Who Was Jesus?

I’ve had some interesting discussions on my blog (and on YouTube) about the question of Jesus’ existence.

As a New Testament scholar, I’d recommend E. P. Sanders’ The Historical Figure of Jesus as a nice, mainstream, scholarly treatment. For more detail, the multi-volume series by John P. Meier (entitled A Marginal Jew) is good, as is the textbook by Theissen and Merz, The Historical Jesus. A good book that surveys differents historical portraits of Jesus is Mark Allen Powell’s Jesus as a Figure of History. And a look at the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus is a good place to get into the nitty gritty of the latest scholarship in detail.

Hope this is useful!

I believe Richard Carrier was writing a book on this subject, to be released in 2009; I’d keep an eye out for that. His latest radio appearance addressed the origins of Christmas and the historicity of Jesus, though I haven’t listened to it yet. I’d also keep checking here (The Jesus Proeject–presently under construction).

Generally speaking, I wouldn’t worry about it much–what does it matter? He is either all myth or part myth, and even if the latter, there are much more interesting historical figures to study.

There is an article by J.Z. Smith in the Encyclopedia of Religion called “Dying and Rising Gods” that argues that the whole concept of dying and rising gods is poorly evidenced and in no small part a product of trying to impose Christian categories on non-Christian religions.

I haven’t read much of Bart Ehrman, but from what I’ve heard, he seems to be a decent source on the historical Jesus.

Also, why should a historical Jesus have necessarily been a “good man”? Why could he not have been a lunatic, not much different in some ways from modern cult leaders?

I believe Barbara Walker is also writing a book on the theory that Jesus was wholly mythological. I heard her in an interview making the case for this kind of made-up saviour figure which I believe she argued was a common and accepted thing at the time.

If you’re a serious student who is interested in investigating all the available evidence and assessing all sides of the debate I would highly recommend reading N T Wright.

His ‘The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is’ is good if you’d like a light introduction, his ‘The New Testament and the People of God’ and ‘Jesus and the Victory of God’ are good if you’re up to something more meaty.

Just going to echo some of the responses others gave – check out Carrier. Secular Web has a bunch of his stuff, and as mentioned, his book is coming out (hopefully) soon.

For an interesting read, look up ‘The Pagan Christ’. It’s an interesting comparison of the stories of Jesus in the bible and other pagan faiths.

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com

Despite the seeming brazenness of the name, one of the most comprehensive sources on the subject anywhere.

ATL-Apostate Says:
December 25th, 2008 at 4:45 pm

Don’t know if anyone’s mentioned it or not, but Bart Erhman (sp?), Religious Studies Prof at UNC-Chapel Hill has written a great deal on this subject. Some of it is even understandable to the non Religious Studies major (i.e., me).

I agree. I by chance stumbled upon a lecture series by Prof. Ehrman title The Historical Jesus Ehrman is an agnostic, so his teaching’s are generally non-christian biased.

I’ve always subscribed to the belief that he (Jesus) existed and was probably a good person who did teach and was religious. However that his ideas and what he said has been misinterpreted or misrepresented by people using him for their benefit or in a misguided belief.

I recommend “The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ” by Gerald Massey, which tries to separate fact from religion.

The search for the historical Jesus has failed so many times that now these failures are numbered – the first quest, the second quest, the third quest.

Historicists cannot produce a consistent historical Jesus.

Some of the wilder theories about the historical Jesus (he went to India, he married Mary Magdalene) are crazier than some mythical theories.

Similarly some mythical theories (the NT was all written by Romans…) are crazier than some historical theories.

We know from 2 Corinthians that Christians had lots of different Jesus’s.

The period between 65 AD and 90 AD was when any controlling influence from Jerusalem was lost, and when knowledge of the early church vanishes to almost zero.

So we really don’t know what Christians of that time were or were not making up about a Jesus.

I think we can pretty much assume that Jesus existed. The entire birth-30years story is fiction and anything added on after the crucifixion is fiction. Most of what is in-between has been mythologised, making it extremely difficult to tell which parts of that are fiction. However, there are some bits that ring true.

Consider this: why would a bunch of people get together and just make up a leader? That would take a deliberate attempt at myth-making. Isn’t it easier to believe that they just started off with dead preacher and tacked a whole bunch of “I heard he…” stories onto that? If we can assume that there is no god because of all the explanations and logical hoops we would have to go through to explain his possible existence, then we must for the same reason assume that there WAS a Jesus.

The overall story of Jesus with all the miracles and sayings taken out fits with what we know of Judea at that time. We know, for example, that Passover was an extremely explosive time and we know that the Romans would have been quick to get rid of any Jews talking about a “new kingdom” that would come and replace the current leadership – especially at a time when the population is so condensed (with everyone going to Jerusalem for the celebrations) and everyone is thinking about a story of escaping from oppressors.

We also know that there were tons of guys who walked around Judea around the time of Jesus, guys we have a lot more contemporary evidence for. We know that they preached various things, some in-line with what Jesus supposedly preached. We know that several of them were crucified. We know that after their deaths, their followers sometimes believed that they had seen them post-mortem and that their births had been somehow miraculous (the virgin birth was not uncommon). We even know that several of them were called “son of god” by their followers. Just to give you a couple examples, we know about Honi the circle-drawer and Hanina ben Dosa (being the most famous).

So why is it difficult to believe that there was just one other such guy who attracted just enough notice to get himself killed, but not enough for anyone to bother writing his name down?

The French/German tv network ARTE has three documentary series on the history of xianity.

Look up Corpus Christi and The Apocalypse at their site.

http://www.arteboutique.com/detailProduct.action;jsessionid=0510340F124F548F7FB3AEB3C5191EEF?fromMenu=true&bundle=true&attributeId=4&product.id=4049

The Romans wrote extensively about the goings-on in their empire. All sorts of people are documented, but no Jesus.

Even Apollonius of Tyana, the likely model for the Jesus action figure is documented.

For an interesting read, look up ‘The Pagan Christ’. It’s an interesting comparison of the stories of Jesus in the bible and other pagan faiths.

Interesting, but apparently wrong.

Sorry, postsimian, but I take issue with the idea that Christians just “lifted” the story from other religions. It makes it sound like some guys are standing around saying “hey, you know that story about Apollo? That one’s pretty good. Can we use that one?”

That’s not what the process of myth-making is about. It’s not because Alexander the Great was supposedly born of a virgin that Jesus gets to be too. The early Christians started with the idea that Jesus is super awesome. In a time when superstition felt real, the next logical thought is: “If Jesus is so super awesome, how can he possibly have been born in the normal way – the way in which all of us are born?” Basically, it’s difficult to think that an extraordinary person could possibly come through ordinary means.

So yes, Alexander was born of a virgin, Isis got pregnant despite her husband’s penis getting cut off, and Buddha’s mother was impregnated by a white elephant entering her side while she slept. That doesn’t mean that each of these religions “lifted” the myth from the others. It merely means that there is a natural process of myth-making that Christianity – like Buddhism, the ancient Greeks, the ancient Egyptians, the Jews, the Hindus, etc. – all participated in.

J. J. Ramsey – you are right when you call out the embarrassment factor as it was presented. We can see where there was embarrassment in Christianity because we have three gospels to look at (discounting John because… well… that one’s just crazy). Where a story in Mark has been changed from a version that is theologically problematic to one that is not (either in Matthew or Luke), we can be pretty sure that at least some early Christians found it embarrassing – such as Jesus failing the first time he tries to heal the blind man.

As for Alexander, you are absolutely right. My apologies. That being said, I didn’t bring him up to compare him to the idea that Jesus existed, but rather to the way in which myths are formed. I’m not really sure what you are getting at when you say “but Alexander the Great still existed.” Did I ever say he didn’t?

The Jesus guy was obviously taken from earlier, like Heracles. He too performed great deeds, rather more impressive that Jesus. Heracles also had a miraculous birth and died in torture and then was called up to heaven by his father.

The Xian story is much wimpier.

CARR
Historicists cannot produce a consistent historical Jesus.

RAMSEY
This is a poor objection to the idea that a historical Jesus existed.

CARR
Of course. Just as the fact that mythicist theories vary is a poor objection to the idea that a mythical Jesus existed.

The failure of historicist methods is simply an indication that historicists do not have a methodology to find an historical Jesus.

Once they start to do the work, then the debate can begin properly.

It hasn’t started yet….

RAMSEY wants evidence that there were different Jesus’s.

CARR
Well produce a Jesus of Nazareth from the time of Paul.

2 Corinthians

For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough.

And Ramsey is quite correct that the criterion of embarrassment only works if the original people are embarrassed.

Paul scorns Christians who do not realise that the Messiah had to be crucified – that this was VITAL to Christianity.

Galatians 3
You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.

We know that Jews were raping the scriptures for hidden meanings.

And Christians like Paul would certainly have read Isaiah 53 and Daniel 9:26.

Or even Psalm 22…

RAMSEY
Except the Bible foretells no such thing, and the verses said to foretell the Messiah’s sufferings are about Israel.

CARR
I know that. You know that.

But do Christians know that?

Look at nutcases like the writer of Barnabas who found the cross in the number of Abraham’s servants.

Or Paul, who took an Old Testament law about oxen, and said it was about Christians.

It is no use being a 21st century atheist and reading the Bible properly.

These people were not 21st century atheists…..

Grimalkin: A bit of an over-simplification, wouldn’t you say? I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the miracles or other attributes were original. It would be unreasonable to expect these men to be familiar with every other deity’s origin and mythology. On the other hand, I think it’s fair to argue that the authors of the bible were at least somewhat educated–they were able to write, after all. Or, maybe it was passed on orally until someone finally decided to write them down. That gives an opportunity for all sorts of things to make their way into the story. I don’t think anyone would seriously argue that a bunch of guys were just standing around bouncing ideas off each other to write the Jesus myth.

J.J. Ramsey: Sure, some parallels are far more credible than others. Are you denying the parallels exist?

CARR
Gosh. I had no idea that Christian expectations of a Messiah were so irrelevant to explaining Christianity.

We’re talking about Jewish expectations of a Messiah. And no, they aren’t irrelevant, since you have to account for those expectations in order to explain how Christians managed to proclaim as a Messiah someone who didn’t fulfill them.

I now realise that only by talking about Jewish expectations of an all-conquering Messiah can we explain why Paul thought it was necessary for somebody to be hung on a tree to take a curse off humanity.

Actually, that is partly true. Christians (including Paul) needed to find some way of explaining away how the crucifixion didn’t disqualify Jesus from being a Messiah. The other part, of course, is the Christian claims that Jesus would eventually be the “all-conquering Messiah” Real Soon Now(TM).

RAMSEY
Except the Bible foretells no such thing, and the verses said to foretell the Messiah’s sufferings are about Israel.

CARR
I know that. You know that.

But do Christians know that?

But that’s the wrong question. You are (apparently) trying to argue that the crucifixion was made up whole cloth. If that is the case, then, you have to come up with an explanation as to why people reading the Scriptures cold, without pre-existing ideas of a Messiah tortured to death in the first place, would read such a Messiah into Isaiah in the first place.

2 Corinthians [11:3-4]

For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough.

If you are trying to use this passage to indicate that Christians literally thought there were different Jesuses, rather than different takes on who Jesus was, that is, different “spirits” or “gospels”, then I question your exegesis. If you aren’t been that wooden in your interpretation, then I apologize for thinking that you are that foolish.

Here Justin is trying to convince a skeptical pagan audience that there were parallels between pagan myths and the Christ story.

And as GakuseiDon pointed out, Justin Martyr often stretched things to prove his thesis.

That’s a fair way of putting it.

Even Acts says Christians ’searched the scriptures’ to prove Jesus was the Messiah.

SO presumably they did not appeal to anything Jesus did.

That presumption hardly follows. More likely, Christians took their own spin on what Jesus did and quoted Scriptures out of context as proof-text.

But Daniel 9:26 prophesies a Messiah who will be killed.

Harper-Collins Study Bible has this note on Daniel 9:26: “Anointed One, Onias III, the deposed high priest murdered in 171 B.C.E. (2 Macc 32-34). The prince. Antiochus IV.

Since you are so familiar with the text, you obviously know that the book of Daniel fairly accurately “predicts” the events leading to the 167 B.C.E. desecration of the Temple, you know, the stuff Hanukkah was about. This is how they date when the book of Daniel was finished, after the conveniently accurate prophecies.

As pointed out above, historicists assume Jesus existed and make the text fit that.

Funny, what I see is mythicists assuming Jesus didn’t exist, and torturing the text to fit, even if it means a spurious translation of kata sarka or finding kludgy explanations for why James is called “brother of the Lord,” or bad analogies comparing someone who is an “elder brother” to humanity in a spiritual sense to someone who was described as a flesh-and-blood brother of specific persons in the past, or klugey explanations for why the “brother of Jesus called Christ” passage in Josephus’ Antiquities is an interpolation, or, at worst, flat out making stuff up.

There are historicists who probably have taken Jesus’ historicity for granted. There are also historicists who see what a mess the mythicists make and react accordingly. For a while, mythicists were taken seriously, back in, oh, 1912. They stopped being taken seriously because of nonsense like this:

As might be expected, the fundamental problems of Pauline study are scarcely touched and no fixed principles of critical investigation are followed. One takes from the literature what he pleases and leaves what he pleases. We are told at the start that no compelling proof for the authenticity of any of the letters can be produced, and yet from them a somewhat elaborate and confident exposition of alleged Pauline thought is derived. Anything in these writings supposedly pointing to the historicity of Jesus is explained otherwise, or is called a later insertion. Finally it is asserted that “the Pauline letters contain no compulsion of any sort for the supposition of a historical Jesus, and no man would be likely to find such there if it were not already for him an established assumption.”

At once several familiar passages demand explanation. For instance I Cor. 11:23ff., describing the last supper on the night of Jesus’ betrayal, seems to point very clearly to a specific event in the life of a historical individual. This difficulty is avoided by assuming that “we have here to do with a clearly later insertion,” at least the reference to the betrayal is “certainly inserted.” Similarly the implication of a historical Jesus in I Cor. 15:5ff. is either another interpolation, or else these experiences are purely ecstatic in character and do not imply, as is commonly supposed, any thought of a definite historical person whose death preceded these unusual manifestations. It is a convenient elasticity of critical method which can allow these options. Again, the mention of “brothers” of the Lord, as in I Cor. 9:5 and Gal. 1:19, is to be understood in the sense of community brotherhood. Yet we are not told why Paul in the same context should not have included Peter and Barnabas in this brotherhood. Moreover brothers in the Lord, not brothers of the Lord, is Paul’s mode of thought for the community relationship. These are typical examples of both the brevity and the method Drews uses in disposing of the Pauline evidence. It is difficult to take arguments of this sort seriously, particularly when they are presented so briefly and with no apparent ground of justification except the presupposition that a historical Jesus must not be recognized.

Look familiar? The mythicists’ attempts to explain away “brothers of the Lord” haven’t gotten any more elegant since 1912. Or take this, from the same book written in 1912:

Much is made of the critics’ disagreement on questions of detail, and of their inability to fix upon a definite quantum of information

Again, this is not only familiar, it is one of your lines of argument. How many times have we seen in this thread you argue that because historicists disagree on various details, the bare fact of Jesus’ existence is suspect? It was no more cogent in 1912 than it is now.

Mythicism isn’t taken seriously anymore because it was tried a long time ago and found wanting.

RAMSEY
At once several familiar passages demand explanation. For instance I Cor. 11:23ff., describing the last supper on the night of Jesus’ betrayal, seems to point very clearly to a specific event in the life of a historical individual.

CARR
Of course, Ramsey knows perfectly well that Paul uses the word ‘paradidomi’ to refer to God handing over Jesus, or Jesus handing over himself, and that for historicists to translate it as ‘betrayal’ in 1 Cor. 11 and ‘hand over’ in other Pauline passages is simply contentious.

The founder of the cult founds the highly symbolic cultic meal, where the founder of the cult is finally present among cult members , but in a symbolic, not literal way.

The one thing Paul mentions Jesus as doing is founding the cult meal.

That is *exactly* what mythical founders of a religion would be expected to do – found a cult ritual in which the mythical founder is made present, if only in a symbolic way.

If Ramsey saw another religion where people summoned up the dead , who was then ‘present’ in the food the cult members ate, he would think twice before accepting that the summoned up person had founded that cultic ceremony.

He would think that cult ceremonies were exactly the sort of thing cult members would assign to the cult ‘founder’.

But because historicists just assume Christianity was founded by Jesus, they take the Gospel stories of Jesus founding that meal as literal.

We can see with our own eyes today the founding of a religion based on a non-existent person.

There is even a picture of this non-existent person at http://www.share-international.org/maitreya/Ma_main.htm

How is Ramsey going to explain away pictures of people?

As easily as mythicists point out how Paul has Jesus being revealed ‘in him’, when Jesus was supposed to have been a real person, revealed to the whole of Nazareth?

Not, of course, that all Gospels record any such alleged event…..

RAMSEY
Since you are so familiar with the text, you obviously know that the book of Daniel fairly accurately “predicts” the events leading to the 167 B.C.E. desecration of the Temple, you know, the stuff Hanukkah was about.

CARR
So what?

There are many Christians who claim the prophecy is about Jesus.

Yes, Christians who are reading their previously obtained beliefs back into the text. It does not follow from this that pre-Christian Jews, including the ones who supposedly made up this Jesus in the first place, would say that the passage was about the Messiah rather than a very unfortunate prophet, priest, or king, any of which are also anointed.

As for there being pictures of Maitreya, take a look at this FAQ:

Q. Will Maitreya look physically like Himself – that is, as He really is – when His first interview takes place, or will He be in a different ‘guise’ – as He usually is when He appears to people?
A. When He appears to people He is usually using a ‘familiar’, a created person through which some part of His consciousness manifests. But when He appears openly to the world, although not using the name Maitreya, He will appear as in fact He is, in the self-created body in which He manifests now in the world

Paul does not mention James manifesting himself in such an out of the ordinary fashion.

As for the reference to 1 Cor. 11:23ff., it is there because it was part of the quote. Shirley Case (the 1912 author of the words that I quoted) mentioned it as a counter to Arthur Drews’ claim that Paul gives no hint of a historical Jesus in his letters. One of the reasons for quoting Case in the first place is to note that historicists were frustrated at the games mythicists played. Speaking of which …

If Ramsey saw another religion where people summoned up the dead , who was then ‘present’ in the food the cult members ate, he would think twice before accepting that the summoned up person had founded that cultic ceremony.

I notice that you used the phrase “summoned up the dead,” which suggests the conjuring of spirits or Hollywood’s take on voodoo, when the Lord’s Supper is described more a ritual meal of remembrance. Now, do I think the first communion meal happened as Paul described? I’d say that it’s a definite maybe. 🙂 I would not grant it the certainty that I would the crucifixion. However, the text in 1 Corinthians 11:23ff is far more historically plausible than you grant, and I find it telling that you had to describe it in misleading terms to make it appear less plausible.

Furthermore, some of your argument is downright bizarre:

I guess Ramsey is going to cut and paste the answers to why Acts hides any relationship of James to Jesus, or why Romans 10 says Jews disbelieve because they either have never heard of Jesus or have rejected Christian preaching on the subject.

That Acts doesn’t mention James as the brother of Jesus hardly negates that Mark does. The same can be said for other places where brotherly relationships to Jesus are not mentioned. The idea that Jews hardly heard of yet another poor stiff that the Romans executed is hardly remarkable, and I already explained why many Jews would have rejected Christian preaching on Jesus–because Jesus looks like an utter failure to them.

So Ramsey thinks it hardly remarkable that the Romans crucified Jesus while the Jews had hardly heard of him?

Causing enough of a fuss to be executed doesn’t necessarily make one famous. The crowd need not have known or remembered Jesus’ name or what he stood for. And since Paul is writing over a decade after the crucifixion was to have happened, there’s even more opportunity for what little notoriety that Jesus had to fade.

And I guess that it really doesn’t bother Ramsay that the only even remotely reliable church history never mentions such important things as who this James allegedly was.

Which “only even remotely reliable church history” is this? Please don’t tell me that you mean Luke, since he had a tendency to “clean up” some of the problems one sees in Mark. Just look at how he reworks Mark 6:1-6.

Historicists haven’t done the work.

They just cannot say why the author of Luke/Acts would hide such important information or even if he had ever heard of it.

Again, this is a pseudoproblem with regard to the question as to whether Jesus existed, since attestation of James as Jesus’ brother is in Mark, the epistle to the Galatians, and Josephus.

CARR
Yes, he seems to have ‘cleaned up’ Mark’s claim that Jesus had a brother called James.

Yes, and the reference to Mary from Mark 6:3 as well. So what? Luke radically reworked the story in Mark 6:1-6, so it’s hardly remarkable that incidental details in Mark’s account were lost in the reworking.