{"id":2357,"date":"2018-05-01T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-01T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mythikismos.gr\/?p=2357"},"modified":"2018-05-01T15:00:00","modified_gmt":"2018-05-01T15:00:00","slug":"historicity-big-and-small-how-historians-try-to-rescue-jesus-by-richard-carrier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mythikismos.gr\/?p=2357","title":{"rendered":"Historicity Big and Small: How Historians Try to Rescue Jesus (by Richard Carrier)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"gospels_1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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When the question of the historicity of Jesus comes up in an honest professional context, we are not asking whether the Gospel Jesus existed. All non-fundamentalist scholars agree that\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0Jesus never did exist. Christian apologetics is pseudo-history. No different than defending Atlantis. Or Moroni. Or women descending from Adam\u2019s rib.<\/p>\n

No. We aren\u2019t interested in that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By Richard Carrier<\/strong><\/p>\n

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When it comes to Jesus, just as with anyone else, real history is about trying to figure out what, if anything, we can\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0know about the man depicted in the New Testament (his\u00a0actual<\/em>\u00a0life and teachings), through untold layers of distortion and mythmaking; and what, if anything, we can know about his role in starting the Christian movement that spread after his death. Consequently, I will here disregard fundamentalists and apologists as having no honest part in this debate, any more than they do on evolution or cosmology or anything else they cannot be honest about even to themselves.<\/p>\n

Here I will summarize the best arguments for historicity and the logic behind the\u00a0best<\/em>\u00a0case for it. And this only means mundane historicity; not the Gospel Jesus, but the Jesus of honest mainstream scholarship. I am most interested in finding out if I have left any good arguments out. So please add more in comments, if any you think remain that aren\u2019t ridiculous and can be taken seriously by mainstream experts. Likewise if you think the logic of any argument I do present can be better formulated.<\/p>\n

The Honest Framework<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Of the experts who remain to be counted, two things are agreed by both sides of the debate: (1) we don\u2019t really know how much of early Christianity actually comes from a historical Jesus (there are only diverse, contradictory, and unresolved opinions about this in the scholarly community); and (2) the cosmo-theological Jesus of the Epistles (wherein Jesus is a godman who lives in and speaks from heaven) and the mytho-heroic Jesus of the Gospels (where Jesus is more or less the central character in a set of parables about how each author believes good Christians should conduct themselves, made to issue statements supporting views the author wants his readers to regard as authoritative) is far more shibboleth than actual founder. And that remains the most likely fact of the matter no matter how historical this Jesus actually is; and regardless of what if anything he may have actually done to get the religion started.<\/p>\n

In its broadest sense, a\u00a0shibboleth<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is a characteristic cultural touchstone by which insiders distinguish themselves from outsiders. Jesus was constructed by different authors (both inside and outside the canon) to represent their own (or their community\u2019s) ideal of what they wanted or needed Jesus to have been and done, so they could teach their worldview through the fabricated authority of \u201ctheir\u201d founder (who by this point was more a construct of the imagination, than the actual founder himself) and so they could test someone\u2019s commitment to their view of things by testing their commitment to \u201ctheir\u201d account of Jesus. The Jesus of the NT is therefore not the founder of the Christian religion, but the\u00a0fictional<\/em>\u00a0founder of one or another\u00a0version<\/em>\u00a0of the Christian religion. The debate consuming academia now is whether from\u00a0this<\/i>\u00a0we can reconstruct the\u00a0actual<\/i>\u00a0founder, the real historical Jesus \u201cbehind\u201d these various shibboleths. You will find that any (non-fundamentalist) expert on Jesus or early Christianity will agree that this is the top question still occupying their field. (For a list and discussion of several other big questions still vexing the field, see Burton Mack\u2019s\u00a0The Christian Myth<\/a><\/em>.)<\/p>\n

The mythic and rhetorical structure of the Gospels renders them, at best, extremely problematic as sources. In contrast, if we order the evidence from most to least reliable, we must start with the authentic letters of Paul. These most scholars agree are\u00a0Romans<\/a>,\u00a01<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a02<\/a>\u00a0Corinthians,\u00a0Galatians<\/a>,\u00a0Philippians<\/a>,\u00a01<\/a>\u00a0Thessalonians, and maybe\u00a0Philemon<\/a>. From these it is apparent that before Paul \u201chad a revelation\u201d (i.e. in modern scientific likelihood: hallucinated, or pretended to have hallucinated, the Christ Jesus preaching a new teaching to him from beyond the grave) the Christian \u201ccommunity\u201d was wholly Jewish (this is evident in\u00a0Galatians 2<\/a>, for example), obeying Torah laws (including dietary restrictions and circumcision), and thus Christianity was just another Jewish sect. Not uncommon in deviating from the mainstream; I survey the evidence of some ten to thirty other known sects of Judaism at the time in\u00a0The Empty Tomb<\/a><\/i><\/strong>\u00a0(pp. 107-13), almost all of which deviated from what modern observers consider \u201cmainstream\u201d Judaism of the time. This new sect\u2019s \u201cpillars\u201d Paul says were widely recognized as being Cephas (\u201cPeter\u201d), James, and John, who were possibly thus called because they were its actual founders. For \u201cpillars\u201d would suggest it was their testimony on which the sect stood, and Paul\u2019s evident need to \u201cget their approval\u201d to maintain his mission suggests all Christians everywhere looked to them as the final authorities on legitimacy.<\/p>\n

The earliest evidence concerning the creed\u2019s origin is in\u00a01 Corinthians 15:3-8<\/a>, which is also questioned, but however meddled with it may be, odds are it confirms at least that the movement began (as is even more plainly claimed in\u00a0Romans 16:25-26<\/a>) from a combination of finding \u201csecrets\u201d in \u201cscripture\u201d and recent \u201crevelations\u201d (i.e. dreams or hallucinations, actual or pretended) of a resurrected Jesus by the church\u2019s first devotees. It notably does not say these revelations occurred \u201con the third day\u201d but that the resurrection was said\u00a0inscripture<\/i>\u00a0to have then occurred, and\u00a0then<\/i>\u00a0Jesus\u00a0later<\/i>\u00a0appeared to confirm this, which appearance may have occurred at any time; Paul doesn\u2019t specify when.<\/p>\n

Paul similarly says, in\u00a01 Cor. 11:23-27<\/a>\u00a0(compare\u00a01 Cor. 15:1<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Gal. 1:11-12<\/a>) that he learned of the Eucharist blessing and ritual (now called \u201cthe last supper,\u201d but not so called by Paul) directly from Jesus (which means, by dream or hallucination, since Paul did not know Jesus alive), rather than historical or eyewitness testimony. Paul also says\u00a0he<\/i>\u00a0introduced the version of Christianity that we now know as something\u00a0distinct<\/i>\u00a0from Judaism (Gal. 1-2<\/a>), abandoning Jewish law. It follows that a historical Jesus never taught that in life. Thus modern Christianity (being no longer \u201ckosher,\u201d i.e. observantly Jewish) is not based on the teachings of a historical Jesus, even if there was a historical Jesus. It is based on the pious dreams or hallucinations of Paul (or Paul\u2019s lies thereof). The\u00a0original<\/em>Christian religion, a sect of Jews, continually shrank and died out within a few centuries. The \u201cnew\u201d Christian religion, essentially founded by Paul and not Jesus, then evolved and survived to become what we now call \u201cChristianity\u201d (on its continual evolution and fragmentation, see David Eller\u2019s survey in\u00a0The End of Christianity<\/a><\/i><\/strong>). Perversely, Islam may be the only surviving fragment of the original Torah-observant Christianity (halal being an evolution of \u201ckosher\u201d).<\/p>\n

This creates an even greater problem for reconstructing what role Jesus may have played in founding Christianity: how much of what is later claimed about Jesus (things he did, things he taught) is an evolution of\u00a0Paul\u2019s<\/i>\u00a0ideas about Jesus (or even dreams or hallucinations by Paul, or even by his congregations or successors) rather than deriving from Jesus originally? Or the ideas of\u00a0other<\/em>\u00a0thought leaders in Christianity besides Paul? Because of data like this, attempting to reconstruct the real origins of Christianity from the Gospels (or even Acts) is next to impossible. Hence the pervasive and unresolved disagreements over this in the scholarly community, from Bart Ehrman\u2019s \u201capocalyptic Jesus\u201d to Reza Aslan\u2019s \u201czealot Jesus\u201d and everything in between, and beyond.<\/p>\n

The Best That Can Be Done<\/strong><\/h4>\n

When the evidence is looked at in this way, it is so easily explicable without a historical Jesus at all, that one ought to wonder if there indeed even was one. A case for that conclusion I lay out in\u00a0On the Historicity of Jesus<\/a><\/em>. And as I explain there, I do not find much merit in any other approaches to doubting the historicity of Jesus than is proposed in\u00a0OHJ<\/a><\/em>, from grandiose astrotheological theories to bizarre conspiracy theories, which often rest on a deeply inaccurate accounting of the facts, and deeply flawed logic. The only plausible explanation for the origins of Christianity without a historical Jesus is what I call the Doherty Thesis (first laid out by Earl Doherty in\u00a0The Jesus Puzzle<\/a><\/em><\/strong>), stripped down to its humblest essentials. Chapters 3.3 and 12.3 of\u00a0OHJ<\/em>\u00a0lay that out in outline (see also my article\u00a0How Did Christianity Switch?<\/a>).<\/p>\n

But what is the alternative? Many expert defenders of historicity agree no evidence outside the Bible is useful. Because it all ultimately just comes from late Christian reporting, which ultimately just goes back to the content of the Gospels. I detail this in Chapters 7 and 8 of\u00a0OHJ<\/a><\/em>, but I consider it too obviously a dead end for historicity to even produce a charitable case from. Any scholar who hasn\u2019t accepted this by now just needs to get over it and move on. Because it\u2019s all a dead end, from\u00a0Josephus<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0Thallus and Tacitus<\/a>. We are left with the Gospels (including Acts) and the Epistles (including Revelation). Acts is too dependent on the Gospels to get us anywhere. Nothing in Acts about a historical Jesus is really different from anything already declared in the Gospels, so Acts adds nothing new. So if the Gospels cannot get us to Jesus, neither can Acts. Likewise Revelation, which is patently fabricated.<\/p>\n

So that leaves the Gospels and the Epistles (of which, the late forgeries we must also discard). What is the best case that can be made from them? The Epistles are really the only valid battleground for this debate. Those are the only documents that have any chance of supporting the historicity of Jesus. I tackle that question last and in detail, in chapter 11 of\u00a0OHJ<\/a><\/em>. But there is still a continuing attempt to defend historicity from the Gospels, by attempting to show that something said in them couldn\u2019t have been said unless there were a real historical Jesus. I tackle that question in chapter 10 of\u00a0OHJ<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and, importantly, in chapter 5 of\u00a0Proving History<\/a><\/em>. There are also attempts to defend historicity from general arguments of probability, which don\u2019t hold up when we take an honest look at the parallels and background (as I show in the first five chapters of\u00a0OHJ<\/a><\/em>). Some still try to argue even from Acts, which I show is implausible in chapter 9 of\u00a0OHJ<\/a><\/em>. Everything else is Christian apologetics.<\/p>\n

Argument from the Gospels<\/strong><\/h4>\n

The standard \u201cbest case\u201d for historicity from the Gospels looks something like this:<\/p>\n