'Tis the season - for bad archaeology and sloppy history, among other things
One of the ever-recurrent features of the Christmas season are the inevitable magazine articles summarizing the current state of research about Jesus and his times. The ones in popular magazines typically come up with some pleasant Mugwump conclusion like, gee, skeptics look at the research and see open questions while believers see it as confirming what they wanted to believe anyway.
And every year, I pick up one of them and think, hey, maybe this would be kind of interesting to read. Then I browse a bit and get annoyed at how its basically just a recycling of the same articles from the previous year with the same sort of sterile one-sentence quotes from various scholars and religious leaders.
This year my slip-up was an online version. I've been seeing ads for a documentary called "The God Who Wasn't There" at a number of blogs. Finally today, I clicked on one and listened to a trailer for it, then checked out their Web site. That's when I realized that I had made the same boo-boo I make every year with these things.
But this argument that Jesus never existed as a historical person is just dense. One popular history of the life of Jesus that is solid in its scholarship but easily accessible is The site for the film is www.thegodmovie.com. This one is apparently done by a fundamentalist who has converted to village atheism.
And as every good village atheist has heard, some scholars a century or so ago questioned whether Jesus actually ever existed as a real historical figure. And since it works so well for village-atheist notoreity, it becomes very convenient to ignore, oh, basically the entire body of historical work on the subject since 1900 or so.
According to what I get from the Web site, the filmaker, Brian Flemming, is particularly concerned about the gap of 40 years or so between the death of Jesus authorship of Mark, the earliest Gospel. Well, heck, goes the village-atheist script, how could it possibly be accurate if nobody wrote anything down until 40 years later?
Now if anyone in the village happens to be familiar with the "historical-critical" scholarship on the Bible that has been around for roughly the last 200 years - sometimes called "Higher Criticism" - will be aware that textual analysis has shown that the Gospels, Mark and Matthew, both rely on a common source, no longer extant but probably a written one. This source is called Q, from the German Quelle (source). Q wasn't necessarily earlier than Mark, but it indicates that other written sources were in circulation.
Also, cultures which reverence oral traditions are able to preserve cycles of sayings in reasonably consistent form over a long period of time. The epics of Homer, for instance, are thought to have circulated for a couple of centuries in the oral tradition without being written down. There's no guarantee that it didn't change during its oral transmission - it likely did - but in clutures where passing along important literary works in oral form is practiced, the art of remembering these things is also cultivated. Anthropological studies on oral cultures also have shown that oral traditions can be transmitted for long periods of time virtually intact.
So the fact that the earliest date of extant Gospel(Mark's) doesn't say immediately to anyone with some knowledge of this stuff that it's unlikely that anything that wound up in the Gospels was just made up.
But the fact that Mark was written down at least 40 years after Jesus' death doesn't mean that it is the earliest extant writing about him. Paul's authentic letters are earlier in date than the Gospel of Mark. Paul was mostly interested in Jesus' life, death and resurrection from a theological perspective in his letters. But he clearly regarded him as having been a flesh-and-blood historical figure.
This argument that Jesus never existed as an historical person is just dense. One of many studies that addresses these issues is Michael Grant's Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (1977), which relies on solid scholarship but is written as a popular history. He describes his own perspective in this particular book as that of "a student of history seeking, as far as one's background and conditions permit, to employ methods that make belief or unbelief irrelevant".
He describes the two poles of approaching the evidence purely from a position of belief, what we might called the faith-based approach, and from that of skepticism. He describes the extreme form of the skeptical position, which seems to be that embraced by the documentary maker, as follows:
This sceptical way of thinking reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth. In ancient times, this extreme view was named the heresy of docetism (seeming) because it maintained that Jesus never came into the world 'in the flesh', but only seemed to;11 and it was given some encouragement by Paul's lack of interest in his fleshly existence. Subsequently, from the eighteenth century onwards, there have been attempts to insist that Jesus did not even 'seem' to exist, and that all tales of his appearance upon the earth were pure fiction. In particular, his story was compared to the pagan mythologies inventing fictitious dying and rising gods.
Some of the lines of thinking employed to disprove the Christ-myth theory have been somewhat injudicious. For example, the student of history, accustomed to the 'play of the contingent and unforeseen', will remain unimpressed by the argument that the vast subsequent developments of Christianity must have been launched from imposing beginnings, or that mighty religions must necessarily have derived from mighty founders: some, notably Hinduism, have not. More convincing refutations of the Christ-myth hypothesis can be derived from an appeal to method. In the first place, Judaism was a milieu to which doctrines of the deaths and rebirths of mythical gods seems so entirely foreign that the emergence of such a fabrication from its midst is very hard to credit. But above all, if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned. Certainly, there are all those discrepancies between one Gospel and another. But we do not deny that an event ever took place just because pagan historians such as, for example, Livy and Polybius, happen to have described it in differing terms. That there was a growth of legend round Jesus cannot be denied, and it arose very quickly. But there had also been a rapid growth of legend round pagan figures like Alexander the Great; and yet nobody regards him as wholly mythical and fictitious. To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars'. In recent years 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus' - or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary. (my emphasis)
The very fact that there are extensive writings about Jesus is a strong indication in itself that such a person really existed. Most writing about individuals at that time was about kings and generals and emperors. Not a lot of carpenters and preachers with hick accents in the backwaters of the Roman Empire were having theological treatises and biographies written about them at that time.
And despite the terrible difficulties it seems to present to fundamentalists and village atheists alike, most believing Christians would have no problem with reading and understanding the findings of historical research, which would have to regard the Resurrection and the subsequent events as something other than literal history. But for Christians, those are "faith events". It's not even a basic Christian belief that Jesus' dead body physically was physically resusitated, although in practice many Christians no doubt understand it that way.
I mean, is somebody is going to argue the case for atheism, at least do it based on sound history and not on village-atheist clicheés.
Also, this is the kind of stuff that rightwingers try to hang on "liberals". Some of the people that argue this may be liberals. But there are hardline atheists who are conservatives, as well. This is not one that can be easily identified by political categories.
