Jesus and the gossip column
Certainly, the Bible and the stories it records are more complex than “literal” history, in a fundamentalist Christian sense of “literal.” And certainly, understanding the historical and literary traditions within the Bible is a complex matter.
But it’s posts like this, citing half-baked theories and unsupported upchuck from an obviously biased position that merely retrenches the general public in a religious impasse, deadlocking us in theories that even many modern scholars – of all varieties – consider nonsense or outdated.
But understanding that these issues are more complex than many Christians realize is not the same thing as agreeing with the scholars in this article, who are neither saying anything remotely threatening to the existence of Jesus, nor are they saying anything new in the realm of NT scholarship.
It’s not new news that Paul’s letters preceded the writings of the gospels. That’s taught in NT Intro classes all over this nation – both in secular universities and in conservative Christian liberal arts colleges. And the early dates of Paul’s letters are not in the least a problem for the historical existence of Jesus or the church that was built on his life, death, resurrection, and teachings. In fact, they show us that the Christian communities, from quite an early date, understood things like death and resurrection of Jesus to be central to the Christian proclamation.
Continuing with Paul, it’s not new news that Paul doesn’t mention many of the life events of Jesus – one simply has to read his letters to observe this. But Paul was not trying to retell the story of Jesus in narrative form. He was writing personal letters to communities of people he could assume already knew those stories through the oral traditions that later became the gospel. Further, Paul DOES mention several of the events in the life of Jesus, most importantly, the very one modern scholarship wants to discredit: The Resurrection of Jesus, which by all historical-critical evaluative measures did happen. The only reason to assume it didn’t is if you have a prior a-theologizing philosophical assumption that assumes miracles are not possible. Read real scholars like NT Wright (instead of Crossan and his ilk) and get back with me when you’re ready to actually discuss the subject in a meaningful way.
Further, it’s not new information that the gospels were written down decades after the life of Jesus. It’s only even noteworthy to us because we are a writing culture. The first century was largely oral. These stories didn’t just get invented or come into existence 40 years after Jesus. No, they existed as oral traditions (and oral cultures know how to preserve oral traditions better than writing cultures do, in some cases) long before they were written down or combined into a single unit.
Additionally, the claim that the witnesses of the gospels are invalidated because they “contradict” each other runs rife with ignorance. People who say this clearly do not understand the nature of how historical research is done. If they did, they would be grateful for the so-called contradictions. Yes, that’s right. I’m not claiming the gospels present a unified synopsis of the life of Jesus lacking varying details. No, I’m not a fundamentalist. But that doesn’t mean their testimonies are invalidated. See, if Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all agreed with each other at every single point, then we would assume they’d collaborated together and their testimony would be relatively invalidated (by historical scholarship measurements) because it would only be one testimony, not four.
In the court of law, when multiple witnesses say the exact same thing, without varying at all, there testimony is questioned precisely because they so accurately agree with each other. But when it comes to the gospels, it is precisely because these documents contain a variety of perspectives, interpretations, and even details, and yet agree on the main themes and activities of Jesus, that historians can consider them each unique, but amazingly similar, witnesses to the historical Jesus. I understand my law-court metahor may be a bit simplistic, but the point is, the claim that the gospels contradict themselves is only a problem for fundamentalist Christians, pop-level agitators, and shoddy scholars. Anyone who understands the difficulties of historical criticism knows this is not a problem, but is possibly even support for the historical claims made by the authors of these texts.
Next, with the authorship of the gospels, it is not new news that they may not have been written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Even conservative scholars like Ben Witherington argue that, for example, John, was written by Lazarus. These books claim no authorship. The tradition of the church has given names to these books, but the tradition is not binding.
(And as far as the authorship of Paul’s letters goes, that’s not new news either. After all, even if a few of those documents weren’t written by Paul, they still contain largely Pauline themes, and the church throughout history has agreed that they reflect the values, teachings, doctrines, and ethics of one of the earliest Christian communities.)
Also, it is not new news that liberal scholars, conservative scholars, and every scholar in between might come up with a new angle on the so-called “Historical Jesus”…you know, since we have an entire social-scientific academic enterprise that values nothing if not inventing knowledge. John Dominic Crossan, in this article says these various Jesus characters appearing in modern scholarship are an embarrassment to the discipline. Well, you know, I agree. But for Crossan to say that is like a drug lord criticizing drug dealers. He is the absolute worst offender.
Next, it is not new news that many of the themes, rituals, images, and stories of the New Testament have ancient Greco-Roman counterparts. Even Jesus borrows stories, like the Rich Man and Lazarus, which has a very close tie to an apparent Egyptian predecessor. But so what? The New Testament writers (ehem, like the Old Testament writers before them) were extremely talented at observing, interpreting, criticizing, and appropriating the culture around them for the good of the gospel. Does that mean Jesus didn’t act symbolically, just because that symbol had already been used? Or could it mean that Jesus wanted to subvert that prior story and show that its ultimate themes can only be fulfilled in him? The question is much more complex than lame statement, “The early Christians stole cultural stories and then applied them (implied: unthinkingly/ignorantly applied) them to Jesus.”
When a NT scholar claims that Jesus may not have existed because of the lack of outside references to him, I seriously have to question his scholarship. First of all, how many people from ancient history do we assume existed, though we have far fewer pieces of evidence than we do supporting the existence of Jesus? Second of all, should we really expect to have birth records of a kid born in one of the smallest towns in the backwoods of the Roman Empire? Should we really expect to have a ton of reportage about a poor teacher who traveled around with a band of twelve random followers (and, yes, Dr. Ehrman, Paul did refer to the disciples of Jesus explicitly in I Corinthians 15:6, where he calls them “the twelve.”). If you want to only appeal to “outsider” texts for the evidence of anyone’s existence, then you’re going to have to question almost everyone in history’s existence.
This is not to say I’m against the questions. This is not to say that questioning the existence of Jesus, or the reality of miracles, or anything is out of bounds. It’s not. If I’m going to say that my faith has certain historical roots (the resurrection, which presumes the incarnation, which presumes historicity), then I better be ready to evaluate the evidence of those claims. That’s fine. Further, I am not a fundamentalist Christian. I don’t believe every passage in the Bible has to be taken literally or the whole thing falls apart. But I also think that we need to be a little more responsible in giving such a valuable platform to minority scholarship. The latest fads of Reza Aslan and Bart Erhman are more just pop-fascination with dumbed down versions of better scholarship and better questions, even from the “unbelieving” community of NT scholars. When most scholars in a given discipline disagree with you (as the article clearly states!), then you should probably consider writing about the subject in a way that will help the public actually understand the real issues. But, then, of course, I’m not the one trying to make money by drawing hits to my webpage, so what do I know? And, really, what more should I expect from an online magazine that also runs hard hitting news about government officials learning slang terms for body parts.
Tom Fuerst blogs at Tom1st.com. You can subscribe to his blog via email here.