Ted Hoffman

Sorry I didnt have time to create links. But Here We are.

On Constantine Brunner: A Rejoinder to Jesus Myth Critics
Summary of Brunner's Arguments

1. Mischievous Critics Were Ignorant of Brunnerian Doctrines
2. Ordinary People Cannot Understand Genius
3. Christ’s Miracles are Ontological Proof of His Existence
4. The Inventors Were Too Stupid to Have Invented Jesus
5. Unique Polemics and Ambiguous Pedigree and Messiahship
6. Argument from Silence: Christ was too Genius to be Noticed
7. Christ was Considered Illegitimate By his Enemies
8. Christ Was Too Jewish To Have Been Invented
9. The Manifold Views of Christ are Proof of his Historicity
10. Apagogical Proof: the Alternative is too Absurd
11. Christ Was Too Sublime To Have Been Invented
12. The Evangelists Couldn’t Have Been so Sly
13. The Quadrilemma
14. Jesus’ Wisdom Was So Sharp, it Must Be Original

Foreword
Some Jesus Myth critics have in the recent past presented Constantin Brunner’s criticism of the Jesus Myth hypothesis as a critique that disproves the Jesus Myth Hypothesis. This write up is a response to such critics
This critique is pursuant to Earl Doherty’s recent refutations of the alleged scholarly refutations of the Jesus Myth Hypothesis. Doherty responded to alleged refutations by Shirley J. Case (The Historicity of Jesus), Maurice Goguel (Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History?), R. T. France (The Evidence for Jesus), Graham N. Stanton (The Gospels and Jesus), Morton Smith (“The Historical Jesus” in Jesus in History and Myth), Ian Wilson (Jesus: The Evidence) and Robert Van Voorst (Jesus Outside the Gospels).

Introduction
Constantine Brunner is a pen name for the German Jewish philosopher called Leopold Wertheimer (1962-1937). He started off as a journalist and later changed his name and proceeded to devote himself to Philosophy, a field in which he became a moderately prominent figure. He grew up in a Jewish family in Germany and ended up being split between the two worlds: he never professed a specific religion and embraced German culture and language while at the same time extolled Jewish prophets, among whom he considered Christ to be the greatest.
His story unfolds like a strategy before us: he died of chronic heart disease in 1937 just after escaping to Holland from the Nazi scourge and six years after his death, his wife and daughter got gassed by the Nazis at Sobibor concentration camp in 1943.
In the course of his Philosophical work, he dabbled in theology and religion and he published Our Christ: the Revolt of the Mystical Genius from those forays in Biblical study. He envisioned Christ as a man, a genius who was born amongst people who could not understand his genius. He believed that the miracles attributed to Christ actually took place as narrated in the Bible. Compared to the “critics” like Albert Schweitzer who he dismissed, Brunner was an amateur in Biblical Scholarship and his unwavering tenor involved surrendering reason to mysticism where the former conflicted with the latter. He lacked the mettle to hold back the cloak of mysticism, which pervaded his work like a contagion, choking the insights that threatened to emerge from his works. As such, his theology became obscure, and his doctrines were often contradictory and self-aggrandizing. Brunnerians today still ponder the actual meanings Brunner had in mind regarding some of his doctrines.
Baruch Spinoza’s metaphysics greatly influenced Brunner’s mysticism and spirituality. Like Spinoza, who was also from a Jewish family, Brunner considered the Bible to contain errors and God to be (part of) nature [1]. He criticized Aristotle, Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant and rejected their Philosophies while embracing Plato and Spinoza. As a Philosopher, it can be said that he did not give the discipline what it demanded of him. He had a short memory and often contradicted himself. His arguments, which demonstrated a lack of commitment to logic, were often poorly constructed and he was given to making ex cathedra declarations whenever he was unable to muster logical arguments to challenges.

Criticizing the Critics
In Our Christ, Brunner wrote an essay in the appendix in which he criticized scholars that employed the critical method in the study of Jesus. These scholars included Samuel Lublinski, Roberstson (A Short History of Jesus) Arthur Drews, Renan, Rudolf Bultmann and Albert Schweitzer. This article is a critical examination of that critique.

Brunner developed some theological constructs that he held as fundamental for the understanding the nature of Christ. He developed a doctrine of genius that separated mankind to two species: die Geistigen (the spiritual elite) and das Dekende (the multitude) [2]. Fused with this doctrine, Brunner developed a matrix of causally related phenomena that made up his holistic worldview, which held that the essence of the universe was absolute thought. He presented these phenomena a triangle with “Practical Understanding”, “Spirit” and “Superstition” occupying the three corners. In brief, Brunner held “practical understanding” to be based on sense experience, like scientific thought. Recognition that everything is part of a unity is spiritual thought and thinking of issues from an individual perspective rather than a unified one is what Brunner called “superstition”. Superstitious thought, he argued, made the ego absolute instead of relativizing it.
Religions, according to Brunner, were superstitious and he held that prophetic Judaism was not a religion because it had the revelatory character of mysticism, which, he asserted, no religion possessed.
Brunner’s doctrines were often self-contradictory. For example his doctrine of genius, which separates the spiritual elite from the multitudes, contradicts the spirit of egalitarianism which he often argued for in what he called his “books on the Jews” alongside Karl Marx. He also believed that the Jews were “the highest race”.

Brunner launched criticisms against the historico-critical scholars he disagreed with, who he referred to generally as “the critics”. The point of departure between Brunner and other scholars was often his own doctrines and metaphysics, which he used as a basis for his arguments. As a matter of principle, he treated his own metaphysics as a touchstone against which other ideologies were to be measured. In some instances, he could reframe the positions of other ideologies or worldviews to make them easily refutable. For example, he dismissed atheism as misguided because it denied the existence of an external God yet the cogitant was in us. Yet among his contemporaries, no atheist ever limited the existence of God to out-of-body spheres. Brunner had therefore erected a straw man as far as atheism was concerned. Further, he never provided any evidence, that the so-called the “cogitant”, was ever in us.

There is much to be said about Brunner as a Philosopher and as a logician and as a critic of Darwinian evolution but the purview of this article is the examination of his arguments against “the critics” in the appendix of Our Christ: the Revolt of the Mystical Genius, as presented on the internet at the Appendix on Criticism.

He rejected Markan priority (which at the time had already gained currency) and he believed that John was the earliest gospel. He faulted John for always “trying to put God in the place of the man” and regarded John’s gospel as “the dogmatic gospel of the ghostly, divinized Christ”. Brunner regarded Matthew as the “chief gospel” that is, “the most significant, most integrated and artistically most powerful gospel.” And Mark, he observer, was “the most stupid” gospel.

Mischievous Critics Ignorant of Brunnerian Doctrines
In his Appendix on criticism, Brunner began by dramatically evaluating the competence of the critics, labeling them in derogatory fashion and advertising the importance of his own doctrines in understanding the nature of Christ. He called the critics “clodhoppers” that propagated “the most pernicious nonsense” and their work, he wrote, was “ultimate buffoonery” with points that were merely “greasy and empty fatuities”. “Scholarly criticism”, according to him, was “egged on by inane slogans,” was merely “ministering to bestiality.” He regarded their acts as proof that “human beings occupy the lowest animal level.” “Critics learn nothing”, he sighed heavily in his appendix. In his view, they were “empty vessels” who were “beyond help” and whose “pitiful, critically erudite, botched writings… are devoid of all thought and all joy, and destroy anything that has a soul.”
He faulted his opponents, who comprised orthodox theologians [3] and scholarly critics, for being ignorant of his doctrines and possessing ill motives. He claimed, without support, that they were not properly acquainted with Judaism and mysticism and on that basis, asserted that they were not qualified to speak about Christ. He asked rhetorically:

In his criticism, Brunner never demonstrated these alleged handicaps. Upon close inspection though, we find below that his doctrines were a conceptual muddle. He claimed that critical method had “contributed nothing”, and claimed that it was a “mischief which falsely claims to be a study of the Gospels and Christ”.
These void accusations and disparaging remarks comprised the ‘opening’ of Brunner’s criticism against the critics. Besides the fact that they were ill-befitting of one that was regarded as a Philosopher, they provide us with a glimpse of the quality of the criticism Brunner employed.
Ordinary People Cannot Understand Genius

Brunner argued that “common sense” could not grasp genius. Genius, he argued, could only be grasped by “spiritual eros”. He asserted that, because Christ was a modified, miraculous human being, he [Christ] could not be understood by the ordinary people.
But Brunner himself was an ordinary man – at least in the sense that he never claimed to belong to the spiritual elite. Yet, he not only understood the alleged genius; he proceeded to construct the doctrine of the spiritual elite and the multitudes, and erected a metaphysics that entailed the mysticism which he alleged was a fundamental ingredient for the understanding of who Christ was.
This contradiction reminds one of the joke in which one person tells the other, “You know, there are only two kinds of people in this world”. And his curious friend says, “Oh yeah? And who are they?” Then he replies wisely, “Those that claim that there are only two kinds of people in this world, and those that don’t: I don’t.”
Knowledge of these doctrines, Brunner repeatedly argued, were fundamental in seeking to understand the nature of Christ, a nature that, he argued, could not be understood by ordinary people – the multitudes.
It has been argued that this division of the society between the dumb multitude and the spiritual elite was fundamentally at odds with the egalitarian ideals that Brunner propounded in his writings on “the Jewish question.” This was a contradiction.
In the same contradictory manner, Brunner argued on the one hand, that the “specifically Jewish character of Christ, in whom nothing of Greek influence can be discerned” was proof that Christ was not invented through borrowing features from Greco-Roma religions. Yet, when confronted with arguments of parallels between Christianity and pagan religions, he wrote that “the really great genius cannot manage without borrowing essential constituent elements.” He argued that the borrowing across ages and cultures demonstrated that Christ was “one with the essence of the people” and was “always and eternally true.”
This, of course, was self-contradictory but when one evaluates Brunner’s writings, one realizes that he was a man capable of speaking different things at different times without hesitation, and he appears his logic was impervious to the law of non-contradiction.

Christ’s Miracles: Ontological Proof of His Existence
Brunner argued that the world-transforming miracles that Christ allegedly performed were “an ontological proof for the existence of the personality of Christ.”
Ontological arguments [4] are a priori arguments that assume that the fact that something can be conceived mentally is proof that it exists. It uses thought alone as proof of existence and does not rely on sense experience or observation. Ontological arguments are often been used to argue that because we can imagine a perfect being, and because perfection has to entail existence, God exists.
Immanuel Kant rebutted the ontological argument by stating that the concept of God, or perfection, did not necessarily entail existence because existence is not a property of a thing.
We can imagine utopia. But that does not entail that utopia exists [5]. On the flipside of the logic of the ontological argument, it can be argued that since we can imagine that God does not exist, God therefore does not exist. Furthermore, to exist is to have a causal relationship with the rest of the universe. This relationship can only be determined by sense experience or observation. Kant observed that imagined thalers are not real thalers. Brunner admitted that Kant was right but shifted the blame to Christian theologians and he faulted Kant for misunderstanding the Ontological proof. He wrote:
This is obscure and so entangled that it defies unpacking in a coherent form: Brunner admitted that Kant was right. Then he accused people who used the ontological argument to prove God’s existence, of misusing it in the service of superstition. Then he clawed back the credit he gave Kant back to his position, dismissed those who did not share his view as lacking the spirit, and then he claimed that there was no need to prove the “spirit”. This is not criticism, this is closing the debate and declaring in an ex cathedra fashion that there is nothing to discuss.
What we see above is the ontological proof gaining a new meaning and application at the Behest of Brunner. Everybody else, like Immanuel Kant and Rene Descartes, Brunner would have us believe, did not know what ontological proof is and they also did not know the proper theme of Philosophy.
Whereas Brunner accused these eminent Philosophers and great thinkers of mishandling the concept of ontological proof, he failed to demonstrate how they misused it. Instead he supplanted the standard ontological arguments with one that he claimed, would “make philosophy aware” of its “proper theme”. Besides latching on an irrelevant matter like “making Philosophy aware” of its place, Brunner’s approach was wrong.
The determination of the existence of a historical person cannot be done in the same matter as the determination of the existence of a “spirit” or of a supernatural being. To determine whether a person existed historically, recourse to historical sources and historical method is necessary. Indeed, to argue about the existence of a historical person through “ontological proof” is absurd. Brunner’s egregious misapplication of Philosophy on a historical question is a classic illustration of the popular adage that says that “when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” Indeed, oftentimes, his ineffectual efforts evoke sympathy.

The Influence of Jesus and His Miracles Prove his Existence

Brunner proceeded to argue that because even fools knew about Christ and we know about his activities, “we are logically constrained to see his concrete, individual, human existence as the cause of the concrete effects we experience, as that which fulfils the conditions for contingency.”
This is a faulty argument that presumes that what is known about a figure, irrespective of who the figure was, is known because it is true. The stories about Mithras were believed by Mithras-worshippers. And their lives were influenced by their beliefs regarding the deeds and sayings of Mithras. But we are not therefore constrained to believe that Mithras existed. We require historical proof for that and the same criterion applies to Jesus. The story of Jesus is not corroborated outside the New Testament gospels. And the gospels are patently fictional because they narrate about a virgin giving birth, dead people rising from the dead and the authors even narrated the words Jesus spoke even when Jesus was alone (Mark 14:39). These are markings of works of fiction because the claims in them are not consistent with human experience. The laws of science are the same today as they were two thousand years ago so there is no reason to believe the laws of science could allow people who had been dead for days to come back to life.
In addition, Biblical scholars like Thomas Brodie (The Crucial Bridge: The Elijah-Elisha Narrative As An Interpretive Synthesis Of Genesis-Kings And A Literary Model For The Gospels) and Randel Helms (Gospel Fictions) have demonstrated that most of the miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospels were literary constructions that involved borrowing from the Old Testament. Richard Carrier has also provided a historians perspective in his article Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story that explains why some of the miracles attributed to Jesus, like his resurrection, lack sufficient evidence to justify belief in their veracity [6]. Authors like Dennis McDonald (The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark) have also cogently argued that through literary borrowing, Mark emulated Homer in the construction of his gospel and borrowed several motifs from Homer, for example, hydropatesis (water-walking) is found in Odyssey 1.98 & 5.48 in which Odysseus walked on water. We also find it in Mark 6:45-52 where Jesus walks on water. Odysseus also slept in a boat, a storm started and he woke up and calmed it (Odyssey 10.31, 12:169) and Mark also narrated that Jesus slept in the stern of a boat, woke up and calmed it (Mark 4:1-2). There are several other parallels that McDonald illustrates that indicate that most of the miracles in Mark, including the feeding miracles and healing the sick, were borrowed from Homeric epics like Iliad and Odyssey. We therefore are not constrained to accept the historicity of Jesus based on his miracles alone because by the same reasoning, we would also be constrained to accept the historicity of Odyssey.
It is important to note that the existence that Brunner is arguing above is not existence in the sense of the “historical existence” of Christ. In other words, he is making philosophical arguments in a historical ballpark. His arguments therefore, even if they were to be philosophically robust, would be irrelevant in the determination of the existence of a historical Jesus.

The Inventors Were Too Stupid to Have Invented Jesus
Brunner argued that “the Jewish Fishermen, tax Collectors, sinners and harlots” were too “superstitious, stupid and illiterate” to invent the genius that was Christ. Brunner believed, rather incorrectly, that the authors of the gospels obtained oral narratives regarding Jesus’ ministry from tax collectors, harlots and Jewish fishermen, which the evangelists then wrotw down, resulting in the gospels as we know them today.
This was an erroneous belief. The first person known to have written about Christ was Paul. And Paul’s Christ was a heavenly, cosmic savior figure who Paul never placed anywhere on earth. Unlike the gospels, Pauline epistles never mention Pilate, Mary, Joseph or other earthly beings we find in the gospels. Neither does Paul mention Capernaum, Bethlehem or other earthly places where Jesus is placed in the gospels. Paul asserted severally that he got his gospel from God through divine revelation, and not from man.
In Galatians 1:11-12, Paul states: “But I make known to you, brethren that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ.”
Brunner was therefore flat out wrong to think that the information regarding were obtained from prostitutes and other amme haaretz (common people). Mark relied on the Old Testament and Hellenistic literature to construct the story of Jesus and Randel Helms, Thomas Brodie and other New Testament Scholars have demonstrated this. Textual criticism has demonstrated that Matthew, Luke and John relied on Mark [7]. Thus Brunner’s argument is false at all levels.

Unique Polemics and Ambiguous Pedigree and Messiahship
Because the messiahship and pedigree of Jesus was so ambiguous in the New Testament, Brunner argued, the story must be authentic because if someone was fabricating the story, such an author would have made Christ have a divine anointment to messiahship and perhaps a royal Kinship.
Brunner noted that the Davidic pedigree was even denied in Matthew 22:41. On account of these, he argued, these authors should not strike us as novelists fabricating coherent story. He concluded that they must have been therefore recording authentic events.
In the same vein, he argued that Christ’s polemics against the Pharisees were “unique and inimitable as the polemics of Socrates against the Sophists. The portrayal of the genius and his times facing one another as enemies” he argued, showed us that Christ must have existed.
Christ’s Messiahship was not ambiguous. At least not to the gospel readers or the early congregations to whom the story may have been read to as liturgy. In Mark, Jesus’ messiaship was a literary “secret” that, consistent with the Markan theme of irony, was known only by the unlikeliest people like the centurion in Mark 15:39. Yet we find that the disciples, who were supposedly closest to Jesus, portrayed as unaware of his Messiahship. This is Markan irony, not ambiguous messiahship.
Contrary to Brunner’s claims that Jesus’ polemics were unique, New Testament Scholars like Burton L. Mack (Who Wrote the New Testament: the Making of the Christian Myth) have demonstrated that Mark, for example, employed a Greek style of aphorisms called chreia. Chreia typically involve anecdotes that have a question or an accusation made by a student or a challenger, followed by a witty response or putdown by the person challenged. The Socratics and cynics used chreia in their writings, plays and philosophical discourse. Mack’s analysis of Jesus led him to conclude that Jesus was a cynic sage and in his book, he illustrates “Cynic-like challenge in the teachings of Jesus” (ibid. p.40). We find an example of a chreia in Mark 2:16, where some scribes and Pharisees question Jesus’ conduct and Jesus delivers a putdown in Mark 2:18-19. We also find that a saying like “We have piped unto you and you have not danced…,” which is found in Luke 7:32 and Matthew 11:17 are also found in Aesop’s fables.
Thus, contrary to Brunner’s claims, Jesus’ polemics were hardly unique and the motifs employed in them can be traced to Hellenistic literature and Greco-Roman literature.

Argument from Silence: Christ was too Genius to be Noticed
Brunner argued that the “literary testimony [about Christ] is slight and uncertain” because Christ was a genius. According to Brunner:
The greater the genius, the less effect he will have directly on his age, the less attention he will attract from those who would be in a position to record interesting details about his life. The genius is invisible to those who surround him.
He attempted to support this argument with an example of Max Stirner, who was a real person but left nothing to discover or describe about him. But contrary to Brunner’s claims, Albert Einstein was a genius and several generations know and more will know about him. Thus it is incorrect to claim that geniuses have little direct effect on their age.
In fact, contrary to Brunner’s line of argument, it ought to be asked – if Christ was such a genius, how come no historian or writer noticed his mental abilities?
The idea that societies ignore geniuses is contrary to human experience, which informs us that society favors the brave, the brilliant and the charismatic. In fact, merely by being different, those that are geniuses attract the attention of the masses.
Thus, prima facie, we have no reason to accept Brunner’s argument. The abilities of geniuses stand out. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t know they were geniuses.
To argue that a man was too genius to be noticed, where such a man was not a recluse and where such a man was astonishing the wisest men in Jerusalem when he was only twelve (Luke 2:42-46) with his answers and where such a man fed thousands of people miraculously, is like arguing that such a man was too noticeable to be noticed. In other words, Christ’s life, as narrated in the gospels defied being ignored. This is a man who was allegedly welcomed by crowds when he made a triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the crowds spread out their clothes on the road for him (Mark 11:8-10). This is the very opposite of the not-known claim Brunner made regarding Jesus.
Brunner also argued that there is no evidence for the historical existence of Jesus because “Christians then would not have been greatly interested in merely providing evidence that Christ really existed; they did not have to prove his existence to the critics – for such sophisticated critics did not exist at the time”
This is not entirely correct. Marcion, like Valentinians and Basilidians believed that God was incapable of becoming corruptible flesh and held that Jesus never existed on earth as a flesh-and-blood man. Polycarp and the Book of John also warn and condemn those that do not believe that Christ was on earth as flesh. So, straightaway, we see that there were those who did not believe that Jesus walked on earth as a man. Then there are those who rejected the story of Jesus as fiction because of claims of resurrection and virgin birth. These included Caius, Porphyry, Julian, Celsus and Minucius Felix. So, whereas they did not demand historical evidence, these people rejected the story of Jesus for reasons that supersede historical questions. When told that there are black roses in utopia, the fact that one responds by stating that there are no black roses does not mean that therefore he or she does not question the existence of utopia.
It is also incorrect for Brunner to assume that authors only write about real people to prove that the subjects existed as historical people. We have writings from various sources about Nero, King Midas and so on, yet these writings were not necessarily intended to prove historicity of these people. The fact that commentators criticize an aspect of the characters therein or the texts themselves is not proof that such commentators accept the historicity of the events narrated in such texts because history is not the only issue that interests people regarding stories. That theological issues or naturalistic grounds underpin the rejection of a story regarding a religious figure for example, does not entail that the historicity of such a deity is therefore accepted as a given.

Christ was Considered Illegitimate By his Enemies
The Mishnah (Berakhot 17b) states, “Let us have no son or pupil who burns his food in public like Jesus of Nazareth”. Brunner argued that passages like these indicated a polemic aimed at portraying Jesus as one who contradicted the Torah “by his heresy and manner of life”.
In the Talmud, Brunner states, Jesus was dismissed as “a bera desanissa (the son of a harlot) and even a mamzer u-ben ha-nida (the bastard, and son of a menstruating woman).” Sanhedrin 67a, Shabbat 104 and Mishna Yevamot 4:13 also refer to Christ’s bastardization.
Brunner also argued that Celsus, through Origen’s Contra Celsum also stated that Mary had been unfaithful to the carpenter she had been betrothed to and was made pregnant by Panthera.

These claims of illegitimate birth and opposition to the rabbis, Brunner argued, must be granted “a certain credibility, not dependent on the portrayal found in the gospels, in so far as the moral criticism which was applied to Christ in his time is still alive in the tradition”. He concluded: “all these details confirm, of course, the reality of Christ’s existence”
It is instructive to note that the critics who wrote the Talmud were not interested in challenging the historicity of Jesus but were more interested in challenging the messianic legitimacy of the figure presented in the gospels and making him lose appeal amongst the Jews.
As such, they focused on emotive and theological reasons and not historical reasons. In any event, the gospels were written some forty years after Christ’s alleged death, and the Talmud and Mishnah written more than a hundred years. The critics would have therefore been hard-pressed to find any contemporaries of Jesus that would have corroborated or authoritatively denied the existence of Jesus as a historical person.
The fact that they tacitly accepted the existence of Jesus does not constrain us to do the same. The fact that they were distracted with religious issues whilst ignoring historiographical questions does not constrain us to do the same.
Critics like Celsus focused on attacking the supernatural claims surrounding the birth of Christ as presented in the gospels, and the resurrection: they were less concerned with historical questions. Others like Athenagoras in A Plea for the Christians 15, Theophilus in To Autolycus 1:9, 13 and Minucius Felix attacked the concept of a human being, who, they held as corruptible, becoming a god. Indeed, there was much that was controversial about Christ and his historicity may have been the last item in the list of controversial issues regarding Christ. That is the reason his historicity was not questioned by critics.

Christ Was Too Jewish To Have Been Invented
Brunner argued that the “specifically Jewish character of Christ, in whom nothing of Greek influence can be discerned” dispelled the notion that Christ had been invented through the influence of the dying and rising saviour gods like Adonis, Attis and Asclepius that were deified in the Greco-Roman world.
This is incorrect. We find Greek influence in the figure of Christ as I have argued above. We find it in form of cynic sayings and dialogues that employ chreia. Scholars like Burton Mack, as been mentioned above, have argued that the historical Jesus must have been a cynic sage because Jesus’ interests, they argue, show very little interest in Jewish traditions and his teachings do not focus much on Jewish issues and institutions. This is contrary to Brunner’s claims.
The concept of incarnation that we find in John (the word becoming flesh), was already present among the Greeks. Tatian writes in Address to the Greeks, 21, that God’s incarnation was similar to that of the Greek gods.
Even the logos concept was borrowed from Greek religions to make Christianity more appealing to the pagans. Hellenistic Jews such as Philo and Greek thinkers alike believed God to be transcendent and too spiritual and pure to come in contact with the material and impure world. Stoics, for example, believed that humans possessed the reasoning principle that governed the universe as per the mind of God [8]. They called this the logos. Among Platonists, the logos varied between being God’s creative forces and being a divine entity. Philonic thought entailed a “heavenly man” who had the qualities of the logos [9].
Even though Brunner believed the logos concept was added later on, the fact of the matter is that Christianity has all the markings of being a religion that was brewed in the melting pot that comprised Greco-Roman religions and Judaism. In addition, Brunner contradicted the argument above when he admitted to the fact that there were common features between Christianity and pagan religions and indeed borrowings from other religions. He refuted the argument above when he admitted “the really great genius cannot manage without borrowing essential constituent elements.” So the argument above was refuted by Brunner himself.

The Manifold Views of Christ are Proof of his Historicity
Brunner wrote: “The Jacobite, Petrine, Synoptic, Pauline, Johannine approaches, different as they are from one another, all guarantee and cause us to discern the One Christ. So that is enough of historical proofs! – which we do not need, though we must not forget we have them.”
The fluid nature of the character of Christ, contrary to Brunner’s argument, is one reason to question the historicity of Jesus and whether the gospels can be regarded as historical documents. The evangelists molded the character of Christ according to the different theological agendas they each had. Mack, ibid. p.6 noted that “each writing has a different view of Jesus.” The differences and contradictions in the narratives we find in the gospels work against them being viewed as historical documents. Richard Carrier explains why either Luke or Matthew is wrong about the date of the nativity in Date of the Nativity in Luke (Online) [10]. It has long been observed that Luke 2:1-2 places Jesus’ birth at 6CE while Matthew 2:1-3 dates it to around 6BCE. Either one of the evangelists is not recording history, or both are not.
Based on the different treatments the figure of Chrust has undergone under various pens in the New Testament, Earl Doherty has argued in The Jesus Puzzle Christ was an intermediary savior figure in Paul that was later historicized in Luke.
Brunner cited Roberstson (A Short History of Jesus) as arguing that the pictures of Christ are contradictory and that Christ was “the most self-contradictory product of a hundred hands working against each other, a mixture of voices that never could, and never did, belong to one and the same personality”
He first responded by admitting that Robertson was right then in his took an about-turn and clawed back that concession arguing that Christ was so impossible that he must have been real.
This is nonsense. It is like arguing that something is so negative that it must be positive. Brunner attempted to support that argument with arbitrary constructs like “Genius shows itself in the unity of contradictions”. “Unity of contradictions” is a contradiction in terms because contradictions entail lack of consistency, or unity. This quality of the genius of embodying contradictions, it can be said, was erected by Brunner to specifically deal with the criticism presented Robertson. Thus genius was as Brunner made genius to be. It renders the notion of genius an arbitrary and meaningless expression that took whatever meaning Brunner thought befitting depending on the weather and the matter at hand.
In a remarkable departure from the tenets of logic, which demand consistency and lack of contradiction, Brunner argued by that by questioning the existence of Christ based on the lack of consistency in the narratives about him, the critics were seeking to dissolve Christ and his works “in their lack of contradiction.” He maintained that by being logical, the critics were mistakenly “imagining the genius to be like them.” The genius could embody contradiction and still be a genius and their minds were simply too inadequate and superstitious to help them understand the genius.
This tactic entailed accepting irrefutable arguments and then engulfing them in the malleable, ever-shifting and fluid concept Brunner labeled “genius”. Of course, in the process, the concept of genius was reduced to nonsense. It meant that if genius claimed that 1+1=7 and a mathematician questioned it, Brunner would simply have responded not by acknowledging a mathematical error on the part of the genius, but by accepting that even though 1+1=2, genius can make 1+1=7 because it is genius and the mathematician is simply too superstitious to understand how genius works and he should just give up. He would conclude by stating that genius was showing mathematics its place in the real scheme of things by asserting that 1+1=7.
This black is white approach to irrefutable arguments shows us that as a logician, Brunner was not committed to the laws of logic as a science of correct reasoning and we see that Brunner often chose the easy, abstruse way out of logical quagmires, rather than face issues rationally. The law of non-contradiction in logic states that a statement cannot be false and true at the same time. Brunner violated this fundamental law of logic. He claimed that “the tension generated by opposites is the life of the genius, a life which knows no contradiction.” He further wrote that the genius dynamically embodied divine nature and human nature, the cogitant and the ideatum. He called this obscure notion “co-inherence.” Although he named his concepts and wrote about people achieving the “unity of consciousness”, “the I-Self”, he never provided any evidence of their existence, or how the alleged “co-inherence” could be discerned. These entities remained unobservable, non-verifiable constructs in his mind. He responded to skeptics and critics of his claims by accusing them of knowing nothing of the mystical genius and “lacking an essential predicate – endowment – which would enable them to undertake criticism”. He piled obscure accusations on top of others without clarifying anything.

Apagogical Proof: the Alternative is too Absurd
The apagogical proof, what Brunner called an “indirect deduction ad absurdum”, seeks to show “the utter absurdity – provided one is consistent – of accepting the critic’s premises,” Brunner wrote.
He exclaimed: “there is no smoke without fire!” and added that the ontological proof in the Gospels and Christ’s words, his “personality’s exalted attitude, his attitude of destiny, reciprocally illuminate and prove one another” prove that such a man existed. Simply put, Brunner held that Christ’s “spiritual significance” was proof that he existed historically. And to think he did not exist was absurd.
Spiritual significance to a deity is proof that a deity is significant to the devotees. It is no proof that such a deity existed as a historical person. Even the followers of the cult of Dionysus were devoted and thought Dionysus as spiritually significant. The spiritual depth and influence of Christ speaks more about the extent to which human beings can be influenced by their beliefs and what believers have made Christ to be in their minds. It has no bearing whatsoever in the evaluation of the historicity if such deities.
The alternative was absurd to Brunner because he was looking at the wrong alternative. It is important to remember that there are several plausible alternatives regarding who Christ was and how he became to be influential. There is the possibility that Christ was a heavenly savior figure who was later historicized. The second is that there was a little-known man who died and whose body disappeared, and who was later apotheosized, legends built around him and was later magnified to a cosmic savior by the devotees. These two examples alone show us that the Christ in the gospels may never have existed as presented in the gospels yet be made by devotees to have a larger-than-life spiritual significance.

Christ Was Too Sublime To Have Been Invented
Brunner argued that other miracle-workers like Apollonius of Tyana were poetic inventions were a pale shade compared to the “unprecedentedly[sic] vivid characterization of Christ.” He argued that Buddha’s picture for example, was “stiff, rigid, and ossified” whereas Christ’s life exhibited vitality, “both manifest and hidden, of its organic structure.” Brunner argued that Buddha’s conversations and disciples were mere categories and did not strike one as real. He wrote that “they do not touch one other, they do not share relationships, they stand like tree-trunks, speak line automatons, and none of them reveals the least trace of individual character.” He also contrasted the teachings of Buddha, which he regarded as “nothing but logical repetitions” that are insipid throughout, with what he called “the gripping vitality of Christ’s authentically spoken words.”
These are dramatic comparisons, not arguments. In any event, vivid descriptions and fluid narratives are evidence of good authorship, not proof of historicity of the characters described in a text. As far as Brunner’s personal reaction to Christ’s words, they are subjective and not of any use in determining the historicity of the events in the New Testament.

The Evangelists Couldn’t Have Been so Sly
Here again, we find a contradiction. Recall that Brunner argued earlier that the evangelists were averagely literate writers who recorded stories they were told by harlots, fishermen and taxpayers who saw Jesus. In constructing the present argument, Brunner had lost track of his earlier argument and was assuming that the evangelists were Jesus’ disciples. These are two inconsistent views of who the evangelists were. Lets proceed to the present argument.

Based on the incorrect assumption that the evangelists were actual disciples of Jesus, Brunner argued that they could not have proceeded to write gospels that portrayed them (the evangelists) as idiots. He wrote:

Biblical Scholarship had shown that the evangelists were never the disciples of Jesus so Brunner’s premise is incorrect hence the entire argument is false. Furthermore, "portrayal of the disciples as ignorant, self-aggrandizing clods" [11] has been identified as a Markan theme by several scholars. Narrative criticism informs us that irony is a rhetorical device meant to help the reader understand the narrative.
Themes that appear to be creations of an evangelist impair historicity and narrative criticism seeks to discern the literary principles that the implied author follows in organizing their work and portrayal of the disciples as blockheads has been identified by scholars as a literary device. Hence the author’s intended effect is lost on Brunner, who is instead taken aback at the profundity with which those he has misidentified as the authors debased themselves.

The Quadrilemma
In a construction similar to C.S. Lewis’ Trilemma [12], Brunner argued:

A trilemma is a logical fallacy that presents three choices, and typically a choice between two unacceptable options and a more reasonable one. An argument that falsely constructs only four options, out of an infinite set of options can be regarded as a quadrilemma. Such an argument is the one Brunner constructed above. He claimed that Christ was either a God, a fool, a charlatan or a perfect mystical genius. Then he chose the last option, claiming that Christ was too human to be a god and too exalted to be a fool or charlatan.
Jesus could have been a fictional construction like Moses, Noah or Robin Hood. Jesus may also have been misquoted or misunderstood. Jesus may also have been slightly deluded yet not fully insane. Or he could have been honestly mistaken about his nature. Or Jesus may have been a faith-healer and apocalyptic preacher whose teachings were later exaggerated after his death [13]. Jesus may also have been a mythical figure that was later transformed by later believers to a flesh and blood man as has been argued by Earl Doherty (ibid).
All these possibilities indicate to us that Brunner made a hasty choice and did not consider all possible options. It is clear that it was not valid for Brunner to negate three possibilities and resort to the only other possibility because the possibilities are more than four.
Brunner was not unaware that there were other possibilities because he lambasted other scholars in his writings for their rejection of a historical Jesus. Amongst Brunner’s contemporaries was David Friedrich Strauss who wrote The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1860), P.L. Couchoud who wrote The Creation of Christ (1939), Albert Kalthoff who wrote The Rise of Christianity (1907) and Arthur Drews, who wrote The Christ Myth (1910). He therefore knowingly limited his set of possibilities to lead the readers to seeing his preferred option as the most reasonable one, while staying silent on the other options by other authors. His quadrilemma was therefore false.

Jesus’ Wisdom Was So Sharp, it Must Be Original
Brunner argued that the sayings of Jesus as handed down through the ignorant and limited amme haaretz (common people) are so magnificent and so potent and in harmony that their quality only survived adulteration and getting diminished because they must have been be dominical. Otherwise, Brunner argued, those sayings would not be existing.
He argued that the Gospels were written when some people (Mark, Matthew, Luke and John), who were no more gifted intellectually than the fishermen and prostitutes that Christ kept company, wrote down what they received through oral transmission from the tax collectors and fishermen, who Brunner believed, memorized what Christ said.
By diminishing, without a basis, the putative transmitters of presumed oral traditions, Brunner sought to magnify the alleged wisdom that these people ended up recording. Scholarship has since shown that writers like the author of Mark were conversant with the works of Homer and Greek writers. As such, they were capable of employing cynic sayings to make interesting dialogues full of witty exchanges.
Brunner’s argument also incorrectly presumes a historical person behind the sayings. Yet Scholarship has indicated that sayings do not have to have a historical person behind them. The gospel of Thomas and Q are sayings sources that were used by evangelists as sources of sayings they placed on the lips of Jesus.
Contrary to Brunner’s enraptured admiration of this wisdom, a close examination of Jesus’ alleged wisdom shows that some of the sayings were patently absurd. For example, Mark 12:30-31 exhorts readers to love their neighbors as themselves. It is sometimes phrased as “do unto others as you would like to be done unto you”. But I cannot love my neighbor as myself because my neighbor is not myself. And what I consider loving may be revolting to my neighbour. In any case, the saying incorrectly presumes that people know what loving themselves entails. Does a smoker who is risking cancer love himself? Does a convicted murderer who wants to escape jail love himself? Should he release fellow prisoners because he loves them? Daniel June argues in Beauty Is Not an Argument: The Three Moral Commands of the Gospels that:

Several other sayings of Jesus are illogical or absurd when examined closely. However it is beyond the scope of this paper to challenge the wisdom of Jesus alleged sayings. As indicated above, most of the sayings attributed to Jesus can be traced back to the Old Testament, Q and Hellenistic sources. And they are not particularly penetrating in their alleged wisdom. That the simple sayings in the New Testament could inspire awe in a Philosopher is puzzling.

Conclusion

Brunner’s criticisms fail to demonstrate that the Jesus Myth theory is without merit. Instead, we see that Brunner was a Philosopher who was ill-equipped at handling a historical question. This incompetence led him to make irrelevant arguments based on incorrect assumptions and made him impervious to legitimate challenges regarding the historical Jesus, which scholars like Bultmann and Schweitzer, Brunner’s contemporaries, were grappling with.
As such, his efforts were completely ineffectual and his criticism merely showed how much dogmatic assumptions were more important to Brunner than the facts and consistent logic.

Notes

1. This is a form of pantheism called naturalistic pantheism. Proponents see nature as God, but in an impersonal sense. Pantheism is the view that God and the world are one.
Brunner was clearly a Pansychist: he held that the mind (thinking) is a fundamental feature, or essence, of the world. He argued that materialism was “thing-quackery”.
2. The exact meanings of these terms are still debated among Brunnerians.
3. Brunner accused Orthodox Christianity of taking from the Gospel of John and Paul epistles “a great deal of Pharisaism and religious idiocy instead of mystical depth” He thought them guilty of introducing the trinity and pagan concepts into the Bible.
4. The Ontological argument has two versions. The first form is associated with Anselm (Proslogion, 2 & 3) which goes back to Diogenes of Babylon and Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicus, Bk.9. The second form is to be found in Descartes (Meditations, V) and has antecedents in Bonaventure, de Mysterio Trinitatis, I1, ll.21-24), and was the one famously criticised in Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason, A592/B620–A603/B631.ll.133-136) and by Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 1.
5. See Ontological Arguments (online at IIDB) for more on the Ontological Argument.
6. For further arguments regarding the historicity of the resurrection, see Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus? - A Debate between William Lane Craig and Bart D. Ehrman
7. See Peter Kirby’s summary on The Priority of Mark at the ECW website
8. Doherty E., The Jesus Puzzle, p.8
9. Brunner argues that he is “quite certain that the whole Logos preface was tacked on” and does not “in any way fit in with the gospel of John, and naturally enough the latter makes no use of it”
10. Carrier lays the basic problem as follows: “The Gospel of Luke claims (2.1-2) that Jesus was born during a census that we know from the historian Josephus took place after Herod the Great died, and after his successor, Archelaus, was deposed. But Matthew claims (2.1-3) that Jesus was born when Herod the Great was still alive--possibly two years before he died (2:7-16). Other elements of their stories also contradict each other. Since Josephus precisely dates the census to 6 A.D. and Herod's death to 4 B.C., and the sequence is indisputable, Luke and Matthew contradict each other.”
11. Michael A. Turton identifies irony as a Markan theme in Historical Commentary on the Gospel of Mark.
See also Donahue, John R., and Harrington, Daniel J. 2002. The Gospel of Mark. Sacra Pagina Commentary Series (Harrington, Daniel J. ed). Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, p.184, Wills, Lawrence M. 1997. The Quest Of The Historical Gospel: Mark, John And The Origins Of The Gospel Genre. New York: Routledge, p117.
12. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argued regarding Jesus’ teachings that either he was telling people lies, and if so, he was a liar, or he was telling people lies but did not know it, hence a lunatic, or he was full of deep wisdom, hence lord. The Christian apologist Josh McDowell used this same argument to argue that Jesus was a divine being in his books More than a Carpenter and The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict.
13. This is argued by Brian Holtz in Turkel Rebutted on Trilemma. He writes that the fourth possibility is “that Jesus was a faith-healer and apocalyptic preacher whose deluded belief in his importance was strengthened in the months leading up to his anticipated martyrdom and was misinterpreted and exaggerated afterwards.”

No Robots

Good job. Very thorough. I have many objections, of course; but I am glad somebody has read Brunner and written about him.

Just a few quick points:

Brunner did not believe in miracles like feeding 5,000 or walking on water. He said that Christ's genius is a miracle, and so is the impact of that genius on the world.

Brunner defends the concept of mysticism with careful definitions. For those interested in the place of mysticism in world history, I would recommend the writings of Rufus Jones.

Brunner is an atheist. He dismisses materialist monism as the religion of the material. He contends that true atheism must embrace the ideal, the mind, the spirit.

And there is no "e" at the end of his first name.

Ted Hoffman

Thanks NR. This is the first draft and I intend to revise it from the reactions I will get.
Brunner was not an atheist. I write above that he dismissed atheism as misguided because it denied the existence of an external God yet the cogitant was in us.
This gloop and gluff about the I-self, the cogitant and other pantheistic, panpsychist constructions do not convey an atheistic mindset. An atheist who beleived in mysticism?
Anyway, it is possible that he was an atheist. He was not a very consistent ideologue. What I have read so far indicates otherwise. Do you have specific citations for this?
Thanks for the heads up regarding the typo "his life unfolds like a strategy", which was meant to be "his life unfolds like a tragedy."
And thanks for making Brunner's works and ideas available.

Doug Shaver

I assume the first year in the parentheses should be 1862?

Ted Hoffman

You are right Doug. Thanks.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Ted,

Excellent stuff. Thanks.

In regards to the statement,
"And they are not particularly penetrating in their alleged wisdom. That the simple sayings in the New Testament could inspire awe in a Philosopher is puzzling."

It is puzzling. As far as I can see the early Christians were not philosophers, but rhetoricians. Even Augustine opened a school, at the age of 20, for rhetoric, not philosophy. Only Clement of Alexandria, (circa 200) I believe, might qualify as a philosopher and he seems to have been more inspired by the gnostic gospels of Jesus Christ

Warmly,

Jay Raskin,
Ph.D. in Philosophy

mountainman

Hi Ted and Jay,

Two separate issues:

1) You both seem to be in some manner convinced and yet
puzzled that "the early Christians were not philosophers,
but rhetoricians".

Do you find it also puzzling that Julian enacted a
"harsh law that forbade Christian rhetoricians and
grammarians to teach, unless they consented
to worship the pagan deities." (AM 24.4.20)

According to your mainstream dating of "early christians"
to perhaps c.100 CE, Julian still recognises the power of
the "christian rhetoricians", to the extent of legislating
against it, 260 years after your mainstream early
christians. Had this been the case in fact for so long?

A second, and separate general issue ...

2) Ted, your work appears extensive on this Brunner,
and you've obviously done alot of research. Do you
think there is anything in Brunner that is still valid for
this age, some gem of wisdom that the intervening
century still regards as inspiring and unique, or do
you think his role was simply a stepping stone in
a transformation of thought?


Best wishes to you both,



Pete Brown

Chili

Those were the same sheep that the shepherds were herding on the night that Christ was born unto Joseph who had a lot of unanswered questions in his life which is what made the night so dark when Christ was reborn in him. The sheep represent these questions and their shepherds were Joseph's strongholds that later became his disciples after his metanoia.

To put this another way, if Joseph was maintaining 5000 loose ends inside a Cave do you not think that they can be answered in the full celestial light?

To walk on water is to go by our intuition from which all primary premisses, including those of our actions, are received.

Here's a quote from Aristotle on this: And here is the rest of it:http://infomotions.com/etexts/philos...sterior-91.txtThat's very good since if we are gods there is no God left to embrace once we know who we are.

jgibson000

Then you might want to go and have your eyes checked!

You seem not to have "seen" Justin Dlal. 1.12. And you are overlooking/ ignoring the fact that Origen was a pupil of the Platonist Ammonius Saccas.

Note too that even Tertullian, who asked "what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem", uses and is intimately familar with Stoicism.

So what? That Augustine taught grammar and rhetoric does not mean, as you seem to think it does, that he was not interested in philosophy or, more importantly, was not himself a philosopher or a teacher of philosophy. He sought out Simplicianus specifically to learn Neoplatonism and to be trained in the libri Platonicorum.

Actually, his teacher was Pantaenus who had been trained in Stoicism. And if you think Clement was inspired by the Gnostic Gospels, you don't know much about Clement or his ideas on the true "gnostic"!

Can you what you've read by and about Clement?

JG

Chili

There is nothing wrong with being stoic or gnostic and both of them will always be ahead of a mystic for the simple reason that noetic vision is beyond lyric vision. It is just the -ism that should not exist in any of them.