The Christ-Myth Myth
Posted July 17th, 2011 at 01:35 PM by Clodius
I hadn't intended to post anything else about the historical Jesus (I like to keep my blog varied!), but comments on my previous H J post, as well as some discussions on other Forum threads, made me realise that I needed to address a question I had (deliberately) ignored in the past - the question of the "Christ Myth" theory, which argues that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, in any shape or form, and that his very existence was a fiction. Below is my defence of the existence of Jesus of Nazareth.
Almost no modern church historian, regardless of their faith position, believes that Jesus is an entirely fictional construct. This alone is not an argument against Jesus being fictional – it is simply a preliminary observation, and I hope by the end of this essay to have demonstrated some of the reasons why the academic consensus is against it. However, academic credibility is not always a factor in determining which theories get the widest publicity. It doesn’t take a great deal of Googling to find numerous websites all advancing the view that there was no historical Jesus, that the figure we read about in the New Testament accounts is the product of some imaginative ancient bricolage, a cobbled-together composite of various long-forgotten Jewish holy men, or a patchwork quilt of obscure pagan myths. The idea that Jesus did not exist at all is usually called the “Christ-myth theory”, and probably its most well-known exponent is Professor Robert M. Price. I will demonstrate why I find the Christ-myth theory implausible by briefly discussing six of the most commonly-advanced arguments for the non-existence of Jesus, and then by offering a positive argument that he did. I want to stress that I am not arguing that he was divine, supernatural, or the son of God. This is a more faith-neutral argument, simply that there did exist in the first century a Jewish teacher who we remember as “Jesus of Nazareth” (though in his own tongue he would have been called Yeshua). I am an atheist, and nothing in this argument depends on religious faith.
Argument 1: There is no archaeological trace of the life of Jesus.
This is certainly true, and any archaeological “evidence” for Jesus that has emerged has turned out to be fake. Consider the Turin Shroud, for example, or the so-called “Jesus family tomb”, both incontestably debunked. However, this in isolation is a fairly weak argument. It arises from an inflated expectation: the expectation that somebody as important as Jesus surely must have left an imprint on the material remains of his day. We need to shake off this unrealistic perspective and remember who Jesus actually was. He was a peasant preacher in an economically deprived part of the Roman Empire. Such people simply don’t leave their footprints in the archaeological record.
It is instructive to look at exactly which Gospel characters can be confirmed by archaeology. Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor, is attested in a Latin inscription from Tel Aviv. Archaeologists have unearthed an ossuary which possibly (probably even) belonged to Joseph ben Caiaphas, a senior Jewish priest who features in John’s account of Jesus’ trial. The various Herodian kings who are mentioned in the narratives are all well-attested, since we have their coins, residences, monuments and grand building projects. In short, the Gospel characters who are confirmed by archaeology are the high and mighty, the kings, ecclesiasts and Governors, exactly the sort of people we would expect to leave a material legacy. If you were to ask an archaeologist to read the Gospels and predict which of the characters would be most likely to be visible to archaeology, these are the exact people they would pick. They would not predict an archaeological afterlife for Jesus and his rag-tag bunch of peasant followers. The absence of archaeological evidence for Jesus is absolutely no reason to suppose he never existed.
Argument 2: Suspiciously, the only people who wrote about Jesus close to his lifetime were Christians. Surely if he really existed we would expect Jewish and / or Roman testimony to his extraordinary deeds?
Again, inflated expectations lie behind this objection. The thinking is that since Jesus’ ministry has had such an enormous impact on world history he would surely have been recorded by non-Christian authors. But this is reading later history back into the first century. Jesus was nothing unusual in his own historical context: an eccentric Jewish holy man who claimed messianic status and was executed by the nervous provincial authorities. There are records of a dozen such individuals from the first century alone, and no doubt there were many more who slipped through the historical net and are now completely forgotten. Nobody Jewish or Roman living in the first century had any reason to suppose that Jesus was in any way special or worthy of notice or consideration. We also need to remember just what a mutilated ruin first-century literature is, just how enormously unlikely it was that any given document would survive from antiquity to the modern day. Entire wars that were fought in the Hellenistic Period are not commemorated in any surviving literature and are only known to modern historians through archaeology. If a war is going to escape the documentary record, how unlikely must it be that the career of an unremarkable Jewish rabble-rouser should survive in the texts?
I have sometimes seen this argument stated even more specifically: we should expect to have actual Roman government records of the ministry and execution of Jesus. This baffles me. I presume the people who make this claim simply don’t understand ancient history. We have Roman government records for almost nothing. (The exception to this rule is Egypt, where a very large number of administrative papyri have survived in the sands thanks to local climatic conditions). To raise this as a serious objection to the existence of Jesus tells us nothing except that the objector has no understanding of the nature of the sources available to those who study Roman history.
In fact, this objection is not quite true. There actually are a small number of non-Christian writers of the first and early second centuries who do mention Jesus. We have to tread very carefully here, however, since evangelicals and Christian apologists very regularly misuse these writings, claiming that they are all positive proof of the existence of Jesus. I have seen this happening in several pieces of evangelical literature that have come my way. When examined, the passages usually cited (by Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus and Pliny the Elder) are, in fact, either probably later insertions in the text, or they do not in any way prove the existence of Jesus. There is only one possible exception to this.
One passage by a first-century non-Christian author can be used (slightly indirectly) to prove Jesus’ existence. Strangely, this is the one non-Christian source rarely quoted by the evangelicals. In a little-known passage, distinct from his highly dubious crucifixion narrative, the Jewish historian Josephus gives us an account of the execution of “the brother of Jesus (the so-called Christ), whose name was James.” We know something about James the Brother of Jesus: after the crucifixion he was appointed the head of the Christian community in Jerusalem. Unlike the part of his book dealing with Jesus’ crucifixion, textual scholars unanimously accept this passage as genuinely Josephan. In this instance (and unlike his crucifixion narrative) Josephus had a plausible narrative purpose for telling us about James’ death: the unconstitutional execution of this evidently popular man led to the firing of the high priest Ananus. So we have here authentic confirmation of the existence of James, the brother of a man called Jesus who went by the name of Christ.
This second scrap of Josephus is the only plausible first-century literary testimony we have for the existence of Jesus outside the Gospels. It might not be much, but it is enough to show that it isn’t quite right to claim there is “no” evidence outside the Bible. Moreover, it’s more than we are entitled to expect. Even if we didn’t have non-Christian literary attestation for Jesus, we shouldn’t be surprised.
Argument 3: The Gospels contain many stories that are strikingly similar to Jewish and pagan myths. They are clearly just copied from other people’s religions.
It cannot be denied that many of the tales about Jesus have close parallels in contemporary myths that were circulating in the Eastern Roman Empire at the time the Gospels were written. This should put us on our guard, but it is not enough to reject wholesale the existence of Jesus of Nazareth.
The mythologising of actual historical figures was a small industry in the Classical world. Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar are the classic examples: they were both people who undeniably existed, but also people who had extraordinary and miraculous stories told about them by their devoted followers after death. In each of these cases the myth-making process began strikingly early. Not all their mythical deeds were politically manufactured: a good deal of the Alexander tradition, in particular, seems to be “bottom-up”, consisting of stories invented by ordinary people and communities who revered the king’s memory. This process was not completely restricted to emperors and generals, either. You just have to read Philostratus’ remarkable biography of the pagan holy man Apollonius of Tyana to see evidence of a much more humble figure picking up mythological accretions as his story was told and retold. In short, the mythological elements of the Jesus story can comfortably be explained as exaggerations and tall tales that grew up around an actual historical figure after his death, no doubt originating among people who regarded him as special and extraordinary. In this, Jesus would be far from unique.
But what about the other possible explanation: that Jesus was entirely mythological, the explanation that the Christ-mythers eagerly promote? Well, if this is the case Jesus would be entirely unique in the Classical world. Certainly many characters in ancient mythology are entirely “made up”, though not necessarily all of them (King Agamemnon, for example, may be based on the folk-memory of a powerful Bronze Age chieftain). However, the fully fictional protagonists of the Graeco-Roman myths were all said to have lived in a distant age of heroes, an indistinct and ill-defined never-never land safely located in the remote past. The Jesus tradition sprang up remarkably early. The first Gospel was written within living memory of the supposed date of the crucifixion. Only twenty years after Jesus’ alleged death, Paul was recounting details of the Gospel story in his extant letters. A fully mythological character taking root so quickly and being precisely located in recent historical time would be utterly unparalleled in all of ancient history. There would have been literally no precedent for this. It cannot ring true.
So we are faced with a choice. Jesus was perhaps a real individual who came to be mythologised after his death, as many other individuals in the classical world had been before him. Alternatively, he may have been a fully mythological figure who, at his date of invention, was located less than twenty years in the past, an unprecedented scenario. Probability is strongly against the latter. The mythological elements of the Jesus story cannot be denied, but they give absolutely no reason to flatly refute his existence.
Argument 4: We have no original manuscripts of the Gospels. We only have copies of copies, made by scribes often centuries after the event, and the manuscripts we possess contain so many differences that they cannot be used as reliable historical sources.
The objection is that we have no way of checking that the copied texts we have contain the actual words written by the original authors. But this statement applies to almost all of the literature of the Classical period. It is no grounds for doubting the essential validity of pagan or secular Greek and Roman texts, so why should it be grounds for objecting to the textual integrity of the Gospels? In fact we have far more ancient manuscript copies of the New Testament than of any other literature of the Graeco-Roman period, and the more independent copies we have, the surer we can be that the texts we read today are faithful to the original words written by authors in antiquity. By comparing as many different manuscripts as possible with each other, we can obtain the most likely reconstruction of the words as they originally stood. If we’re happy to accept the text of Homer’s Iliad as being largely accurate and intact (as all classicists are), there’s no way we can’t draw the same conclusion for the Gospels. Anyway, this argument concerns the textual integrity of the Gospels, and actually has nothing to do with whether or not Jesus existed, though it is often (bizarrely) cited as an argument in support of the Christ-myth theory.
Argument 5: The Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses and are not contemporary documents, so how can we know if what they say is true?
The idea here is that, since the Gospels were not written at the time of Jesus’ life and ministry (or even particularly soon after his death) they are not “primary sources”, and are therefore of dubious reliability. This complaint reflects a lack of understanding of ancient history as a disciple. Due to the patchy documentary record of the period, it is standard practice for historians to rely on “after the event” accounts when writing ancient history. The Roman historian Tacitus, for example, records events that occurred well before his lifetime in the Annals. Such documents need to be treated with great care, certainly, but the fact that they were written post factum is not sufficient grounds for dismissing them, any more than we should immediately discount a modern book about the Second World War because it was written by a historian living after the period she describes. Tacitus and other first-century writers had access to many documents now lost to us. They researched their books, they didn’t just make them up. With great care, it is possible to work out which sources ancient writers had at their disposal when constructing their narratives, and so to critically assess how reliable their information is (as had been attempted, with varying degrees of success, for the Gospels). Rather than just complaining about how potentially dubious the Gospels are, it would be better to subject them to the kind of critical analysis that classicists use on writers like Tacitus, so we can assess for ourselves how much truth they are likely to contain. They should not be uncritically accepted, but they cannot be uncritically dismissed.
Argument 6: Nazareth did not exist in Jesus’ lifetime.
The town in which the “historical” Jesus is said to have been raised, it has been claimed, did not in fact exist until after Jesus’ lifetime. If this were true, it would be persuasive evidence of the “fictional” nature of the Gospel accounts. In fairness to people who make this assertion, it was tenable until quite recently. However, in December 2009 the Israeli archaeologist Yardenna Alexandre excavated an early first-century dwelling on the site of Nazareth. The fact that Nazareth is not referred to in any non-Biblical sources in the early first century is easy enough to explain when we remember that, ever since the earliest systematic excavations of the area in the 1960s (which uncovered water cisterns, making the subsequent discovery of a settlement pretty inevitable) we have known that Roman-period Nazareth was never more than a tiny village. Nazareth existed in the lifetime of Jesus. Nobody should make this claim anymore, but you may encounter it in old books and on non-updated websites, so I felt it was worth briefly discussing.
***
So none of the usual arguments upon which the “fictional Jesus” argument depends in fact hold water. But this is a negative approach to the debate. Are there any positive arguments I could advance for Jesus’ existence? Is there anything (in addition to Josephus’ above-quoted reference to Jesus’ brother) that might lead us to accept that Jesus of Nazareth, in some form or another, existed as a historical figure?
The best place to start is to consider Jesus’ alleged fame in his homeland. The Gospel accounts regularly refer to the size of the crowds he drew both in Jerusalem and in the Judaean and Galilean countryside. From here, it’s just a question of probability. If this character had been entirely invented, how could his story have been so widely accepted in Judaea and Galilee despite the people of this region having no recollection of his ministry? Foreigners might have bought it, certainly, but not people who lived in the very regions through which the “fictitious” Jesus was said to have travelled and gained widespread fame. And we know for sure that the very first Christian converts after the crucifixion were not foreigners, but came from the province of Judaea. More specifically, they seem to have come predominantly from Galilee, the northern region where Jesus himself was brought up and is said to have spent most of his ministry. In Acts 1:11, in the first ever recorded address to a group of Christian worshippers after the crucifixion, the followers of Jesus are referred to as “men of Galilee”. And it isn’t only the Bible which affirms the Judaean origins of the Christian faith. Tacitus, writing with Roman disdain about the famous persecutions of Nero, describes Judaea as the “source of this wickedness”, meaning Christianity.
It is simply unthinkable that the strength of local support the movement enjoyed in its earliest years would have been possible had the character of Jesus been entirely fictitious. Let’s try a thought experiment. Just imagine for a moment that a religious group emerged in the modern world claiming that the Son of God had preached and died in your home town a few years ago. They allege that this Messiah had travelled right through your region, appearing in the local papers and on regional TV news and addressing large gatherings of people in public spaces. One problem – neither you nor anyone else in your area has any recollection of any of this happening. How much success do you suppose these claims would enjoy? Sure, they may fool a few people on the other side of the world, but how many people on your street would go with it? This is the great difficulty that the “Jesus didn’t exist” school faces. People in the past were not inherently more gullible or stupid than people in the present. They were human beings with the same capacity for rational thought as you or I. If the “fictitious local Messiah” scam wouldn’t work in your town today, there’s no reason to suppose it would have washed in first century Judaea.
Of course, as I said at the very outset, none of this necessarily supports the idea that Jesus was a miracle-working Son of God. The responsible approach to the historical study of Jesus is a critical, sober analysis of the Gospels and any other material that may shed light on this figure. It is historically irresponsible to simply, automatically accept everything the Gospels tell us, and it is irresponsible to automatically reject a claim simply because it occurs in a Gospel. The Gospels are historical texts, fascinating but frustrating collages of fact and mythology, and the responsible approach to them is to draw on the standard tools of historical and textual analysis to help us tell one from the other.
Almost no modern church historian, regardless of their faith position, believes that Jesus is an entirely fictional construct. This alone is not an argument against Jesus being fictional – it is simply a preliminary observation, and I hope by the end of this essay to have demonstrated some of the reasons why the academic consensus is against it. However, academic credibility is not always a factor in determining which theories get the widest publicity. It doesn’t take a great deal of Googling to find numerous websites all advancing the view that there was no historical Jesus, that the figure we read about in the New Testament accounts is the product of some imaginative ancient bricolage, a cobbled-together composite of various long-forgotten Jewish holy men, or a patchwork quilt of obscure pagan myths. The idea that Jesus did not exist at all is usually called the “Christ-myth theory”, and probably its most well-known exponent is Professor Robert M. Price. I will demonstrate why I find the Christ-myth theory implausible by briefly discussing six of the most commonly-advanced arguments for the non-existence of Jesus, and then by offering a positive argument that he did. I want to stress that I am not arguing that he was divine, supernatural, or the son of God. This is a more faith-neutral argument, simply that there did exist in the first century a Jewish teacher who we remember as “Jesus of Nazareth” (though in his own tongue he would have been called Yeshua). I am an atheist, and nothing in this argument depends on religious faith.
Argument 1: There is no archaeological trace of the life of Jesus.
This is certainly true, and any archaeological “evidence” for Jesus that has emerged has turned out to be fake. Consider the Turin Shroud, for example, or the so-called “Jesus family tomb”, both incontestably debunked. However, this in isolation is a fairly weak argument. It arises from an inflated expectation: the expectation that somebody as important as Jesus surely must have left an imprint on the material remains of his day. We need to shake off this unrealistic perspective and remember who Jesus actually was. He was a peasant preacher in an economically deprived part of the Roman Empire. Such people simply don’t leave their footprints in the archaeological record.
It is instructive to look at exactly which Gospel characters can be confirmed by archaeology. Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor, is attested in a Latin inscription from Tel Aviv. Archaeologists have unearthed an ossuary which possibly (probably even) belonged to Joseph ben Caiaphas, a senior Jewish priest who features in John’s account of Jesus’ trial. The various Herodian kings who are mentioned in the narratives are all well-attested, since we have their coins, residences, monuments and grand building projects. In short, the Gospel characters who are confirmed by archaeology are the high and mighty, the kings, ecclesiasts and Governors, exactly the sort of people we would expect to leave a material legacy. If you were to ask an archaeologist to read the Gospels and predict which of the characters would be most likely to be visible to archaeology, these are the exact people they would pick. They would not predict an archaeological afterlife for Jesus and his rag-tag bunch of peasant followers. The absence of archaeological evidence for Jesus is absolutely no reason to suppose he never existed.
Argument 2: Suspiciously, the only people who wrote about Jesus close to his lifetime were Christians. Surely if he really existed we would expect Jewish and / or Roman testimony to his extraordinary deeds?
Again, inflated expectations lie behind this objection. The thinking is that since Jesus’ ministry has had such an enormous impact on world history he would surely have been recorded by non-Christian authors. But this is reading later history back into the first century. Jesus was nothing unusual in his own historical context: an eccentric Jewish holy man who claimed messianic status and was executed by the nervous provincial authorities. There are records of a dozen such individuals from the first century alone, and no doubt there were many more who slipped through the historical net and are now completely forgotten. Nobody Jewish or Roman living in the first century had any reason to suppose that Jesus was in any way special or worthy of notice or consideration. We also need to remember just what a mutilated ruin first-century literature is, just how enormously unlikely it was that any given document would survive from antiquity to the modern day. Entire wars that were fought in the Hellenistic Period are not commemorated in any surviving literature and are only known to modern historians through archaeology. If a war is going to escape the documentary record, how unlikely must it be that the career of an unremarkable Jewish rabble-rouser should survive in the texts?
I have sometimes seen this argument stated even more specifically: we should expect to have actual Roman government records of the ministry and execution of Jesus. This baffles me. I presume the people who make this claim simply don’t understand ancient history. We have Roman government records for almost nothing. (The exception to this rule is Egypt, where a very large number of administrative papyri have survived in the sands thanks to local climatic conditions). To raise this as a serious objection to the existence of Jesus tells us nothing except that the objector has no understanding of the nature of the sources available to those who study Roman history.
In fact, this objection is not quite true. There actually are a small number of non-Christian writers of the first and early second centuries who do mention Jesus. We have to tread very carefully here, however, since evangelicals and Christian apologists very regularly misuse these writings, claiming that they are all positive proof of the existence of Jesus. I have seen this happening in several pieces of evangelical literature that have come my way. When examined, the passages usually cited (by Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus and Pliny the Elder) are, in fact, either probably later insertions in the text, or they do not in any way prove the existence of Jesus. There is only one possible exception to this.
One passage by a first-century non-Christian author can be used (slightly indirectly) to prove Jesus’ existence. Strangely, this is the one non-Christian source rarely quoted by the evangelicals. In a little-known passage, distinct from his highly dubious crucifixion narrative, the Jewish historian Josephus gives us an account of the execution of “the brother of Jesus (the so-called Christ), whose name was James.” We know something about James the Brother of Jesus: after the crucifixion he was appointed the head of the Christian community in Jerusalem. Unlike the part of his book dealing with Jesus’ crucifixion, textual scholars unanimously accept this passage as genuinely Josephan. In this instance (and unlike his crucifixion narrative) Josephus had a plausible narrative purpose for telling us about James’ death: the unconstitutional execution of this evidently popular man led to the firing of the high priest Ananus. So we have here authentic confirmation of the existence of James, the brother of a man called Jesus who went by the name of Christ.
This second scrap of Josephus is the only plausible first-century literary testimony we have for the existence of Jesus outside the Gospels. It might not be much, but it is enough to show that it isn’t quite right to claim there is “no” evidence outside the Bible. Moreover, it’s more than we are entitled to expect. Even if we didn’t have non-Christian literary attestation for Jesus, we shouldn’t be surprised.
Argument 3: The Gospels contain many stories that are strikingly similar to Jewish and pagan myths. They are clearly just copied from other people’s religions.
It cannot be denied that many of the tales about Jesus have close parallels in contemporary myths that were circulating in the Eastern Roman Empire at the time the Gospels were written. This should put us on our guard, but it is not enough to reject wholesale the existence of Jesus of Nazareth.
The mythologising of actual historical figures was a small industry in the Classical world. Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar are the classic examples: they were both people who undeniably existed, but also people who had extraordinary and miraculous stories told about them by their devoted followers after death. In each of these cases the myth-making process began strikingly early. Not all their mythical deeds were politically manufactured: a good deal of the Alexander tradition, in particular, seems to be “bottom-up”, consisting of stories invented by ordinary people and communities who revered the king’s memory. This process was not completely restricted to emperors and generals, either. You just have to read Philostratus’ remarkable biography of the pagan holy man Apollonius of Tyana to see evidence of a much more humble figure picking up mythological accretions as his story was told and retold. In short, the mythological elements of the Jesus story can comfortably be explained as exaggerations and tall tales that grew up around an actual historical figure after his death, no doubt originating among people who regarded him as special and extraordinary. In this, Jesus would be far from unique.
But what about the other possible explanation: that Jesus was entirely mythological, the explanation that the Christ-mythers eagerly promote? Well, if this is the case Jesus would be entirely unique in the Classical world. Certainly many characters in ancient mythology are entirely “made up”, though not necessarily all of them (King Agamemnon, for example, may be based on the folk-memory of a powerful Bronze Age chieftain). However, the fully fictional protagonists of the Graeco-Roman myths were all said to have lived in a distant age of heroes, an indistinct and ill-defined never-never land safely located in the remote past. The Jesus tradition sprang up remarkably early. The first Gospel was written within living memory of the supposed date of the crucifixion. Only twenty years after Jesus’ alleged death, Paul was recounting details of the Gospel story in his extant letters. A fully mythological character taking root so quickly and being precisely located in recent historical time would be utterly unparalleled in all of ancient history. There would have been literally no precedent for this. It cannot ring true.
So we are faced with a choice. Jesus was perhaps a real individual who came to be mythologised after his death, as many other individuals in the classical world had been before him. Alternatively, he may have been a fully mythological figure who, at his date of invention, was located less than twenty years in the past, an unprecedented scenario. Probability is strongly against the latter. The mythological elements of the Jesus story cannot be denied, but they give absolutely no reason to flatly refute his existence.
Argument 4: We have no original manuscripts of the Gospels. We only have copies of copies, made by scribes often centuries after the event, and the manuscripts we possess contain so many differences that they cannot be used as reliable historical sources.
The objection is that we have no way of checking that the copied texts we have contain the actual words written by the original authors. But this statement applies to almost all of the literature of the Classical period. It is no grounds for doubting the essential validity of pagan or secular Greek and Roman texts, so why should it be grounds for objecting to the textual integrity of the Gospels? In fact we have far more ancient manuscript copies of the New Testament than of any other literature of the Graeco-Roman period, and the more independent copies we have, the surer we can be that the texts we read today are faithful to the original words written by authors in antiquity. By comparing as many different manuscripts as possible with each other, we can obtain the most likely reconstruction of the words as they originally stood. If we’re happy to accept the text of Homer’s Iliad as being largely accurate and intact (as all classicists are), there’s no way we can’t draw the same conclusion for the Gospels. Anyway, this argument concerns the textual integrity of the Gospels, and actually has nothing to do with whether or not Jesus existed, though it is often (bizarrely) cited as an argument in support of the Christ-myth theory.
Argument 5: The Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses and are not contemporary documents, so how can we know if what they say is true?
The idea here is that, since the Gospels were not written at the time of Jesus’ life and ministry (or even particularly soon after his death) they are not “primary sources”, and are therefore of dubious reliability. This complaint reflects a lack of understanding of ancient history as a disciple. Due to the patchy documentary record of the period, it is standard practice for historians to rely on “after the event” accounts when writing ancient history. The Roman historian Tacitus, for example, records events that occurred well before his lifetime in the Annals. Such documents need to be treated with great care, certainly, but the fact that they were written post factum is not sufficient grounds for dismissing them, any more than we should immediately discount a modern book about the Second World War because it was written by a historian living after the period she describes. Tacitus and other first-century writers had access to many documents now lost to us. They researched their books, they didn’t just make them up. With great care, it is possible to work out which sources ancient writers had at their disposal when constructing their narratives, and so to critically assess how reliable their information is (as had been attempted, with varying degrees of success, for the Gospels). Rather than just complaining about how potentially dubious the Gospels are, it would be better to subject them to the kind of critical analysis that classicists use on writers like Tacitus, so we can assess for ourselves how much truth they are likely to contain. They should not be uncritically accepted, but they cannot be uncritically dismissed.
Argument 6: Nazareth did not exist in Jesus’ lifetime.
The town in which the “historical” Jesus is said to have been raised, it has been claimed, did not in fact exist until after Jesus’ lifetime. If this were true, it would be persuasive evidence of the “fictional” nature of the Gospel accounts. In fairness to people who make this assertion, it was tenable until quite recently. However, in December 2009 the Israeli archaeologist Yardenna Alexandre excavated an early first-century dwelling on the site of Nazareth. The fact that Nazareth is not referred to in any non-Biblical sources in the early first century is easy enough to explain when we remember that, ever since the earliest systematic excavations of the area in the 1960s (which uncovered water cisterns, making the subsequent discovery of a settlement pretty inevitable) we have known that Roman-period Nazareth was never more than a tiny village. Nazareth existed in the lifetime of Jesus. Nobody should make this claim anymore, but you may encounter it in old books and on non-updated websites, so I felt it was worth briefly discussing.
***
So none of the usual arguments upon which the “fictional Jesus” argument depends in fact hold water. But this is a negative approach to the debate. Are there any positive arguments I could advance for Jesus’ existence? Is there anything (in addition to Josephus’ above-quoted reference to Jesus’ brother) that might lead us to accept that Jesus of Nazareth, in some form or another, existed as a historical figure?
The best place to start is to consider Jesus’ alleged fame in his homeland. The Gospel accounts regularly refer to the size of the crowds he drew both in Jerusalem and in the Judaean and Galilean countryside. From here, it’s just a question of probability. If this character had been entirely invented, how could his story have been so widely accepted in Judaea and Galilee despite the people of this region having no recollection of his ministry? Foreigners might have bought it, certainly, but not people who lived in the very regions through which the “fictitious” Jesus was said to have travelled and gained widespread fame. And we know for sure that the very first Christian converts after the crucifixion were not foreigners, but came from the province of Judaea. More specifically, they seem to have come predominantly from Galilee, the northern region where Jesus himself was brought up and is said to have spent most of his ministry. In Acts 1:11, in the first ever recorded address to a group of Christian worshippers after the crucifixion, the followers of Jesus are referred to as “men of Galilee”. And it isn’t only the Bible which affirms the Judaean origins of the Christian faith. Tacitus, writing with Roman disdain about the famous persecutions of Nero, describes Judaea as the “source of this wickedness”, meaning Christianity.
It is simply unthinkable that the strength of local support the movement enjoyed in its earliest years would have been possible had the character of Jesus been entirely fictitious. Let’s try a thought experiment. Just imagine for a moment that a religious group emerged in the modern world claiming that the Son of God had preached and died in your home town a few years ago. They allege that this Messiah had travelled right through your region, appearing in the local papers and on regional TV news and addressing large gatherings of people in public spaces. One problem – neither you nor anyone else in your area has any recollection of any of this happening. How much success do you suppose these claims would enjoy? Sure, they may fool a few people on the other side of the world, but how many people on your street would go with it? This is the great difficulty that the “Jesus didn’t exist” school faces. People in the past were not inherently more gullible or stupid than people in the present. They were human beings with the same capacity for rational thought as you or I. If the “fictitious local Messiah” scam wouldn’t work in your town today, there’s no reason to suppose it would have washed in first century Judaea.
Of course, as I said at the very outset, none of this necessarily supports the idea that Jesus was a miracle-working Son of God. The responsible approach to the historical study of Jesus is a critical, sober analysis of the Gospels and any other material that may shed light on this figure. It is historically irresponsible to simply, automatically accept everything the Gospels tell us, and it is irresponsible to automatically reject a claim simply because it occurs in a Gospel. The Gospels are historical texts, fascinating but frustrating collages of fact and mythology, and the responsible approach to them is to draw on the standard tools of historical and textual analysis to help us tell one from the other.
Total Comments 0
