To state my claim more clearly: It is beginning to seem plausible to me that the evidence we have fails to suggest the existence of a man named Jesus and called The Christ living in the first third of the first century CE.
Not that the evidence suggests no such man existed, but rather, that the evidence fails to suggest that such a man existed. A small distinction, but an important one to keep in mind in what I say below. It’s not that I’m arguing Jesus didn’t exist, but rather, I’m arguing that the evidence we have most plausibly only suggests events which do not imply or presuppose the existence of such a historical figure.
The basic idea is this. If you read the New Testament books in the order in which they were written, you begin with Paul. Reading Paul as though for the first time, you learn that he has a story to tell about a figure who was crucified and rose from the death, and that this death has redemptive significance. Paul says he got this information from two sources: From scripture, and from that being himself. He calls the being Jesus Christ.
The experience of reading things this way reminds me very much of my experiences growing into Liberal Christianity of having read countless verses and passages of scripture that I’d read a thousand times before, and realizing “oh shit, it’s not just ‘open to interpretation’ it just plain doesn’t say what I was taught to think it says.” When I read Paul without assuming the traditional Gospel story, I have exactly the same eye-opening experience. Paul just simply isn’t saying anything about the gospel Jesus.
Well, a “feeling” or “experience” isn’t an argument, but this is meant as an articulation of a very broad overview of how an argument would go. The actual words of Paul, in their most immediate sense, seem to imply about Jesus nothing other than “There’s a heavenly being who was crucified by demons, but rose again, and this is good for us. I got this information from scripture, and from that being himself in personal visions and revelations.” Nothing in there about a historical human being at all.
Then after Paul in the NT, everything else looks just like legendary elaboration on this basic theme.
Okay so of course are a very few passages in Paul that seem a little out of place on this reading, to be sure. (Very few.) For example, references to Christ being of the seed of Abraham and David, and being born of a woman. This might suggest that he’s talking about a historical figure. But not necessarily. Many ahistorical figures (i.e. figures of mythology, whether concieved of as fictional or, by believers, as real but “celestial” or “heavenly”) were born of an (also mythical/celestial/heavenly) woman. The reference to the seed of Abraham and David is harder to understand if the figure being referred to isn’t historical. But these references seem out of place in the larger context described above if read as plainly stating that Jesus was a human being on earth. And it’s not impossible that a spiritual/celestial/heavenly/whatever figure could be referred to as being of the “seed of David.” Paul uses the phrase “according to the flesh” to modify the claim that Christ is of the seed of David, and this phrase doesn’t seem clearly to mean “in earthly flesh.” (Apparently that idea would normally be expressed by some other phrase. I don’t remember what I read about that though, sorry.) It’s not actually clear what it means. But we do know that the heavenly realms were often considered to have tiers–and that the lower tiers were more “fleshly.” And Christ is spoken as lowering himself from where God is. It would seem plausible that “according to the flesh” doesn’t mean Jesus was on Earth, but rather, that he was in a low heavenly tier, close enough to the earthly realm that realities corresponding to facts about earthly descent could correspond to realities in that lower tier in some way. (This recalls the then-current notion a celestial man who is a model for earthly man, where aspects of earthly men correspond imperfectly to attributes of the celestial man.)
So it seems there are not-implausible readings of these passages that cohere with the ahistorical reading. And the wider context of what Paul says about Christ is so suggestive of the idea that Paul is talking about a story revealed to him from scripture and direct revelation about something that happened in the lower heavens, that the “seed” passages don’t seem enough to hang a hypothesis of a historical Jesus on with any certainty.
(Paul referring to James as “brother of the Lord” may also seem difficult to account for on this reading, but recall that Paul thinks we’re all brothers of the Lord. Given that fact, referring to a chief Jesus-Visionary as “brother of the Lord” could well be something like calling a bishop “first among equals.” As with “seed” this isn’t in itself a clearly correct reading of the passage, but it shows that the ahistorical reading isn’t impossible or even particularly implausible, and if the ahistorical reading of the rest of Paul suggests itself, then the ahistorical reading of this passage gains positive plausibility instead of just “it could have been” plausibility.)
Then as you move forward in the chronology, you get to Mark. And what Mark has to say about Jesus looks exactly like a literary construction intended to teach what Jesus is about without nailing him down as an actual historical figure. Most of its pericopes seem to rework OT stories. It has very clear parallels to the Oddysey of all things. (Actual respected view taught by actual historians here.) It sets up a theme practically from the beginning of fictionalizing higher truths through parables. The story also has a clear theme of expectation-reversal that makes the whole thing read as fiction, not history much less biography.
It’s not that Mark “can be read” as fiction–its that practically everything about it invites the reader to understand it as fiction.
I haven’t really digested the arguments on Q and Johanine material, but already things seem pretty clear from what the arguments I’ve already outlined. And if Q seems to provide evidence for a historical figure, the sparseness of the document itself makes it hard to see it as strong evidence, and the hypothetical nature of the document (a hypothesis that seems to be losing support in the last decade or two) compounds the weakness of its evidential value.
And AFAIK everyone thinks the Johanine additions come from late material, if not being simply made up by the Johanine authors themselves.
(BTW it’s usual to say the gospel was written before the three epistles, but given, among other things, the fact that the gospel seems to involve a much more elaborate and apologetic christology, I think it’s really possible that it was written later. And if that is so, then reading the first epistle without assuming it refers to a historical Jesus is eye-opening in much the same way reading Paul “in order” is. Look at that introduction. If you forget about the Jesus story and read it wondering openly what the author is talking about, it doesn’t sound like he’s talking about a man who walked the earth but a spiritual being of some kind that appeared to him in a vision. Certainly it refers to touch, but visions were known to include tactile experiences. Here I’m not just saying the passage “could” be read this way, though, I’m saying it positively sounds like that’s what he’s talking about–a vision he had that included tactile aspects. It may be hard to tell if this is the “right” way to read it just from this passage alone, but juxtaposing how this passage seems with what I’ve already noticed about reading Paul “in order” and things here in I John are very suggestive. Anyway I wouldn’t hang my hat on this, just throwing out the idea. It’s really hard to figure out what kind of redactive layers are in I John anyway. The letter seems very disjointed and self-contradictory.)
Even in a piece of writing as (most scholars think) late as Revelation, we don’t really have any information about a historical figure. Indeed–once again, Christ is represented as a purely spiritual or heavenly being giving revelations.
So the idea isn’t, “no one can prove Jesus existed,” or even, “The evidence suggests Jesus never existed.” Rather, the idea is “the NT itself strongly suggests Jesus was concieved of originally as a heavenly being giving revelations about heavenly events to people on earth.” And from that it follows that there’s no particular reason to posit a historical Jesus.
That’s very broadly where my reasoning is at right now. What follows is a more autobiographical account of how I ended up thinking these things.
I started wondering about this stuff as a result of a recent SDMB thread where I defended a liberal view of Christian ethics which I based, not on a historical Jesus exactly, but on what I took to be the teachings of the NT that were somehow “new” and “difficult,” i.e. not explicable simply as what people would say if they were trying to figure out how to have a religion. But at the time I was assuming Jesus existed, and had something to do with the existence of these “difficult” teachings. They were significant enough to make people think that in dealing with Jesus, they were dealing with the divine, and this impression stuck as they went on to try to live his ideals, and that’s how the religion started.
Having written what I wrote there, I decided to look into Christian origins again (I hadn’t done so in possibly over a decade). I don’t remember how I proceeded, but I ended up somehow begining my significant thinking by reading Richard Carrier’s book Proving History. In this book, Carrier uses Bayes’s Theorem to illustrate a careful way to reason about historical evidence. He ends up very convincingly criticizing practically every historical tool I’d ever learned about when looking into NT studies. He shows convincingly, for example, that the Criterion of Embarrassment (which I’d mentioned alot in the sDMB thread linked above…) is simply bad reasoning. (What he says is a little more elaborate. It can be used if you’re sufficiently careful in just the right way–but it seems people typically aren’t.) And so too for other tools such as Multiple Attestation, Primitivity, and a bunch of others I forget now. (And above it all was an overarching problem–even if these tools could establish that a text was original, this isn’t really clearly relevant to the question of whether the text is fictional or not. I don’t remember if Carrier said that or if it’s something that occured to me my own self.)
Well, I’m not a historian, and my knowledge of Bayes’s Theorem and its proper use is very basic. So I went looking for critiques. The best one seemed to be one written by an evolutionary biologist IIRC with an interest in NT studies. As an evobiologist (or something like that), he knows Bayes inside and out, and had a lot of problems with the way Carrier used it. Basically, he had concerns that Carrier was being too loose with it, and was ignoring important technical matters.
I saw a few criticisms of Carrier’s use of Bayes, but this one was by far the most careful and clearly valid-if-any-crit-was-valid. But having read it, it seemed to me the guy had misunderstood Carrier in some important ways. And when I read Carrier’s reply, Carrier had the same replies that I had anticipated on his behalf. And then when the critic replied, he basically acknowledged that Carrier had a point.
(I don’t want to rehash the whole debate because I couldn’t if I wanted to, but basically, Carrier is fully aware that he’s using it loosely, but argues convincingly that he is doing so responsibly, since he’s using it basically as a heuristic for reasoning about justified degrees of certainty, and not as an exact tool for making statistical predictions.) Reading this exchange gave me confidence in Carrier’s competence. (I am aware of philosophical debates about how to interpret and use Bayes, and I do think Carrier tends to sweep this under the rug, but I also think the way he uses it is unobjectionable on all accounts, so long as it’s clearly understood that he’s not claiming to measure anything but justified subjective certainty. And I ALSO think he may not agree with how I just characterized what he’s measuring, but anyway this is getting away from me a little so back to the main text.) As for his competence as a historian, well, he’s got a PhD, a tenure track job and he publishes and that’s about what I know about that. Well, also, he doesn’t show preference for implausible wild claims, and he argues that even if someone is convinced by his arguments for ahistoricity, no one should be feeling confident about it especially if they are not an expert since he doesn’t feel confident and since he is very much in the minority in his field on this question. This attitude adds more confidence that my impression that he is a reasonable thinker is on target.
Carrier has a book coming out early next year directly arguing for ahistoricity so that will be interesting. But meanwhile, I read his review of Earl Doherty’s The Jesus Puzzle. (Doherty’s site seems to have quite a bit of information from that book. See especially the supplementary articles) Now Doherty is not a professional scholar, but he has been praised by scholars for the quality of his work. Carrier himself went into the book expecting conspiracy-theoretical nonsense (this was way back in 2002 btw) but instead came away half-convinced. A lot of what I said above stems from what Doherty says.
I have also read more mainstream liberal scholars who do believe in a historical Jesus, but I have not been able to find any of these mainstream scholars dealing with Carrier’s criticisms. (Carrier’s not the only one to bring up such criticisms, but I can’t find responses to this style of criticism anywhere. I’d love to have something pointed out to me.)
Robert Ehrman has written a book arguing that Jesus existed, which I haven’t read yet. But the reviews don’t seem good, and his huffington post article was disappointing, basically consisting in ad homs and arguments from tradition and authority. Weird for someone who was once a Christian but became an atheist in the course of his career as an NT scholar, and who writes otherwise top-notch stuff about the early church.
Well, that’s where I’m at. What do you think about this stuff?
