Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth
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Was Jesus Crucified in the Spiritual Realm Rather Than on Earth?
ONE OF THE STAUNCHEST defenders of a mythicist view of Christ, Earl Doherty, maintains that the apostle Paul thinks that Jesus was crucified, not here on earth by the Romans, but in the spiritual realm by demonic powers. In advancing this thesis, Doherty places himself in an ironic position that characterizes many of his mythicist colleagues. He quotes professional scholars at length when their views prove useful for developing aspects of his argument, but he fails to point out that not a single one of these scholars agrees with his overarching thesis. The idea that Jesus was crucified in the spiritual realm is not a view set forth by Paul. It is a view invented by Doherty.
It is rather difficult to respond to a book like Doherty’s recent massive tome, Jesus: Neither God nor Man. It is an 800-page book that is filled with so many unguarded and undocumented statements and claims, and so many misstatements of fact, that it would take a 2,400-page book to deal with all the problems. His major theses are set forth in a brief preface that lists “The Twelve Pieces of the Jesus Puzzle.” Many of the claims are problematic, and I have dealt with a number of them already. One particular piece is especially unconvincing: in Doherty’s view, Paul (and other early Christians) believed that the “Son of God had undergone a redeeming ‘blood’ sacrifice” not in this world but in a spiritual realm above it.25
Doherty’s reason for this remarkable statement involves what he calls “the ancients’ view of the universe” (was there one such view?). According to Doherty, authors who were influenced by Plato’s way of thinking and by the mythology of the ancient Near East believed that there was a heavenly realm that had its counterpart here on earth. “Genuine” reality existed, not here in this world, but in that other realm. This view of things was especially true, Doherty avers, in the mystery cults, which Doherty claims provided “the predominant form of popular religion in this period.”26 (This latter claim, by the way, is simply not true. Most religious pagans were not devotees of mystery cults.)
In the first edition of Doherty’s book, he claimed that it was in this higher realm that the key divine events of the mysteries transpired; it was there, for example, that Attis had been castrated, that Osiris had been dismembered, and that Mithras had slain the bull.27 In his second edition he admits that in fact we do not know if that is true and that we do not have any reflections on such things by any of the cult devotees themselves since we don’t have a single writing from any of the adherents of the ancient mystery cults. Yet he still insists that philosophers under the influence of Plato—such as Plutarch, whom we have met—certainly interpreted things this way.
In any event, in both editions of his book Doherty claims that the myths of the mystery cults and of Christianity took place in this upper, spiritual realm. In particular, Christ was crucified up there, by the demons, not down here, by humans. As he states, “The essential element of The Jesus Puzzle interpretation of early cultic Christ belief, and the one which has proven the most difficult for the modern mind to comprehend and accept, is that Paul’s Christ Jesus was an entirely supernatural figure, crucified in the lower heavens at the hands of the demons spirits.”28 Like Wells before him, Doherty refuses to allow that 1 Thessalonians—which explicitly says that the Jews (or the Judeans) were the ones responsible for the death of Jesus—can be used as evidence of Paul’s view: it is, he insists, an insertion into Paul’s writings, not from the apostle himself. (Here we find, again, textual studies driven by convenience: if a passage contradicts your views, simply claim that it was not actually written by the author.) More telling for him is the passage I already quoted above from 1 Corinthians 2:6–8, which indicates that the “rulers of this age” were the ones who “crucified the Lord of glory.” For Doherty these are obviously not human rulers but demonic forces. Thus for Paul and other early Christians, Christ was not a human crucified on earth but a divine being crucified in the divine realm.
But is this really what Paul thought—the Paul who knew Jesus’s own brother and his closest disciple Peter, who learned of traditions of Jesus just a year or two after Jesus’s death? Is this why Paul persecuted the Christians—not for saying the (earthly) messiah was crucified by the Romans but for saying that some kind of spiritual being was killed in heaven by demons? And why exactly was that so offensive to Paul? Why would it drive him to destroy the new faith, as he himself says in Galatians 1 that he did?
There are a host of reasons for calling Doherty’s view into serious question. To begin with, how can he claim to have uncovered “the” view of the world held by “the” ancients, a view that involved an upper world where the true reality resides and this lower world, which is a mere reflection of it? How, in fact, can we talk about “the” view of the world in antiquity? Ancient views of the world were extremely complex and varied, just as today’s views are. Would anyone claim that Appalachian snake handlers and postmodernist literary critics all have the same view of the world? Or that Primitive Baptists, high-church Episcopalians, Mormons, atheists, and pagans do? Or Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists? Or Marxists and capitalists? That all of these groups have “the” modern view of the world? To talk about “the” view of the world in any century is far too simplistic and naive.
It is true that Plato and his followers had a certain view of reality where, roughly speaking, this material world is but a reflection of the world of “forms.” But Platonism was simply one of the ancient philosophies popular at the time of Christianity. Also popular was Stoicism, with a completely different, nondualistic sense of the world; Stoicism lacked the notion that this realm is an imitation of the higher realm. So too did Epicureanism, which thought in fairly modern fashion that the material world is all there is. Why should we assume that the mystery cults were influenced by just one of these philosophies? Or for that matter by any of them? What evidence does Doherty cite to show that mystery religions were at heart Platonic? Precisely none.
When, in his second edition, Doherty admits that we do not know what the followers of the mystery cults thought, he is absolutely correct. We do not know. But he then asserts that they thought like the later Platonist Plutarch. How can he have it both ways? Either we know how they thought or we do not. And it is highly unlikely that adherents of the mystery cults (even if we could lump them all together) thought like one of the greatest intellectuals of their day (Plutarch). Very rarely do common people think about the world the way upper-class, highly educated, elite philosophers do. Would you say that your understanding of how language works matches the views of Wittgenstein? Or that your understanding of political power is that of Foucault?
In the case of someone like Plutarch there is, in fact, convincing counterevidence. Philosophers like Plutarch commonly took on the task of explaining away popular beliefs by allegorizing them, to show that despite what average people naively believed, for example, about the gods and the myths told about them, these tales held deeper philosophical truths. The entire enterprise of philosophical reflection on ancient mythology was rooted precisely in the widely accepted fact that common people did not look at the world, or its myths, in the same way the philosophers did. Elite philosophers tried to show that the myths accepted by others were emblematic of deeper spiritual truths.
I hardly need to emphasize again that the early followers of Jesus were not elite philosophers. They were by and large common people. Not even Paul was philosophically trained. To be sure, as a literate person he was far better educated than most Christians of his day. But he was no Plutarch. His worldview was not principally dependent on Plato. It was dependent on the Jewish traditions, as these were mediated through the Hebrew scriptures. And the Hebrew scriptures certainly did not discount the events that transpire here on earth among very real humans. For the writers of the Hebrew Bible, the acts of God did not transpire in some kind of ethereal realm above us all. They happened here on earth and were deeply rooted in daily, historical, real human experience. In the same way, the early Christian
s, including Paul, thought of Jesus crucified the way they thought of other prophets who had suffered. He was crucified here on earth, by humans.
In short, since we know almost nothing about what adherents of the mystery cults believed, we simply cannot assume that they thought of the world like Plutarch and other upper-crust elite philosophers. One thing that we do know about them, however, is where they were located and thus, to some extent, where they exerted significant influence. We know this from the archaeological record they have left behind. Among all our archaeological findings, there is none that suggests that pagan mystery cults exerted any influence on Aramaic-speaking rural Palestinian Judaism in the 20s and 30s of the first century. And this is the milieu out of which faith in Jesus the crucified messiah, as persecuted and then embraced by Paul, emerged.
There are no grounds for assuming that Paul, whose views of Jesus were taken over from the Palestinian Jewish Christians who preceded him, held a radically different view of Jesus from his predecessors. Paul tells us about his background. He was raised a highly religious Jew, and he was a Pharisee. Were Pharisaic Jews influenced by the mystery cults? Did they spend their days plumbing the depths of the myths about Attis and Osiris? Did they look deeply into the mysteries of Isis and Mithras? It is an easy question to answer. These mystery cults are never mentioned by Paul or by any other Christian author of the first hundred years of the church. There is not a stitch of evidence to suggest that mystery cults played any role whatever in the views of the Pharisees or, for that matter, in the views of any Jewish group of the first century: the Sadducees, the Essenes (who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls), the revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow the Romans, the apocalyptic prophets like John the Baptist (and their followers), or the common people. So not only do we not know whether mystery cults were influenced by “the” (alleged) ancient view of the world—whatever that might be—there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that these cults played the least role in the development of early views of Jesus. Rather, we have plenty of reasons, based on our early Jewish sources, that just the opposite was the case.
That in no small part is why not a single early Christian source supports Doherty’s claim that Paul and those before him thought of Jesus as a spiritual, not a human, being who was executed in the spiritual, not the human, sphere. That is not the view of Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John. It is not the view of any of the written sources of any of these Gospels, for example, M and L. It is not the view of any of the oral traditions that later made their way into these Gospels. And it is not the view of the epistles of the New Testament, including Hebrews—the one book of the New Testament that may well reflect some Platonic influence—which unabashedly stresses that Christ “came into the world” (10:5), declares that he made a bloody sacrifice in this world (10:12), and says that “in the days of his flesh he offered up prayers and petitions to the one who was able to save him from death, with strong cries and tears” (5:7). This is not heavenly but earthly suffering. Or consider the book of 1 John, which is quite emphatic not only that Jesus shed his blood (1:7) as an “expiation for sins” (2:2) but also that he was a real, fleshly human being who could be heard, seen, felt, and handled when he was “manifested” here on earth (1:1–3).
So too with Paul. Paul indicates that Jesus was born (in this world) of a woman and as a Jew (Galatians 4:4); he repeatedly stresses that Jesus experienced a real bloody death (for example, Romans 3) and that he was bodily raised from the dead (1 Corinthians 15). This resurrection was not in the heavenly realm for Paul. It was here on earth. That is why Jesus appeared, not to heavenly beings in the upper realm, but to human beings in this one (1 Corinthians 15:5–8). If his resurrection took place here on earth, where was his crucifixion? Paul leaves little doubt about that. Jesus had a last meal with his disciples on the “night” in which he was handed over to his fate. Do they have nights in the spiritual realm? This is a description of something that happened on earth. But even more, Paul stresses that Jesus was buried between his death and his (earthly) resurrection. Surely he means he was buried in a tomb, and that would be here on earth.
The early Christians, Paul included, had a thoroughly apocalyptic understanding of the world, inherited from a Jewish worldview attested long before them, in which this created order would be transformed by the power of God when he brought his kingdom here, to this earth. The kingdom was not an ethereal place in some spiritual realm. For apocalypticists—from the Jewish author of the famous “War Scroll” discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Christian author of the book of Revelation—the future kingdom would be earthly, through and through (Revelation 20–21). Paul and others expected Jesus to return from heaven, into this very realm where we dwell now (1 Thessalonians 4–5), leading to the transformation of both us and the world (1 Corinthians 15). Paul thought Christ was to “return” here because he had “left” here. This is where he was born, lived, died, and was raised. It all happened here on earth, not in some other celestial realm. Jesus was killed by humans. The forces of evil may have ultimately engineered this death (although, actually, Paul says God did); the demons (whom Paul never mentions) may have inspired the authorities to do the dirty deed, but it was they who did it.
In sum, there is no evidence to support Doherty’s contention that for Paul and the Christians before him Jesus’s death took place in the spiritual rather than the earthly world, effected by demons instead of humans. But there are many other reasons to reject this view.
Did Mark, Our First Gospel, Invent the Idea of a Historical Person, Jesus?
WE HAVE SEEN THAT most mythicists maintain that the early Christians believed in a divine Christ modeled on pagan dying-rising gods or, in the case of G. A. Wells, in a Christ who was Wisdom made incarnate. It is widely thought among those who hold such views that the Jesus of the Gospel tradition—the Jewish teacher and prophet of Galilee who did miracles and then was crucified by the Romans—is an invention of our first Gospel, Mark. The later Gospels then derived their views, and many of their stories, from him. This view is suggested in several places by Wells29 and is stated quite definitively by Doherty: “All the Gospels derive their basic story of Jesus of Nazareth from one source: the Gospel of Mark, the first one composed. Subsequent evangelists reworked Mark in their own interests and added new material.”30 Throughout this study I have addressed this issue piecemeal in the context of other discussions. Here I would like to tackle it head-on to show that it is almost certainly not correct.
To begin with, there are solid reasons for doubting that the Gospel of John is based on Mark or on either of the other two earlier Gospels, even though the matter is debated among scholars.31 But the reality is that most of the stories told about Jesus in the synoptic Gospels are missing from John, just as most of John’s stories, including his accounts of Jesus’s teachings, are missing from the synoptics. When they do tell the same stories (for example, the cleansing of the Temple, the betrayal of Judas, the trial before Pilate, the crucifixion and resurrection narratives) they do so in different language (without verbatim overlaps) and with radically different conceptions.32 It is simplest to assume that John had his own sources for his accounts. And I should stress yet again that even if John did know the earlier Gospels, they did not provide him with most of his stories about Jesus as these, generally, are not found in those other books.
I should stress as well that some of these sources lying behind John stem from the early years of the Jesus movement, as is evident in the fact that some of them still betray their roots in Aramaic-speaking circles of Palestine. This puts them (some of them) in the early days of the movement, decades before Mark was written.33
Whatever one decides about the Gospel of John, it is clear that Matthew and Luke used narratives of Jesus’s life and death that were independent of Mark. The sources I have called M and L contain accounts, not only of Jesus’s words and deeds but also of his Passion, that differ from those in Mark. Even more telling, Luke explicitly informs us that “many
” authors before him had produced accounts of the things Jesus said, did, and experienced. Mark by itself is not “many.” Other Gospels, in addition to Mark, were produced. It is regrettable that some of Luke’s other predecessors did not survive, but there is no reason to think he is lying when he says that he knows about them. And when he summarizes his Gospel at the beginning of his second volume, the book of Acts, it is clear that in his mind a full narrative of “the things accomplished among us” (as he describes the accounts of his predecessors in Luke 1:1) include not only what Jesus said and did but also the accounts of his Passion, up to the narrative of the ascension (Acts 1:1–4). Mark did not make up this kind of narrative. There were others. Luke writes his simply because he thinks he can do a better job.
In addition, Luke indicates that these kinds of narratives were based on what was being told by “eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” (1:2). In other words, Luke admits that even before there were written accounts of Jesus’s life and death, these stories were being passed along orally, from the very beginning. The apostle Paul knew several of the people who passed along such stories, as we have seen, as he mentions traditions that he inherited from believers before him (1 Corinthians 11:22–24; 15:3–5) and names several of Jesus’s close intimates as personal acquaintances: the disciples Cephas and John, along with Jesus’s brother James.