Quote:Did Jesus Exist? The Trouble with Certainty in Historical Jesus Scholarship
While Ehrman spends a great deal of time analyzing the evidence, he does so in ways which ignore the more recent critical scholarship which undercuts his entire position. In other words,the case for a historical Jesus is far weaker than Ehrman lets on.
By Thomas S. Verenna
Independent Researcher
1. Some Caveats
In a forthcoming volume, soon to be published in the Copenhagen International Seminar Series,a group of scholars contribute essays on the current crisis in the scholarship that is dedicated tothe historical figure of Jesus.
Many of the contributors - most of them approaching the subject from a European mindset — seem to feel that historical Jesus scholarship has reached an impasse; while new studies continue to be published in the field, scholars are growing tired of the rehashing of old ideas which are reproduced in these studies anew. With the increasing number of scholars dedicating themselves to the theory of reception in Biblical Studies, and with the accessibility of literary criticism steadily becoming a major contender in the field of New Testament, older scholarship in the form of historical criticism — once ingrained in consensus — is being challenged in favor of a more literary approach, and the new approach is gaining ground. One of the problems associated with historical Jesus studies which has not really been addressed, in its current form, might be found in the inability to accept the probability that the figure of Jesus might not have existed historically. While it is clear that scholars accept the possibility, most conclude that the hypothesis for nonexistence is so meagerly supported that it can simply be ignored. While this position has been challenged in recent years, it remains, for reasons which shall be addressed below, a sturdy part of the field of New Testament. This paper, however, takes a position contrary to this and argues that not only is the position of ahistoricity possible, but plausible enough that it deserves more attention and more respect than it is currently given. This contribution argues, hopefully persuasively, that by dismissing the position of ahistoricity, or by not taking into account its possibility, contributes directly to the problems associated with historical Jesus studies.
2. Certainty and the Crisis in Historical Jesus Scholarship
Bart Ehrman, in his recent book Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (New York: HarperOne, 2012), 1-7, writes, problematically so, that “Jesus certainly existed” and that he knows of no scholar of New Testament who would even raise such doubts. He repeats this in his Huffington Post article on the subject where he writes, again, of the certainty of the historicity of the figure of Jesus. He adds in this little bit (emphasis added):"One may well choose to resonate with the concerns of our modern and post-modern cultural despisers of established religion (or not). But surely the best way to promote any such agenda is not to deny what virtually every sane historian on the planet ...has come to conclude based on a range of compelling historical evidence. "One is left to wonder: is there no room left for doubt in the field of New Testament concerning the historicity of the figure of Jesus? Has the field become so static and immovable that to even doubt that Jesus lived is to warrant the label of insanity? And should academic freedom be sacrificed? Should the academy limit a critical position by intimidating and ridiculing those few scholars who do not believe Jesus existed historically into submitting to the consensus of the majority? Or, as Ehrman implies, should scholars who doubt the certainty of historicity be fired from academic posts or just denied work in academia?
Have we here, in our modern world so many decades removed from the papal encyclical Divino afflante spirit, the only unchallengeable subject in the whole of the vagaries of historical inquiry? Have we discovered the very grail upon which we place our proclamation, dogmatic as it is, that we have found--with certainty--an unassailable fact and an impregnable position: the historicity of the figure of Jesus? This is disconcerting; how reminiscent of the sort of mistreatment minimalists received at the hands of those academics who were certain of the historicity of the Old Testament patriarchs and the patriarchal narratives.
So too those scholars who were certain of the historicity of Moses and the Exodus or those who found great biblical usefulness in Speiser’s translation of the Nuzitablets.
Certainty, as one should know, is a dangerous expression when dealing in a field as decidedly unpredictable as ancient history.
What may be consensus today could be considered the fringe perspective in a mere decade or two — roughly about how long it takes for a well-argued interpretation to spread through academia, to be republished or translated into a new language, to go through the process of peer review, of rebuttal and defense, and so on. This is why certainty, as a rule, should never be presumed. By the very notion of 'certainty' we have here the flaw in Ehrman's argument and the overall crisis about which I write this paper--that is to say, we have here the presupposition central to his argument by which he does not permit anything less than complete acquiescence. It seems many scholars agree with him, some even likening mythicism to anti-religious ideology(which in many cases is quite true, but certainly not in all cases), to crankery (again, in many instances, this is true), and to amateurs outside the field (also true in many circumstances).
To state openly that Jesus never existed is to automatically lump oneself into the same sort who denies the world is over 6,000 years old, or so Ehrman argues. As the argument goes, it is just as silly and absurd an idea as young earth creationism. After reading only some of the large amount of poorly-researched and naïve (if not highly opinionated) discussions on the internet about mythicism, I have a hard time faulting scholars for these sorts of reactions. And yet Ehrman actually seems to have attempted to read it all — from the most absurd argument to the most reasoned methodology. Overall, the good arguments and the credible scholars who offer them — few as they may be now — have been drowned out by the flood of junk. Yet while I can sympathize with Ehrman and appreciate his frustration, it does not excuse the rather curious problems in his article and book on the topic.
Ehrman’s article for the Huffington Post is rather incendiary, again the likely result of frustration; but he attacks mythicism the concept and the proponents of it personally rather than dealing with it and, as a result, makes several incredible mistakes that he might have otherwise caught had he been more cautious in his methodology. In the book Ehrman is much more civiland careful than the article and takes the time to address the difference between a credible scholar and an internet message board discussion of the subject, but in his apparent rush to accomplish his task of proving the historicity of his apocalyptic Jesus, he has made more than a few critical errors in his presentation of the data. First he makes no real distinction between the types of mythicist arguments and instead lumps them all together, creating a ‘guilt by association’ effect that is neither appropriate nor reasonable. For example, Carrier’s arguments which are often sound and methodical are lumped in with the claims made by Acharya S whose arguments are usually poorly researched and lack in contextual understanding. So the mistakes of one are stretched across the spectrum, as if Carrier were making the same claims Acharya S does, which is just not true. Imagine if the same sort of method were applied to historical Jesus scholarship? What if them is takes of, say, an amateur were attached to the otherwise excellent work of the rest of historical Jesus scholars? What if Ehrman were thrown under the same category with Robert Eisenman — a man with whom he clearly doesn’t agree? Certainly that wouldn’t be fair to him! One should hope that, if anything, Ehrman would be the first to offer corrections and, in those instances, the corrections would be highlighted. In this regard, Ehrman makes no effort to show how often the credible scholars like Thomas Thompson, Bob Price, or Carrier make an effort to educate the lay public on the many false arguments made by the internet denizens and various amateurs. But deep-seeded presuppositions seem to have fabricated the illusion of certainty in a discussion about the historicity of the figure of Jesus.
While Ehrman spends a great deal of time analyzing the evidence, he does so in ways which ignore the more recent critical scholarship which undercuts his entire position. In other words, the case for a historical Jesus is far weaker than Ehrman lets on. The criteria used to establish historicity, for example, have come under some rather withering fire over the past few years.
In addition to this, much of what historical Jesus scholars have relied upon for evidence has also been diminished through new investigations of these sources; these include textual critical sources like the hypothetical ‘Q’ which is no longer necessary for the development of the synoptic tradition.
Former extra biblical sources like the Talmud, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus which were used to support the historicity argument have shown to be much weaker evidence overall. Even the debate over the genre of the Gospel accounts has severely limited the case for historicity. If the Gospel of Mark was written as a performance piece, or a piece of Jewish fiction writing akin to Tobit or Judith, or if it is simply a case of biblical rewriting — a common genre in the Second Temple Period and into late antiquity — one would be hard pressed to argue that the Gospels are mythologized history; something which is commonly suggested by those claiming the Gospels represent Greco-Roman biographies (more on this below).These challenges may not destroy the case for historicity, but they certainly don’t help it. None of these critical arguments are ‘fringe’; they are all legitimate criticisms which have run their through the academy in the proper way (through presented papers, peer-reviewed publications, doctoral theses, and so on). Yet these challenges so diminish the supporting structure for historicity that finding the figure of Jesus in these sources is nothing if not difficult, perhaps even impossible. And this is precisely why one should expect to find instances in Ehrman’s book where he discusses, to even a minor degree, these rather pressing issues. It was disappointing, troubling in fact, to see prime opportunities for such discussions go ignored, time and time again, as if they had never been proposed; as if they didn’t exist at all.
Still, there is a disconnect somewhere when it is still considered ‘fringe’ to doubt, even when taking in the massive amount of recent critical scholarship. The implication seems to be made that since many scholars believe mythicism to be ‘a stretch’ it is simply not sane to even consider it; Ehrman argues it is akin to denying a hard science like biology, which is not only a fallacy of false analogy (since history and biology are completely different fields with different standards of evidence) but just absurd. Jesus isn’t a specimen with recognizable parameters that one can analyze and from it draw conclusions, like a fossil in a museum. Even the best evidences archaeologically for his existence actually have nothing at all to do with the archeology of a figure of Jesus but rather with the period in which it is believed he lived — and even that period is devoid of any sort of Christian archaeological evidence. Jesus is a hypothetical entity, and one that admittedly is highly speculative and subjective — a problem that has plagued the field of New Testament and particularly historical Jesus scholarship whose historians, as they say, look down the well of their field and, upon seeing their own reflections staring back at them, believe they have found Jesus. However Ehrman goes to great lengths in his book to try to show that mythicism is insane (or at delusional). He spends chapters on the sources of evidence without once critically engaging any of them in a competent manner, as one would expect him to do. He seems as though he didn’t check the primary sources at times, he makes huge leaps in logic, and makes rather bizarre errors which a respectable historian like himself should not make. He seems to want to so hide the fact that the sources are not sufficient that he seems completely unaware that he contradicts himself. That he does this in a book meant to expose the same errors in the mythicist community is not just a matter of irony, but perhaps may be symptomatic of the limitations of the historical Jesus enterprise. On a spring morning in about the year 30 CE, three men were executed by the Roman authorities in Judaea. Two were 'brigands,' men who may have been robbers, bandits or highway men, interested only in their own profit, but who may have also been insurgents, whose banditry had a political aim. The third was executed as another type of political criminal. He had not robbed pillaged, murdered or even stored arms. He was convicted, however, of having claimed to be 'king of the Jews' —a political title….It turned out, of course, that the third man, Jesus of Nazareth, would become one of the most important figures in human history. Due in part to the overvaluation of the Gospels as some sort of biography, the figure of Jesus, it is taken for granted, lived. All of these ‘facts’ presented by these scholars about the historical figure of Jesus come mainly from the canonical Gospels. But the error of argument here is that underlining presumption that Greco-Roman biographies were always written about historical figures. This is simply not the case. There was no law or edict in antiquity about what one could or could not write or how they could write it. Authors emulated the parts of works they liked and were not limited by genre. Such was the process of imitation, even going back to the days of Aristotle (Poetics 1447a-b). Still, the best example one might find on a fictional hero who is historicized in biography is Lycurgus, legendary lawgiver of Spartan lore. Plutarch dedicates a biography to him, complete with genealogy; but his attestation goes well beyond this. Lycurgus gets honorable mentions and is discussed by Plato ( Republic 10.599d), Aristotle (Politics 2.1270a, Rhetoric 2.23.11), Xenophon (Constitution of the Lacedaimonians 1), Polybius (Histories 4.2, 6.10), Josephus ( Against Apion 2.220), Isocrates (Panathenaicus12.152), Epictetus ( Discourses 2.20), Tacitus ( Annals3.26),and Livy ( History of Rome38.34) to name a few. But it is unlikely that Lycurgus was any more real than Romulus, of whom several Greco-Roman biographies are extant (Plutarch, Romulus; also Livy dedicates his first book of From the Founding of the City to the life of Romulus); stories of his life and deeds can also be found in ancient historiographies (e.g., Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities
2). The figure of Romulus is attested in works from Ovid ( Fasti ), Cicero ( Laws, Republic), and to Tertullian ( Apology ). It may also be worthwhile to note in passing that among these selected works mentioning Romulus there exists a tale of his death, resurrection, and rebirth to the figure of Quirinus — a tale which is completely missed in Ehrman’s discussion of pagan parallels (along with Inanna, whose mythical archetype was known to the Jews vis-à-vis Ezek. 8.14).Of course there are differences between the Gospel narratives and these ancient authors, but the differences do not discount the fact that simply because the Gospels might have been understood as Greco-Roman biographies that they are automatically useful, or even partially useful, histories of the figure of Jesus. The fact that histories were written and rewritten containing fictional events and fictional characters suggests that the authors of these narratives were not at all concerned with ‘what happened’ but were more involved in ‘telling a story’. Yet there is a good chance that the genre of the Gospels is not best explained by their association with Greco-Roman biographies.
Some quick background: in 1977, Charles Talbert, while not the first ever, was the earliest contemporary historian to argue persuasively for Greco-Roman biography as the genre of the Gospels; a work more recently published, though still over fifteen years old, was published by Richard A. Burridge addressing the same issue. But in the time between Burridge’s first publication and the present, several other investigations have been made into the study of genre and the Gospels. Most notably is the analysis by Michael Vines, where he takes Burridge, and David Aune as well, to task. His most relevant point, in this author’s opinion, is that the Gospels do not focus on biographical aspects but on theological ones. Burridge’s case rests on whether or not the Gospels imitate, unconsciously or purposefully, the genre of Greco-Roman biography (though he admits that the option is there that they only do so coincidentally). However, the Gospels do not imitate Greco-Roman biography as Burridge, Aune, and Talbert believe and this is easily demonstrated. The Greco-Roman biography of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus is not one continuous narrative but, rather, the story of his life as discussed by Philostratus. Philostratus not only gives us his sources (personal letters and the will of Apollonius himself — whether real or not, reports about him located at shrines, Damis of Hierapolis, Maximus of Aegeae, and so forth), he analyzes his sources (why he chose not to use Moeragenes), debates points of Apollonius’ life against his sources ( cf.1.23-24), inserts anecdotes; there is no question that the story is being recounted by Philostratus. Most important, perhaps, is that Philostratus is not telling us the story to explain a theological point (though, as any piece of ancient literature, it is designed and rhetorically structured), but he is engaging the source material for the purpose of writing about the life of Apollonius. The Gospels, however, present a continuous story line with no pause, no discussion of method, no discussion of sources, no anecdotes, and make appeals to theological nuances like Jesus’ divine mission (Mark 1:1-3, for example). These sorts of traits go against the grain of Greco-Roman biography. As dubious as the historicity of Apollonius may be, his biography is actually so under and more credible than that of the Gospels precisely because (a) we know who wrote it and (b) our narrator discusses his sources, allowing us to analyze his methods. Returning to Arrian’s Anabasis Alexandri, his work contains many elements commonly associated with the genre of Greco-Roman biography. If one were looking for an example of Burridge’s ideological history written with coincidental and, perhaps, even unconscious links to Greco-Roman Biography, Arrian’s Anabasis Alexandri is the best one will find; yet it is dramatically unlike anything we see with the Gospel accounts. In the very opening of his first book, he explains part of his method to the reader: Wherever Ptolemy and Aristobulus in their histories of Alexander, the son of Philip, have given the same account, I have followed it on the assumption of its accuracy; where their facts differ I have chosen what I feel to be the more probable and interesting. ( Anabasis Alexandri 1.1) Like Philostratus, Arrian compares his sources (see earlier discussion). His sources are, therefore, also subject to criticism and evaluation (since we actually know what they are). Here with Arrian, as before with Philostratus, there is a direct engagement with the sources; one is not reading a story. While some events display traits of a narrative, the reader is able to interact with it, to analyze the history with the narrator. With the Gospel accounts there is no interaction with the narrative; the reader is moved along with the story, unable to analyze and critique it and, instead, is told that how the author of the Gospels wrote it is precisely how it occurred. There is never an instance where the Gospel authors take two separate accounts of an event and openly discuss which is more likely to have occurred, even though each Gospel portrays similar events differently, in different chronologies, with different individuals, and sometimes within different contexts and even locations. What one reads is what one gets and, in almost every instance, what one gets is a theologically-driven exegetical interpretation of the Hebrew Bible.
4. Some Concluding Thoughts
In the spirit of fairness, what must be remembered by all parties is whether the narrative is fictional or not, it does not change the fact that there might have been a historical figure upon which it was based; a figure lost to posterity. In other words, it is entirely possible that the figure of Jesus existed as a historical entity, but is not presently available in any of the historical data scholars currently interpret. But this should not be mistaken as an approval for the assumption of historicity about such a figure; in fact it proves only that the existing evidence — if this were indeed the case — is such that more doubt is necessary than is currently given or accepted. But what we cannot do, what we cannot allow to happen, is let our presuppositions cloud our judgment to the point where we claim ‘certainty’, a word which can be so ideologically driven in and of itself, about something for which the case is far from definitive. One should never seek to limit their scholarship the way Ehrman does in this book where, instead of the exceptional and lucid research of his other work on textual criticism; he argues that the Jews in the Second Temple period were only expecting a Davidic messiah — a point which has been thoroughly contended and, dare I say, refuted for the better part of 20 years. Nor would we see anyone argue that a heavenly messiah was impossibility to Second Temple period Jews, as Ehrman does. Whatever valuable contribution to the discussion Ehrman might have brought to the conversation is lost to us because he started from a position of certainty. Some might argue that the case for historicity is still there. Some argue that a case can still be made despite the fact that much of what was used previously to support historicity has come under the critical lens. Maybe they find all the critical arguments of the past decade completely unconvincing or not at all compelling, or maybe they just haven’t cared since completing their doctoral theses two or three decades ago. But that doesn’t mean that there is not also a case to be made that, along with other theologically rich Jewish narratives from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, what we have here is an edifying narrative figure euhemerized into history. Perhaps such a position is only acceptable in Old Testament; perhaps New Testament studies are not yet ready for such a perceived secular position. But simply because an idea, based on some very valid scholarship, goes against the grain is no reason to dismiss it. I find a lot of positions argued in the academy unconvincing. That doesn’t mean I will seek to have those adhering to these positions ridiculed to the point where they are forced to agree with me. That is nothing short of a form of coercion which ultimately leads to the complete disintegration of academic freedom. Then we must ask ourselves, if this is how we treat our colleagues, if we start limiting their critical voices, then why are we even here? What is the point in studying to become a scholar at all? If academia only exists to reinforce preconceived notions and stifle original thinking through coercion and ridicule, then where does that leave the guild? Is there no room left for doubt? Can there not be made some room for those of us who remain agnostic about the historicity of the figure of Jesus? I echo the words of Thompson: The best histories of Jesus today reflect an awareness of the limits and uncertainties in reconstructing the story of his life…. Whether the gospels in fact are biographies — narratives about the life of a historical person — is doubtful. He’s not wrong. And yet so much is found wanting in the recent exchange between mythicists and historicists. Perhaps the problem has to do specifically with the certainties of individual interpretations on both sides. But this problem cannot be solved by limiting critical voices. The doubters, those who see Jesus as a literary construct or as an edifying archetypal figure or as an inter-textual character or who just don’t believe that a historical Jesus will ever be found because of the limitations of the evidence, need to have a voice. They need to be allowed to express their views in order to prevent stagnancy, in order to open up new pathways of investigations. But most important of all, the doubters need a voice so that ‘certainty’ over the historicity of Jesus can be laid to rest — at least, that is, until more evidence
You're just not typing loud enough.
