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Posted by on Jan 29, 2013 in History, Jesus | 20 comments

The Puzzling Figure of Jesus – Man, Myth, Messiah? Our very own Aaron Adair on Jesus.

Recently for my local Secular Student Alliance (SSA) group I gave a talk about what we can know about the historical Jesus, and perhaps he was originally a non-historical figure made flesh. This proposition is not the least bit popular among academics, let alone Evangelicals, but it isn’t necessarily crazy either. You will find some comparing it to Holocaust denial or creationism, but the evidence that Jesus existed is nowhere near as strong as it is for evolution or the Nazi-led Holocaust. There is significant evidence for Jesus, prima facie, but things get hairy when you look again.

My talk was recorded and you can watch it now.

The basic points: the only independent sources we have about the life of Jesus are Christian, there is only one such source (the Gospel of Mark), and it is written in a way that is more fiction than anything else. There are also difficulties in understanding how a Galilean Jew went from nice bloke to god-made-flesh very early on as seen in the letters of Paul, and why the first Christians who followed a Roman criminal were not harassed by the pagan authorities early on as attested by Christian sources (namely, Acts). There is also the weird issue of why there were many that believed Jesus lived and died a century earlier than is the standard chronology; how did that happen? After these points, I get into the most plausible Jesus myth hypothesis (there are plenty of crappy ones) which can answer these problems, though it has its own hurdles.

What do you think is the best explanation?

  • AussieMichael

    I think due to the lack of evidence and the fact that unlikely things happen I think that there are an infinite number of plausible stories. Mine is that there was an historical preacher called Jesus who had a small number of followers and was crucified. I think that his following remained small until Paul came along. Paul had a seizure and started having visions. Now Paul was aware of the Christians   but wasn’t much interested in actually finding out about Jesus except what he saw through his “visions”. Now Paul’s Christianity as it included the Gentiles thrived and I think that the original Jesus movement died out just leaving the precursors of the Gospels.

    • http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

      I think i generally concur with you there. As you say, the number of plausible number of stories means that you can pretty much pick one and have no real satisfactory way as to verifying whether it is true or not.

  • Peter

    I think there certainly is some story telling in the Gospels. I’m not sure how much. I think Jesus most probably existed as the description of him in 1 Corinthians (a man crucified who was betrayed and passed on a tradition of a communion meal 1 Cor 11:23) doesn’t sound like a heavenly being to me. I also think the James the Lord’s brother is most probably his biological brother. This is because he is clearly a high up figure in the Church (Gal 2:12) and he is described as both an apostle and a brother of the Lord in the same sentence (Gal 1:19). If “brother of the Lord” was just a title or name for any member of the church, why use it in the same sentence as another title? Moreover the Gospel tradition recorded that Jesus had a brother of that name. One thing that did occur to me about Mark’s Gospel as I read this though was I used to think that it was just improbable that Mark could have attributed sayings and deeds and prophecies to some figure in the past without any historical basis: but after all that is what the Book of Daniel is.

    • http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

      Peter – that is my main argument as to whether there was a historical Jesus. I can’t imagine multiple people actually just making stuff up out of nothing, and then following / leading this movement.

      On the flipside, weird cults (David Koresh etc) are cults built upon lies and manipulation whereby the main person ends up dying anyway (for their false beliefs).

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_NZMJ7JRYKH7WR6YTXJGG3PU65E John Grove

    I would agree with AussieMichael. I think perhaps there was a man who fit the bill of Jesus. But that person can never be recovered because so much has been made up about him. He may have even been a decent man who called out the hypocrisy of the Jews and for that got crucified. But that Jesus IS NOT the same one who became known to us by the myths of the bible.

    • http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

      Spot on John.

      Although i think I believe in some historical nugget to Jesus, it is so far removed from the Jesus reported in the Bible that it might just as well have been mythological.

  • pboyfloyd

    I think that the idea of the Gospels being historical accounts is a word-game in and of itself.

    Is it that historians can look at these stories and agree that they were indeed written around those times, as opposed to say a modern day pastor writing the story from the perspective of one of the tomb guards, kind of a reimagining, a fleshing out, from pure imagination, of course?

    In the first case, historians can agree that the Gospels are just as historic as, say, The Iliad, which says nothing about the accuracy of any details, but we can still glean information about the times in which it was written.

    In the second case, we could still get something out of it as to the historicity of some locations, that there were Romans ‘there’ at that time.

    But the word-game really kicks in if it is considered that the Gospel writers themselves are writing historical accounts as opposed to the idea that they’re writing journalistic reports as many Christians would like to imagine.

    These are separate arguments, one being that the Gospels were written about the time of the supposed events and, two being that the Gospel writers were historians themselves, since they wrote some decades after the events took place.

    Apologists can use a bait and switch here, by talking about the Gospels in terms of four separate accounts of the events, taking the details as truth, as a Christian would do, then, if an atheist quibbles about the accuracy of the details, how true those details are, the apologist switches to talking about sources, acknowledging that Matthew and Luke are embellishments of Mark, as it were fine and dandy for the Matthew writer, say, to concoct a story from traditions, supposed prophecies, the basic Mark story and so on.

    At any point in a mini-debate back and forth between an apologist and a non-believer, or even a Christian who is losing his faith, the apologist can switch from the separate account perspective, to the concocted mix and match perspective.

    Was there a real person at the root of these ‘histories’/'accounts’/'legends’? I think that’s like asking if there was a real person at the root of the King Arthur stories.

    Really, does it make any difference at all?

    • http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

      Ian – good points. I think the idea that the Gospels were written by historians is laughable. That Luke was a historian based mainly on his use of real place names and events makes Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes, a historian.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_NZMJ7JRYKH7WR6YTXJGG3PU65E John Grove

    Here is a good laugh for you all:
    Man claiming to be pastor leaves waiter note: ‘I give God 10%. Why do you get 18?

    http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/pastor-tip-receipt-155914258.html

  • http://twitter.com/adair_aaron Aaron Adair

    Thanks for the responses so far, everyone.

    Indeed, there very well could have been a historical figure at the beginning of the religion, but he is totally lost to us with all the myth-making afterwards. Totally plausible. The only question is parsimony; does having a human at the beginning explain the data as well or better than any other hypothesis.

    Consider what was mentioned about the Lord’s Supper in 1 Cor 11. Paul says that he learned of this, not from others, but from revelation from Jesus. So is Paul recalling history or myth?

    Consider James, the brother of the Lord from Gal 1. Is Paul saying James was Jesus’ biological brother, or is he referring to James as another Christian, since all Christians were adopted sons of God and all brothers of Jesus? Paul uses the language of brothers all the time in his letters, so this makes the reading more ambiguous. There is also nothing that makes James more likely a biological brother of Jesus by being apostle; Paul says he is an apostle (Rom 1:1, etc.) after all. There is also some ambiguity in the Greek in Gal 1:19, that it may be saying that James was “just” or “simply” a brother of the Lord, that he wasn’t that special (and perhaps not the same James mentioned in Gal 2).

    Again, the evidence is murky. But that’s what the nature of the evidence when it comes to early Christianity. As it is, there really isn’t any supremely probable solutions. I just think the mythical Jesus hypothesis is the most probable, though not by much. There is a lot of weird evidence that it could explain, but again there is plenty to consider, and it would take volumes of papers and books to discuss all the roads such an argument can go down. What a mess it is!

    • Peter

      I suppose the problem I have with the mythical Jesus hypothesis is that it is vulnerable to disproof. For instance, it is possible that Paul received the teaching about communion  through a revelation from heaven (though 1 Cor 11: 23 says that Jesus said these things on the night he was betrayed, and I’m not sure about there being “nights” and “betrayals” in heaven – though I wouldn’t know). But if either 1) he received it from the Lord through the apostles, or 2) the quotation from Jesus did come from revelation but Paul already knew when he received it that the events described had happened here on earth, then mythicism is immediately falsified. Only one pathway is consistent with mythicism. Similarly it is falsified if the Testimonium Flavinium had replaced an earlier reference to Jesus in Josephus, or if Paul had meant that James was Jesus’s brother. You might think that each of these individually are improbable, but all must be false for the Jesus hypothesis to be correct – and (independent) probabilities add up!

      For Gal 1:19 I suppose the issue that the sentence in my ESV Bible implies that James was both an apostle and a brother of the Lord (and since all apostles were presumably also “brothers of the Lord” the latter title would have been redundant – if it was just a title). It says “But I saw none of the apostles except James the Lord’s brother”.

      • http://twitter.com/adair_aaron Aaron Adair

        Peter, indeed a mythicist position is difficult if there are multiple arguments of difficult probability that it requires. And fortunately you are focusing on the verses that really do make-or-break the hypothesis. But some things are not that strong.

        You also mention the Testimonium Flavianum, but even if authentic in part (or replacing something else about Jesus), we don’t know Josephus’ source. If it was other Christians (rather plausible, even probable), then we just have someone repeating the gospel story, not an independent witness. If Josephus said he was depending on eyewitnesses to Jesus or documents from those that had seen him, then it would be powerful evidence, but we can’t be sure Josephus said anything about him, let alone independent of what the stories in the gospels say. At best the TF would show that the story of Jesus’ life existed in the 90s, but not necessarily anything else, and there are good reasons to think Josephus never mentioned Jesus as all (the context suggests the whole passage is an insertion).As for 1 Cor 11 and the Lord’s supper, there are a few points. The word that says “betrayed” in the Greek also means “deliver up”, so what Paul is talking about isn’t necessarily the Judas story. As for night, according to ancient conceptions there were levels of heaven with their own copies of what is on earth (I mentioned some of those sources in the talk); heaven also is where Eden/paradise is and where Adam is buried. So on a mythicist interpretation, there is nothing contradictory with the idea of Jesus doing something at night up in the heavens.For Gal 1:19, the phrase that James is an apostle and a brother isn’t redundant in its context because it also mentions another apostle, Peter. He is very important, a pillar for the Jerusalem church, (Gal 2:9), so he is more than simply a brother. Since Paul is arguing how he has his authority from direct revelation rather than human sources, he is distancing himself from as much of the other human authorities as he can. He is admitting to seeing Peter and no one else except for another Christian, James. So, what Paul can be saying here is that he only saw Peter and no other apostle except another mere member (instead of another pillar). I mentioned that the Greek has some ambiguity at this point, so this interpretation is possible, though it would take a serious argument to show it is the best interpretation. But it seems plausible enough to read it as not being redundant and speaking of a biological brother of Jesus. So it isn’t a death blow to the mythical Jesus hypothesis, but it is the best punch to be thrown on its own.Still, this is the difficult stuff, and I hope that the scholars that will attack the mythical Jesus hypothesis will focus here; this is the only weak point worth talking about.

  • Edward Gemmer

    It is interesting to try and figure out, though lately my thought is that I don’t care.  I am a proud Atheist for Jesus, not because of some person named Jesus but because I was raised Catholic and have always felt a lot of admiration for most of the things that Jesus supposedly stood for.  

  • Andy_Schueler

    You might think that each of these individually are improbable, but all must be false for the Jesus hypothesis to be correct – and (independent) probabilities add up!

    No, statistically independent probabilities are multiplied. If the probability of there being an earlier reference to Jesus from Josephus, which was replaced by the forged Testimonium flavianum, would be 0.05, and the probability of “brother of the Lord” being a title that could only refer to biological brothers would also be 0.05 – the probability of both being true would be (0.05 * 0.05) = 0.0025. 
    The likelihood of the conjunction of two or more events is always less than the likelihoods of the individual events – they don´t add up.

    • Peter

      Aha but I’m arguing this is a case of Pr(X or Y or Z) – and in that case you sum them. This is the complement of Pr(~X & ~Y & ~Z). Pr(A or B) is not Pr(A) + Pr(B) unless they are independent.

      • Andy_Schueler

        Aha but I’m arguing this is a case of Pr(X or Y or Z) – and in that case you sum them. This is the complement of Pr(~X & ~Y & ~Z). Pr(A or B) is not Pr(A) + Pr(B) unless they are independent.

        I see what you mean, but you still don´t add them up – it would be possible to get probabilities > 1 if you would add them up. 
        If you have the statistically independent events X, Y and Z for example and want to calculate the probability that at least one of them is true – it would be 1 – the probability that all of them are false, i.e. 1 – (Pr(¬A) * Pr(¬B) * Pr(¬C)). 

        • Peter

          Yes, I see you are correct. I also confused independence with “disjoint” in my last post when I said ” Pr(A or B) is not Pr(A) + Pr(B) unless they are independent.” Oops.

          • Andy_Schueler

            But in the case of just two events, the result is actually very close to adding them up. To stay in the example of there being a probability of 0.05 for there being an earlier reference to Jesus in Josephus and also 0.05 for “brother of the Lord” being a title that could only be used for a biological brother – the probability that at least one of those two is true would be (1 – (0.95 * 0.95)) = 0.0975. Which is very close to the simple addition of 0.05 + 0.05 = 0.1. So for just two events, you were almost correct . 
            But if you add more events, the probability that at least one of them is true will diverge stronger from the sum of all individual probabilities. 

  • Daydreamer1

    Hi Aaron,

      From this I feel that the current state is that it is very hard to pick one idea that fits all the different convolutions in the various texts we find – one ring to rule them all, so to speak. But it makes me wonder whether it is easier to take a step back and admit that this is not a failure of our various hypothesis, but instead is due to the nature of trying to fit a round peg in a square hole; one hypothesis cannot explain the entire variety. Or more precisely, one hypothesis cannot explain the entire variety in a way that people find theologically appeasing.

      But we are not trying to play this game with Greek mythology. Or at least while we could try and reclaim the ‘real Apollo’ from history we do not feel the need to try and drag that kind of interpretation out of it.

      There may well have once been a philosophical guy called Jesus who spoke out against things he found objectionable and was killed for it. There would certainly be nothing new about that – we see it from Socrates (or at least the story of him) to all the people martyring themselves for freedom of speech and democracy (or those dying for their preferred tyranny) today.

      I think we are only put in a position of attempting to create difficult and convoluted descriptions of who Jesus ‘actually was’ because many have decided he really had magical powers (or was magic itself etc). We could quite easily find ourselves doing it for Apollo instead if history had worked out differently. I think the fact they end up convoluted and never capable of explaining every facet of the stories about the man is not down to weakness in either our imaginations or abilities, but emerges from the fact that there are so many weaknesses in the literature about Jesus that nothing internally consistent can be constructed; never mind tested.

      So again: perhaps a step back. If ideas attempting to encompass Jesus in a way that can pick out what is real and what is not fail in their grander schemes then perhaps an approach like that of our relationship with Apollo, no matter how unappealing that may be to those who teach themselves about Jesus’ magic. Humans are quite capable of creating stories about things that didn’t happen. A quick check on the net is all it takes to find that someone somewhere believes even the most bizarre. It gets picked up and over time diversifies. The fact that this happens today lends credence to the idea it happened in the past, and without widespread literacy and education it perhaps took less than it does today. I don’t see why that in itself isn’t a very serious hypothesis regarding Jesus given the bizarreness of the rest of the story (and I am not too accepting of the theologians argument that if only we could wholeheartedly accept the bizarreness as real then we would see just how acceptable the whole thing is).

  • http://www.facebook.com/matt.brown.96742 Matt Brown

    I think that this scholarship is very good just and the other scholarship in dealing with the other abrahamic faiths https://www.facebook.com/alincolnism