2017

Aron Ra, Historical Jesus, and Bias

Aron Ra was kind enough to have me on his podcast to talk at some length about historical Jesus. We met last year in Seattle when he came through on a book tour, and he took an interest in my debate last summer with Dr Carrier. Aron is a mythicist, although he doesn’t follow Carrier’s hypothesis. The conversation meanders a bit, but there’s a lot of good material in here. We talk about the composition of the early Christian church, Paul’s crucifixion theology, the temperament of atheists, and more. 

Here’s the video, Episode 77 of the Ra-Men Podcast.

Aron was surprised to learn that sometimes atheists call me a fake atheist for promoting the historical Jesus hypothesis. He actually laughed at the idea. Should I have been surprised to see that people who watched the video left comments about me being a Christian? I was surprised, but only because I’m a fool. Of course that’s what some atheists are going to say, even after watching Aron laugh at such irrational behavior. Aron agrees with me that atheists shouldn’t use the historical Jesus as a point of orthodoxy, and that’s my overriding message, so it’s nice to have him on my side on that point.

We also talked a little bit about the divisiveness that seems to be too common among atheists. Aron talked about the people who will shun and slander you for disagreeing with them on one issue, even if you agree on many others. Sam Harris also talks about this phenomenon, the hyper-critical stance that is common among atheists. In the US, atheists are more analytical and more disagreeable than average, and it shows. 

As for historical Jesus, we half agree. About half the stuff he had to say about the New Testament and early Christianity is the same sort of thing I would say. Jesus clearly wasn’t God. The gospels are not eyewitness accounts. The New Testament books contradict each other, and they include a bunch of legendary material adapted from pagan sources. On the other hand, Aron and I disagree on a lot, such as what century the Christian cult started; what the cult that Paul joined was like; whether the first reference to Jesus being placed in history implies that he was born on Earth hundreds of years BC; and why the historical consensus for the last hundred years has been that Jesus was a historical figure. I’ve gotten a lot of practice summarizing others’ points, and I think that habit helped ground the conversation. Most of the conversation was about the historical Jesus. 

I did a little homework after the discussion, and after the end of this post are some notes that I think provide a useful context for understanding the discussion. If you haven’t watched the video yet, you probably want to watch it before reading my notes. 

The big idea: accepting bias as natural

Everybody’s biased, and that’s natural. We atheists know that our beliefs bubble up from our meat brains. They’re not divine inspiration from above. Our beliefs are fallible and often self-serving. Even mythicists like Aron Ra can agree that when atheists accuse me of being a Christian, that’s tribal bias at work. Maybe we atheists can use the topic of historical Jesus as a way to recognize bias in our own community. Recognizing bias is the first step toward mitigating it.

Earlier posts

Am I a Fake Atheist? 

Honest Debate: Historical Jesus with Ricard Carrier

Notes

Roman Catholic Jesus scholars

I got this wrong. A papal encyclical of 1907 prohibited Roman Catholic scholars from evaluating the Bible from an historical-critical perspective, but that restriction was rescinded in 1943. In fact Catholic scholars, such as John Meier, have helped spur today’s renaissance in historical Jesus research.

Timeline

Aron and I had trouble agreeing on the timeline of when various works and ideas entered the historical record. Here is an approximate timeline according to mainstream scholars.

30, Jesus’ ministry and execution
50s–60s, Paul’s writing and ministry, introducing the crucifixion to Christian theology
70, Gospel of Mark, first record of Jesus’ biography
90?, Epistle to Titus, describing elders/overseers, roles that later developed into priests and bishops
90, Josephus, who refers to John the Baptist and Jesus
150, Justin Martyr’s First Apology

Docetics, “phantomists”, early Christian faction

They believed that Jesus had “walked among us”, although he only appeared to be physical. This belief shows how implausible Carrier’s celestial-only Christ would be. Even the early Christians who hated the physical world still taught that their divine-only Christ appeared to people here on Earth. The Gospel of Thomas represents a similar view, in which the celestial Jesus came to Earth temporarily. Docetist beliefs are first documented in 1 John, written about a generation or two after Paul.

Ebionites, “the poor ones”, Jewish Christians

Basically, these were original Christians, before Paul came in and established Christianity 2.0. They were Jewish ascetics who hung out around Jerusalem, fawned on Jesus’ brother James, and waited for Jesus to return and usher in the End Times. There was no faction of Ebionites when Paul joined Christianity. The zealots hanging out around Jerusalem were just regular old fanatics. They became a “heresy” only after Paul’s Christianity 2.0 took off and the hard-core fanatics didn’t go along.

Jesus ben Ananias
Around AD 70, this madman reportedly prophesied against Jerusalem and was killed during its siege. “Jesus” was the sixth most common male name at the time. 

Justin Martyr, Christianity’s firs apologist

He wrote the First Apology around AD 150. He argued that pagans should accept Christians because their account of Christ was like stories about their own gods. And why were the stories about Jesus like those of the pagan gods? According to Justin, the gods and heroes were similar to Christ because demons had studied the prophecies concerning the future Christ and had imitated them. Here’s what he says:

When the demons heard through the prophets preaching about the coming of Christ, … they proposed many so-called sons of Zeus, supposing that they could cause people to think the things about Christ were a catalogue of marvels similar to those uttered by the poets… But even though demons heard what was said by the prophets, they did not accurately understand them, but they imitated in error the predictions about our Christ.

Justin expands on the point, showing how various “son of Jupiter” were failed attempts to create fake “Christs” based on Jewish prophecy.

And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-born of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Chris, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and descended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. Be well assured . . . that I am established in the knowledge of and faith in the Scriptures by those counterfeits which he who is called the devil is said to have performed among the Greeks; just as some were wrought by the Magi in Egypt, and others by the false prophets in Elijah’s days. For when they tell that Bacchus, son of Jupiter, was begotten by [Jupiter’s] intercourse with Semele, and that he was the discoverer of the vine; and when they relate, that being torn in pieces, and having died, he rose again, and ascended to heaven; and when they introduce wine into his mysteries, do I not perceive that [the devil] has imitated the prophecy announced by the patriarch Jacob, and recorded by Moses? And when they tell that Hercules was strong, and travelled over all the world, and was begotten by Jove of Alcmene, and ascended to heaven when he died, do I not perceive that the Scripture which speaks of Christ, “strong as a giant to run his race,” has been in like manner imitated? And when he [the devil] brings forward Aesculapius as the raiser of the dead and healer of all diseases, may I not say that in this matter likewise he has imitated the prophecies about Christ? . . . And when I hear . . . that Perseus was begotten of a virgin, I understand that the deceiving serpent counterfeited also this.

Historians’ presuppositions

Mythicists commonly say that historians are biased or that they have a blind spot about Jesus. Carrier says they wear “Christian goggles” even if they’re not Christian themselves. Are historians really unwilling to question Jesus’ existence? History says otherwise. From the early 1800s to the early 1900s, it was respectable for a historian to promote one mythicist theory or another. Influential scholars, such as Bruno Bauer from Tübingen, argued that Jesus was a fiction. Mythicism waned over time, and early in the 20th century it collapsed when historians reached a consensus that the gospels were written in the 1st century, not in the 2nd. Historians have all sorts of things to say about how the gospels were written and how that history reflects on historical Jesus. Mythicists, on the other hand, tend to deal lightly with the topic of how and why the gospels were composed. An historical Jesus became the consensus not because historians always assumed Jesus existed but because decades of research along mythicist lines didn’t lead anywhere.

Multiple angels and different Jesuses

Aron was referring to Paul’s letter to the Galatians, in which Paul writes, “But even if we, or an angel from the sky, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let them be accursed” (Gal 1:4). Later in Galatians (4:14), Paul equates Jesus with an angel. Paul thought that Jesus was an angel who had taken on human form to live and die among humans, as part of God’s plan. 

Context questions for mythicists

In the future, I’ll try to remember to to ask questions like these. Mythicists like to focus on specific arguments, and questions like these help put the conversation in a broader context.

• What scholar do you follow most closely?
• What’s the least plausible part of your hypothesis? (Carrier names the cosmic sperm bank and the undocumented switch from celestial to earthly Jesus.)
• What’s the best evidence for Jesus’ historical existence?
• What cult in history is most similar to the Jesus cult that Paul joined? (Carrier says the Osiris cult.)
• What book is most similar to the Gospel of Mark? (Carrier says the account of Elijah and Elisha in the Books of Kings.)
• Where did the crucifixion story come from? (Carrier says a vision by Peter.)
• About how sure are you that you’re right?
• When someone tells you that the scholarly consensus is wrong, how skeptical should you be?
• What would happen to a historian who could demonstrate that Christianity started without a historical Jesus? 

Narrative of Christian origins

A telltale difference between the mainstream account and mythicist accounts is that mainstream historians can provide a plausible story of Christian origins that fits the evidence we have. Mythicists like to pick at the evidence for Jesus, but they don’t like to explain in any detail how early Christianity developed and how it left the historical traces we have. I would love to see a mythicist narrative that covers these points, all of which are explained by the historical Jesus hypothesis. I am not even asking for proof, just a believable narrative.  

• How and when did the cult start? Who founded it? 
• Where did the crucifixion story come from and why do the pre-Pauline creeds and the Didache omit it? 
• Who were Peter, John, and James (the brother of the Lord)?
• When Paul joined, what did the cult structure look like, why did it look like that, who was in charge, and why? 
• What did Paul contribute to the sect? 
• How did Mark get written? Why does it include embarrassing details that later gospels had to walk back? Why is Jesus’ messianic identity a secret? On what authority was the gospel accepted by Christians? 
• How did Matthew get written and where did the strikingly original material in the Sermon on the Mount come from? How did two Beatitudes end up separately in Thomas?
• How did Luke get written and why are its phrases harder-edged than parallel phrases in Matthew? Where did the additional parables come from? 
• How did John get written, how is the story different from the earlier gospels, and why? 
• How does John the Baptist change from Mark to John and why? 
• How did the structure of the early church develop from Paul’s time to the end of the first century?