Tag: mythicism

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.

Was There a Passion Narrative Before Mark’s?

I recently took down my page about the crucifixion of Jesus because I decided I should not take the historicity of Jesus for granted in my writings on this website. In these times that is something that needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed, and I am looking into how persuasive a case can be made.

But if you had read that page, you may remember that I thought it likely that “Mark,” the author of the earliest gospel (that we know of), drew upon an oral tradition or maybe a written account of the events from Jesus’ arrival in his final visit to Jerusalem through his crucifixion. Subsequent to examining the gospel accounts and writing up my findings, I obtained a book on the subject by the well-regarded Biblical scholar Raymond Brown. This provoked some new thoughts that I want to share with you now that I’ve finished reading it.

The book is thirty years old, and so does not incorporate more recent research, but it is highly detailed and well versed in the research up to that time. Brown had a sterling reputation as a rigorous scholar. He was also a Catholic priest, and although often criticized for questioning the historical basis of certain claims of the the church, he was not one to question the real existence of Jesus or the central dogmas of Christianity. For these reasons I found what he had to say in this book especially interesting.

Much of the book was a line by line comparison and commentary on latter parts of the passion accounts in four canonical gospels and the less-known Gospel of Peter. I confess I skimmed much of that material. But as the second of his two volumes it also included several appendixes with studies of particular aspects of the topic. It was a couple of these that I found revealing.

The first is Appendix VII, “The Old Testament Background of the Passion Narratives.” In this section Brown gives a thorough listing of every passage in the Jewish scriptures that the gospel passion narratives seem to refer to. There are dozens of them, which raises the question of whether Mark’s narrative was created from what he regarded as prophecies in the Jewish scriptures rather than any pre-existing oral or written account of the passion events. Brown rejected the theory that Mark based his narrative purely on an imaginative reflection on the Jewish scriptures. But he conceded that those scriptures “influenced heavily early Christian presentation of the passion” in order to expand “the preaching outline into dramatic narratives.” In other words, Mark probably knew a basic outline of what happened to Jesus at the end of his life but created much of what he wrote about it as an exegesis of those scriptural passages.

The second is Appendix IX, “The Question of a PreMarkan Passion Narrative.” This was written by Martin L. Soards and edited by Brown for this book. Soards goes thr0ugh a long list of scholars who examined the question of whether there was a pre-existing passion narrative that Mark drew on, examining their methods and findings. He concludes that there was such a narrative, but that discovering what was in it “may finally be an impossible” task. His reason for thinking there was one is based entirely on Mark’s mention of “Judas, one of the Twelve,” in his passion account. Soards asks why Mark would feel it necessary to identify Judas when he had already brought up Judas earlier in his gospel. His answer is that Mark must have relied on an earlier account in which this was the first mention of Judas. That sounds pretty tenuous to me.

What was striking was that Brown, who fully accepted the historicity of Jesus, indicated by publishing these two appendices that much (most?) of Mark’s account of the passion events was creative exegesis and that it was near impossible to recover the historical events behind it. This back in 1994, long before any mythicist arguments about the historical Jesus had become widely known. It reinforces my belief that I was correct in deleting several of my pages so that I can avoid assuming Jesus’ historicity before taking a more careful look at the problem.

Thanks for joining me on this journey! As always, I welcome your comments on this blog post.

Richard Carrier’s new mythicist book about the historical Jesus

I finished reading Richard Carrier’s new book, “The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus,” a couple of days ago. It did change my mind about the relative merits of the theory Jesus was only seen in visions versus the theory that Jesus was a real person. The evidence I thought was the strongest for the latter theory, passages in the letters of Paul suggesting he thought of Jesus as historical, is more ambiguous than I believed. The passages were those indicating Jesus was “born of a woman, born under the law” (Galatians 4:4), saying Jesus was of the Jewish race “according to the flesh” (Romans 9:5), and referencing “Jame, the brother of the Lord” (Galatians 1:18-19). Carrier’s arguments about those passages are very detailed and as far as I can tell sound.

I am not yet ready to lean definitely toward the mythicist position, but I do want to think this through more carefully. When I first looked into the work of Carrier and other mythicists about 15 years ago it left me doubtful that anything about an historical Jesus could be recovered. Subsequently I set aside my interest in the subject for a while. I have to admit that in the meantime my mind reverted back to the assumption Jesus was historical, probably less due to intellectual conviction than because that assumption had been part of my imagination for so many years.

My page on this site about the historicity of Jesus will have to be revised. My arguments there no longer seem sufficient to wave aside the mythicist position so easily. But I will keep my other pages mostly intact for now. What I intended with this website wasn’t really about whether Jesus was historical, although I am interested in the question. What I intended was to assess what the teaching of Jesus was. I want to do that both for its contribution to my own spiritual life, as the gospels have inspired me since I was a child, and as a means of discussing what look to me like erroneous versions of his teachings.

I will have to approach that question differently than I had planned though. Rather than trying to excavate a presumed teaching behind the various sources about Jesus, I’ll examine his teaching as presented by various authors, such as Paul and the authors of the four canonical gospels. Whatever points the sources have in common will be of interest, whether Jesus was historical, the product of visions, or a literary character of longstanding cultural influence.

So that is where I am at now. I’ll do a bit of rewriting of the current pages to clarify my intentions, and then resume my explorations into the endlessly fascinating topic of Jesus and the origins of Christianity.

Additions regarding mythicism and the Temple incident

I just finished revising several pages of the website in line with what I had to say in my last post about how a book by Robyn Faith Walsh overturned my picture of how the gospel authors created their compositions.

This was important because I want to make the strongest case possible for what really happened without relying on contested assumptions. Walsh (and other authors) have put in question the idea that the gospel writers were writing within and for particular communities of early Christians, relying on stories passed down in those communities. Rather, there is evidence the authors were addressing literate audiences, both Christian and non-Christian, and relying heavily on literary sources and tropes of the time.

The biggest change from this was on my page about the execution of Jesus. I deleted the passages about how the narrative of Jesus’ final days showed particular signs of oral transmission, an argument which I now regard as less convincing. I still think a story was handed down orally, but that Mark probably invented many of the memorable details.

While revising that page I also expanded the sections on Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple, adding new material that helped fill out what historical information I think we can take away from this story.

I made change to the page on Jesus as an Historical Person (formerly titled Jesus in History) as well, moving my objections to mythicism–arguments that Jesus was purely mythological and not a real person–to the beginning and clarified some of my points. I did this because mythicism seems to have a large following these days and I wanted to address it up front.

That’s it for the revising, now I can return to my draft of the next page for the site. This one is about the ideas Jesus’ disciples drew from in order to make sense of his death and the “appearances” of Jesus that followed his death. I look forward to sharing it with you.

As always, you can make comments on this blog post regarding the changes I outlined above.