Historicity of Jesus
Psst… Hey kids… College is a waste of time. Back in the day it was the only way to get a higher education, but now all you need is iTunes and/or a web browser. Well, unless you need one of those fancy diplomas that get you jobs that allow you to feed yourself with things that you can’t order by number, but really, don’t be so shallow. It’s all about the learning.
In the last year or so, many major universities (like Stanford, Harvard, Yale and MIT) have started offering their class materials online for free, and I’ve recently started to take advantage of this incredible opportunity for continuing education. I just finished listening to a Stanford course (downloaded from Stanford on iTunes U) called Historical Jesus given by first century Biblical scholar Thomas Sheehan. If the idea of spending about 15 hours listening to lectures on this topic appeals to you, I highly recommend this course.
Anyway, I came to this class with the reasonably firm belief that Yeshua of Nazareth had never existed. If we look for extrabiblical accounts of Jesus the pickings are slim. Chronologically, the closest such account to the supposed life of Jesus is the so-called Testimonium Flavianum, which is a reference to Jesus by Flavius Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews, written around 93AD (about 6 decades after the supposed death of Jesus). It’s certainly more than a little sketchy that a man who had such tremendous impact wasn’t considered a worthy subject to write about for generations after he was dead, and that the first non-Christian to do so was a guy who wasn’t born until several years after the date given for the crucifixion. So if you’re looking for contemporary accounts, you come up totally empty. And, even if the Testimonium is good enough for you, its authenticity is hotly debated. Most scholars consider it to be at best an exaggeration of the original reference by later Christian scribes and at worst a completely fraudulent interpolation. If you’re interested in details of those arguments, they can be found in the Wikipedia articles to which I have linked above. Beyond that, there are no other extrabiblical references until well into the second century, by which time the authors are almost certainly influenced by early Christian accounts, and not by history.
As for the Biblical accounts, the earliest of which (the first Pauline Epistles) come more than 20 years after the crucifixion, I had always dismissed them out of hand as being biased, and therefore unreliable. However, this course opened my eyes to several techniques which can be used to sift potentially real information out of the largely (if not completely) mythological gospels. The most compelling of these (as far as I can concerned) are the criteria of multiple attestation and embarrassment.
The criterion of multiple attestation (or “the cross section”) focuses on those sayings or deeds of Jesus that are attested in more than one independent literary source (e.g., Mark, Q, Paul, John) and/or in more than one literary form or genre (e.g., parable, dispute story, miracle story, prophecy, aphorism).[source]
To really begin to understand the implications of this criterion, you first need some understanding of the relationships amongst the gospels. Since the gospel of John is so late in comparison to the three synoptic gospels (usually dated around the last decade of the first century) and so different from them, let’s ignore it for now. The two-source hypothesis is widely accepted, and seems the most sensible to me. This is the theory that Mark was the first of the canonical gospels to be written and that Matthew and Luke copied from Mark extensively. However, there is also a good deal of other material that is identical in Matthew and Luke, but not present in Mark. In this theory, this material is attributed to a theoretical and undiscovered gospel (called Q by scholars) which was read and copied by both. So, in Mark and Q, we have two independent and relatively early accounts of Jesus. If you accept the earlier dates given for the writing of the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas (discovered in Nag Hammadi), there are three such independent sources. The criterion of multiple attestation says that anything which appears in two or all three of these sources is probably historically accurate. I won’t go into what overlaps, but for this discussion, it is sufficient that overlap exists.
Now let’s have a look at the criterion of embarrassment.
The point of the criterion [of embarrassment] is that the early church would hardly have gone out of its way to create material that only embarrassed its creator or weakened its position in arguments with opponents. Rather, embarrassing material coming from Jesus would naturally be either suppressed or softened in later stages of the Gospel tradition, and often such progressive suppression or softening can be traced through the Four Gospels. [source]
In short, this criterion states that anything appearing in the gospels which seems to undermine the message of early Christianity or embarrass the founders is probably either true (and well-known enough that it couldn’t have been left out completely) or a modification of an even more embarrassing account. A good example of this is the story of Jesus submitting himself to baptism by John. If Jesus is actually the son of god, it doesn’t make sense in the Christian worldview for him to take this subservient position to a mere prophet. When this story first appears in Mark, it is softened by a reference to a passage in Isaiah in which the talks of (supposedly) John as “preparing the way” for the messiah. Matthew and Luke soften the story even further, including Luke’s account of a fetal John the Baptist leaping for joy in the presence of a fetal Jesus. By the time John’s gospel rolls around, the baptism has been completely eliminated. The crucifixion (a shameful way to die) and Peter’s denial of Jesus in the passion story are further examples of this criterion.
This article doesn’t do justice to any of these arguments, but there is plenty of material available online for you to research on your own if you’re interested in greater detail. The point I was trying to make is simply that using these methods of viewing New Testament books, there may actually be useful historical information which can be gleaned. So am I now a believer in the historicity of Jesus? Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but I am far less certain about his nonexistence. I think the worst you can say about the existence of Jesus is that it’s an open question.
~I AM~
February 18th, 2008 at at 1:30 pm
Both of these criteria have issues. Multiple attestation can be explained by an unknown common source, or if it’s not too extensive simple coincidence (or a combination of the two, obviously). In both cases, there’s also the possibility that later copyists made changes moving the stories closer together.
Still, there’s something to be said for multiple attestation. The criterion of embarrassment is much more suspect. It is extremely common for the most absurd and implausible legends of religions to include their central characters doing things that seem to contradict central themes of the religion, or portray their gods and heroes in a less than flattering light. In many cases, it would be crazy to use that as evidence of historical accuracy (the bad behavior of Zeus in the Athena origin story hardly suggests that the Greeks based that legend on historical events). There can be any number of other reasons such embarrassing details might be present. For example, they might echo some other stories the author is invoking, or they may have a meaning which escapes us so that the author conceived of them as necessary rather than embarrassing. The arguments that put great weight on this always show an incredibly impoverished imagination in conceiving of the ways in which an inaccurate account might come to be put together; an inaccurate account certainly need not be, and hardly ever is, the polished masterwork of a cunning propagandist (and even if it were that, cunning propaganda sometimes finds value in employing elements that may superficially appear contrary to its purpose).
February 18th, 2008 at at 10:35 pm
Hi,
I also finished the course. It was great!
February 19th, 2008 at at 7:13 am
Of course, I completely agree with your arguments, and I in no way mean to suggest that either of these criteria can offer us anything more than circumstantial evidence. However, I’d like to point out that with the criterion of embarrassment, you have to be careful to view purported embarrassments from the perspective of the people for whom the myths were being written at the time and not a modern audience. That Wikipedia article points this out, in fact, and gives the excellent example of the incident in the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas in which the young Yeshua kills a playmate only to bring him back to life. While modern Christians find this embarrassing, from what we know of early Christianity, they probably wouldn’t.
When you start talking about classical polytheism like the Greek mythos, you’re looking at the “bad behavior” of the gods with modern eyes. I would hold that there is little or nothing in those legends which would have been embarrassing to classical Greeks. The gods in most polytheistic systems serve a somewhat different purpose than do the gods of monotheisms. They aren’t paradigms for human behavior so much as vehicles for conveying stories (sometimes with a moral, and sometimes simply entertaining) in which the believers can see themselves. These gods are often intended to represent the worst in mankind, not the best. The characters which are paradigms for human behavior are often human heroes and demigods like Prometheus and Herakles.
If you want to see a polytheistic god behaving badly, simply examine the Krishna legends. Krishna rarely does anything a modern Christian wouldn’t be ashamed to see YHWH or Jesus doing, but that wasn’t the point.
So, in short, I agree with you, but be careful with your frame of reference.
February 20th, 2008 at at 6:10 pm
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the idea of multiple attestation, but what about the dozen or more previous references to a christ-like savior in defunct religions? Christ means “the anointed one” in Greek. It is obvious the story of christ was told many times before monotheism took the stories over.
I think of these previous christ figures as proof that Christianity was merely beating a dead horse and Christianity only flourished because of its strict adherence to one god and the eventual sublimation of the competing polytheisms through coersion, deceit and eventually threats and force.
I mean, isn’t it classic circular reasoning to use multiple sources from the bible to prove the stories in the bible as true?
I would have to have two (preferably more) concrete, outside, independent, reliable sources in order to seriously consider Christ, and for that matter, most anything in the bible to have actually existed.
Obviously, historians suffer from these kinds of problems all of the time. There is also the big problem of many generations of fraudulent additions and revisions by the many who wanted and believed Christ to exist.
Unfortunately, I agree with those who believe history is written by those in charge and even modern events take on a whole new light when interpreted through the lens of other cultures and witnesses.
February 20th, 2008 at at 6:55 pm
You’re absolutely correct. The stories in the gospels are mostly if not entirely false and are heavily plagiarized from earlier religions. I am in no way saying that multiple attestation supports the stories. For the purposes of this post, I’m only interested in whether there was a preacher named Yeshua around the beginning of the first century who was later mythologized, or whether he was a completely fictional character to begin with.
If 50 years from now, someone writes a biography of me that’s full of lies and supernatural claims, it doesn’t mean I didn’t exist. However, if several people write different stories about me (even if they differ greatly) independently of one another, it can be considered evidence (weak though it may be) to future historians that I did in fact live.
The fact that the two or three sources differ from each other dramatically, means that we can actually know very little about Yeshua even if he did exist, and this is evidence that the stories are false, not the other way around. However, they are all about a preacher of the same name in the same time period, so that is evidence that there was such a man.
And please note that I never said Christ. That’s an affirmation of a belief about this person. I only used his name. Even if Yeshua existed, he certainly wasn’t the Christ.
March 12th, 2008 at at 8:23 pm
I think it is great that you are looking at the bible in a critical aspect. However, I would like to point out that the historical authenticity of the bible has already been proven by Jewish, Atheist and Christian scholars. I would add that these are professionals who have completed more then just a 15 hour online course. No other historical document in the world has been examined and then cross examined like the documents in the Bible. As a result, you can conclude that what is said in the Bible can be taken as accurate accounts of what was written at that time and the burden of proof therefore lies on the person disputing the facts in the Bible. As you pointed out, even the late Book of Thomas from the Gnostic text documents Jesus existence (although, if I recall, the original document is not carbon dated until after the first century). The claim that Jesus exists is a well known accepted fact by not just Christians, but by non-Christian historians alike. In closing, your reinventing the wheel and the question weather Jesus existed or not is not even a question anymore by the majority of the academic community.