Should You Believe Jesus Was Historical?

Historians’ consensus, charitable readings, and reasonable doubts

Image by 246861, from Flickr

Was Jesus a historical person, or is Christianity a myth-based religion like all the others? And how should the nonexpert who’s not emotionally committed to Christianity decide what to think about the question of Jesus’s historicity?

History isn’t a science

We might begin by seeking out the consensus of experts and deferring to their opinion.

It turns out that most historians who focus on the New Testament and Jesus scholarship believe Jesus was a historical figure. So does that settle the matter? If you ask pompous NT historians like Bart Ehrman, he’d say yes, it does, and the alternative viewpoint, known as the Christ myth theory, is just so much ignorance spewed by cranks on the internet.

But there are three problems with appealing to this consensus. First, history isn’t a science, and when we appeal to a consensus that isn’t based on the practice of scientific methods, we’re in danger of committing a fallacious appeal to popularity. The reason is that without the shield of scientific methods, our opinions are subject to a host of cognitive biases, prejudices, political agendas, and so on. Tribes form when folks who share the same biases pool their resources to further their goals.

Instead of just venting emotions and protecting dogmas, scientists test hypotheses and employ rigorous, artificial languages such as mathematics to minimize the impact of subjectivity on their explanations.

The discipline of history is part of the humanities, and although historians are indeed experts in that they’re highly knowledgeable about some historical period, they’re not scientific experts. There’s such a thing as a biased expert. For example, Christian priests and Scientologists might be experts about Christian theology and the cult of Scientology, but that doesn’t mean we should defer to their dogmas.

True, late-modern historians pride themselves on the relative rigour of their inquiries. For example, these historians join forces with anthropologists and archeologists to inform their narratives, and NT scholars rely on certain principles to guide their reasoning, such as:

• the criterion of multiple attestation (to corroborate sources of information)

• the criterion of embarrassment (part of a narrative is historical if it would have embarrassed the preservers, who therefore wouldn’t have been incentivised to invent it)

• the criterion of coherence (a narrative is more likely to be historical if it coheres with our background knowledge of the historical setting)

• the criterion of dissimilarity (a statement belongs to a historical source if it is original or differs from neighbouring sources).

But that rigor is a weak reed indeed, and it makes for pseudoscientific expertise at best.

Certainly, we approach the truth when we corroborate our sources. That first principle is shared by scientists who perform multiple independent tests to weed out errors in their collections of data. But the other criteria are junk.

For starters, those other criteria are prominent only in Jesus studies, not among historians in general, and we’ll see why in a moment. Moreover, these principles are more like rough heuristics or rules of thumb than foolproof assurances of historical reliability. Their applications are always subject to myriad doubts.

For example, standards of what counts as embarrassing change, and discerning the contents of anyone else’s mind is difficult, if not impossible, let alone the mind of someone who lived in an ancient, practically alien culture. Also, some people lack shame altogether, so embarrassment isn’t a problem for them. Religious zealots may believe the end justifies the means, and they’re liable to be so committed to their tribe or cult that they’d deliberately do or say something outrageous just to demonstrate their fidelity to the cause. Similarly, gangs maintain their cohesion by “getting dirt” on their initiates, forcing them to violate their standards so they have no choice but to rely on the group.

The criterion of coherence assumes there’s no such thing as verisimilitude in fiction, which is preposterous. Moreover, this criterion contradicts the criterion of dissimilarity. If a saying is unique to Jesus, for example, and shows up nowhere else in history, that means the saying doesn’t cohere with Jesus’s environment. So, how do we know the saying goes back to Jesus rather than just to an ancient author who made up a story? Can’t fictions be unique and original?

The Christian bias of most Jesus scholars

The second problem is that most historians who focus on Jesus and the New Testament are themselves Christians, so they have a conflict of interest. The modern academic discipline of history is supposed to be secular and nontheological, yet most NT historians are emotionally committed to establishing the dignity of their faith. And in some cases, these scholars’ degrees are in religious studies or some other nebulous, theological discipline rather than history itself.

This is so even for Bart Ehrman. Although he eventually abandoned his Christian faith, he was once not just a Christian but an Evangelical fundamentalist, studying the Bible at Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College. Far from being neutral on questions about Christianity, he may be prone to distorting the evidence in complicated ways because of the conflicts in his personal experience with the religion. His vehemence in rejecting the Christ myth theory testifies to his emotional connection to Christianity.

The same is true for the mythicist Robert Price. He, too, was a fundamentalist who abandoned his faith, but he went further in the opposite direction. He became a connoisseur of paranoid conspiracy theories. He’s a fan of Fox News and Lovecraftian fiction, and he entertains even far-fetched criticisms of Christianity.

These are extreme cases, but the point is that even the minority of NT scholars who aren’t Christians have axes to grind. The biases of Christian NT scholars are only more apparent. Now, if history were a science, those biases wouldn’t be such a problem. But sadly, that’s not the case.

Historians like John Dominic Crossan may imitate economists and present their research in complicated ways, positing multiple levels of a convoluted chain of custody in an oral tradition, for example, to make the theory seem rigorous. But historians only tell us stories about the past. Those stories are grounded in logic and evidence, and they’re intended to be objective and nonfictional. But they’re not based on sheer math or experiments that circumvent the author’s personal interests. For that reason, history can be politicized or tainted by religious or even secular prejudices.

Albert Schweitzer made this point decisively over a century ago in The Quest for the Historical Jesus, when he surveyed the various extant academic portraits of Jesus and showed how they told us more about the historians than their ancient subject.

Compare the findings of the Jesus Seminar to those of conservative NT scholars. The former findings seem more objective in that they demythologize the New Testament, eliminating the supernatural elements and presenting Jesus as just a charismatic healer and sage. But those skeptical scholars didn’t compel the ancient facts to speak for themselves because no one can experiment on the past. Instead, they applied their liberal Christian or atheistic biases, assumed that Jesus was historical and that miracles are improbable, and deduced that Jesus must have been such and such a plausible figure.

By contrast, the conservative scholars presuppose the Bible’s inerrancy, so they twist the facts to preserve the literality and mystique of Christian traditions.

The result is a largely political or cultural conflict. While it’s true that the advent of the historical-critical method made for at least a rational telling of history, unscientific rationality doesn’t establish the kind of authority to which we should defer. After all, under those circumstances, we might still fear we’d just be fallaciously appealing to tribal popularity. The superficial appearance of rationality is familiar from sophistry, casuistry, and spin doctoring, and even scientists can fudge the numbers, as in the replication crisis of the soft sciences.

Moreover, this second problem is why it’s so suspicious that the so-called historical criteria of authenticity show up mainly in Jesus studies. The historians who rely on them have an axe to grind: they want to prove that Christianity is a special religion because it rests on a historic founder, not just visions and propaganda.

These historians are like the Christian fundamentalists who obtain academic degrees from religious institutions in the US to lend a veneer of academic respectability to their arguments. The only difference is that the NT historians who belong to secular departments moderate their enthusiasm. They don’t have to sign institutional pledges to defend the religion at all costs. Yet in opposition to the tide of modern skepticism, they still devised a pseudoscientific method to show that the Christian narrative has a semblance of plausibility.

Deferring to NT experts, then, on questions that cut to the heart of Christianity’s good intentions, like the question of whether there was ever a historical Jesus in the first place, is fraught with peril.

The philosophical question of Jesus’s historicity

The third problem is that appealing to the consensus of historians on this question is lame and irrelevant because the question raised by the Christ myth theory is philosophical, not strictly historical.

That is, there are two questions we might be asking here. We can ask whether we have reason to think Jesus was a historical figure, for (a) historical purposes or (b) philosophical ones. Those two sets of purposes are often confused in the debates between Jesus historicists and mythicists, so I’ll try to clarify them here.

Historians aren’t interested in deciding whether something is Real or True. When they say they have reason to think something happened in the past, they’re applying a historian’s standards, which are operationalized not for philosophical debates about what we’re ultimately justified in believing, but to keep the historical conversation and enterprise going.

Historians may therefore be happy to side with a charitable interpretation about what happened because the philosophical question of what’s really real doesn’t matter to them. Short of violating the naturalism that’s baked into the secular academy, by entertaining the likelihood of flat-out miracles, the historian may be happy to grant the veracity of some ancient report for the sake of historical argument.

Technically, if we’re applying more philosophical, epistemic criteria and we’re interested in weighing the legitimacy of that historian’s procedure, we may have room for rational doubts about many accounts of the ancient past. Of course, that philosophical skepticism can be taken too far when it leads us to doubt whether there’s an external world at all. But the philosophical standards might in some cases take us beyond where the more restricted, professional historian would be willing to go.

And this may well be the case with Jesus’s historicity. What the Christ myth theory does implicitly is raise philosophical concerns about the historian’s method. The reason these concerns are brought to bear here is that there are highly interested parties, namely Christians and atheists. Christians revere their religion, while atheists are appalled by Christian gullibility and hypocrisy.

So, one further reason why historians may circle the wagons and affirm that Jesus was a historical figure is that they resent having their standards challenged by philosophical skeptics. It may suffice for the historian’s professional purposes to grant Jesus’s historicity, as a matter of charity and maintaining his or her profession’s integrity. But that’s not the same as saying we’re philosophically justified in believing Jesus was historical.

The appeal to the historians’ consensus misses that distinction and distracts from the underlying issues raised by the Christ myth theory.

Sources of confidence in Jesus’s historicity

Perhaps, then, we can base our judgment about whether Jesus was historical solely on the respectable criterion of multiple attestation. Are there independent, contemporaneous sources for Jesus’s historicity? Not really, and certainly not as many as you’d think or as Church tradition would have us believe.

Infamously, the canonical gospels aren’t written by the four evangelists who are named in their respective titles. At least two of them depend on one of the others, and probably all four are intertextually related. In short, it’s quite rational to believe that Mark is the only independent source among those four gospels. In any case, none of those narratives is written as a historical report. They’re all highly propagandistic, the authors being committed Christians who wanted to spread the “good news” without even bothering to specify their sources. They also wrote a generation or two after Jesus would have lived.

Paul’s epistles are earlier than the gospels, but he didn’t write as much as Church tradition says he did. Some of those epistles are forgeries, as scholars have shown. Moreover, Paul strangely doesn’t say much about the historical Jesus. He’s intent on presenting his readers with a highly theological creed about a dying and rising savior deity. He says Jesus was crucified and buried, but these brief references could have had only symbolic rather than literal importance, given the elaborate, sometimes allegorical nature of Paul’s quasi-Gnostic theology. And Paul speaks of James as the “brother of the Lord,” but that’s ambiguous because he could have been speaking of a brother in a cultic sense.

There are also the early sayings gospels, such as Thomas and perhaps Q. There’s some overlap between them, so they might not be independent of each other, or they might be based on a common, lost source. But the main problem with them is that they sound Gnostic or Cynical, which means the sayings could have originally been anonymous ones from different wisdom traditions, and Christians could have collected them and slapped Jesus’s name on them.

Also, the New Testament writings generally can be read as falling within the genre of the myths of dying or suffering savior deities and heroes that were popular at the time in the Greco-Roman mystery religions. Maybe Christianity was just a Jewish adaptation of that mytheme that derived from the myth of Osiris, observation of natural cycles (of vegetation and the motion of stars and planets), and shamanic explorations of peak states of consciousness.

We need strong evidence of Jesus’s historicity, then, to show why Christianity should be treated as an exception to the mystery religions, to overcome that initial doubt about the themes of the Christian narrative and practices.

Then there are the two references to Jesus in Josephus. Yet because Josephus’ works were transmitted to us by Christian copyists, there was ample opportunity for interpolations. Most scholars agree that the more elaborate of the two references is at least partially a later Christian addition to Josephus’s text. But there’s room for reasonable doubt about the authenticity of both.

For example, scholars often say they trust the less elaborate one, which speaks only of the Sanhedrin judges who “brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James.” These scholars reason that a Christian copyist would have inserted more pious detail, which is what happened with the other reference to Jesus in Josephus.

But again, this is just a thin reed. First, this reasoning overlooks the odd syntax of the Josephus passage, which gives pride of place to Jesus, whereas the subject is ostensibly James who’s here referred to circuitously as the brother of Jesus.

Second, what if the copyist didn’t want to give the game away? What if he or she were a competent interpolator rather than a clumsy oaf who didn’t want to defeat the purpose by writing nothing like the author the copyist was trying to imitate? Sure, there’s some reason to think a Christian copyist would get carried away and provide extraneous information for a clever later historian to detect. But doesn’t it merely flatter that historian to presume that there could be no such thing as a competent interpolator in the ancient world, someone capable of pulling the wool over our eyes?

Mind you, as I suggested above, the problem with that degree of skepticism is that it could lead to doubts about all kinds of ancient texts. Possibly, there are interpolations in all of them, but agnosticism on that basis — about who said or did what in the ancient world — would be defeatist.

We can stem the tide of skepticism, though, by recognizing that writers don’t all have equally sized axes to grind. Writers or copyists may have to be interested in their subject matter; otherwise, they wouldn’t bother setting pen to papyrus. But not all ancient writers were religious maniacs who wrote propaganda for a cult. If we’re talking about pamphlets written under the latter circumstances, a little extra skepticism is warranted.

In any case, while there are some other ancient sources on Jesus (such as Tacitus, Suetonius, and the Talmud), they’re even more problematic, so the above ones are the best we have. Are they strong enough to rationally justify the belief that Jesus lived in history? Perhaps, depending on how charitable or skeptical you’re inclined to be. But as we’ve seen, these sources are also objectively problematic, which means that some level of doubt about Jesus is warranted.

The bottom line here is that even the strongest sources are ambiguous at best, and at worst, they’re tainted by their propagandistic and hagiographical milieu.

Socrates, Jesus, and a charitable treatment of the sources

Perhaps you’re thinking there’s no need to lose ourselves in these weeds. If we have enough reason to think that Socrates, say, was historical, why should we be more skeptical about Jesus? Neither Socrates nor Jesus wrote anything, as far as we know, and there are some independent, roughly contemporaneous references to each figure. If that’s enough for Socrates, why not for Jesus?

Without delving again into the details of the sources, there’s one key difference between them. The textual references to Socrates from Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes are all secular and naturalistic. Socrates is presented as just a human man, a great philosopher and gadfly, to be sure, who had his head in the clouds, got caught up in politics, and was executed by the state. But for those writers, he was just a man.

The genres and dispositions of the authors matter. Plato, for example, may have had a far-fetched metaphysical system he was exploring and proposing, about how all of nature is a shadow of a hidden, ideal realm. And Plato, too, had an axe to grind in that he was using the character of Socrates to sell his philosophy. Nevertheless, Plato was a philosopher, not a cult propagandist, and he doesn’t present Socrates as a miraculous, supernatural figure.

It’s precisely for this reason that, regardless of any doubt we might have about the sources (such as how they present inconsistent portraits of Socrates), charity is at least feasible in granting Socrates’ historicity so we can tell a responsible form of history. There’s no initial implausibility in granting his existence in the ancient past, an initial doubt that would make that act of charity gratuitous.

The New Testament’s references to Jesus, however, belong to a more questionable genre, and they’re so saturated with theology, propaganda, and midrash that taking the Christian sources for granted wouldn’t be an act of intellectual charity as much as an act of being ignominiously victimized by an ancient con or confusion. The Christian sources are plain hagiographies and deifications of Jesus, so they’re questionable from the outset, given the philosophical principles of epistemology (the discussion of which typically lies outside the boundaries of the historian’s discourse).

We can’t even treat the Christian sources as legendary, as though the earliest ones were the most naturalistic and the hagiographic mania built up over time. The fact is that the oldest sources, namely Paul’s epistles and the creeds or hymns he includes, are the most theologically extravagant of the lot. For Paul, Jesus was no mere man. All that Paul says he knows about Jesus he says derived from a vision he had and from his searches through the scriptures (Rom. 16:25–26, Gal. 1:11). Judging from his letters, Paul wasn’t interested in the historical Jesus.

The two Jesuses

The upshot, as I say elsewhere, is that we ought to be both agnostic about whether Jesus lived in history, and apathetic about the matter, assuming we’re not fully-committed Christians.

There are enough problems with the historians’ consensus and the available sources to justify rational doubts about their veracity and literality, and thus to support some Christ myth theory. Whether we lean towards skepticism or charitable acceptance in this case depends more on our character and our interests than on the ancient facts.

The proper, more objective stance to take is an agnostic one: there may or may not have been a historical Jesus, given the poverty of the evidence we’ve been left with, and we’ll never know with much assurance whether there was such an historical founder of the religion or not, unless that evidence changes.

But once again, there’s a deeper point to make in this context. Just as there’s a difference between the historical and philosophical questions of Jesus’s historicity, there are two Jesuses at issue. So when we ask about his historicity, we need to be clear which Jesus we’re talking about.

Obviously, it’s plausible that Christianity was founded by a charismatic Jewish man named “Jesus,” who had such an elevated, revolutionary perspective on religion and life in general that he garnered a following that threatened Roman security, so he was executed for sedition and was later deified by followers who felt obliged to honour his memory. Indeed, we know that Jews at the time were revolting against Rome since just a few decades after Jesus was supposed to have lived, a war broke out between Judea and the Roman Empire.

Exercising that degree of charity towards the Christian tradition poses no threat to atheism or a respectable worldview. But there would likely be no Christ myth theory or controversy about Jesus’s existence if that “Jesus of history” were the only Jesus in question. The problem is that that figure gets mixed up with the supernatural “Jesus of faith.” And that confusion is no recent accident but is foundational to orthodox Christianity.

The second Jesus, then, whom we can call “Christ” for clarity, wasn’t just a man, but a miracle-working deity who conquered death, appeared to witnesses after he died on the cross, and somehow disappeared on some shortcut route to Heaven. Extending charity to the suggestion that Christ was a historical figure is obviously a separate matter.

Apathy towards picking between the realistic options

We can ask, then, whether the evidence in the New Testament and external sources rationally justifies belief either that Jesus or Christ was historical, and the answers need hardly be the same. Jesus’s existence as a mere extraordinary man, posited to account for the rise of Christianity, is plausible. Even here, though, there’s no need to grant that he existed because a Christ myth theory can account for the same evidence roughly as well.

That same evidence is, of course, nowhere near sufficient to rationally justify the belief that Christ was historical. And this is why we should be apathetic about the dispute between the historicists and mythicists.

If we’re talking about Jesus the natural man, a charitable view might be useful for the sake of argument. Indeed, when writing about Christianity, I often assume such a man lived in history because nothing of atheistic significance turns on that question of historicity. Christianity might have had a historical founder, one of many Jews who were crushed by Rome. Or Christianity might have originated from a colossal confusion or fraud. Either scenario is perfectly plausible in a godless world through which we’re all muddling.

But if we’re talking about the supernatural Christ of faith, or the conflation of the man and the deity who is called Jesus Christ, the so-called only begotten son of God, that entity is ruled out long before we get to the New Testament or Josephus. Epistemic considerations already eviscerate the rationality of accepting those supernatural claims. Thus, as a criticism of accepting the historicity of Christ, the Christ myth theory is superfluous.

Thus, an atheist or a skeptic needn’t defend a Christ myth theory as the only safeguard against submitting to Christian balderdash. This more elite thinker excludes Christ’s possibility on basic epistemological grounds, and entertains only the more mundane possibilities that Christianity originated from (a) Jesus, a historical human wise man, healer, or revolutionary, or (b) a myth that led to mass confusion or fraud about the religion’s foundation.

Again, either of those options is reasonable, and because the available evidence is ambiguous and scanty, choosing between the two amounts to a coin toss or a projection of little more than your mood at the time.

---