History is, as the title implies, a fickle mistress. Like any other field of study, you find what you’re inclined to look for be they either heroes or villains. The problem is that the study of history is not a neutral endeavor but requires the use of a worldview in order to make sense of what has come before.
It is very tempting and terribly easy to cherry pick history. It is also terribly easy to make assumptions about history, namely that history has always been done the way that we do it. However that is not the case. The modern historian, that is, the person who enshrines events of the modern era has had camera and voice recording that has made the work of chronicling events a relatively effortless task. The result of this is an inherently anachronistic view of the recording of history. What we, as moderns, demand of our historians is alien to the ancient world. The modern concept of doing history is the result of a long series of decisions and developments of technology that, if we are not careful, will cause us to misjudge the past, making unfair and unreasonable demands on those who have come before us and endeavored to transmit the past to us.
Why is this important and even necessary to keep in mind?
It is so because of articles like this from our old friend Valerie Tarico, co-authored with Jesus-myther David Fitzgerald, titled, “Evidence About Jesus is Weaker than You Might Think”, which has the tag-line, “Most people would be shocked to learn how little is actually known about Jesus.”
That tag-line, of course, prompts a question in my mind, the question being, just how much don’t we know, that they’re supposing that we should?
The piece begins,
Before the European Enlightenment, virtually all New Testament experts assumed that handed-down stories about Jesus were first recorded by eye witnesses and were largely biographical. That is no longer the case.
What’s the case? That there’s no longer the assumption but rather a growing confirmation since we have learned more and more about the ancient standards of historiography and what composed such works? Even atheist and scholar Bart Ehrman recognizes this, writing,
Understanding the differences can be key to recognizing the way any particular ancient biography “worked,” including the Christian examples such as Mark (and the other Gospels).
Though Ehrman is not a believer, and denies the claims of Jesus, he is more than willing to admit the fact that the gospels are the earliest and best source for information on the person known as Jesus of Nazareth.
The article continues,
Assuming that the Jesus stories had their beginnings in one single person rather than a composite of several—or even in mythology itself—he probably was a wandering Jewish teacher in Roman-occupied Judea who offended the authorities and was executed. Beyond that, any knowledge about the figure at the center of the Christian religion is remarkably open to debate (and vigorously debated among relevant scholars).
Now, there’s several claims there that are worth unpacking, but this post is about the other claims.
The next two paragraphs are telling,
Where was Jesus born? Did he actually have twelve disciples? Do we know with certainty anything he said or did?
As antiquities scholarship improves, it becomes increasingly clear that the origins of Christianity are controversial, convoluted, and not very coherent.
Did they just seriously ask those questions?
Yes. Yes, they did.
Further, what does it mean to say that the, “origins of Christianity are controversial,”—apart from the foolishness of the cross—,”convoluted, and not very coherent”? What does that mean? Let’s see if there’s any clarification.
There is a list of points that are offered. The first point mirroring the title.
The more we know the less we know for sure.
Let’s see,
After centuries in which the gospel stories about Jesus were taken as gospel truth, the Enlightenment gave birth to a new breed of biblical historians.
Okay, like who?
Most people have heard that Thomas Jefferson secretly took a pair of scissors to the Bible, keeping only the parts he thought were historical. His version of the New Testament is still available today. Jefferson’s snipping was a crude early attempt to address a problem recognized by many educated men of his time: It had become clear that any histories the Bible might contain had been garbled by myth. (One might argue that the Protestant Reformation’s rejection of the books of the Bible that they called “apocrypha,” was an even earlier, even cruder attempt to purge the Good Book of obvious mythology.)
How about the yarn that is being spun,—well, let’s call it what it is: an outright misrepresentation of what most Jefferson historians have referred to as a book of personal devotion that Jefferson created to help him reflect on the person of Jesus. The tome, titled by Jefferson himself, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, was,
[…]to clarify the teachings of Jesus which he believed provided “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”
Whatever Jefferson’s personal beliefs, the assertion that this was secretive is simply ludicrous. Oh, and Jefferson was not a biblical scholar.
They continue on this point,
The more scholars study the roots of Christianity, the more confused and uncertain our knowledge becomes. Currently, we have a plethora of contradictory versions of Jesus—an itinerant preacher, a zealot, an apocalyptic prophet, an Essene heretic, a Roman sympathizer, and many more —each with a different scholar to confidently tout theirs as the only real one.
These “contradictory versions of Jesus” are not the product of any meaningful handling of the text, but rather presuppositions brought to the text. They refer to it rightly as a “scholastic mess”. Further, they mention a book, Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, characterizing it as illuminating the problem, rather that the fact that it is a critique of many of the criteria that are used and the problems that they have with one particular type of critical scholarship, as this brief review of the book discusses.
Then there’s point two,
The Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses.
They claim in regards to this,
Every bit of our ostensibly biographical information for Jesus comes from just four texts – the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Though most Christians assume that associates of Jesus wrote these texts, no objective biblical scholars think so. None of the four gospels claims to be written by eyewitnesses, and all were originally anonymous. Only later were they attributed to men named in the stories themselves.
There’s a problem with this: only two of the Gospels bear the names of disciples as titles, those being Matthew and John. The author of the Gospel of John is credited with its authorship both externally by Papias and Iraneus, and internally by scribal notation. Matthew’s authorship seems to hinge on two parts: the publication of logia or “sayings” and then the Gospel constructed around them.
Papias also gives us external evidence that Mark was Peter’s scribe, as well as Justin Martyr. Luke’s gospel clearly begins with a statement that he was not an eyewitness but was recording the testimony of those who were. But as for the claim that “no objective biblical scholar thinks [the gospels were written by eyewitnesses]” simply has no grasp of the historical reality that every bit of eyewitness testimony simply must be written by the very hand of the eyewitness is simply absurd, from a meaningful, historically minded perspective. Have these people not heard of Richard Bauckham’s work Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, in which he argues,
[…there was the] continuing presence and testimony of the eyewitnesses, who remained the authoritative sources of their traditions until their deaths,…
Bauckham, Richard (2008-09-22). Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Kindle Location 291). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.
Let’s say that the gospels were not the produced by the hands of the eyewitnesses themselves but were produced under their supervision and guidance to the point that we can claim that they were.
There is a further claim of anachronism however no evidence is brought forward to demonstrate the accusation. This paper here deals with several of the accusations putting them to bed with ease.
Then there’s point 3,
The Gospels are not corroborated by outside historians.
They say,
Despite generations of apologists insisting Jesus is vouched for by plenty of historical sources like Tacitus or Suetonius, none of these hold up to close inspection. The most commonly-cited of these is the Testimonium Flavianum, a disputed passage in the writings of ancient historian Flavius Josephus, written around the years 93/94, generations after the presumed time of Jesus.
Um, one generation, to be exact. The question, is what do the sources say? Do the sources make denials or do they make substantiating claims? The fact is that no presently available historical source denies the existence of or the claims of Jesus. As far as the Testimonium Flavium the Josephus website has detailed scholarly links where one can draw their own conclusions.
More than that, turning again to atheist scholar Bart Ehrman, who writes in his book, Did Jesus Exist?,
The problem with the historical Jesus…was that he was in fact all too historical….Jesus was so firmly rooted in his own time and place as a first-century Palestinian Jew—with an ancient Jewish understanding of the world, God, and human existence—that he does not translate easily into a modern idiom. …And we can know what he was like.
Ehrman, Bart D. (2012-03-19T23:58:59). Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (Kindle Locations 192-197). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
The problem is that, as a person of history, we can know more about Jesus than any other and have earlier and more reliable testimony.
Then there’s point number four.
Early Christian scriptures weren’t the same as ours.
Okay, I’ll bite.
At the time Christianity emerged, gospels were a common religious literary genre, each promoting a different version or set of sacred stories. For example, as legends of Jesus sprang up, they began to include “infancy gospels.”
Okay. That depends upon when someone placed the emergence of Christianity. The best sources, both Christian and non-Christian, place Christianity early, I mean very early. If Jesus was crucified as early as AD33, the consensus of scholarship places it’s establishment in Jerusalem and Judea within 2 years. The “bible” of that church was the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. The first texts would then be, by testimony, Matthew’s logia and possibly Galatians and maybe Ephesians. By the turn of the second century (AD100), Christian writers like Clement of Rome, Linus, Alexander Papias, Polycarp, none of which mention the “infancy gospels”. Why is that? Because they weren’t written until the middle of the second century, and are immediately dismissed as frauds.
Now, there’s no link, no reference to substantiate the assertion that the gospels were “a common religious literary genre”. This article argues that the gospels are indeed unique, even being distinct from another type of Greco-Roman literature meant to praise the subject, but definitely qualifying as a subset of historical biography. To borrow a line from Hitchens, “What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” There are other assertions, they seem to amount to poisoning the well, but this post needs to move along.
Point five,
Christian martyrs are not proof (if they were even real).
Okkkaaay.
Generations of Christian apologists have pointed to the existence of Christian martyrs as proof their religion is true, asking “Who would die for a lie?” The short answer, of course, that all too many true believers have died in the service of falsehoods they passionately believed to be true—and not just Christians. The obvious existence of Muslim jihadis has made this argument less common in recent years
That’s a straw man. It’s not the martyrs, it’s the apostles, those who were the closest to Jesus, one of which Josephus writes of, namely James the brother of Jesus,
[When], therefore, Ananus was of this disposition, … so he assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others,…; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned… (Antiquities of the Jews, 20.9.1.200)
Further, they reference a book that has been roundly criticized and that has been demonstrated to be questionable in its scholarship. One critic even considered it a recasting of another book that has been historically criticized.
Point six.
No other way to explain the existence of Christianity.
Alright.
Most people, Christians and outsiders alike, find it difficult to imagine how Christianity could have arisen if our Bible stories aren’t true. Beyond a doubt, Christianity could not have arisen if people in the first century hadn’t believed them to be true. But the stories themselves?
Um, yeah.
Best-selling New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman believes that the biblical stories about Jesus had their kernel in the person of a single itinerant preacher, as do most New Testament scholars. Historian Richard Carrier and David Fitzgerald (co-author of this article) take an opposing position—that the original kernel was a set of ancient mythic tropes to which unsuspecting believers added historical details. Ehrman and Carrier may be on opposite sides of this debate, but both agree on one important fact: the only thing needed to explain the rise of Christianity is the belief fostered by the rival Christian preachers of the first century.
I want to focus on this statement: “Historian Richard Carrier and David Fitzgerald…take an opposing position—that the original kernel [of truth that Ehrman sees] was set to a set of mythic tropes to which unsuspecting believers added historical details.”
Now, the texts that comprise the Bible fall into a number of literary genres, such as law, history, poetry, and sometimes they run together, and here’s a series of discussions on that fact. Now the point that I want to contend is this: did those early believers know what they were doing or not? Now, you can say that an unsuspecting group of people might be led into a lie, you might even believe something is true based upon an authority, however, as a writer, and Mr. Fitzgerald should know this, you don’t write things unintentionally. Either the believers were intentionally passing along something that they knew wasn’t true or they weren’t. Did these people know that they were using these tropes or not? As far as the claims that they make, one needs to listen to this interview with historian Borden Painter and this well-documented article which directly refutes many of Carrier’s claims.
Under the heading, “Keeping Options Open” the author’s again misrepresent a source, Philip Davies, saying that,
Davies argues that the only way the field of New Testament studies can maintain any academic respectability is by acknowledging the possibility that Jesus didn’t exist.
The link to an essay by Davies, what he says is that he doesn’t think,
[…]that in another 20 years there will be a consensus that Jesus did not exist, or even possibly didn’t exist, but a recognition that his existence is not entirely certain would nudge Jesus scholarship towards academic respectability.
Davies’ point is in regard to consensus and his opinion, not what is or is not scholarly respectability, in regard to the number of ways that the historical Jesus is seen by a variety of scholars. What’s interesting is that Davies’ essay is commenting on the very next statement that the article makes, asserting that the question of historicity doesn’t matter. It clearly mattered to the Apostle Paul who, in writing to the Corinthians, wrote,
And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Corinthians 15:17-19, ESV)
In the end, people like Fitzgerald, who is merely a herald of mythers like Richard Carrier and Robert M. Price, depend upon the ignorance of their audience and their ability to twist credible, reasonably honest scholars and historical sources to their ends.
Now, does this mean that there aren’t questions?
Of course not. What it means is that we have to be able to ask the right questions, recognize those pesky presuppositions, follow the links, and deal with original sources.
For further consideration:
David Fitzgerald debating his position.
The historical Jesus: a presentation by a professor of history.
Cambridge scholar Peter J. Williams on the historical Jesus.
Triggermanblog 
The comments on Jefferson are actually quite accurate:
“In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to them. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their Logos and Demi-urgos, Aeons and Daemons male and female, with a long train of Etc. Etc. Etc. or, shall I say at once, of Nonsense. We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the Amphibologisms into which they have been led by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging, the matter which is evidently his, andwhich is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an 8 vo. of 46. pages of pure and unsophisticated doctrines, such as were professed and acted on by the unlettered apostles, the Apostolic fathers, and the Christians of the 1st. century. Their Platonising successors indeed, in after times, in order to legitimate the corruptions which they had incorporated into the doctrines of Jesus, found it necessary to disavow the primitive Christians, who had taken their principles from the mouth of Jesus himself, of his Apostles, and the Fathers cotemporary with them. They excommunicated their followers as heretics, branding them with the opprobrious name of Ebionites or Beggars.”
Source: Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams; http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letters-of-thomas-jefferson/jefl222.php
As for Josephus: “where one can draw their own conclusions.”, the issue with historic text is interpolation.
Did the book go over postmortem veneration?
Dave
There is interpolation in the Testimonium Flavium, the problem is that it’s not the testimony itself, there’s a minimalist, scholars consider it as original, that has been found in an Arabic version. What they (mythers) do is take the pietistic expansion, which is characteristic of later New Testament manuscript copies, and throw out the baby with the bath water.
Further, Jefferson commits an error of anachronism comparing the gospels to later Jewish texts rather than what would have been contemporary to Jesus. It’s not his fault because they wouldn’t be discovered until almost 150 years after his death. Jefferson also forgets that every single ethical teaching of Jesus is proof texted by a citation of the Pentateuch, either Leviticus or Deuteronomy, something that a good 1st century Pharisee, which is what Jesus was, would do.