The Historical Jesus
The parallels between ancient pagan customs and Christianity’s celebrations of the birth and resurrection of Jesus are too obvious to ignore. Picking away at those flakes of cracked paint on the wall, it was not long before I learned that Jesus maps directly to the archetype of the savior god who is crucified, dies for the sins of the world and is resurrected in the fulfillment of prophecy. As I would discover, this archetype reveals itself in more than a dozen mythologies older than that of Jesus, including Dionysus, Osiris, Mithras, Krishna, Quetzalcoatl, Sakia, Tammuz and Prometheus.
My Catholic upbringing taught me that Jesus was and is the only Son of God, and that Jesus was god made flesh so that he could take part in the human experience. As I began to explore the death and resurrection of Jesus, I turned my attention to the historical Jesus because though there are many myths about a dying god that was resurrected, Christians dismiss this “archetype” argument by claiming that Jesus stands above the others because he was “real.”
So how “real” was Jesus? How much evidence do we have for the existence of Jesus as a historical figure, the man described in the gospels, the god made flesh, the miracle worker, the great teacher? Bart Ehrman, the Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with degrees from Wheaton College (B.A.) and Princeton Theological Seminary (M. Div and Ph D.), addressed this topic in a lecture on the New Testament. He said, “Given the effect that Jesus has had on history ever since his death, one might expect that his life made an enormous impact on the society of his day – like a comet striking the earth. But if the historical record is any indication, Jesus scarcely made any impact at all – less like a comet striking the earth than a stone being tossed into the ocean” (56).
Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy in their work The Jesus Mysteries draw similar conclusions, noting that looking for the historical Jesus was “futile.” They are astonished at the complete lack of evidence for the man who is reputed as the one and only incarnation of God (157).
As I’ve stated several times, not a word of the New Testament was recorded while Jesus was alive, not a word was recorded for decades after his death. The words finally written down were not written by eyewitnesses (as some would like me to believe) nor were they written by Jesus’ disciples. They were not even written in Jesus’ native Aramaic – they were written in Greek. Jesus inspired no one during his lifetime to document his life, his works or his words.
Outside of the New Testament, accounts written in the first century of a man named Jesus are essentially non-existent. Hundreds of non-Christian texts or letters survive from the first century, yet not one philosopher, poet, historian or scientist in public or private documentation mentioned Jesus. There are no birth or death certificates, no trial records – no reference of any kind to Jesus.
Within the first one hundred years after his death, Jesus is mentioned only twice in all the pagan sources and even these references are insignificant. One is by the Roman governor, Pliny the Younger in 112 CE, who in a letter mentions a group of Christians who are followers of Christ. That’s it, that’s all he mentions.
The second is by the Roman historian Tacitus, who in his work The Annals, written in 115 CE, mentions the Christians who are followers of “Christ,” who, he notes, was crucified under Pontius Pilate (Ehrman 56-57).
There is only one instance of an account from the first century that is written by someone other than a follower of Jesus that says something similar to what the followers said. This is the highly disputed passage found in the work of Jewish historian Josephus in The Antiquities of the Jews.
At about this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one might call him a man. For he was one who accomplished surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as are eager for novelties. He won over many of the Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. When Pilate, upon an indictment brought by the principal men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him from the very first did not cease to be attached to him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the holy prophets had foretold this and myriads of other marvels concerning him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has to this day still not disappeared.
Christians to this day continue to point to this passage as all the verification needed for proof of Jesus’ existence and the credibility of the stories told in the gospels. These Christians should be aware that the majority of scholars, Jewish and Christian alike, are in agreement that parts if not all of this passage were not written by Josephus but were added centuries later by Christian scribes. Critical study of this passage reveals the following:
· The writing style is not consistent with the rest of Josephus’ work.
· If removed, Josephus’ original argument runs on its proper sequence.
· Origen, one of the most conscientious scholars of the ancient church tells us in the beginning of the third century that there is no mention of Jesus in Josephus’s work.
· Early Christians do not mention anything written by Josephus until the beginning of the fourth century, when Roman Church propagandist Bishop Eusebius suddenly produced a version which contained these passages.
· The passage is in direct contrast with Josephus’s own philosophical beliefs and his political pragmatism (Freke 137).
From here I returned to Lee Strobel’s work, The Case for Christ, to see how the Christians reconcile these apparently insurmountable problems. In his chapter called “The Corroborating Evidence: Is There Credible Evidence for Jesus outside His Biographies,” Strobel interviews Edwin M. Yamauchi, Ph.D. at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
They begin with the passage from Josephus and Yamauchi acknowledges the controversy regarding the text. Yamauchi asserts that the early Christian copyists merely “inserted some phrases” that Josephus would not have written, but he concludes that ultimately the text is genuine. As an example, he notes the opening line, “About this time there lived a man named Jesus, a wise man, if indeed he was a man.” He states that the beginning of the sentence noting Jesus as a wise man was likely authentic, but the end of the sentence which questions whether he was a man “appears to be an interpolation.” He also notes two other occurrences of interpolation: that Jesus is the “Christ” and that he rose from the dead on the third day. The remainder of the work, Yamauchi informs us, is authentic. He also notes that the works of Josephus are considered very accurate, that his mention of Jesus is “highly significant” and considered “extremely important” (78-80).
Notice that neither Yamauchi nor Strobel addresses the controversies noted above: that the entire paragraph could be removed without affecting the continuity of Josephus’ argument, that in the third century Origen declared that no such reference to Jesus existed in Josephus’s work, and that Christians did not lay claim to this passage as evidence for the historical Jesus until the fourth century CE.
David Klinghoffer, author of Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, says, “I’m not aware of any scholar, however, who has pointed out a curious and pregnant parallel between the story of Jesus of Nazareth and another tale that Josephus chooses to tell in the Antiquities immediately after the paragraph about Jesus: the story of Decius Mundus. The juxtaposition is worth contemplating,” Klinghoffer adds, because “the way the Jewish mind worked, at least the mind of a Jew steeped in rabbinic tradition as Josephus described himself, was to think of strangely juxtaposed stories as commenting upon one another” (40-41).
Decius Mundus was a Roman knight, and Jospehus explains that he wished to seduce a married woman. He achieves success by getting priests to assist him in convincing the woman that he is the incarnation of the Egyptian god Anubis. His trickery succeeds and after spending the night in the woman’s chamber his disguise is revealed and everyone, except Mundus who is exonerated because he acted out of passion, is convicted by the Roman authorities and crucified, including the woman herself (40-41).
After placing the reference to Jesus in the Antiquities in context, Klinghoffer questions whether Mundus is the Jewish historian’s comment on Jews. Perhaps Mundus represents Jesus and Israel represents the lusted wife of God. Jesus succeeds in his seduction of some Jews by putting on the guise of a deity through the help of others (priests and disciples). If the tale is implied juxtaposition, then Josephus is suggesting that Jesus and his followers are heretical and that they are fools for seducing Jews toward a new faith. In the end it is Jesus who is crucified as punishment by God for deceiving his people (41-42).
In my opinion, this case for juxtaposition is missing too many pieces to be used as evidence. It does, though, add to the argument that the entire passage was added later, since Josephus’s argument runs its proper sequence when we remove the section about Jesus.
Let’s return now to the interview that Strobel conducted with Yamauchi to build a case for “Credible Evidence for Jesus Outside His Biographies.” They turn to a discussion of the works of Tacitus and Pliny the Younger. (These works appeared approximately 80-85 years after the death of Jesus and are the only mention of Jesus or Christianity within a hundred years of the death of Jesus with the possible exception of Josephus). Yamauchi’s conclusion on each of these writings is essentially the same: They prove that there were Christians and that the Christian movement must have been strong (82-84).
Neither Strobel nor Yamauchi extend a claim that these passages prove the existence of a historical Jesus. Instead, Yamauchi deduces that the events of Jesus’ life must have happened in order for him to have such a devout following almost a century after his death: “And it’s significant that Tacitus reported that an ‘immense multitude’ held so strongly to their beliefs that they were willing to die for their beliefs” (83).
It appears a convincing tale. Why would anyone put such faith in a man who hadn’t truly existed or hadn’t performed the deeds attributed to him? Putting this into context, however, I remember that the Christians at the time of Tacitus and Pliny the Younger had not witnessed Jesus’ acts. If there were people still alive that had been alive at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion they would be in their nineties – and would have been only ten years old at the time of the crucifixion.
The followers Tacitus and Pliny the Younger mention were adhering to a faith that had been passed to them through oral tradition, as were the followers of Osiris and Dionysus. I ponder their dedication. Why would they hold so strongly to their belief, to the point of death? Their belief had a profound affect on them.
Sounds as if the proof is in the pudding. The evidence for Jesus can be found in the profound dedication of his believers.
I remember the more than 80 followers of David Koresh who went to the grave with him in 1993 in Waco, Texas. And I wonder again about the time in Jonestown, Guyana, when 913 of 1100 people did as Jim Jones did – “drink the Kool-Aid” laced with potassium cyanide. And why do Neo-Nazis continue to follow the racist dogma of Adolf Hitler?
I can find multitudes of examples where people have followed something or someone blindly without any tangible evidence to substantiate the claims. Consider the one billion Christians and the one billion Muslims in the world today. Can the “truth” on both sides be right?
When I reflect on these facts, I cannot accept Strobel’s and Yamauchi’s claim. The fact that there were some people decades after Jesus’ death who were willing to die for their belief in Jesus does not convince me of the truth of the story of the resurrection.
No definition of “immense multitude’ is given. Was it 30, 300 or 3000 people? We do not know.
Works Cited:
Ehrman, Bart D., The Great Courses: The New Testament, The Teaching Company Limited Partnership, Chantilly, CA, 2000
Freke, Timothy & Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries; Three Rivers Press, New York, New York, 1999
Klinghoffer, David, Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: the Turning Point in Western History, Three Leaves Press, New York, 2006
Strobel, Lee, The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus, Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1998
© Robert Jacik 2008
