishnah, a collection of rabbinic teachings about the Jewish law, based on oral traditions that had long been in circulation, and written in the early third century, some two hundred years after Jesus would have died. Most of the Talmud, however, consists of a series of commentaries by later rabbis on the Mishnah, called the Gemara. There are two different sets of these commentaries, one produced in the fourth century by Jewish scholars who lived in Palestine, the other produced in the fifth century by scholars of Babylon. The latter is considered the more authoritative.
For a long time scholars treated the Talmud as if it presented historically accurate information about Jewish life, law, and custom from a much earlier period, all the way back to the first century. Few critical scholars take that view today. In both its iterations, it is a product of its own time, even though it is based on earlier oral reports.
Jesus is never mentioned in the oldest part of the Talmud, the Mishnah, but appears only in the later commentaries of the Gemara. One of the problems even with these very late references is that Jesus is not actually called by name even though it is reasonably clear that he is the one being referred to. There are some passages, for example, that refer to a person named “Ben [son of] Panthera.” Panthera was the name traditionally given to the Roman soldier who was said to have seduced Mary, who in these passages is called a hairdresser. Her child, then, was born out of wedlock. Scholars have long recognized that this tradition appears to represent a subtle attack on the Christian view of Jesus birth as the “son of a virgin.” In Greek, the word for virgin is part
henos, close in spelling to Panthera.
In other references in the Talmud we learn that Jesus was a sorcerer who acquired his black magic in Egypt. Recall the Gospel accounts of how Jesus fled with his family to Egypt soon after his birth and his abilities later in life to perform miracles. He is said in the Talmud to have gathered five disciples and to have been hanged on the eve of the Passover, after a herald proclaimed the charges of sorcery against him for forty days. Here again we may have a biased version of the Gospel accounts, where Jesus is killed during the Passover but with injudicious speed after a very quick trial, his execution occurring some twelve hours after his arrest.
These Talmudic references to Jesus were written hundreds of years after he would have lived and so are really of very little use for us in our quest. By the time they were set down, Christianity was a major force in the Roman Empire, and every single Christian telling stories about Jesus naturally assumed that he had really existed as a historical person. If we want evidence to support the claim that he did in fact once exist, we therefore have to turn to other sources.
CHAPTER THREE
The Gospels as Historical Sources
AT THE BEGINNING OF the last chapter I mentioned one criticism I have received over the years that has surprised me. And here is another. Sometimes in a review or an e-mail a reader will provide a short but hard-hitting laundry list of complaints about one or another book I’ve written, and two items on the list are (a) that I’m needlessly attacking the Bible (I objected to this complaint in chapter 2) and (b) that I am saying nothing new but am merely rehearsing what scholars have known for a long time. I find this two-pronged critique a bit odd for lots of reasons but in particular because the two prongs seem to be at odds with each other. How am I attacking anything if I am simply saying what scholars have long known? I don’t see how a critic can have it both ways.
At the same time, I do understand the critique. Very conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christians do not agree with what other scholars have long said about the Bible. And what the critics are objecting to is my decision to make this information public. Fair enough. But in my view, the public has the right to know what scholars have discovered after spending countless hours, days, months, and years grappling with the hard issues. And to discount it all as “saying nothing new” is simply an ad hominem attack. My popular books (as opposed to my scholarly books, which are written for the six people in the world who care) are meant for laypeople and so are designed to show a wider audience, in nontechnical language, the findings of true and intriguing importance that scholars have made. How can anyone complain about making the public more knowledgeable?
The same complaint can well be made about the present chapter. In it I do not advance scholarship or come up with some new theory. What I discuss here is common knowledge among scholars in the field. In fact, most of it is standard information that even my conservative critics will by and large agree with, either to their pleasant surprise or to their dismay. It deals with why our Gospel sources are important for the question of whether Jesus existed, and my claim is that once one understands more fully what the Gospels are and where they came from, they provide powerful evidence indeed that there really was a historical Jesus who lived in Roman Palestine and who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. We will see in the chapters that follow that this is not the only kind of evidence we have for the existence of Jesus. Quite the contrary, there are other compelling data to consider. But the Gospels are the obvious place to start.
A Preliminary Comment on the Gospels as Historical Sources
AS I WILL TRY to show momentarily, the Gospels, their sources, and the oral traditions that lie behind them combine to make a convincing case that Jesus really existed. It is not that one can simply accept everything found in the Gospels as historically accurate. Far from it. The Gospels are filled with nonhistorical material, accounts of events that could not have happened. This is shown, for example, by the many discrepancies they contain in matters both great and small. If you have two contradictory accounts of the same event, both accounts cannot be accurate. And once you read the Gospels carefully, with keen attention to minute details, you will find such contradictions all over the map. Eventually these small details add up to big pictures, which also are sometimes at odds with one another.
At the same time, there is historical information in the Gospels. This historical material needs to be teased out by careful, critical analysis. Before doing so, I need to make a preliminary remark about the Gospels as historical sources. Sometimes the Gospels of the New Testament are separated from all other pieces of historical evidence and given a different kind of treatment because they happen to be found in the Bible, the collection of books that Christians gathered together and declared sacred scripture. The Gospels are treated in this way by two fundamentally opposed camps of readers, and my contention is that both of them are completely wrong. However else the Gospels are used—for example, in communities of faith—they can and must be considered historical sources of information.
At one end of the spectrum, fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians often treat the Gospels as literature unlike anything else that has ever been produced because, in their theological opinion, these books were inspired by God. In this view, inspired literature is not amenable to the same kind of historical and critical investigation as other kinds of literature.
I think this is wrong, and not simply because I am an agnostic who does not believe the Bible is the inspired word of God. I thought this approach was wrong even when I was a committed, believing Christian. It is wrong because whatever else you might think about the books of the Bible—whether you believe in them or not, whether you consider them inspired or not—they are still books. That is, they were written by people in historical circumstances and contexts and precisely in light of those circumstances and contexts. There is no God-given way of interpreting God-given literature, even if such literature exists. It is still literature. And it has to be interpreted as literature is interpreted. There is no special hermeneutic handed down from above to direct the reading of these books as opposed to all others. Their authors were human authors (whether or not they were inspired); they wrote in human languages and in human contexts; their books are recognizable as human books, written according to the rhetorical conventions of their historical period. They are human and historical, whatever else you may think about them, and to treat them differently is to mistreat them and to misunderstand them.
At the other end of the spectrum is another group insisting that the books of the Bible need to be given separate treatment. These are certain agnostics and atheists who claim that since, say, the Gospels are part of Christian sacred scripture, they have less value than other books for establishing historical information. As odd as it might seem, the nonbelievers who argue this are making common cause with the fundamentalists who also argue it. Both groups treat the Gospels as nonhistorical, the fundamentalists because the Gospels are inspired and the atheists (those who hold this view) because the Gospels are accepted by some people as sacred scripture and so are not historical.
The (sometime) atheist opinion of the Bible as nonhistorical is no better than the (typical) fundamentalist opinion. The reality is that the authors of the books that became the Bible did not know they were producing books that would later be considered scripture, and they probably had no intention of producing scripture. The Gospel writers—anonymous Greek-speaking Christians living thirty-five to sixty-five years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death—were simply writing down episodes that they had heard from the life of Jesus. Some of these episodes may be historically accurate, others may not be. But the authors did not write thinking they were providing the sacred scriptures for the Christian tradition. They were simply writing books about Jesus.
These authors had nothing to do with later developments, such as that their books were considered inspired and were placed in a canon and called the New Testament. The au
thors were real, living, breathing, historical persons; they had heard reports about Jesus; they had probably read earlier accounts of his life; and they decided to write their own versions. “Luke” (whoever he really was and whatever name he had) tells us this himself, in the beginning of the third Gospel: “Whereas many have attempted to compile a narrative of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as the eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them over to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all these things closely from the beginning, to write for you an orderly account” (1:1–3).
I should stress that I am not saying that Luke and the other Gospel writers were trying to present disinterested accounts of the life of Jesus. These authors were anything but disinterested, and their biases need to be front and center in the critics’ minds when evaluating what they have to say. But at the same time, they were historical persons giving reports of things they had heard, using historically situated modes of rhetoric and presentation. The fact that their books later became documents of faith has no bearing on the question of whether the books can still be used for historical purposes. To dismiss the Gospels from the historical record is neither fair nor scholarly.
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