Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth
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But what struck me most about the meeting was precisely how religious it was. Every year I attend meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, conferences on early Christian studies, and the like. I have never, in my recollection, been to a meeting that was so full of talk about personal religion as the American Humanist Association, a group dedicated to life without religion.
I suppose there was so much talk about religious belief because it is almost impossible in our society to talk about meaning and fulfillment without reference to religion, and humanists feel a need to set themselves over against that dominant discourse. And so at their annual meetings one finds workshops and sessions dealing with such matters as how to talk to one’s family when one has left the faith, how to deal with religion in the schools (school prayer, creationism, and so forth), how to engage in the practice of meditation outside religious structures (for example, Buddhist), and so on. All of these situate humanism in relation to something else, as is clear as well when humanists describe their personal beliefs in negative terms: “agnosticism” (one who does not know whether there is a God) or “atheism” (one who does not believe in God). Even the association’s self-description on their website involves a contrast with others in society: “Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism and other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.”
As surprised as I was at the meeting of humanists to hear so much about religion, what I was not surprised to learn was that a good number of the people there—at least the ones I talked to—are either mythicists or are leaning toward mythicism. Their favorite authors are such figures as Robert Price, Earl Doherty, and some of the others I have mentioned in these pages. And many of them were completely taken aback when they learned that I have a different view, that I think that there certainly was a Jesus of Nazareth who existed in history, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and about whom we can say a good deal as a historical figure.
The Problem of the Historical Jesus
IN MY VIEW MYTHICISTS are, somewhat ironically, doing a disservice to the humanists for whom they are writing. By staking out a position that is accepted by almost no one else, they open themselves up to mockery and to charges of intellectual dishonesty. But to accomplish their goals (about which I will say more in a moment), this is completely unnecessary. Of course, for mythicists, it goes without saying, belief in Jesus is a problem. But the real problem with Jesus is not that he is a myth invented by early Christians—that is, that he never appeared as a real figure on the stage of history. The problem with Jesus is just the opposite. As Albert Schweitzer realized long ago, the problem with the historical Jesus is that he was far too historical.
Most televangelists, popular Christian preacher icons, and heads of those corporations that we call megachurches share an unreflective modern view of Jesus—that he translates easily and almost automatically into a modern idiom. The fact is, however, that Jesus was not a person of the twenty-first century who spoke the language of contemporary Christian America (or England or Germany or anywhere else). Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and for our own purposes.
Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world. He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise. He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life. He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy. He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of social security, food stamps, welfare, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy), or the welfare state. So far as we know, he expressed no opinion on the ethical issues that plague us today: abortion and reproductive rights, gay marriage, euthanasia, or bombing Iraq. His world was not ours, his concerns were not ours, and—most striking of all—his beliefs were not ours.
Jesus was a first-century Jew, and when we try to make him into a twenty-first-century American we distort everything he was and everything he stood for. Jesus himself was a complete supernaturalist. He believed in the Devil and demons and the forces of evil at work in this world. He knew little—possibly almost nothing—about the workings of the Roman Empire. But what little he knew, he considered evil. He may have considered all government evil unless it was a (future) theocracy to be run by God himself through his messiah. He certainly was no proponent of our political views, whatever our views happen to be.
These forces of evil were asserting their control over the world with increasing vehemence. But Jesus thought that God would soon intervene and destroy them all to bring in his good kingdom on earth. This would not come from human effort—expanding democracy, building up national defense, improving the educational system, winning the war on drugs, and so on. Human effort counted for nothing. It would come from God, when he sent a cosmic judge to destroy the present order and to establish God’s kingdom here on earth. This was no metaphor for Jesus. He believed it was going to happen. And happen soon. Within a few years.
Jesus was mistaken about that. He was mistaken about a lot of things. People don’t want to hear that, but it’s true. Jesus was a man of his own time. And just as all men and women of their own time are wrong about so many things, so too was Jesus. And so too are we.
The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew. When we create him anew we no longer have the Jesus of history but the Jesus of our own imagination, a monstrous invention created to serve our own purposes. But Jesus is not so easily moved and changed. He is powerfully resistant. He remains always in his own time. As Jesus fads come and go, as new Jesuses come to be invented and then pass away, as newer Jesuses come to take the place of the old, the real, historical Jesus continues to exist, back there in the past, the apocalyptic prophet who expected that a cataclysmic break would occur within his generation when God would destroy the forces of evil, bring in his kingdom, and install Jesus himself on the throne. This is the historical Jesus. And he is obviously far too historical for modern tastes. That is why so many Christians today try to reform him.
The Mythicist Agenda
IN MY VIEW HUMANISTS, agnostics, atheists, mythicists, and anyone else who does not advocate belief in Jesus would be better served to stress that the Jesus of history is not the Jesus of modern Christianity than to insist—wrongly and counterproductively—that Jesus never existed. Jesus did exist. He simply was not the person that most modern believers today think he was.
Why then do mythicists claim he did not exist? I am not asking what evidence mythicists offer for Jesus’s nonexistence. I have already considered the evidence and shown why it is problematic. I am asking the deeper question: What is driving the mythicists’ agenda? Why do they work so hard at showing that Jesus never really lived? I do not have a definitive answer to that question, but I do have a guess.
It is no accident that virtually all mythicists (in fact, all of them, to my knowledge) are either atheists or agnostics. The ones I know anything about are quite virulently, even militantly, atheist. On the surface that may make sense: who else would be invested in showing Jesus never existed? But when you think about it for a moment, it is not entirely logical. Whether or not Jesus existed is completely irrelevant to the question of whether God exists. So why would virulent atheists (or agnostics) be so invested in showing that Jesus did not exist?
It is important to realize the obvious fact that the mythicists all live in a Christian world for which Christianity is the religion of choice for the vast bulk of the population. Of course we have large numbers of Jews and Muslims among us and scattered Buddhists, Hindus, and other major faith tradi
tions in our culture. But by and large the people we meet who are avidly religious are Christian. And mythicists are avidly antireligious. To debunk religion, then, one needs to undermine specifically the Christian form of religion. And what easier way is there to undermine Christianity than to claim that the figure at the heart of Christian worship and devotion never even existed but was invented, made up, created? If Christianity is based on Jesus, and Jesus never existed, where does that leave the religion of billions of the world’s population? It leaves it in total shambles, at least in the thinking of the mythicists. (One could easily argue that Christianity would survive quite well without a historical figure of Jesus, but that would be a different story and a different book.)
What this means is that, ironically, just as the secular humanists spend so much time at their annual meetings talking about religion, so too the mythicists who are so intent on showing that the historical Jesus never existed are not being driven by a historical concern. Their agenda is religious, and they are complicit in a religious ideology. They are not doing history; they are doing theology.
To be sure, they are doing their theology in order to oppose traditional religion. But the opposition is driven not by historical concerns but by religious ones.
But why would mythicists be so violently opposed to traditional religion? My sense is that it is because they believe that historic Christianity—the form of religion best known in the mythicists’ environment—has done and continues to do more harm than good in the world. They look at our educational systems and see fervent Christians working hard to promote ignorance over knowledge, for example, in the insistence that evolution is merely a theory and that creationism should be taught in the schools. They look at our society and see what incredible damage religion has done to human lives: from the sponsorship of slavery to the refusal to grant women reproductive rights to the denial of the possibility of gay love and marriage. They look at the political scene and see what awful political power the religious right yields: from imposing certain sets of religious beliefs on our society or in our schools to electing only those political figures who support certain religious agendas, no matter how hateful they may be toward other (poor, or non-American) human beings and how ignorant they may be about the world at large.
I have to admit that I have a good deal of sympathy with these concerns. But I am also a historian who thinks that it is important not to promote revisionist versions of the past for ideological reasons rooted in nonhistorical agendas. The writing of history should be done by following strict historical protocols. It is not simply a means of promoting a set of personal likes and dislikes.
I should also say that even though I happen to share some of the biases of many of the mythicists when it comes to harm that has been done over the years in the name of Christ (not just in crusades and inquisitions, but in our own society, right here, right now), I also see that a tremendous amount of good has been done in his name, and continues to be done, by well-meaning and hardworking Christian men and women who do untold good in the world on both massive and individual scales.
But neither issue—the good done in the name of Christ or the evil—is of any relevance to me as a historian when I try to reconstruct what actually happened in the past. I refuse to sacrifice the past in order to promote the worthy cause of my own social and political agendas. No one else should either. Jesus did exist, whether we like it or not.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I HAVE GIVEN HERE TWO separate bibliographies that may be useful for the nonprofessional: one of mythicist literature, the other of scholarship on the historical Jesus.
Mythicist Literature
This list is not meant to be exhaustive. Instead, it comprises some of the best-known and most influential mythicist literature produced, especially (but not exclusively) in recent years. I have included only books in English.
Acharya, S (a.k.a. D. M. Murdock). The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold. Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited, 1999.
Carrier, Richard. Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn’t Need a Miracle to Succeed. N.p.: Lulu Press, 2009.
Doherty, Earl. Jesus: Neither God nor Man: The Case for a Mythical Jesus. Ottawa, ON: Age of Reason Publications, 2009.
———. The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Ottawa, ON: Age of Reason Publications, 1999.
Drews, Arthur. The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus Christ. Trans. Joseph McCabe. London: Watts & Co., 1912.
Freke, Timothy, and Peter Gandy. The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999.
Graves, Kersey. The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors: Christianity Before Christ. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007. First published in 1875.
Harpur, Tom. The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light. New York: Walker & Co., 2004.
Hoffmann, R. Joseph, ed. Sources of the Jesus Tradition: Separating History from Myth. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010.
Jackson, John G. Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth. Austin: American Atheist Press, 1988. First published in 1941.
Leidner, Harold. The Fabrication of the Christ Myth. Tampa, FL: Survey Books, 2000.
Price, Robert. The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems. Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011.
———. The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition? Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003.
———. Jesus Is Dead. Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2007.
Robertson, Archibald. Jesus: Myth or History? London: Watts & Co., 1946.
Robertson, John M. Christianity and Mythology. London: Watts & Co., 1910.
———. Jesus and Judas: A Textual and Historical Investigation. London: Watts & Co., 1927.
———. The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory. London: Watts & Co., 1917.
Salm, René. The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus. Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2008.
Thompson, Thomas L. The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Wells, George A. Cutting Jesus Down to Size: What Higher Criticism Has Achieved and Where It Leaves Christianity. Chicago: Open Court Press, 2009.
———. Did Jesus Exist? 2nd ed. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986. First published in 1975.
———. The Historical Evidence for Jesus. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988.
———. “Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus?” Free Inquiry 31 (2011): 19–25.
———. The Jesus Legend. Peru, IL: Carus, 1996.
———. The Jesus Myth. Chicago: Open Court, 1999.
Zindler, Frank R. Through Atheist Eyes: Scenes from a World That Won’t Reason. Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2011.
Studies of the Historical Jesus (and Related Topics)
The following list is highly selective. I’ve included only a few of the books that in my opinion are among the most important and interesting studies of the past thirty or forty years that are accessible to nonspecialists. For a full annotated bibliography, which is now fifteen years old, see Craig A. Evans, Life of Jesus Research: An Annotated Bibliography, rev. ed., New Testament Tools and Studies 24 (Leiden: Brill, 1996). Evans’s bibliography includes 2045 entries of significant books and articles—and even this is nowhere near exhaustive.
Allison, Dale. Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998.
Borg, Marcus J. Conflict, Holiness, and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus. New York: E. Mellen Press, 1984.
———. Jesus, the New Vision: The Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987.
Brandon, S. G. F. Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity. New York: Scribner, 1967.
Charlesworth, James. Jesus Within Judaism: New Light from Exciting Archaeological Discoveries. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
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ssan, John Dominic. The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991.
———. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994.
———. Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1995.
Downing, F. Gerald. Christ and the Cynics: Jesus and Other Radical Preachers in First-Century Tradition. Sheffield, Eng.: JSOT Press, 1988.
Ehrman, Bart D. Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999.
———. The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. 5th edition. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011.
Fredriksen, Paula. From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1988.
———. Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews. New York: Vintage, 1999.
Funk, Robert W. Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996.
Funk, Robert W., and the Jesus Seminar. The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998.
Funk, Robert W., Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar. The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. New York: Macmillan, 1993.