Some Thoughts On Jesus and History

An arti­cle in the Stan­ford Dai­ly today caught my atten­tion: Jesus Nev­er Lived, Speak­er Says.

My first thought was a bit car­nal — how come our events don’t get the same cov­er­age in the Dai­ly? We almost cer­tain­ly draw more peo­ple (as when Dr. Bill Craig lec­tured on the exis­tence of God to a crowd of hun­dreds) and our views are cer­tain­ly con­tro­ver­sial (God exists, Jesus is God, sin is real, sal­va­tion is pos­si­ble, etc).

My sec­ond thought was more focused: I should respond to this. I hear more and more stu­dents talk­ing about the exis­tence of Jesus as though there is some real con­tro­ver­sy, so I should­n’t let this pass with­out com­ment.

Now I was­n’t at the talk, so I don’t know exact­ly what the speak­er said. All I know is what the arti­cle claims the speak­er said. He could have been con­sid­er­ably more effec­tive at mak­ing his point than the arti­cle seems to indi­cate. This isn’t, strict­ly speak­ing, a cri­tique of the speak­er so much as a reflec­tion on the whole notion of Jesus being a make-believe per­son.

Accord­ing to the arti­cle, there are two clues that Jesus nev­er exist­ed:
1) Paul did­n’t talk about the details of Jesus’ life
2) The sto­ries about Jesus sound pret­ty amaz­ing.

So Paul did­n’t talk about the details of Jesus’ life in his let­ters. I find this unsur­pris­ing giv­en that I, an ordained Pen­te­costal mis­sion­ary, rarely do so in my own let­ters. Even when writ­ing let­ters devot­ed to the­ol­o­gy I rarely talk about Jesus’ life the way that the speak­er seemed to assume that Paul should have:

“Paul nev­er dis­cuss­es Jesus’ fam­i­ly, his deeds, where he went or where he came from,” Car­ri­er said. “He nev­er dis­cuss­es any of his con­fronta­tions with the author­i­ties, nor any dis­putes about what he taught. He says Jesus became flesh, was cru­ci­fied and buried, but he nev­er says when or where or posi­tions these events in any his­tor­i­cal con­text.”

I rarely bring up these details because they are assumed to be the back­ground for the con­ver­sa­tion, in much the same way that I rarely men­tion the details of George Bush’s life when dis­cussing his pol­i­tics. That does­n’t mean I don’t believe in or am unaware of the fact that he has daugh­ters — it just means that I don’t always con­sid­er them ger­mane.

To insist that Paul should have men­tioned such details as evi­dence that he believed Jesus was a real per­son seems quite arbi­trary to me, espe­cial­ly giv­en that he men­tions Jesus by name 198 times with absolute­ly no indi­ca­tion that he’s refer­ring to a made-up indi­vid­ual. No one would argue that I don’t believe in George Bush on such grounds, and so I don’t see why we should think that this is evi­dence that Paul did­n’t believe in Jesus.

As to Jesus’ life sound­ing pret­ty amaz­ing — ya think? That sort of seems to be the point. The claim that Jesus was God in human form almost requires that cer­tain amaz­ing events occur through­out his life. So I sort of scratch my head when the guest lec­tur­er says:

“Jesus con­forms so close­ly to the cri­te­ri­on of a myth­ic hero the prob­a­bil­i­ty that he was a myth­ic hero increas­es sub­stan­tial­ly,” he said. “There are 22 fea­tures that have been iden­ti­fied by schol­ars that are com­mon­ly shared by many myth­ic heroes. They can be ranked with a score accord­ing to how many fea­tures they have. Jesus clear­ly scores at least 19 out of 22.”

…

Jesus scores high­er on this scale than almost all oth­er heroes, includ­ing Her­cules and Romu­lus, Car­ri­er said. Only Oedi­pus scores high­er.

“Jesus com­petes for sec­ond place only with The­seus and Moses,” he said. “Every­one who scores more than 11 on this scale is most like­ly myth­i­cal. No his­tor­i­cal fig­ures who accu­mu­lat­ed some of these fea­tures by chance or leg­end, such as Alexan­der the Great or Augus­tus Cae­sar, scores even as high as 11.”

Well of course he scores quite high. That’s like point­ing out that NBA play­ers are tall and ath­let­ic. How do you think they score all those points? Jesus being extra­or­di­nary is sim­ply evi­dence that he was extra­or­di­nary. Whether he was extra­or­di­nary by not exist­ing or extra­or­di­nary by being God is the ques­tion the guest speak­er wished to address — but his argu­ment does noth­ing to tip the bal­ance.

Against these fee­ble argu­ments stands the schol­ar­ly con­sen­sus that there was actu­al­ly a man named Jesus. Why is there such a con­sen­sus? Because in addi­tion to the Bible, there is plen­ty of exter­nal evi­dence that Jesus lived. For exam­ple:

• Tac­i­tus (55–117 A.D.): Annals 15.44 (search for Chris­tians on the page)
• Sue­to­nius (70–160 A.D.): Life of Claudius 25.4 (search for Chres­tus)
• Jose­phus (37–100ish A.D.): Antiq­ui­ties 18.3.3 (see also a crit­i­cal ver­sion of the text) and Antiq­ui­ties 20.9.1

There’s a very help­ful (although incom­plete) arti­cle sum­ma­riz­ing these and oth­er extra­bib­li­cal sources about Jesus which includes a dis­cus­sion of the reli­a­bil­i­ty of the Jose­phus text.

I think the reporter was wise to include this dis­claimer the guest speak­er offered:

Despite this evi­dence, Car­ri­er was quick to point out that this is just a the­o­ry.

“We need to go out and inter­act with the com­mu­ni­ty and see if it stands up to the evi­dence,” he said. “I’m not here declar­ing that this is absolute­ly true and it would be fool­ish to deny it. We’re not at that stage yet.

“The nor­mal pro­ce­dure is to assume that a per­son who is claimed to be his­tor­i­cal is his­tor­i­cal,” he con­tin­ued, “unless there is a rea­son to doubt it. I believe this is an appro­pri­ate prin­ci­ple. For exam­ple, mere­ly lack­ing evi­dence is not enough of an argu­ment for some­one not exist­ing his­tor­i­cal­ly. You need actu­al evi­dence for them being mythi­fied.”

I am still await­ing such evi­dence.