Salm’s basic argument is that Nazareth did exist in more ancient times and through the Bronze Age. But then there was a hiatus. It ceased to exist and did not exist in Jesus’s day. Based on archaeological evidence, especially the tombs found in the area, Salm claims that the town came to be reinhabited sometime between the two Jewish revolts (between 70 CE and 132 CE), as Jews who resettled following the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans relocated in northern climes. Salm, like Zindler, wants to insist that Mark did not indicate that Jesus came from Nazareth: Mark 1:9, for him, is a later insertion.
Salm himself is not an archaeologist: he is not trained in the highly technical field of archaeology and gives no indication that he has even ever been on an archaeological dig. He certainly never has worked at the site of Nazareth. Still, he bases almost his entire case on archaeological reports about the town of Nazareth. In particular, he is impressed by the fact that the kind of rock-cut tombs that have been uncovered there—called kokh tombs, otherwise known as locula tombs—were not in use in Galilee the middle of the first century and thus do not date to the days of Jesus. And so the town did not exist then.
This is a highly problematic claim. It is hard to understand why tombs in Nazareth that can be dated to the days after Jesus indicate that there was no town there during the days of Jesus. That is to say, just because later habitation can be established in Nazareth, how does that show that the town was not inhabited earlier? Moreover, Salm fails to stress one of the most important points about these special rock-cut tombs: they were expensive to make, and only the wealthiest families could afford them.13 There is nothing in any of our records to suggest that Nazareth had any wealthy families in the days of Jesus. And so no one in town would have been able to purchase a kokh tomb. So what does the fact that none were found from the days of Jesus indicate? Precisely nothing. The tombs that poor people used in Palestine were shallow graves, not built into rock like kokh tombs. These poor-person graves almost never survive for archaeologists to find.
I should also point out that these kokh tombs from later times were discovered on the hillside of the traditional site of Nazareth. Salm, however, claims that the hillside would have been uninhabitable in Jesus’s day so that, in his opinion, the village that eventually came into existence (in the years after 70 CE) would have been located on the valley floor, less than a kilometer away. He also points out that archaeologists have never dug at that site.
This view creates insurmountable problems for his thesis. For one thing, there is the simple question of logic. If archaeologists have not dug where Salm thinks the village was located, what is his basis for saying that it did not exist in the days of Jesus? This is a major flaw: using forceful rhetoric, almost to the point of indiscretion, Salm insists that anyone who thinks that Nazareth exists has to argue “against the available material evidence.” But what material evidence can there be, if the site where the evidence would exist has never been excavated? And what evidence exactly is being argued against, if none has been turned up?
There is an even bigger problem, however. Many compelling pieces of archaeological evidence indicate that in fact Nazareth did exist in Jesus’s day and that, like other villages and towns in that part of Galilee, it was built on the hillside, near where the later rock-cut kokh tombs were built. For one thing, archaeologists have excavated a farm connected with the village, and it dates to the time of Jesus.14 Salm disputes the finding of the archaeologists who did the excavation (remember that he himself is not an archaeologist but bases his views on what the real archaeologists—all of whom disagree with him—say). For one thing, when archaeologist Yardena Alexandre indicated that 165 coins were found in this excavation, she specified in the report that some of them were late, from the fourteenth or fifteenth century. This suits Salm’s purposes just fine. But as it turns out, among the coins were some that date to the Hellenistic, Hasmonean, and early Roman period, that is, the days of Jesus. Salm objected that this was not stated in Alexandre’s report, but Alexandre has verbally confirmed that in fact it is the case: there were coins in the collection that date to the time prior to the Jewish uprising.15
Salm also claims that the pottery found on the site that is dated to the time of Jesus is not really from this period, even though he is not an expert on pottery. Two archaeologists who reply to Salm’s protestations say the following: “Salm’s personal evaluation of the pottery…reveals his lack of expertise in the area as well as his lack of serious research in the sources.”16 They go on to state, “By ignoring or dismissing solid ceramic, numismatic [coins], and literary evidence for Nazareth’s existence during the Late Hellenistic and Early Roman period, it would appear that the analysis which René Salm includes in his review, and his recent book must, in itself, be relegated to the realm of ‘myth.’”17
Another archaeologist who specializes in Galilee, Ken Dark, the director of the Nazareth Archaeological Project, gave a thoroughly negative review of Salm’s book, noting, among other things, that “there is no hint that Salm has qualifications—nor any fieldwork experience—in archaeology.” Dark shows that Salm has misunderstood both the hydrology (how the water systems worked) and the topography (the layout) of Nazareth and points out that the town could well have been located on the hill slopes, just as other nearby towns were, such as Khirbet Kana. His concluding remarks are damning: “To conclude: despite initial appearances this is not a well-informed study and ignores much evidence and important published work of direct relevance. The basic premise is faulty, and Salm’s reasoning is often weak and shaped by his preconceptions. Overall, his central argument is archaeologically unsupportable.”18
But there is more. As it turns out, another discovery was made in ancient Nazareth a year after Salm’s book appeared. It is a house that dates to the days of Jesus. The discovery was reported by the Associated Press on December 21, 2009. I have personally written the principal archaeologist, Yardena Alexandre, the excavations director at the Israel Antiquity Authority, and she has confirmed the report. The house is located on the hill slopes. Pottery shards connected to the house range from roughly 100 BCE to 100 CE (that is, the days of Jesus). There is nothing in the house to suggest that the people inhabiting it over this time had any wealth: there are no glass items or imported products. The vessels are made of clay and chalk.
The AP story concludes that “the dwelling and older discoveries of nearby tombs in burial caves suggest that Nazareth was an out-of the-way hamlet of around 50 houses on a patch of about four acres…populated by Jews of modest means.” No wonder this place is never mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, Josephus, or the Talmud. It was far too small, poor, and insignificant. Most people had never heard of it, and those who had heard didn’t care. Even though it existed, this is not the place someone would make up as the hometown of the messiah. Jesus really came from there, as attested in multiple sources.
Again I reiterate the main point of my chapter: even if Jesus did not come from Nazareth, so what? The historicity of Jesus does not depend on whether Nazareth existed. In fact, it is not even related to the question. The existence (or rather, nonexistence) of Nazareth is another mythicist irrelevancy.
Claim 3: The Gospels Are Interpretive Paraphrases of the Old Testament
A NUMBER OF MYTHICISTS argue that the New Testament Gospels are little more than reworkings and paraphrases of passages of the Old Testament applied to an invented figure Jesus. Within Jewish tradition this approach to interpreting a text by paraphrasing, expanding, and reapplying it is called Midrash; if the text is a narrative rather than a set of laws, the Midrash is called haggadic (as opposed to halakhic). And so Robert Price has recently argued that “the whole gospel narrative is the product of haggadic Midrash upon the Old Testament.”19 The logic behind this assertion is that if the stories told about Jesus in the Gospels have been modeled on those of Old Testament figures, we are dealing with literary fictions, not historical facts, and that Jesus, as a result, is a made-up, fictional character.
Robert Price and Haggadic Midrash
There are significant problems with this view, as I will explain in a moment, but the ultimate problem again is one of scope and relevance. The fact that a story about a person has been shaped according to the mold of older stories and traditions does not prove that the core of the story is unhistorical. It simply shows how the story came to take its shape.
Take as an example the way the story of Jesus is told in the early chapters of the Gospel of Matthew. It has long been recognized that Matthew wants to portray Jesus as a “new Moses,” and so it is no surprise to find that the things that happen to Jesus in Matthew closely parallel the Old Testament traditions about Moses. Just as the ruler of the land, the Egyptian pharaoh, sought to destroy Moses as an infant (Exodus 1), so too the ruler of the land, the Jewish king Herod, sought to kill the infant Jesus (Matthew 2). Jesus and his family escape by going to Egypt, the land of Moses. Just as Moses brought the children of Israel out of Egypt to come to the Promised Land (Exodus 13–14), so too Jesus returned from Egypt to Israel. Matthew emphasizes the point by quoting the prophet Hosea’s declaration of the salvation of Israel: “Out of Egypt have I called my son” (Hosea 11:1, quoted in Matthew 2:16), only now the “son” is not the nation of Israel but its messiah, Jesus. To escape Egypt, the Israelites had to cross the Red Sea at the exodus. The first thing that happened to the adult Jesus is that he too entered and then came out of the water at his baptism (Matthew 3). The Israelites were in the wilderness for forty years being tested by God, and so too Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days to be tempted (Matthew 4). The Israelites traveled to Mount Sinai, where they were given the Law of Moses; Jesus immediately went up to a mountain and delivered his Sermon on the Mount, where he provided an interpretation of the laws of Moses (Matthew 5–7).
In point after point, Matthew stresses the close parallels between the life of Jesus and the life of Moses. And his reason for doing so is clear: for Matthew, Jesus is the new Moses, who provides the authoritative interpretation of the Law of God to the people who choose to follow him. This portrayal is distinct to Matthew: the other Gospels do not include all of these parallels (no king sets out to kill the child; there is no flight to Egypt, no Sermon on the Mount, and so forth). It is the way Matthew personally shaped the story, for reasons of his own.
But the fact that Matthew shaped the story in this way has nothing to do with the question of whether or not Jesus existed. What the shape of the story makes us suspect are the many details, molded in such a way as to allow Matthew to make a theological point about Jesus (the new Moses). The historical existence of the object of the story is a completely different issue.
That is because stories are always shaped, not just by the biblical authors, but by everyone who tells them. And so we in the modern world shape the stories we tell in a number of typical ways. We have the rags-to-riches story, the feel-good war story, the downfall-of-the-great-man story. The shape of the story is not related to the question of whether the figure in the story actually existed.
It would be easy, for example, to tell the story of the demise of Richard Nixon in terms of Shakespearian tragedy. Many of the facts fit the mold well enough, and the facts that don’t fit can easily be bypassed or altered to make them fit. Does our ability to shape the story in the way we want mean that Watergate didn’t happen or that Richard Nixon never lived? No, it just means that Nixon’s story is amenable to a certain kind of shape.
So too with Jesus. Some of the followers of Jesus believed he was the new spokesperson of God, like Moses of old, and so they told stories about him to make the connections with Moses obvious. Many other followers considered him to be a prophet of God and the Son of God. And so they naturally talked about him in the ways they talked about other Hebrew prophets, such as Elijah and Elisha and Jeremiah.
A good example of how this works appears in the story of Jesus and the widow of Nain in Luke 7:11–17, which is similar in many ways to a story told about the prophet Elijah and his encounter with another widow, this one from Zarephath, also in the northern part of the land of Israel (1 Kings 17:17–24). Elijah learns that the only son of the widow has died, and he tells the mourning mother to give him the corpse. He raises the child from the dead and returns him to his mother, who proclaims, “Now that I know that you are a man of God and that the world of the LORD in your mouth is truth.” So too Jesus comes to Nain and learns that the only son of a widow has died. He tells her not to mourn, he goes up to the corpse, and he raises the young man from the dead. And the crowd’s reaction is similar: “A great prophet has risen among us and God has looked favorably on his people.” The crowd, in other words, realizes that Jesus has just performed a feat like his predecessor Elijah, and that he too, therefore, is a great prophet of God.
When a story about Jesus so closely parallels a passage in the Old Testament, it is reasonable to assume that the storyteller—in this case, Luke or his source—has shaped the story in light of its scriptural parallel. But is it fair to say, as Price does, that “the whole gospel narrative” is nothing but a midrash on scripture? That is going too far, as can be seen by the fact that in a number of cases the examples Price cites are far from obvious. For instance, as in the story of the widow of Zarephath in 1 Kings 17, Price indicates that the story in which Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law (Mark 1:29–31) is drawn from 1 Kings 17:8–16, where Elijah provides miraculous quantities of food for the widow and her son in the time of famine. Unlike the earlier account I mentioned, however, here there are so many differences between the two episodes and so few similarities that it is hard to see how one was drawn from the other. The Elijah story is about a widow; Mark says nothing about a widow. The Elijah story is about the prophet feeding a starving family. The Jesus story is about him healing a woman who is ill, who then feeds him (not the other way around). The Elijah story is about a prophet helping a non-Jew; the Jesus story is about a Jew. It is hard to see that one of the stories is modeled on the other.
Or take a second story, Jesus healing the paralytic in Mark 2, which Price says is based on an episode in 2 Kings 1:2–17, Elijah healing King Ahaziah. Really? Simply read the stories for yourself. The differences are so pronounced that it is hard to see one as the source for the other.
The overarching problem is this: Price, as we saw earlier, was correct in stressing that historians deal not with certainties but only with probabilities. But he seems to have jettisoned this view when actually making historical judgments. In his view, virtually any story about Jesus with the remotest tie to a text of the Old Testament is written off as a midrash. But where are the probability judgments? To illustrate the problem, consider two stories, one that can plausibly be thought to have been made up to provide a parallel to a text in the Old Testament, and the other not.
The story of Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem has long been recognized by scholars as historically problematic. It is told in an especially interesting way in Matthew’s version (Matthew 21:1–11). Near the end of his life Jesus decides to make his fateful trip to Jerusalem; he instructs his disciples to find a donkey so that he can ride into town. In fact, in Matthew, the disciples are instructed to find two animals, a donkey and its colt. They bring the animals to Jesus, and he straddles the two and rides into Jerusalem to the acclamation of the crowds, who spread cloaks and branches on the road before him, shouting, “Hosanna to the son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” We are told that this extraordinary entrance scene was to fulfill a prophecy of scripture: “Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey,” a quotation from the Old Testament prophet Zechariah (9:9).
In the other Gospels, when Jesus rides into town it is only on one animal, a donkey. Matthew has read the prophecy in Zechariah in an overly literalistic way, not realizing the poetic character of the passage. In the Hebrew Bible, poetry is written in sense lines, in which the statement of the first line eit
her is contrasted with a statement in the second line or, instead, is restated in the second line in different words. Zechariah described the arrival of the holy one in two different ways in the two lines: he would come on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey. This is a standard form of Hebrew poetry. But Matthew read the passage literally, thinking that Zechariah was imagining two different animals (a donkey and a colt), and so when he wanted Jesus to fulfill this prophecy, he had him straddling the two animals, a rather uncomfortable and somewhat undignified entrance into the city, one might think.
This entire scene is built around the fulfillment of a prophecy, which may make it historically suspect. But there are other reasons for doubting that it happened the way Matthew describes it. If it is true that the crowds were shouting that Jesus was the messiah now arriving in the holy city, why didn’t the authorities immediately take notice and have him arrested both for causing a disturbance and for claiming to be the Jewish king (when only Rome could appoint the king)? Instead, according to Matthew and the other Gospels, Jesus spent an unmolested week in Jerusalem and only then was arrested and put on trial. But it defies belief that the Roman authorities who were in town precisely in order to prevent any mob actions or uprisings would have failed to intervene if the crowds shouted in acclamation for a new ruler arriving in town.
Jesus almost certainly came to Jerusalem, as we will see later, but not like this. The story has been made up (or adopted) in order to show that he fulfilled the prophecy of Zechariah.
Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth Page 20
