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For a number of years I held a more or less Bultmannian estimate of the historical Jesus as a prophet heralding the arrival of the eschatological Kingdom of God, an end to which his parables, faith healings and exorcisms were directed. Jesus had, I thought, predicted the coming of the Son of Man, an angelic figure who should raise the dead and judge mankind. When his cleansing of the temple invited the unforgiving ire of the Sadducee establishment, in cahoots with the Romans, he sealed his own doom. He died by crucifixion, and a few days later his disciples began experiencing visions of him raised from the dead. They concluded that he himself was now to be considered the Son of Man, and they expected his messianic advent in the near future.
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There are already problems here. We learn from Steve Mason's "Josephus's Pharisees: The Narratives" that the Pharisees, not the Sadducees, are the establishment. Moreover, many scholars now doubt the temple incident. Though it remains a possibility, I'm not so sure it really happened.
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I remember first encountering the notion that the Jesus saga was formally similar to the Mediterranean dying and rising god myths of saviors including Attis, Adonis, Tammuz/Dumuzi, Dionysus, Osiris, and Baal. I felt almost at once that the jig was up. I could not explain away those parallels, parallels that went right to the heart of the thing. I felt momentary respite when I read the false reassurances of Bruce M. Metzger (may this great man rest in peace), J.N.D. Anderson, Edwin Yamauchi (may I someday gain a tenth of his knowledge!), and others that these parallels were false or that they were later in origin, perhaps even borrowed by the pagans from Christianity. But it did not take long to discover the spurious nature of such apologetical special pleading. There was ample and early pre-Christian evidence for the dying and rising gods. The parallels were very close. And it was simply not true that no one ever held that, like Jesus, these saviors had been historical figures. And if the ancient apologists had not known that the pagan parallels were pre-Christian, why on earth would they have mounted a suicidal argument that Satan counterfeited the real dying and rising god ahead of time. That is like the fundamentalists of the 19th century arguing desperately that God created fossils of dinosaurs that had never existed.
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Dying and rising gods? He can't be joking. Archaya S, anybody?
The parallels are not close - close examination of them in 21st century scholarship continues to reaffirm the negative trajectory of these "rising and dying gods" and the early Christian movement.
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And, yet, all of this scarcely proved that Jesus had not existed at all. Bultmann freely admitted that such myths clothed and shaped the form of resurrection belief among the early Christians, but he felt there had actually been certain Easter morning experiences, visions that might have given rise to a different explanation in a different age. I now think Bultmann’s argument runs afoul of Ockham’s Razor, since it posits redundant explanations. If you recognize the recurrence of the pagan savior myth in the Christian proclamation, then no need remains to suggest an initial “Big Bang” (Burton L. Mack) of an Easter Morning Experience of the First Disciples.
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The "pagan savior myth"? How does he equate dying and rising gods to salvation? Its equivocation, and Price should know better than that.
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G.A. Wells, like his predecessors advocating the Christ Myth theory, discounted the gospel story of an historical Jesus, an itinerant teacher and miracle worker, on the grounds of its seeming absence from the Epistle literature, earlier than the gospels, implying that there was no Jesus tradition floating around in either oral or written form at the time Paul and Peter were writing letters.
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Current studies in Thomas and Q show this to be false, reinforced by new understandings in Paul. Price is a bit behind here. Moreover, Price fails to calculate the role of traditions
in Paul, and Paul's denial of such traditions for himself? Price isn't working with Paul, he's overlooking him.
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All they referred to was a supernatural Son of God who descended from heaven to vanquish the evil angels ruling the world, then returned heavenward to reign in divine glory till his second advent. Had Paul known of the teaching of Jesus, why did he not quote it when it would have settled this and that controversial question (e.g., paying Roman taxes, celibacy for the Kingdom, congregational discipline)?
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Way too many assumptions here.
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Why does he seem to refer to occasional “commands of the Lord” in a manner so vague as to suggest charismatic revelations to himself? Why does he never mention Jesus having healed the sick or done miracles? How can he say the Roman Empire never punishes the righteous, only the wicked?
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Why would he talk about Jesus' miracles? What if they weren't part of the original tradition? Why does Paul specifically refer to Jews? Why does Paul say that Jesus was born under the law - is God born under the law? Who is Paul blaming for Jesus' death? Perhaps he pulled a Josephus and praise the Roman empire since he's working under it? Perhaps there's more to the story than merely dismissing it?
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This is a weighty argument, but another makes it almost superfluous. Take the gospel Jesus story as a whole, whether earlier or later than the Jesus story of the Epistles; it is part and parcel of the Mythic Hero Archetype shared by cultures and religions worldwide and throughout history (Lord Raglan and then, later, Alan Dundes showed this in great detail.).
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First of all, there's no "gospel story". Price still hasn't ridded himself of his Christian upbringing. There are "gospel
stories" and each must be evaluated on its own merits. And each evaluated separately, you oddly lose much -
most - of the archetypal heroic qualities. Born of a virgin? Not in Mark he wasn't. Nor was he god there either. Special abilities as a child? Not in Matthew or Mark or John. Only in Luke. If Price can't distinguish as much, then I seriously doubt his comptency in evaluating the "Christian story" altogether.
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Leave the gospel story on the table, then. You still do not have any truly historical data. There is no “secular” biographical information about Jesus.
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Considering that Josephus was a Jew, there's no "secular biographical information" about quite a many people in his own works. Where do we get our information about the Pharisees from, eh? Oh, right, Josephus the Jew, the Christian scriptures, and late - did I mention late? - Rabbinic sources.
One deception the "mythicists" like Price hope you won't think about - there were no "secularists" back then. It wasn't like it was then. Tacitus was a pagan. Josephus was a Jew. Everyone had their own agenda. Writing history for the sake of history was something of an anomoly. And even the few secular histories are full of the miraculous, and sometimes only attested by a single author. Why is Price trashing the gospels, instead of actually working with them?
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Even the seeming “facts” irrelevant to faith dissolve upon scrutiny. Did he live in Nazareth? Or was that a tendentious reinterpretation of the earlier notion he had been thought a member of the Nazorean sect?
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Or was that he was a member of the Nazorean sect a later reinterpretation of who he was
because he lived in Nazareth? Perhaps both? Maybe neither? Poor rhetorical question.
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Did he work some years as a carpenter? Or does that story not rather reflect the crowd’s pegging him as an expert in scripture, a la the Rabbinic proverb, “Not even a carpenter, or a carpenter’s son could solve this one!”? Was his father named Joseph, or is that an historicization of his earlier designation as the Galilean Messiah, Messiah ben Joseph? On and on it goes, and when we are done, there is nothing left of Jesus that does not appear to serve all too clearly the interests of faith, the faith even of rival, hence contradictory, factions among the early Christians.
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Ah, now we see it yet again. Why do ex-Christians carry a chip on their shoulder still? "the interests of faith" - sorry Price, cut the antipathy and move into scholarship.
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I admit that a historical hero might attract to himself the standard flattering legends and myths to the extent that the original lines of the figure could no longer be discerned. He may have lived nonetheless. Can we tell the difference between such cases and others where we can still discern at least some historical core? Apollonius of Tyana, itinerant Neo-Pythagorean contemporary of Jesus (with whom the ancients often compare him) is one such. He, too, seems entirely cut from the cloth of the fabulous. His story, too, conforms exactly to the Mythic Hero Archetype. To a lesser extent, so does Caesar Augustus, of whom miracles were told. The difference is that Jesus has left no footprint on profane history as these others managed to do. The famous texts of Josephus and Tacitus, even if genuine, amount merely to references to the preaching of contemporary Christians, not reporting about Jesus as a contemporary. We still have documentation from people who claimed to have met Apollonius, Peregrinus, and, of course, Augustus. It might be that Jesus was just as historical as these other remarkable individuals, and that it was mere chance that no contemporary documentation referring to him survives. But we cannot assume the truth of that for which we have no evidence.
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Why speak of truth? Truth is irrelevant. Price is still trying to battle his past Christianity here. Talking of "truth" signifies that one is not dealing with historical reconstructions, but vague notions of absolutism - what is "true" can never be known 100%. However, if you take the Jesus that scholars have reconstructed, and plug him back in his own time, does he fit? Has Price asked that question?
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A paragraph back, I referred to the central axiom of form criticism: that nothing would have been passed down in the tradition unless it was useful to prove some point, to provide some precedent. I am sorry to say that this axiom cancels out another, the Criterion of Dissimilarity: the closer a Jesus-saying seems to match the practice or teaching of the early Church, the greater likelihood that it stems from the latter and has been placed fictively into the speech or life of Jesus merely to secure its authority. Put the two principles together and observe how one consumes the other without remainder: all pericopae of the Jesus tradition owe their survival to the fact that they were useful. On the assumption that Christians saw some usefulness to them, we can posit a Sitz-im-Leben Kirche for each one. And that means it is redundant to posit a pre-Christian Sitz-im-Leben Jesu context. None of it need go back to Jesus.
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Wow. What a strawman. Price is tricky here, but just plain wrong. For example, if something really did happen to Jesus, wouldn't that be pretty useuful? Perhaps it was so real that you had to invent ways to circumnavigate problems it created? Hence the birth of apologetics. If everything was cogent, there would be no apologetics. But everything's not cogent. There are problems. And the evangelists and early Christians have to work around the problems they inherited.
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Additionally, we can demonstrate that every hortatory saying is so closely paralleled in contemporary Rabbinic or Hellenistic lore that there is no particular reason to be sure this or that saying originated with Jesus. Such words commonly passed from one famous name to another, especially in Jewish circles, as Jacob Neusner has shown. Jesus might have said it, sure, but then he was just one more voice in the general choir. Is that what we want to know about him? And, as Bultmann observed, who remembers the great man quoting somebody else?
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Again Price doesn't address the historical Jesus, but only his "sayings", as if that were primary importance. Well, it is for some, I would guess, maybe Christians who like to hear his message. But for scholars who try to reconstruct the past, Price's pleading is irrelevant.
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Another shocker: it hit me like a ton of bricks when I realized, after studying much previous research on the question, that virtually every story in the gospels and Acts can be shown to be very likely a Christian rewrite of material from the Septuagint, Homer, Euripides’ Bacchae, and Josephus.
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Yes, the onset of parallelomania. Wasn't it GakuseiDon who showed that Jesus came from IKEA? Hey look! Pyramids in Mexico... Pyramids in Sumer... They must be related!
The fallacious thinking is obvious.
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One need not be David Hume to see that, if a story tells us a man multiplied food to feed a multitude, it is inherently much more likely that the story is a rewrite of an older miracle tale (starring Elisha) than that it is a report of a real event. A literary origin is always to be preferred to an historical one in such a case. And that is the choice we have to make in virtually every case of New Testament narrative.
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One could do the same with Josephus' War. Or Naevius' Bellum Punicum. I'm sure I could find literary precedents for much of the so-called "historical writings" produced at the time. The problem is - is there a trajectory? And if so, how do you distinguish between real events rewritten in a literary style, literary borrowings on top of real events, and literary events? Price doesn't even bother to make that distinction.
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And it implies an historical Jesus of a particular type. It implies a Jesus who was a latter-day Judah Maccabee, with a group of brothers who could take up the banner when their eldest brother, killed in battle, perforce let it fall. S.G.F. Brandon made a very compelling case for the original revolutionary character of Jesus, subsequently sanitized and made politically harmless by Mark the evangelist. Judging by the skirt-clutching outrage of subsequent scholars, Mark’s apologetical efforts to depoliticize the Jesus story have their own successors. Brandon’s work is a genuine piece of the classic Higher Criticism of the gospels, with the same depth of reason and argumentation. If there was an historical Jesus, my vote is for Brandon’s version.
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Apocalyptic and anti-Roman - that sounds like the Historical Jesus to me.
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But I must point out that there is another way to read the evidence for the Zealot Jesus hypothesis. As Burton Mack has suggested, the political element in the Passion seems likely to represent an anachronistic confusion by Mark with the events leading to the fall of Jerusalem. When the Olivet Discourse warns its readers not to take any of a number of false messiahs and Zealot agitators for their own Jesus, does this not imply Christians were receiving the news of Theudas or Jesus ben Ananias or John of Gischala as news of Jesus’ return? You don’t tell people not to do what they’re already not doing. If they were making such confusions, it would be inevitable that the events attached to them would find their way back into the telling of the Jesus story. It looks like this very thing happened. One notices how closely the interrogation and flogging of Jesus ben-Ananias, in trouble for predicting the destruction of the temple, parallels that of Jesus, ostensibly 40 years previously. We notice how Simon bar Gioras was welcomed into the temple with palm branches to cleanse the sacred precinct from the “thieves” who infested it, Zealots under John of Gischala. Uh-oh. Suppose these signs of historical-political verisimilitude are interlopers in the gospels from the following generation. The evidence for the Zealot Jesus evaporates.
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Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
The same argument can be made for modern day evangelical revivals and TV preachers - isn't it kind of funny that big church preachers always seem to fall into some sex scandal? Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker - heck there is a whole list of them
here.
Now, I challenge Price to distinguish between what he's doing with the Jesus story and what can be done with the scandalous Christian. There's no difference. By Price's reasoning, one of them is real while the rest are literary borrowings.
There's a reason parallelomania is considered quackery by scholars - IT IS.
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I have not tried to amass every argument I could think of to destroy the historicity of Jesus. Rather, I have summarized the series of realizations about methodology and evidence that eventually led me to embrace the Christ Myth Theory. There may once have been an historical Jesus, but for us there is one no longer. If he existed, he is forever lost behind the stained glass curtain of holy myth. At least that’s the current state of the evidence as I see it.
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And he finishes with a non sequitur. How nice. Funny to see him conclude with very different statements than the ones he made earlier.
06-07-2007, 07:03 AM
