Tag: god

Historical evidence in favor of Christian claims

I read ahead on what I am writing about on my Jesus Reconstructed website, so the interesting things I come across have not all reached my pages yet. In this post I want to share three pieces of evidence that strike me as favoring some of the claims of Christianity.

1. Jesus as a real human being. T.S. Schmidt’s new book Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ (click for a free copy) makes a very strong case for the authenticity of the famous Testimonium Flavianum passage in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews. In Schmidt’s translation the passage is more ambivalent about Jesus than in other translations, and Josephus’ references to Jesus’ “mighty” words and deeds, the resurrection, and the identification of him as the Christ could have been derived from Christian sources. But as Josephus knew some of the chief priests alive in the early 1st century, or knew their immediate descendants, he would have been in a position to know if the crucifixion actually happened. Schmidt’s case, plus references to James the brother of Jesus by both Josephus and Paul, have persuaded me that the historical evidence favors the reality of Jesus as an actual human being and not, as the mythicists argue, a figure known only through visions.

2. Jesus’ self-conception. Many scholars argue that high claims for the role of Jesus in history were developed sometime after the resurrection reports, and that Jesus in his lifetime did not see himself as more than a prophet and rabbi (a teacher of the correct interpretation of the Jewish laws). Yet in Paul’s account of the last supper, Jesus said he was instituting a “new covenant.” I have not been able to find evidence of manuscript variations in his use of this phrase. This is a pretty high claim, as the last covenant God made was through Moses on Mount Sinai. Jesus is claiming that the Passover meal was now, for his disciples, a remembrance of a new covenant made by the sacrifice of his body and blood, not a remembrance of the old covenant given through Moses. This quote is evidence that Jesus himself saw his death as instituting a new phase in God’s plan for humanity.

3. The resurrection. Although I find the gospel accounts of appearances of the risen Jesus unconvincing as historical evidence, the appearances referred to in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians carry weight as reports derived from witnesses. Lately commentators have favored explanations comparing these reports to other types of visions of deceased people, such as grief visions by survivors (Peter/Cephas and James would be candidates for this), or visions induced by mystical practices (Paul is the candidate here). These comparisons are meant to show that the visions of the risen Jesus were not unique. It is true that there are contemporary reports of realistic appearances by deceased people, including appearances to multiple people at the same time and appearances to both those who knew and did not know the departed in their lifetime. However, to my knowledge there are no other examples of appearances of the same dead person to multiple individuals and groups (especially a group as large as 500 people) at different times. This aspect seems unique. It is also far from clear if all of the contemporary incidents can be explained as purely psychological rather than actual communications from a dead person. In some reports the deceased communicates information that otherwise could not have been know to the recipient. (I experienced this myself in a dream of a former colleague who informed me he had died.) From a historical standpoint, the events behind the appearance reports in Paul’s passage remain an unsolved mystery.

As I consider all this, I find myself leaning toward the position that the historical evidence shows at least these three things: Jesus was a real person, he saw his death as instituting a new covenant with God, and the reports of his appearances after his death remain an unsolved mystery. I am surprised at this, not because I had a firm opinion about traditional Christian claims one way or the other, but because I expected the historical evidence to be inconclusive about these particular topics. Of course the Christian claims are not proven by any of this, but it does provide a historical basis for some apologetic arguments.

I don’t mind moving closer to traditional Christianity (I still have a ways to go on some issues), but I am left with a further dilemma. Which church would I join? So far I see them all as problematic. We’ll see where all this takes me.

Elaine Pagels’ new book; plus another argument vs. “mythicism”

Over the last couple of days I tore through Elaine Pagels’ new book, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus. Pagels is well known for her work on early Christianity and especially her work on the Gnostic Gospels found at Nag Hammadi. The new book is meant as a culmination of her reflections about Jesus, both as a scholar and as a human being long interested in spirituality and religion. I always enjoy reading about someone else’s spiritual journey and how it may have points of intersection with mine. Miracles and Wonder is an easy read, aimed more at the general public than at scholars.

Nothing in the book changed my mind about Jesus as an historical figure, although there was some information I wasn’t aware of. I will have to go through it again more carefully and take note of points of special interest. I did notice she still talks about the Christian “communities” that the writers of the gospels were supposedly addressing, without mentioning new research such as that of Robyn Faith Walsh showing how the authors more likely were addressing a literate audience curious about Christians. Walsh did not appear in her bibliography.

I was also surprised to see her name check the late Jane Schaberg, a former professor of mine at the University of Detroit when I was an undergrad majoring in Religious Studies. Pagels relates how she and other scholars of early Christianity ignored Schaberg’s 1987 book The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives, because they assumed the book was a “hostile polemic,” but that she regrets now that hasty assumption. I read the book about twenty years ago, during an earlier phase of my periodic immersion in questions on the historical Jesus, and found it, as I expected, to be a work of careful scholarship. I know from Schaberg, who I became friends with, that she received hate mail and death threats from people on account of that book.

So I recommend Pagels’ book as worth reading as a kind of combined spiritual autobiography and summary of widespread views among scholars about Jesus from an historical perspective. It doesn’t break any new ground or go very deeply into any topic, but is of course well informed on them.

On a different topic, I added another point to my list of reasons for rejecting mythicism and holding that Jesus was a real person. This is that Paul refers to Jesus as “born of a woman” and as a Jewish man “according to the flesh.” He certainly sounds like he thinks Jesus was a human being. I also rearranged the order of my several reasons to put what are probably the stronger arguments first.

Alan