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