Historical Jesus Beats Mythical Jesus

150 years ago, David Friedrich Strauss described 

the gospels as part history and part myth, a formulation

that has stuck ever since.

Sometimes people ask me why, as an atheist, I'm so sure that Jesus existed as a real guy. Here's why. Historians conclude that Jesus probably existed because that’s the best explanation for the evidence we have.  There is a ton of evidence that an apocalyptic sect popped up within Judaism in the first century AD, and historians hypothesize an actual Jewish faith healer and martyr as the inspiration for this sect. The Jesus-myth hypothesis, on the other hand, doesn't offer any alternative explanation for where this sect came from. In fact, it  doesn't even try. Finally, you can just look at the state of Jesus mythicism and tell that it’s not credible scholarship.

Who founded Jewish Christianity?
A thriving Jewish sect existed before Paul established Christianity for gentiles. Who started it? Where? Historians say it was Jesus in Galilee. Mythicists have no clear answer.

Why did early Christianity have no official leader, rules, or creeds?
Early Christians struggled to figure out who could be a Christian, what you had to believe, whose direction to follow, and even who Jesus had been. There was no church hierarchy or pope to specify which people and beliefs were legitimate. Historians say that Jesus’ execution left the sect without clear direction and leadership. Mythicists don’t explain why the people who invented the sect left these leadership issues up in the air.

How did certain leaders in the early church get identified as Jesus’ brother and apostles?
Paul meets with Jesus’ so-called brother James, and with two so-called apostles, Peter and John. Historians explain this by saying those people were Jesus’ brother and disciples. Mythicists have no clear answer.

Who is the preacher who composed the sayings attributed to Jesus?
The gospels include a lot of unremarkable teaching attributed to Jesus that really anybody could have said. The synoptic gospels, however, also include a body of original teachings that challenged the assumptions of 1st century Jews. We underestimate the power and originality of these sayings because 2000 years later they’re old hat, but at first they were so unusual that evangelists sometimes “tamed” them with a little editing. Who came up with these remarkable sayings? Turn the other cheek? God's reign is like dirty leaven? Who is behind this distinctive voice? Historians say it was Jesus who said these unusual things. Mythicists have no clear answer.

Why did the author of Mark create a new literary genre, the gospel?
Today we take gospels for granted, but the first gospel was unprecedented. According to historians, the author strung together elements from written and oral traditions to synthesize a narrative. While myths tend to be about great heroes of the distant past, this was the story of a hillbilly bastard exorcist who had died a loser’s death just a generation or two earlier. Historians say that this genre-creating work was inspired by Jesus. How do mythicists explain Mark?

Why don’t Jewish and pagan critics of Christianity question Jesus' existence?
Critics said he was a fool, magician, fraud, or bastard but not a fiction. Historians say that Jesus was a public figure, so even critics of Christianity acknowledged that he had lived and died. What is the mythicist explanation?

Hitchens asks, why are the gospels full of weird details?
That's right, Hitchens laid out "impressive" evidence for why he thought there may have been a historical Jesus, whom he characterized as a charismatic, deluded rabbi. Hitchens makes the point that the gospels have enough weird elements that they are evidently “not a whole-cloth fabrication”. If Jesus were merely an invention, why would the gospels say he was from Nazareth in Galilee and not the “right” city, Bethlehem in Judea? Early Christians had to invent two competing explanations for how Jesus could have been born in Bethlehem despite growing up in Nazareth. If he were just a myth, why bring in Nazareth at all? And why are the first witnesses to the resurrection just lowly women and not higher-status men? Again, not a detail that one would invent. Here is a link to a video clip of Hitchens making his case.

What are the telltale signs of a fringe idea?
Revolutionary ideas, such as natural selection, deny the scholarly consensus and offer something better. Fringe ideas merely deny the scholarly consensus. Creationist arguments are primarily criticisms of evidence for evolution, not a better explanation of the fossil record. Mythicist arguments are primarily criticisms of evidence for Jesus, not a better explanation for how Christianity started. Where is the biologist who uses creationism in their work? Where is the historian who uses Jesus mythicism to write a better history of Christian origins?

What are the telltale marks of group-identity bias?
If a fringe idea is largely confined to an identity group, it’s probably the product of group identity rather than evidence. The same is true if the idea is especially popular with the more outspoken members of that group and if it readily inspires emotional arguments. Young-earth creationism is like this, and so is Jesus mythicism.

More evidence
My arguments are holistic and brief. If you want to get down to brass tacks and assess evidence in detail, here’s a great article in which an atheist historian lays it all out for us. Again, Jesus mythicists will try to pick apart each piece of evidence, but they can’t propose a more plausible explanation for where Christianity came from.

The Big Picture: Jesus Mythicism and Atheism
Accepting the historical consensus on Jesus and rejecting mythicism would be a great way for the atheist community to show that we value scholarship and evidence over our own group-identity bias.

2015

The amniote clade split into countless smaller clades.

Clades in Grandmother Fish

Last week the printer shipped me two of the first finished copies of Grandmother Fish, which I raised money for last year on Kickstarter. There’s a lot I can say about Grandmother Fish: the 15 years I’ve been working on it; the help I got from science communicators, parents and children; how Karen’s art brought out the soft side of evolution; the difficulty of turning evolution into a story; or the power of kinesthetic learning. Today what’s on my mind is the concept of clades. In the old way of thinking, each living thing went into one or another categorical bucket, as in bird, reptile or mammal. In terms of clades, there are no buckets. Instead there are countless branch points, each leading on to more branch points. A clade is an ancestral population and all living things that ever descended from that population. Each time the evolutionary tree of life branches, both new branches are still part of the original clade, but each also represents a smaller clade of its own. Grandmother Fish shows children how living things are related, branch by branch. What excites me about this is that it demonstrates a new way of thinking about relatedness. In the old way of thinking, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals were all classes of vertebrate. In the new way of thinking, reptiles and birds are in one clade, with mammals in a sister clade. Those two clade combine in the amniote clade, with amphibians as their sister clade. Then the amniotes and amphibians combine in the tetrapod clade, and so on. Where 19th century scientists saw tetrapods as four classes, 21st century scientists see them as countless nested populations defined by sequential branching in the family tree. That’s one of the subtexts of Grandmother Fish, that we organize living things according to their lines of evolutionary descent.

Creationists can’t create a book to match Grandmother Fish. They have no cogent explanation for why animals resemble each other the way they do. The evolutionary family trees in Grandmother Fish show children how various sorts of animals are related to each other. Creationists can’t even generate a list of which animals are which kind. They say that each animal is in one and only one kind, and that these kinds have biological reality, but they can’t assign each animal to a kind. That’s because animals come in clades, not kinds. Relationships among animals are complex. Creationism reduces relationship down to a single factor: for any two animals, are they the same kind or not? Evolution posits a more complex and informative question: for any two animals, what was their most recent common ancestor, what was it like, when did it live, and where?  That’s what the five Grandmothers are in Grandmother Fish, they’re common ancestors found at major branch points in the history of our lineage.

The two-page phylogenetic tree in Grandmother Fish was a stretch goal, and I’m glad we added it to the book. Getting each branch point in the right sequence was a challenge, especially because genetic testing is rewriting the tree year by year. But the hard work means that these two pages include a large amount of scientific information, all distilled down to a simple, visually appealing diagram. It’s the sort of information that one can’t imagine without understanding the concept of common descent.

Am I a Fake Atheist?

Atheists often say Jesus was a myth.

Occasionally, some of my fellow atheists accuse me of being fake. Sometimes they say I’m a Christian going undercover and trying to undermine atheism from within. To one guy, I’m a wannabe Christian, which at least is a little more imaginative. Or I’m a fake atheist, whatever that means. It feels weird to have someone from the tribe declare me an outcast, but I try not to take it personally. It’s just what I deserve for flouting tribal boundaries. 

Online and at atheist gatherings, I’m likely to challenge atheists when their criticisms of religion are unfair. For example, saying that there’s no evidence for a historical Jesus is a flat-out error. Identifying religion with mental illness is another popular misconception. It’s natural to be unfair to the “enemy camp,” so errors like these are common. In terms of tribal politics, my criticizing a fellow atheist’s attack on religion is tantamount to treason. It’s just the sort of thing that gets you cast out of the tribe. But I’m not really defending the “enemy.” It’s not religion that I’m trying to protect. I'm trying to protect atheism—our secular community, such that it is. Humans in any group are prone to think negatively and speak unfairly about “enemy” groups. In fact, people generally love to hate the “other,” as everyone generating propaganda knows. Atheists are no different. The humanity we share with the believers makes us more like them than different from them. It’s no surprise to see us atheists engaging in the same simplistic, us-versus-them rhetoric that we accuse believers of indulging in. 

So does that mean I’m wasting my time, fighting human nature like this? Sometimes it feels like I am. But it’s not healthy to build a community around negativity, and I have reasons to hope that atheism can lose some of this bias. Why should I hope? 

• We atheists pride ourselves on being evidence-driven. Even though this principle is often neglected, it’s still an ideal that I can appeal to. We atheists humbly acknowledge that our evolved minds sometimes trick us into seeing things that aren’t there and believing things that aren’t true. 
• Young atheists from secular homes don’t necessarily have the same chips on their shoulders that so many of us older atheists do. 
• A number of atheist writers, such as Alain de Botton, have pointed out that there’s more to religion than oppression. 
• As for human nature, if it is our nature to be tribalistic, it is also our nature to be adaptable. Western civilization has made great progress in terms of self-awareness and broad-mindedness. 

All these factors give me hope, and I’ll keep expecting reasonableness from my fellow atheists. At least until they take my atheist card away and kick me out of the tribe for real. 

More Posts About Atheism

Walk-n-Talk Discussions

Walk & Talk at Burning Man

How do you get a large number of people to share their opinions in meaningful discussions? An open discussion seems to be something of an ideal among atheists, perhaps because we lean toward analysis and individualism. The first problem with open discussions of any size is that they are too easily dominated by extraverts. If someone gets angry over a sensitive topic, they also take more than their share of the spotlight. Usually, a few people do most of the talking. I’ve organized and participated in a lot of discussions over the years, and I want better results than that. Particularly if you’re concerned with empowering women’s voices, the issue is salient because on average it’s men who do most of the overtalking. Part of the problem is with extraverts, especially the loudmouths who feel compelled to talk and often talk over others. Don’t judge them too harshly. Everyone’s different, and some people are different by being more of a loudmouth. There’s another reason, however, that we don’t hear from some people. Speaking up in front of a big group is scary for a lot of people. And honestly it’s a big responsibility, taking the spotlight and asking a large group of people to listen to you instead of saying what they have to say. Plenty of people don’t even want to take their share of the air time. They have things to say, often some really insightful things, but they’re comfortable speaking in smaller groups, not big ones. How do you even things out, so that loudmouths can’t shut people out, and so shy people can contribute to a discussion without being forced to take the stage? My proposal is to run the discussion as a “walk-n-talk.” It’s an event that I’ve run several times at Burning Man, game conventions and Unitarian Sunday school. Instead of sitting, the participants stand in an open space and they all share their opinions on a question by walking to one side of the room or the other. A moderator leads a more or less regular discussion, except that each participant also gets to “voice” their opinion without taking the spotlight and in a way that can’t be talked over.

Here’s an example of the walk-n-talk format working. One year we had a quiet 7th grader in Sunday school. She paid attention in our discussions but she never spoke up. Near the end of the school year, we did a walk-n-talk, and for one question she walked way to left, as far as she could get. I asked her why she felt so strongly, and she explained her perspective to the class. It was easier for her to finally say something because she the walk-n-talk format allowed her to first voice an opinion without commanding others’ attention or even talking. We can encourage shy kids to speak up in class, but context counts more than words. 

Here’s my boilerplate description of the event for game conventions.

Walk & Talk
Stand and be counted with your people! Everyone stands in a group. The leader presents the group with either/or choices such as, “If you like pirates better than ninjas, move left. If you like ninjas better than pirates, move right.” Everybody gets to see how everyone else in the group answers each question. After each question, we talk briefly, and people on either side can explain their choices.  Then we move on to new questions. The questions cover whatever topics would be appropriate to the event. Participants can also pose questions to the group. Originally a Burning Man event.
   
Requires an open space where a dozen people or more can walk back and forth. Good for a high-traffic area because people can drop in at any time. Works best at 50 - 90 minutes.

Instructions for Moderators
If you have a feel for moderating the process, no instructions are really necessary, but here is the process spelled out. If you’re not moderating, these instructions still work as “the rules.”

1. You, the moderator, stand on the centerline of the room or area, dividing it into left and right. You stand at the edge of the play area. The participants gather into a mob in front of you, in the center of the play area.

2. Explain that this is a safe place for a conversation where people can disagree without criticizing someone else’s feelings or questioning their experiences.

3. The moderator poses a two-answer question to the group, such as, “Which do you like more, dogs or cats? If you like dogs more, move over that way.” Point right. “And if you like cats more, move that way.” Point left. “If you like them equally, stand on the center line.” Indicate the halfway line across the area, the imaginary line directly in front of you.
    

4. Participants move to one side or the other, often groaning at the difficulty of the decision.
    

5. You elicit a conversation on the topic. Call on people on each side. Encourage them to try to explain their viewpoints and possibly convince people in the middle. People can change position as they see fit.
    

6. Keep the conversations short. When they get too long, tell everyone to get back in the middle for the next question. You can often do new questions inspired by the discussion.
    

7. For some questions, you will want people moving not just left and right but up and back. For the cat and dog question, for example, you can add a new dimension to differentiate city people from country people. Once people are divided into right and left for dogs and cats, have them move forward (toward you) if they’re city people and back if they’re country people. Are there correlations? Do urban dog-lovers love different sorts of dogs from rural dog-lovers?
    

8. Start with safe topics, like movies or food. Gradually you can get to more personal issues, such as personal life.
 

9. My events are usually 50 to 90 minutes.
 

10. In a public venue with an open invitation, it’s nice to position the players so that you are facing the entrance, and it’s behind the players. That way new players can unobtrusively join in the back. They can also slip away if they like.

Advice for a Burning Man Walk-n-Talk 

For anyone who want to know more, here is a link to a document that I wrote to coach a friend the first time he was running the event.

Guidelines

Verbatim Notes from Gamefest

Here are the notes I prepared for the last walk-n-talk I did at Gamefest in Denver. The topic was gamer identity, an easy catch-all topic. As you will see, the notes are highly sketchy, really just reminders for me to refer to quickly when I need a new topic.

Verbatim Notes

Availability
If you want me to run a walk-n-talk at your event, email me: jt at jonathantweet dot com.

Sex Ed at Church

Comprehensive sex ed, with or without God

Every year, middle school kids across the US participate in a program of private sex education classes that cover the topic frankly, comprehensively, and graphically. It’s liberal in general and LGBTQ-friendly in particular. Each class is led by one man and one woman, and an honor code of confidentiality helps the young people feel safe opening up on this touchy topic. The program puts special emphasis on values, not to enforce any particular moral code but to help the participants explore and develop their own values. The classes don’t just convey information. They foster a culture of respect and openness, allowing the students to ask the personal questions they have and to the learn from each other. This curriculum, called Our Whole Lives, is used in the UU and UCC churches, and it’s a good example of what I mean when I say that religion is better thought of as a social institution than as a belief. Those of us at UU or UCC churches might believe that kids should have good sex ed classes, but what counts is that people before us have put this program together for us to use. It’s the institution that makes it happen. In this case, the institution is the sort of sex ed program that you can’t find just anywhere. 

Fostering community

The Our Whole Lives program is a fine example of intentionally fostering a mini-community. The participants promise each other confidentiality, and the adult leaders create a safe space where young people can discuss sensitive topics about sex, romance, love and other adolescent minefields. When my daughter started this program years ago, it was the first year she didn’t complain about going to church school on Sunday morning. The program created a group that she wanted to be part of. We atheists are individualistic by reflex, but some experiences develop only in the context of an intentional community.

Volunteerism

One feature of a religious community is that it elicits volunteer work from members. Lots of nonprofit organizations, such as Girl Scouts, also rely on volunteer efforts. The Our Whole Lives class is taught by two adult volunteers, one male and one female. These instructors see young people respond positively to the program, and that experience hooks them and gets them to keep volunteering. While I’ve never led OWL, teaching Sunday school and mentoring young people has given me some of the same fulfillment. Some of the value that a church structure brings to a community is simply the infrastructure to recruit, prepare, and coordinate volunteers. 

Multigenerational community

Richard Haynes is a leader in the atheist community and a former Christian minister. He sees two sorts of atheist groups in the States: older atheists with money but no time, and younger atheists with time but no money. As he points out, churches bring the generations together like few other institutions do. OWL is a classic case of elders passing down secrets to the youth, and a band of young initiates growing closer together by sharing emotionally powerful experiences. In ancient initiations, elders taught secrets to the youth. In OWL, elders create a safe space for the youth to share their own secrets with each other. Reflecting the intergenerational nature of church, Unitarians are sometimes called “atheists with kids.” That description certainly holds for my family. 

On our own

The closest thing I have to a holy book is The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. In verse, Wallace explores what it means to be human now that we have found out that the gods don’t exist. In “Sunday Morning,” he describes us as “unsponsored, free.” And that describes the freedom we Unitarians have in figuring out how to run our congregations. No deity is sponsoring us. We’re not responsible to any external party for how we initiate our children into adulthood. No human generation before us has ever had to navigate a sexual landscape like today’s, with more options, fewer prohibitions, and effective birth control. Our Whole Lives lays it all out there to help young people find their way. 

Bigger than yourself

Jonathan Haidt examines morality from an evolutionary perspective. He says that people are mostly selfish, but we’re also a little “groupish.” Being part of a group comes naturally to us, just like looking out for “number one” comes naturally. It’s common for people to say that they gain fulfillment by devoting themselves to something that’s bigger than themselves. Ultimately, perhaps this tendency arises from the primeval instinct to feel as though one is part of a family, clan, or tribe. 

OWL participants create a mini-community, which is bigger than they are individually. I can see the results myself. This year I’m mentoring a 9th grader, and I can see how close-knit the 9th graders are. I worked with these same students two years ago, and they are much better connected now.

Atheists in OWL

Of the kids I’ve seen go through OWL, I mostly don’t know which ones are atheists and which are believers. Maybe lots of them don’t know themselves. That’s my congregation for you. Is OWL a “religious” program? People who define religion as a belief would say that it’s religious for the believer kids but not for the atheists. I pay more attention to behavior than to beliefs, so I’d say it’s religious for all of them, believers and atheists alike.

Institutions Get Work Done

Lots of people believe that adolescents should get frank information about sex and help sorting their way through romance, emotions, love, and the rest. On some level, I’ve always agreed with that idea, but that belief by itself doesn’t go very far. What worked for me is being connected to a congregation. OWL is a social institution, one that coordinates activity around a modern sex ed program. It’s institutions that makes things happen. A secular organization could readily duplicate what OWL accomplishes, but only by creating a duplicate institution. 

OWL and your kids

If you’re a parent curious about OWL for your kids, you can look up a Unitarian congregation near you. Unitarians have no creed or doctrine, so each congregation has its own style. Some have a pagan flavor, some are basically humanist (like mine), and in others a sort of deistic God is popular. Some congregations call themselves fellowships rather than churches to announce their distance from your typical church. I prefer the term church because I don’t like to be divisive, but that’s just me.

----

Rites of Passage: the OWL program is intense enough to qualify as a "rite of passage."

2015

Dozens of  atheist-friendly scholars
evaluate Jesus’ sayings line by line.

Public and Private Jesus

Historians consider the life and teachings of Jesus in the gospels to be a mix of authentic record and religious embellishments. Two groups deride the historians’ approach as nonsense: the Christians who say that all the gospel stories are all true, and the atheists who say that none of them are. As historians have been pointing out for 150 years, it’s not that simple. First, historians exclude the gospel of John. It contradicts the earlier three gospels on almost every point, was written last (furthest from the historical events), and never rings true in the historian’s ear. Second, historians examine the synoptic gospels—Mark, Matthew, and Luke—to see which parts seem more plausible and which less. They use various formal criteria, such as the criterion of embarrassment. This rule of thumb says that embarrassing details, such as Jesus’ ignominious death on a cross, are probably true because they’re the opposite of what someone would invent. Applying these criteria takes some expertise, including familiarity with the religious beliefs and expectations of Jesus’ audience. But this post is about my simple rule of thumb that an armchair scholar can apply to the synoptic gospels to help them sort the probably true from the probably false. I call it the criterion of publicness, and it states that teachings and events that take place in secret are probably inventions. The reasoning is simple. When gospel writers needed to invent a miracle or teaching, they would have it occur in secret, which implicitly explained why no one had ever heard of that miracle or teaching before. If you lay out the career of Jesus in the synoptics, there’s a pretty clear split between Jesus the historically plausible public faith healer and Christ the private and highly improbable Son of God.

Public Jesus and Private Jesus

What follows is a rough breakdown of Jesus’ career as reflected in the synoptic gospels. The criterion of publicness does a pretty neat job of splitting the gospel story into, on one hand, a plausible account of the public life of a first-century Jewish prophet and, on the other hand, a series of miracles and teachings that make Jesus look great and make the Jews look terrible. 

Public	Private
Baptism under John the Baptist. Historians consider this event, in which Jesus repents of his sins, rock solid because the author of Mark would not have invented it. Later gospel authors downplayed Jesus’ baptism, demonstrating how this historical event ran counter to early Christians’ theological agenda.	Temptation by the Devil. After his baptism, Jesus is driven by the holy spirit into the desert, and there the devil shows up personally and tempts him. This legend demonstrates Jesus’ cosmic status as God’s Son.
Exorcism and Healing. Jesus was known as a healer. The ability to heal was considered miraculous and rare, but it didn’t mean that someone was a messiah or son of God. Jesus’ failures are also public, as when he was unable to perform miracles in his hometown because the people there didn’t have enough faith. He also insisted that people were cured by their faith.	Nature Miracles. Jesus calms a storm when he and his disciples are in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. Unlike exorcisms, control over weather is hard to explain with the placebo effect, but then the whole event tales place in private with no one around to corroborate it. Walking on water, same thing.
Apocalyptic Visions. Personally, I’d rather not think of Jesus as apocalyptic, but several public apocalyptic sayings are attributed to him. Most top scholars seem to attribute apocalyptic pronouncements to the historical Jesus. While he makes apocalyptic claims, Jesus refuses to give a public sign from heaven to validate his authority. His prophecy about the Temple being destroyed is probably historical. He said that not one stone would be on another, which didn’t come true. An invention would have been literally true.	Messianic Claims. The disciples planned to rule the twelve restored tribes of Israel with Jesus as their king, or at least that’s what was reportedly said in private. Jesus is secretive of his divine status, revealing it only in secret. For the last hundred years, historians have understood this literary device as cover for the historical reality that Jesus never claimed to be anyone’s messiah.
Parables. Mark, Matthew, Luke, and Thomas include many memorable parables, mostly about “God's reign”, usually translated as the Kingdom of God. These parables are unlike anything else that anyone was saying at the time, so they seem to derive from the historical Jesus.	Secret Teachings. According to the synoptics, Jesus explained his enigmatic parables in secret to his disciples. In Mark, he spells out that he is hiding his message in parables so that the Jews won’t understand his message and won’t have a chance to repent before being destroyed. Jesus also secretly gives Peter and the other disciples the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven and the power to “bind” and “loose.” Sure he does.
Beatitudes. Like the parables, the beatitudes are marked by unexpected turns of phrase. The hungry are the lucky ones? What sense does that make? Ironic, pithy sayings sound like Jesus’ words. Ethics. Turn the other cheek and go the extra mile—these are original phrases that sound authentic.	Transfiguration. When Jesus is revealed as the Son of God in all his glory, a peer to Moses and Elijah, he is not secreted away with his twelve disciples. No, he’s secreted away on a mountain with just his top three disciples: Peter, James and John. It sounds like the Transfiguration was an event that some of Jesus' disciples denied seeing, so Mark’s author helpfully explains that only the top three saw it. Historians often consider this scene, where Jesus is filled with light, to reflect genuine visions of Jesus, but visions that his followers had after his execution, not during his life.
Entry into Jerusalem. Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem sounds like something invented to fulfill prophecy, but it did reportedly take place in public. E. P. Sanders thinks it really happened, albeit on a small scale.	Last Supper. This is the private meeting where Jesus gives his disciples bread and wine as his body and blood. Probably the “Lord’s supper” tradition started as a sort of funeral feast in remembrance of Jesus, as Paul describes. The Last Supper story reads like a staged scene invented to establish the origin of a ritual that was already traditional. An early “church order”, the Didache, presents an alternative Eucharist service with no new covenant of broken body or shed blood.
Temple Incident. Jesus caused some sort of trouble at the Temple in Jerusalem. Normally that might not have been a big deal, but this was during Passover, when zealous Jews thronged the streets and prayed for an uprising that could throw off the hated Romans. This incident marked Jesus as a troublemaker, and the leaders of Jerusalem handed him over to the Romans for execution. Harsh actions such as this one maintained the uneasy peace with the Romans, delaying all-out war for a generation to come.	Garden of Gethsemane. The story of the garden is lovely. Faithful Jesus prays before his impending sacrifice. His disciples, faithless Jews, fail him. Judas, the disciple with the most Jewish name, betrays him—to the Jews. This story looks like an invention with a clear agenda.  Trial. Historically speaking, the Roman prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate, was remarkably cruel. If the Jewish leaders handed a rebel over to his soldiers for execution, would Pilate have bothered with a trial? And which disciple was at the trial taking notes of the proceedings? And how did the disciple hear Pilate’s wife telling him about her dream? The trial is another story that makes Jesus look good. It also shifts blame from the Romans to the Jews, where early Christians wanted it to be.
Crucifixion. Jesus’ humiliating death on the cross is another event that historians consider solid because no early Christian would invent such a story. Early Christians downplayed the crucifixion, sometimes going so far as to say that Jesus hadn’t really been crucified. Luke and John both portray Jesus as not really minding that much while he’s crucified. Paul seems to have been the first to make sense of the crucifixion. He reinterpreted it as a sacrifice that earned Christ the status of Son of God at his resurrection.	Betrayal by Peter. Peter denies knowing the crucified Jesus, a nighttime encounter calculated to makes Jesus’ number one Jewish disciple look bad. Empty Tomb & Resurrection Appearances. The gospels contradict each other on who saw the resurrected Jesus first. What they all agree on is that Jesus showed himself only to his followers. Why didn’t Jesus appear to High Priest Caiaphas? According to Matthew, dead saints rose and prophesied on the streets of Jerusalem, but Jesus kept to his little circle.

The Gospel of John

The fourth gospel, attributed to John, is the exception that proves the rule. Here at last is Jesus as the divine figure that Christianity would have preferred all along. He’s not a helpless baby born of a virgin; he’s an incarnation of the divine Word (Logos). He doesn’t repent of his sins in baptism under John; he crowds John out with a bigger baptism campaign of his own. He’s not coy about being the messiah; he walks around talking about how great he is and claiming unity with God. He doesn’t deny his audiences a sign; his ministry is nothing but supernatural signs one after another that identify him as divine. John’s gospel shows what happens when a gospel writer was not constrained by Jesus’ actual life. The author pulled out the stops and rewrote Jesus to be the divine figure that the author’s sect of Christians wanted. And why is Mark so different from John? Because the author of Mark did feel constrained by Jesus’ actual life. He left in the baptism, Jesus’ family thinking that he was crazy, Jesus not being able to perform miracles in his home town, and Jesus’ despair on the cross. If “Mark” hadn’t been writing about a historical figure, he could have taken the same liberties that “John” did. Instead, he had to structure the narrative carefully to honor the memory of Jesus’ public life while carefully inserting new events and teachings that took place “in secret.”

A Historical Prophet

Obviously there’s more going on in the synoptic gospels than can be explained using the simple criterion of publicness. Sorting through the details takes more work. For example, some of the Beatitudes are more likely to be authentic and others less. If you want to get down to this level of detail, the Jesus Seminar has an amazing book called The Five Gospels. It’s hard to recommend this book too much for someone who’s curious about what the historical Jesus probably did or did not say. It’s the result of debate among many prominent scholars and dozens of other experts, and it carefully assesses historicity line by line. But short of that level of research, I hope that this post demonstrates that a little analysis can help you glimpse the life of a historical prophet underneath the layers of religious elaboration found in the gospels.

PS: Whenever I write about historical Jesus, some atheists try to be helpful by informing me that he didn’t exist. If you'd like to leave such a comment, please also provide at least one piece of evidence (not argumentation) that Christianity was originally founded by someone other than Jesus. Meanwhile, here’s a post summarizing how the historical Jesus hypothesis fits the evidence better than the mythic Jesus hypothesis. And if you really want to get down to brass tacks, here are two links to an atheist historian who lays out evidence for Jesus and who handles the typical objections:

bit.ly/atheistjesus1

bit.ly/atheistjesus2

MLK's Institution

Reminding atheists that sometimes

Christianity is good.

tl;dr We atheists should be able to acknowledge that churches empowered King’s campaigns even if we don’t believe in King’s God.

Here in the States, the third Monday of January is Martin Luther King Day. He’s the only individual to get his own federal holiday. Since King was a great man and a Christian, his day seems like a good opportunity for us atheists to appreciate the good that religion can do in the secular world. Some atheists are quick to point out that King’s values aren’t exclusive to Christianity, and that’s true. The implication, however, is that in an alternate reality there may be a secular King who was just as successful in promoting civil rights as our Christian King was. That scenario seems unlikely. Since even atheists admire King, his career is a useful opportunity for us to see what’s good about Christianity and about religion in general. In particular, King’s career demonstrates the value of religious institutions. Atheists often define religion as a belief or maybe a belief system, but first and foremost religion is a social institution. Maybe it’s our individualism or our rationalism, but we atheists commonly underestimate the value and power of institutions. King’s life can help us see the good that institutions can do, even when they’re religious.

The Black Church

On a number of levels, King couldn’t have done what he did if he hadn’t been a minister. As a black man, his opportunities for leadership were limited. The black church, however, allowed him to pursue a career of learning, communication, inspiration and leadership. In some theoretical world, perhaps a gifted black man could have led an equivalent career as part of a secular institution, one devoted to community and justice. But in our actual world, the black church offered this opportunity to King and no other institution did.

The black church connected King to black leaders across the country. It gave him churches to speak at, congregations to speak to, and an organization through which to spread ideas and recruit allies. His status as a minister gave him clout that helped him lead his campaign. Churches aren’t beliefs. They imply buildings, meeting rooms, newsletters, organizational structures, connections to people in the community, and congregations that are willing to gather and hear someone inspire them to action. Apart from any sort of belief, churches are social institutions that bring people together, and those institutions made King’s career possible.

The Christian Church

As a Christian minister, King had a connection to Christian clergy and laypeople across the world. For the most part, this connection was theoretical, but King made it practical. As a minister, he called on clergy from across the country to join him in Selma. After “Bloody Sunday,” hundreds of white clergy answered his call and joined him on short notice. It’s true that people of any belief could have joined him and did, but the institution of the Christian church provided an impressive, rapid influx of white allies, each of whom was connected to a congregation back home. When a white congregation saw its minister fly to Selma, that must have had a big emotional impact. Emotional impacts are irrational, so atheists are sometimes uncomfortable with them, but emotions are usually how things get done in this world. 

Maybe if there were an international secular institution that went back 2000 years, and if it had a cadre of educated, professional community leaders on hand to join a civil rights campaign, then maybe a secular version of King could have called on the leaders of that institution. In real life, that institution was the Christian church. 

Perhaps the most famous white minister to answer King’s call was James Reeb. He’s famous because he was beaten to death. It’s sad to say, but the death of a white minister from Boston shocked the nation the way that deaths of black activists had not. Reeb’s martyrdom was not in vain. It advanced the cause of civil rights. Reeb didn’t just happen to be a minister. He was there in Selma because he was a minister and because King was one.

On a less dramatic level, King’s identity as a Christian minister allowed him to reach the hearts of many white Christian laypeople. His civil disobedience was predicated on God’s justice trumping human law. When people called him an extremist, he called out Jesus as an example of an “extremist.” White clergy and lay people across the country picked up his call for racial justice and campaigned for civil rights in their hometowns. Like King, they used the infrastructure supplied by the church to gather crowds, inspire congregations, and spread the word. 

Christian Faith

Atheists assure me that if King had been an atheist, he still could have lived a life with just as much courage, determination, hope, and love. Maybe they are right. King believed that no matter what his enemies did to his body, his soul was safe with Christ, but maybe that didn’t make any real difference to him. He believed that his campaign emulated the life of Christ, but I suppose even an atheist can aspire to emulate a hero like Jesus. King led a heroic career, explicitly in the name of Jesus, but I sure can’t prove for certain that a godless King couldn’t have braved everything the actual King braved and more. Still, if an atheist is certain that King’s faith didn’t contribute to his heroism, the point of this post is that it's institutions that get work done, not ideas. 

Bad Christian Institutions

Some atheists get uncomfortable when they hear religion being praised, and they want to jump in and point out its flaws. That’s natural. It is true that religious institutions were operating on the opposite side of the civil rights movement. Southern Baptists had church buildings to meet in and copy machines for their racist fliers, too. That’s all true. The point here is not that religion is always good but that religion is powerful, and that its power stems from its institutions. We are well aware that these institutions can be used for evil purposes, and in all fairness we atheists ought to acknowledge that they can also be used for good purposes. King’s holiday is a fine time for us to reflect on that.

Secular Assessment

If religious people are going to get over the tribal thinking that sets them against each other and against us, maybe we secular people need to show them the way. It’s natural for us atheists to downplay the degree to which Christianity contributed to King’s accomplishments, but maybe we would do well to rise above our tribal nature. Reflecting on King’s life is a good opportunity for us atheists to do just that. 

2015

Chris Stedman advocates working 
with liberal believers. 

Who Cares If You Believe in God?

Atheists should stand up to the religious right to protect equality, liberty, and justice. The religious right is dangerous, the struggle is one that we can win, and opposing the religious right makes us look good. The same cannot be said, for example, for historical Jesus. Promoting the idea that Jesus never existed puts us on the wrong side of scholarship and makes us look biased. I’d like the atheist community to get past its affection for believing that Jesus didn’t found Christianity. I’ll go further. My dream is that atheists will become known as people who don’t care whether you believe in God. Why should we care? Modern culture is about letting people do their thing. But it’s obvious that we do care, and plenty of atheists disparage believers in just the same terms that believers use for atheists. What if atheists stopped caring? If that happened, young people would see that the believers judge people by their beliefs about God, but the atheists don’t. We’d look broad-minded, which is a win in modern culture. If my dream came true, it might also help believers hate us a little tiny bit less. But mainly it’s my dream because we atheists would actually have to become more broad-minded. Specifically, we’d have to tame our tribal instincts and stop gunning for the sacred symbols that the outsiders revere. In other words, we’d have to become more enlightened, and it’s an enlightened community that I want to be part of. 

The conflict is tribal. 

If you listen to atheists and believers describe each other online, you’ll learn that one side is populated by delusional fools who are lying to themselves, a menace to all that is good and true. Luckily for humanity, the other side is populated, with some admitted exceptions, by well-meaning, reasonable people who aren’t blind and can see what’s really going on in this universe. In fact, this second groups has a privileged, enlightened understanding, free of the illusions that most people throughout history have lived their lives under. The only disagreement between the two sides is which side is which. Is is the atheists who are the fools, or the believers? That’s the debate. The first thing to know about the heated conflicts between atheists and believers is that they’re tribal. Humans are naturally tribal, and we instinctively see things “our” way, to the detriment of “them” in the out-group. Believers have dogmatic reasons to believe that their religion-versus-religion conflicts represent cosmic truth, but we atheists can see these conflicts for what they are: political struggles among social apes.  

Humans excel at binary thinking, pattern matching, and taking sides in interpersonal conflicts. These traits lead believers to dislike atheists. Binary thinking says that if “we” believers are good then “they,” the atheists, must be bad. Pattern matching means that if one atheist hates religion then all atheists must hate religion. The human propensity to take sides means that believers intuitively develop negative judgments of us. Of course, the same process works in the other direction, with atheists automatically developing negative judgments of believers. The tribal nature of this conflict explains why it is so resistant to resolution. People get emotional and talk past each other, and debate leads nowhere. Since we atheists don’t have traditions, prophets, or scripture to limit our perspective, we ought to be the first to embrace the modern view of human cognition and to recognize our own tribalism.

Belief in God is the wrong target.

Because belief in God is a symbol of identity, its importance is exaggerated in the minds of both believers and atheists. In conflicts between groups, tribal symbols loom large: national flags, sacred images, distinctive clothing, holidays, God in various forms, and so on. But it’s costly for atheists to oppose belief in God, and the benefits of doing so are uncertain.  

Costs are high.

Opposing belief in God means we atheists come across as intolerant, as the Christmas billboards from American Atheists do. Even if more people become atheists as a result, the status of atheists goes down in the eyes of observers. Today in the States, there are plenty of people who don’t believe in God but won’t call themselves atheists. Some of that is due to the lies believers tell about us, but I bet our critical habits also contribute to that reluctance. Opposing belief in God also supports the idea that people can be evaluated based on whether they believe in God. The public’s opinion of atheists would get better if people stopped assessing others by their beliefs. Finally, opposing belief means not working with liberal believers who are at work resisting the religious right.

Benefits are iffy.

Anti-theists like to say that religious beliefs lead to bad behaviors, and they’re right. But it’s easy to exaggerate how powerful beliefs are. Christians and atheists go about their lives pretty much the same way, and they even face death with the same feelings of fear and sadness. Why don’t religious beliefs make a bigger practical difference? Because human lives run on feelings more than on ideas. People know they should exercise, but how many do? Of all the people who believe in astrology, few of them head to Las Vegas when the stars say they are lucky with money. If someone believes that President Obama is the Muslim Anti-Christ, they probably go about their lives pretty much like other people. Of all the people who believe that climate change is killing the planet, how many of us are really changing our lifestyles? Beliefs are not good motivators for behavior. A much better motivator is social proof. Seeing other people doing something is a great motivator for doing that behavior yourself. Even if belief in God should in theory lead to all sorts of bad behavior, most people can be counted on to not lead their lives in accord with their own ideals. 

Besides, even when belief does motivate people, is that always bad? Sometimes faith inspires people to do good things, as with Florence Nightingale or Martin Luther King. Belief in God, per se, doesn’t seem to be the problem. Problems are things the religious right wants to do, such as cut evolution from school curricula. Let’s fight those things directly.

Some atheists are likely to say that the world would be a better place if tomorrow everybody stopped believing in God. Suppose that were true. So what? That’s a magical hypothetical. The real question is which would serve humanity better, atheists opposing belief in God or atheists not caring about belief in God?   

Enlightenment is good for us.

The religious right, especially in Christianity and Islam, has created a secular backlash. To most people, secularism looks good compared to the religious right. One part of secularism is an enlightened view of personal liberty, including freedom of belief. Saying that we don’t care whether people believe in God means we are in line with secular ideals, as opposed to the extremists who want to limit what people can believe. 

My fellow atheists should see that it would be good for us if people cared less about belief in God. That idea lets us atheists off the hook. If you want to lay it on thicker, say “I don’t judge people by whether they believe in God.” No one wants to be judgmental. To my compatriots I might go so far as to say it’s un-American to judge people by whether they believe in God. Doing so is also against the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As long as people judge others by their beliefs about God, atheists are going to have a PR problem. So let’s stop. 

The best thing about not caring about theism is that it’s a powerful mental exercise for us. It’s natural for an atheist to oppose theism on some level, but if we can rise above our natural, us-versus-them instincts, then we are better people with a clearer view of the world. Atheists don’t have any supernatural beliefs to limit our view of the world. We know we’re not God’s chosen people, and we know that our truth is not guaranteed by any deity, scripture, or prophet. By rights, we ought to be the first people to embrace the new science of human identity and to check our own biases. Maybe one day believers will say, “Atheists are going to hell for sure, but you gotta admit that they’re broad-minded.” I suppose it’s biased of me to expect that my in-group should be above average in terms of self-awareness and tolerance. I can live with that.

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See also Reading about religion: Books for atheists on the topic of religion, as well as tribalism in general.

2015

Unlike Jesus, Moses wasn’t even close to historical.

Legendary Moses

A new Moses movie is out, and, since I’m a great big fan of the historical Jesus, a friend of mine asked about “the historical Moses.” Some of my fellow atheists get upset at me because I say that Jesus was a historical person. Today they might be happy to hear me “get with the program” and say that Moses is a legendary figure. He didn’t exist, nor did anyone like him. The same goes for the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob/Israel, and Joseph. Even King David’s existence is in doubt. When looking at the Bible, it’s important to sort out the history from the legend, the way historians do. It doesn’t make sense to treat the whole thing as the same, either all literally true or all made up. That approach is too simple to be useful. Thanks to archeology, we now have a better idea of Hebrew history, and Moses isn’t there. Neither is the Hebrews’ bondage in Egypt or their conquest of Canaan. That’s good news, since it means that the ethnic cleansing of the Bible is fantasy rather than history.

Modern history of ancient Palestine

The Hebrews were not slaves in Egypt, and Yahweh did not show off by killing Egyptians. Hebrew armies did not ethnically cleanse the Promise Land. Instead, the Hebrews were nomadic pastoralists driving their herds across the hills of Palestine. They looked down on their neighbors, the farmers. In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain, the farmer, sees his offering rejected by Yahweh, while Abel, the shepherd, sees his offering honored.

The nomadic Hebrews presumably traded with the civilized people of the coastal regions, whose economy was based on farming. Suddenly, about 3000 years ago, the Hebrew settlements switched from temporary to permanent, and the shepherds took up farming. This switch was probably the result of the collapse of Bronze Age civilization in the area. No one is sure why civilization fell, but it fell hard in the eastern Mediterranean. For the Hebrews, taking up the plow meant adopting a more laborious lifestyle, and they commemorate the  hated switch in the story of the Garden in Eden. Yahweh curses men to earn their bread by the sweat of their faces. If you want bread. someone's got to farm.

Genocide

Some of the most horrific stories of the Bible come from the conquest of the Promised Land. The mighty Hebrew armies, acting on Yahweh’s orders, massacre men, women, children, and even livestock. None of that ever happened. Nor the wandering for 40 years in the wilderness, nor bondage in Egypt. Those stories were invented because they were a more satisfying history than the truth: “The civilized cities collapsed, so we couldn’t trade with civilized people any more, and if we wanted the products of settled life, we had to become settled ourselves.” Of course, today these ancient stories of plagues, bloodshed, and triumph come across as genocidal, with Yahweh a fearsome megalomaniac. 

In the story of Moses, Yahweh is vindictive in a personal way. His vicious plagues afflict the everyday Egyptians, punishing them for their king’s hard-heartedness. In the olden days, it was considered only natural that people suffered for their king’s misdeeds. What’s worse, however, is that the everyday Egyptians wind up suffering not because their king is hard-hearted but because Yahweh wants to show off. Pharaoh would relent, but Yahweh hardens his heart to prevent him from freeing the Hebrews. With Pharaoh’s heart hardened, Yahweh gets to demonstrate increasingly terrible plagues until finally he kills off all the first-born in the land. The Jewish celebration of Passover commemorates the night when Yahweh slaughtered children in order to show off how bad-ass he was. It’s no wonder that in the 2nd century CE a major Christian reformer, Marcion, advocated ditching the Jewish scriptures altogether. Who could believe that Yahweh was a good guy?  

Moses and Jesus

The differences between Moses and Jesus are instructive. Traditional believers say that Moses and Jesus are equally historical, and Jesus mythicists agree with them. Historians, however, distinguish between these two figures, and here are some reasons why. 

Timing

The story of Moses was written long after he was said to have lived (Deut 34:6), whereas Paul started writing about Jesus while Jesus’ brother, James, and his lead disciple, Peter, were still alive. 

Precedence

Exodus is evidently based on earlier, simpler stories embodied in ceremonial creeds (Deut 26:6-10, Josh 24:2-13), while the stories about Jesus’ life have no clear precedent. Jesus was the historical figure to teach mainly in parables. The earliest written gospel is an innovative literary form, an amateur account pieced together from stories from the oral tradition. Later on Christians copied all sorts of magical elements from other religions, but many mundane details of Jesus’ biography are original and look genuine.

Sources

The story of Moses comes from one source, while we have four independent first-century sources for Jesus: the Q gospel of Jesus’ saying, the gospel attributed to Mark, the gospel attributed to Thomas, and Josephus’ history. 

Embarrassing details

Moses was said to be slow of tongue, needing his brother Aaron to speak for him. Is this the sort of embarrassing detail that authors wouldn't invent about their hero? On the contrary, it's an addition by the Aaronite priests, their way of shoehorning their man Aaron into the story. It's bad storytelling, and so this detail is generally dropped from modern retellings. Jesus' life, on the other hand, is marked by details that were embarrassing to his early followers, so embarrassing that they took pains to paper them over. Prominent among these details are his repentance and baptism under John the Baptist and his shameful, miserable death on the cross. 

Oral style

Moses speaks in long lectures, like Jesus does In “John’s” gospel. In both cases, historians take these lectures to be fictions, possibly pious fictions. Many of Jesus’ sayings, on the other hand, are pithy, memorable phrases. “Turn the other cheek” is the sort of formula that oral histories are able to preserve. The words that Christians falsely attributed to Jesus are noticeably second-rate. Thomas Jefferson said that picking the genuine sayings out of the text was like spotting “diamonds in a dunghill”.  Historians think these memorable phrases were passed down for 20 years or so before being recorded in the Q source and other works. 

Orthodoxy and originality

The laws attributed to Moses look like an expression of orthodox Hebrew patriarchy. They could have been assembled by a committee. Jesus’ teachings, on the other hand, are puzzling and paradoxical. The Kingdom of Heaven is like dirty leaven? Like a tiny seed? We’re supposed to turn the other cheek and go the extra mile? These are original, memorable sayings. The work of the committees was to tame these sayings for general consumption. When Jesus said, for example, that a man had to hate his father to follow him, the editors of “Matthew’s” gospel changed the line to say that one had to love Jesus more than one’s father. 

Legends and history

Christians put Moses and Jesus in the same category (historical), and so do Jesus mythicists (legendary). Mainstream historians, on the other hand, see them as very different. Treating Moses and Jesus as the same is an error, whether it’s literalists who do it or atheists.

PS: More about historical Jesus

I know that some people can't read about Jesus being historical without wanting to raise a heated objection. If that sounds like you, please read what an atheist historian has to say on the matter:

http://bit.ly/atheistjesus1

http://bit.ly/atheistjesus2

Bonus Moses Comment

Follow-up comment on my post about Moses being legendary. 

Q. Why isn’t it reasonable to think that there could have been a historical leader of the Hebrews like Moses, someone on whom the stories are based, however vaguely? 

A. It’s more plausible that the Hebrews never had a ruler like Moses because the Hebrews were nomads, and nomads don’t have rulers. People hate to be told what to do, and we’ll walk away rather than put up with bosses. Bosses arise in places where people can’t leave, such as fertile river valleys or islands. Once people settle into agriculture, it’s easier to get them to submit to rule because they can’t just walk away like nomads can. But having a boss is not natural, and people generally don’t like it. Nomads can unite for war in great masses, and they sometimes acclaim ultimate leaders to serve as commanders-in-chief, but the union of tribes dissipates once the war is over. While nomads don’t have rulers, what they have instead is forefathers. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob/Israel and Joseph are forefathers. Moses is a spiritual forefather for the Hebrews, a heroic authority to put some weight behind the law. 

We are used to seeing nations led by charismatic rulers, and the Moses story sounds like something that could be based on a historical ruler and lawgiver. In fact, what could have gotten a nation of nomads to follow a man like Moses? It would take the sort of miracles described in Exodus. Maybe if someone really could call down the wrath of Yahweh on enemies, then the Hebrews would have followed him. But as for history, the existence of such a ruler is very much in doubt. 

For more about tribal culture, see Francis Fukuyama’s Origin of Political Order. The book is tremendous, summarizing the rise and decay of political order around the world from prehistory to the French Revolution. After reading it, I feel like I understand history for the first time.