This is Chapter Two of the book Jesus Potter, Harry Christ (2011), by Derek Murphy.
CHAPTER TWO
Doubting Jesus: Ancient and Modern Controversy
“To the question, then, on what grounds do you deny that such a person as Jesus Christ existed as a man? The proper answer is, because his existence as a man has, from the earliest day on which it can be shown to have been asserted, been as earnestly and strenuously denied, and that, not by enemies of the Christian name, or unbelievers of the Christian faith, but by the most intelligent, most learned, most sincere of the Christian name, whoever left the world proofs of their intelligence and learning in their writings, and of their sincerity in their sufferings.” – Reverend R. Taylor, 1834
IN THE LAST CHAPTER WE EXPLORED the similarities between Jesus and Harry Potter and ended with the question, is Jesus, like Harry, a purely literary figure? To begin with, we need to understand that this is not a new question. As Reverend Taylor pointed out in 1834, the idea that Jesus Christ existed as a historical man has been denied not only by modern critics, but also by Christian communities (now branded as heretics) since the earliest periods of the Christian movement.[i]
St. Ignatius. for example, who was martyred before 117AD, fought against the Docetist heresy, which denied that Jesus had come in the flesh. Docetists, most likely with the Platonic split between spirit and matter in mind, believed that Jesus had come in the appearance or “semblance” of a human only, but did not have physical body. Ignatius had to vigorously dispute the claim that Jesus was born, crucified and raised only in appearance. T.R. Glover captures the spirit of his writing:
Men around him spoke of a phantom crucified by the deluded soldiers amid the deluded Jews. – No! cries Ignatius, over and over, he truly suffered, he truly rose, ate and drank, and was no daemon without a body – none of it is seeming, it is all truly, truly, truly. He has been called hysterical –death before him, his Lord’s reality denied, and only time for one word –Truly.[ii]
Overlooking Ignatius’ zeal and emphasis on the Jesus who truly existed, how can we reconcile the traditional account of Christian history with the fact that early “heretics” denied that Jesus had come in the flesh? The Docetist understanding of Jesus is not some late schism; the New Testament Epistle of John shows that similar beliefs were active and threateningly popular very early in the Christian communities:
Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world. (1 John 4: 1-3)
Rather than the traditional account of one, Catholic (universal) message of Jesus Christ, in the first few centuries of Christianity there were dozens of factions, each of which believed very different things about Jesus, and many of whom believed that the major events in Jesus’ life only occurred in appearance.
At the same time, classically educated scholars familiar with ancient philosophy, poetry or religion have been struck by the similarities between Jesus Christ and other mythological figures. Jesus raised the dead and healed the sick, and so did Asclepius; Jesus provided wine at a wedding feast, and suffered so that humanity might be saved, as did Dionysus; Jesus descended into Hell, and had powers to make the lion and lamb lay down together, just like Orpheus. These parallels were much more obvious in the first few centuries of the Christian movement, when these other figures played an active role in religion, spiritual practices, literature and culture, than they are today. Hence Celsus, a pagan philosopher who wrote a condemnation of the Christian movement in the 2nd century AD, could ask:
Are these distinctive happenings unique to the Christians – and if so, how are they unique? Or are ours to be accounted myths and theirs believed? What reasons do the Christians give for the distinctiveness of their beliefs? In truth there is nothing at all unusual about what the Christians believe, except that they believe it to the exclusion of more comprehensive truths about God.[iii]
This alone should come as a surprise to those familiar with traditional accounts of Christian history. Jesus was supposed to be something entirely new. His miracles, death and resurrection were expected to shock and awe; even his humility and ethics are assumed to be in stark contrast to the wild revelries of the pagans. Actually – as Celsus pointed out – there was nothing in the doctrine of Christianity that was at all surprising to their contemporaries.
Writing several decades earlier than Celsus and trying to justify his beliefs to critical outsiders, the apologist Justin Martyr, who converted to Christianity around 130 and was martyred around 165, acknowledges the parallels between Jesus and pagan figures without ever making the modern claim that these similarities are simply coincidental:
When we say that the Word, who is first born of God, was produced without sexual union, and that he, Jesus Christ, our teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven; we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter (Zeus). For you know how many sons your esteemed writers ascribed to Jupiter: Mercury, the interpreting word and teacher of all; Æsculapius, who, though he was a great physician, was struck by a thunderbolt, and so ascended to heaven; and Bacchus too, after he had been torn limb from limb; and Hercules, when he had committed himself to the flames to escape his toils; and the sons of Leda, and Dioscuri; and Perseus, son of Danae; and Bellerophon, who, though sprung from mortals, rose to heaven on the horse Pegasus (First Apology XXI).[iv]
Justin’s formal argument is that although other pagan gods are also said to have been “born without sexual union, crucified, died, rose and ascended into heaven,” Jesus Christ physically and actually performed this feats, and is therefore unique:
But in no instance, not even in any of those called sons of Jupiter, did they imitate the being crucified; for it was not understood by them, all the things said of it having been put symbolically. (First Apology LV)
This argument is no different from the assertion that Harry Potter and Jesus Christ are fundamentally different, because Jesus was real. However, this distinction is only possible with faith that Jesus genuinely performed the supernatural deeds that other figures accomplished only “symbolically”; thus, the critical question is whether Jesus was a historical figure who performed his miraculous feats of power in the flesh, rather than just in appearance. The importance of this criterion was not lost on the early church fathers. Faced on all sides with the criticism that the gospel stories were spiritual allegories and not intended as historical truth, the early church fathers argued passionately for the fact of Jesus’ physical body. That they needed to argue at all, and so vehemently, that Jesus was a real person despite his similarities to other traditions, is an indication that this claim was not widely accepted.
The purpose of this chapter is to show, first, that the claim of Jesus Christ being either in part or in totality comparable to the mythologies of other cultures is not a modern invention of conspiracy fanatics, but has been argued and supported by some of the greatest thinkers in history; and second, that the current academic consensus that there was a historical founder behind Christianity is the product of a specific trend in academic thought, rather than a conclusion based on reliable evidence.
At the same time, the arguments and quotations presented here are not to be construed as an argument for or against the existence of Jesus Christ; many of the works presented have already been criticized, called into question or disputed as academic research into the subject has progressed. My goal is only to demonstrate that a modern controversy over the historical Jesus exists, that it has a long and substantial history, and that, in effect, the jury is still out.
I also want to show that certain claims regarding Jesus are not modern delusions of “fringe” scholars – in fact there are few claims made about Jesus today that were not made centuries earlier. The reason a few writers (myself included) continue to re-raise these arguments is because most people are completely unaware that they can be made at all. After demonstrating that the hypothesis of Jesus Christ as Christianity’s historical founder is not the only logical possibility, and that the evidence used to support him is not unanimously accepted, can we move into more speculative theories.
The Modern Debate
In the year 1600, scientist and astronomer Giordano Bruno reiterated Celsus’ argument that the gospel stories of Jesus Christ were akin to pagan mythologies. Unfortunately, at the time, the Church did not permit such blasphemous accusations – after a seven-year trial he was burned on the stake. As R.E. Witt relates,
Excommunicated by an obscurantist ecclesiasticism he went to the stake for his beliefs. He was convinced that the wisdom and magic-born religion of ancient Egypt excelled the fanatical theory that burnt dissident thinkers as heretics. For the Biblical record was on par with the Greek myths. Refusing to retract his teachings, he met his doom dauntlessly, for he had less cause than his judges to fear the verdict of history and could snap his fingers at them in warning. Giordano Bruno, the unfrocked monk, perished on 16 February 1600, for his intransigent denial that Christianity was unique.[v]
Bruno’s death represents perhaps the birth pains of the Enlightenment; an age when mankind flexed its mental prowess and attempted to find logical answers through reason rather than by faith, superstition or revelation. Although most scholars attribute the movement to the 18th or 19th centuries, it can be traced back to Descartes’ cogito ergo sum (1637), or even the Scientific Revolution that began about a century earlier (Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543). An interest in classicism and the translation of mythologies from newly discovered parts of the world, critical biblical scholarship, along with the weakening power of Church censorship, led to the publication of many dozen treatises investigating the historical nature of Jesus Christ.
One of the earliest of these essays was published by G.E. Lessing (based on notes by Reimarus), under the general title Wolfenbüttel Fragments, between 1774 and 1778. It concludes that Jesus was wholly terrestrial and never meant to start a new religion. French Enlightenment writer and philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778), although maintaining the idea of a historical, crucified founder, cautions that very little of the gospels could be taken at face value. Voltaire claimed that the Gospels were “written by persons acquainted with nothing, full of contradictions and imposture” and that “the whole history of Jesus – only a fanatic or a stupid knave would deny it – should be examined in the light of reason.”[vi] Constantin-François Volney and Charles François Dupuis, two great thinkers of the French Enlightenment, published works in the 1790’s claiming that the stories of Jesus Christ found in the gospels, as well as many other myths, were based on movements of the sun through the zodiac. According to Dupuis:
Jesus is still less man than God. He is, like all the deities that men have adored, the sun; Christianity is a solar myth. When we shall have shown, that the pretended history of a God, who is born of a virgin in the winter solstice, who is resuscitated at Easter or at the Vernal equinox, after having descended into hell, who brings with Him a retinue of twelve apostles whose chief possesses all the attributes of Janus—a God, conqueror of the prince of darkness, who translates mankind into the empire of light, and who heals the woes of the world, is only a solar fable, … it will be almost as unnecessary to inquire whether there was a man called Christ as it is to inquire whether some prince is called Hercules.[vii]
The writings of Constantin Volney (1757-1820) were also influential in challenging the claim that Jesus was historical. In 1808, Napoleon I was under the influence of Volney when, in a conversation that he had with Wieland at Weimar, he said it was a great question to decide whether Jesus had existed.[viii] Another theory was raised in Germany around the same time by Bahrdt and Venturini, who introduced a skeptical movement into Jesus’ life that “so far forsook the gospel representation as to leave his real historical form largely a matter of conjecture.”[ix] Jesus, they said, was a protégé of the Essenes, who had drawn upon secret wisdom from Babylonia, Egypt, India and Greece. Thus, he was revealer of ancient and secret wisdom, but not the savior portrayed in the gospels.
Thomas Jefferson, in a book now frequently called the Jefferson Bible, wrote under the premise that the Gospel authors had incorporated both events and teachings that could not be historically accurate to Jesus himself.[x] In 1829 Reverend Robert Taylor published The Diegesis, which professes Christianity did not originate with a historical founder and in fact has far more ancient roots. Prior to this work, Taylor founded the Christian Evidence Society, among whose central claims were that the persons in the gospels never existed and the events in the gospels never happened. Taylor was thrown in jail for blasphemy and conspiracy to overthrow the Christian religion. A more influential (and controversial) work was David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, first published in 1835 and translated into English in 1846. The Life of Jesus is an attempt to remove all of the mythical elements from the gospel accounts in order to search for the genuine figure behind them; as such Strauss is considered a pioneer in the historical investigation of Jesus.
The first Gospel accounts, in Strauss’s opinion, have not been drawn up from an historical point of view. They do not relate the events as these took place, but express certain ideas by means of images and symbols, or, to employ the exact term that Strauss makes use of, by myths. What is important in the notion of the myth is not the idea of unreality, but that of a symbolical expression of a higher truth. The mythical explanation seems to Strauss the synthesis which resolves the antibook between the naturalist and the supernatural explanations of the life of Jesus.[xi]
Strauss’s research was continued by Bruno Bauer, who accepted Strauss’s premise but focused on the mythical rather than historical Jesus. Starting in 1840, he argued that Jesus was merely a fusion of Greek, Roman and Jewish theologies. In Christ and the Caesars (1877),[xii] Bauer argued that the language of the New Testament was more in line with Stoicism and Roman culture than Judaism. Hermann Detering notes, “The ‘demon’ to whom Bauer submitted had whispered to him that all the Pauline letters were inauthentic and that an historical person named Jesus very probably never existed.”[xiii] Wilhelm Wrede would later (1901) repeat many of Bauer’s ideas in his book, The Messianic Secret. Going back in the other direction, Vie de Jésus (life of Jesus) by Ernest Renan in 1863 – mostly a compilation of German criticism – was directed at the public and consequently attracted more attention. Renan’s novel paints a literary picture of a (very human) gentle dreamer, and makes the claim that the idea of a risen God comes from the passion of a deluded woman. In 1875 Kersey Graves published The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors (or Christianity Before Christ). In his preface, Graves states that Jesus taught no new doctrine or moral precept; that he inculcated the same religion and morality as other moral teachers; and that he differs so little in his character, preaching, and practical life from some of the oriental Gods, that “no person whose mind is not deplorably warped and biased by early training can call one divine while he considers the other human.”[xiv]
Around the same time, the “Rosetta Stone,” found by Napoleon’s army in 1799 and translated by Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion in 1822, inspired a frenzied academic study of Egyptian mythologies. This movement motivated specifically Egyptian comparisons between Christianity and mythology. In 1877 W.R. Cooper published The Horus Myth in its Relation to Christianity, in which he writes:
The works of art, the ideas, the expressions, and the heresies of the first four centuries of the Christian era cannot be well studied without a right comprehension of the nature and influence of the Horus myth. We cannot ignore these facts. We have as Christians no reason to be afraid of them.[xv]
Egyptologist Gerald Massey, (1828-1907) author of Gnostic and Historic Christianity and other works, also compared Jesus’ biography with Egyptian mythology. Once having made this identification, however, he goes on to conclude that the figure of Jesus is completely mythological, and could never have been historical. In a private edition of his lectures published at the turn of the 20th century (c.1900), he says:
Nothing is more certain, according to honest evidence, than that the Christian scheme of redemption is founded on a fable misinterpreted; that the prophecy of fulfillment was solely astronomical, and the Coming One as the Christ who came in the end of an age, or of the world, was but a metaphorical figure, a type of time, from the first, which never could take form in historic personality, any more than Time in Person could come out of a clock-case when the hour strikes; that no Jesus could become a Nazarene by being born at, or taken to, Nazareth; and that the history in our Gospels is from beginning to end the identifiable story of the Sun-God, and the Gnostic Christ who never could be made flesh.[xvi]
John Mackinnon Robertson (1856-1933) wrote several books in his lifetime about the mythical Jesus, whom he identified as the solar deity of a Jewish cult. Based on the evidence that everything found in the gospels can be paralleled to pagan mythology, and that the Jesus Paul speaks of is a “speechless sacrifice” rather than a person of action and teaching, Robertson concluded that Jesus was a composite of pagan myths.[xvii] He is perhaps most famous for Pagan Christs: Studies in Comparative Theology, which was published in 1903. Also published in 1903 was G.R.S. Mead’s Did Jesus Live 100 B.C, which finds a Talmudic basis for the Jesus of the gospels. In 1906 Albert Schweitzer published The Quest of the Historical Jesus, a classic work of biblical historical criticism. Thomas Whittaker, meanwhile, in The Origins of Christianity (London, 1904; 1909), argued “Jesus may not be an entirely fictitious person, yet the gospel stories are almost wholly mythical.”[xviii] These texts influenced Arthur Drews’ The Christ Myth (1909), which synthesized and strengthened many of the earlier arguments, and W.B. Smith’s Ecce Deus, that earned a full review in The New York Times on August 13, 1911. A little later we find Edward Carpenter’s Pagan and Christian Creeds (1920) and Jesus of Nazareth: Myth or History by Maurice Goguel (1926). According to Goguel:
Jesus must, then, have been at the beginning the God of a mystery. At the time of Paul neither the God nor the mystery had become historical. They were to become so in the period to follow the creative age, when it would be no longer possible to understand the high spirituality which had inspired the primitive faith, and when the celestial drama upon which Christianity of the first generation had lived had been transported to earth.[xix]
After a century of debate over the historical Jesus, by the beginning of the 20th century it was generally conceded that Jesus, even if he existed, was virtually unknowable. The great German scholar Rudolf Karl Bultmann and his new literary critical school of Formgeschichte (form criticism), effectively shut down inquiry into the historical Jesus with his memorable 1926 statement, “I do indeed think that we can know nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary; and other sources about Jesus do not exist.”[xx] This position – that the historical Jesus is beyond the scope of rational inquiry – was taken for granted in 1927 by philosopher Bertrand Russell in his treatise, Why I am not a Christian:
Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one.[xxi]
In response to this apparent dead-end, research into the historical Jesus led in two distinct directions. The first was a continued emphasis on comparative mythology, wherein the historical Jesus was ignored in favor of the interpretation of the mythos and its importance for understanding the human condition. This was the direction which gained prominence through the writings of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and Sir James George Frazer. The second was a renewed interest in discovering the historical Jesus, by identifying and removing all traces of mythology, which focused on identifying dissimilar elements in the Christ movement that might have originated with a historical founder.
Mythology, Archetypes and the Subconscious
James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (first published in 1890) scandalized Europe by equating the story of Jesus Christ with mythologies from more primitive and ancient peoples, and arguing that all mythical heroes that die and come back are really vegetation gods representing the changing seasons.[xxii] The Golden Bough had a major influence on anthropology and many of the poets and authors of the 20th century, and invited the interpretation of mythology and religion as allegories.
Frazer was an early piece of a movement towards the appreciation and universalism of humanity. With the ongoing synthesis and comparison between different religious and mythological traditions, it became clear to many that human beings, rather than gods, were responsible for the creation of their own myths – and moreover that the similarities between these stories reflected some as yet unknown common link between all humans. The study of mythology became seen as a way to access the raw, original subconscious desires and motivations of mankind.
In the late 1890’s, Sigmund Freud interpreted mythology as the result of repressed sexual desires. For example, Sophocles’ classic myth of Oedipus Rex (the King) was considered by Freud to be incestuous in nature, and to support his claim that all men have a subconscious desire to sleep with their mothers and kill their fathers. Freud’s studies have become so widely appreciated that few people have not heard of the Oedipal Complex, which Freud explains in his work “The Interpretation of Dreams.”
His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours – because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.[xxiii]
It must be pointed out, however, that Freud’s thought is rooted in the assumption that dreams and mythology are productions of the subconscious mind, and that subconscious motivations are universal. There may be truth in Freud’s theories, but there are also many controversial claims that are simply not adequately supported. Critics of Freud have christened Freudian analysis the “find the penis” game. Trying to read Harry Potter, for example, along Freudian lines, is both possible and ultimately unsatisfying. In Harry Potter’s Oedipal Issues (2001), Kelly Noel-Smith explains
Given that it is every child’s phantasy to remove, by death, his or her father to enjoy exclusive possession of his or her mother (and, inversely, to eliminate one’s mother to take her place with one’s father), the reader of Harry Potter is able to indulge in wish fulfillment of the most basic phantasies without the grief which would ordinarily attach to them: we know, at a conscious level, that the story is not true; unconsciously, the deaths of Harry’s parents represent a wonderful fulfillment of Oedipal phantasies.[xxiv]
Less commonly known about Freud is his interest in comparative mythology. His book Moses and Monotheism (1938) explores the link between the Judaic monotheism of Moses and the sun-centered religion of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, claiming that Jewish monotheism was inspired by this violently intolerant Egyptian religious movement. As Jan Assman says in Moses the Egyptian, “Freud stresses (quite correctly) the fact that he is dealing with the absolutely first monotheistic, counter-religious, and exclusivistically intolerant movement of this sort in history”[xxv]
Carl Gustav Jung later argued that the human psyche is by nature religious, and that mythology, religions, dreams, art and philosophy can be used to explore the unconscious:
Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes.[xxvi]
Like many of his peers, interest into comparative mythology greatly influenced his work. As a student of Freud, his early position was that myth originates and functions to satisfy the psychological need for contact with the unconscious. He was “staunchly committed to independent invention” of myth and asserted there is “no evidence and indeed no possibility of contact among all of the societies with similar myths.”[xxvii] Based on the similarities between various world traditions and the presumed impossibility of contact, Jung came up with the concepts of “the collective unconscious” and “psychological archetypes.” In other words, since many cultures use the symbol of a dying and resurrecting savior figure, and since these cultures did not share the symbol with each other, it must have come out of universal subconscious forces.
Jung argued that Christianity, although once vital, stopped interpreting its myths and so stopped being relevant to modern people. “Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously.”[xxviii] Noting the conflicts between the claim of a historical Jesus and comparative mythology, Jung reasons,
(…) if the statement that Christ rose from the dead is to be understood not literally but symbolically, then it is capable of various interpretations that do not conflict with knowledge and do not impair the meaning of the statement.[xxix]
According to prominent Jungian Mircea Eliade, all myths are religious myths, (except for modern myths, which may be secular). Eliade also continues the Jungian idea that you cannot go from sacred to profane; in other words, it is possible for humans to create religious myths (sacred stories) based on mundane experience (profane), but not the other way around. Mythologist Joseph Campbell continued this emphasis, even subjugating the historical to the mythic. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) his primary purpose was to explore the similarities between Eastern and Western religions. Later, in his four-volume series of books The Masks of God (1959-1968), Campbell tried to summarize the main spiritual threads common throughout the world while examining their local manifestations. He made it clear that it is the stories themselves that are important – not whether or not the stories have historical basis.
We may doubt whether such a scene ever actually took place. But that would not help us any; for we are concerned, at present, with problems of symbolism, not of historicity. We do not particularly care whether Rip van Winkle, Kamar al-Zaman, or Jesus Christ ever actually lived. Their stories are what concern us: and these stories are so widely distributed over the world – attached to various heroes in various lands – that the question of whether this or that local carrier of the universal theme may or may not have been a historical, living man can be of only secondary moment. The stressing of this historical element will only lead to confusion; it will simply obfuscate the picture message.[xxx]
Campbell represented mythology studies at its most matured; however, by continuing in the tradition of Freud and Jung, he sought only the universal aspects of humanity which gave rise to specific mythological symbols, and was not interested in finding any shared external source for these symbols.
Christian apologist C.S. Lewis reflects many of the humanistic tendencies and shifts Christianity went through in the middle of the 20th century. During the rise of the “modernist heresy” much of Christian thought and writing involved Neo-scholasticism and biblical literacy, along with the adamant refusal of the studies mentioned above. In the 1950’s, however, under humanist theologians like Kahr Rahner and John Courtney Murray, Christian theology began to turn towards tolerance, inclusion and inter-faith dialog. The Second Vatican Council (1962) is a record of these changes, although the Catholic Church has since moved back to a more conservative position. An inspired theologian, C.S. Lewis accepts the universal mythology of Jung or Campbell and models a very modern (liberal) Christianity – one which could accept the mythical nature of the gospels without being threatened by it. His conclusion is that all the other figures who are similar to Jesus Christ were legends, stemming from the imagination, and that Jesus Christ was the same story, but as a historical reality:
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. . . God is more than god, not less: Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about “parallels” and “Pagan Christs”: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome.[xxxi]
Lewis’ hypothesis however, is based on the assumption that there is a great deal of evidence for the historical Jesus: “it is all in order.” If Jesus existed, then similarities to mythology are simply irrelevant. Thus, the similarities between Jesus and other mythological figures are not threatening to Christians, but only as long as the evidence for the historical Jesus is strong enough to silence our incredulity that a historical person should have so much in common with mythology.
One limitation of the focus on psychological undercurrents of universal mythology is that, although popularizing the similarities between various mythological traditions, it also chained the rich field of comparative mythology into the fixed, limited historical period of the movement. Consequently the rich field of comparative mythology research is unfortunately seen as “dated” or only relevant for psychology majors.
The Criteria of Double Dissimilarity
While mythologists were busy exploring the similarities between Jesus Christ and world mythology and claiming that they were produced out of some universal human need or shared unconscious, biblical scholars continued the quest for the historical Jesus with a shifted focus. Using a methodological tool first advocated by Bultmann, the Criteria of Double Dissimilarity (or “CDD”), scholars tried to identify the genuine historical founder behind the Christian movement by combing through the Bible for ideas that could not be traced either to Judaism or the Early Church. As Bultmann says in The History of the Synoptic Tradition (1921),
We can only count on possessing a genuine similitude of Jesus where, on the one hand, expression is given to the contrast between Jewish morality and piety and the distinctive eschatological temper which characterised the preaching of Jesus; and where on the other hand we find no specifically Christian features.[xxxii]
Bultmann’s Criteria of Double Dissimilarity was reiterated and expanded by Ernst Käsemann and Norman Perrin, gaining the seal of approval among academics, and has since remained influential in academic research into the life of Jesus.
We can only sketch in a few bold strokes the embarrassment of critical research. It lies in this; while the historical credibility of the Synoptic tradition has become doubtful all along the line, yet at the same time we are still short of one essential requisite for the identification of the authentic Jesus material, namely, a conspectus of the very earliest stage of primitive Christian history; and also there is an almost complete lack of satisfactory and water tight criteria for this material. In only one case do we have more or less ground under our feet, when there are no grounds either for deriving a tradition from Judaism or for ascribing it to primitive Christianity. (Käsemann )[xxxiii]
Thus we reach the fundamental criterion for authenticity upon which all reconstructions of the teaching of Jesus must be built, which we propose to call the ‘criterion of dissimilarity’. Recognising that it follows an attempt to write a history of the tradition concerned, we may formulate it as follows: the earliest form of a saying we can reach may be regarded as authentic if it can be shown to be dissimilar to characteristic emphases both of ancient Judaism and of the early Church, and this will particularly be the case where Christian tradition orientated towards Judaism can be shown to have modified the saying away from its original emphasis. (Perrin)[xxxiv]
Although the CDD is a reasonable academic process, it has a few disadvantages. First of all, it is made possible by first completely ignoring the mythological and pagan elements in the gospels. Biblical scholars (of the Bultmann variety) unanimously conclude that these are “later additions” and can tell us nothing about the historical Jesus. In other words – if Jesus was pagan, i.e. if all of those mythical elements were the core of him, and he consisted of nothing else, he would not be historical; thus leading to a dead-end in research and the impossibility of knowing any more about him. Therefore, scholars focus on what Jesus, as a hypothesized historical figure, must have been. Since many of the elements in the Bible came either from pre-Christian Jewish movements or post-Jesus Christian apologetics, Jesus (according to the CDD) is to be found somewhere between these two.
This has been the motivating reasoning behind research into the historical Jesus for the last few decades. It must be noted, however, that with this type of research, the historical Jesus remains only an unproven theory: Jesus the historical figure is the binding element given to any untraceable idea, phrase, philosophy or theology from a specific time period. Based on the fact that the gospel accounts of Jesus Christ are almost completely filled with earlier Jewish ideology or later Christian theology which developed over time (and hence can say little about a historical founder), the only way to talk about the historical Jesus intelligibly is to talk about the type of person he could have been: he was either Jesus the Jew (who got immediately transformed into something very different by his followers) or nothing at all.
This trend is clearly shown by a few of the more popular titles published about Jesus in the last few decades: Jesus the Jew (1973); Jesus and Judaism (1985); The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991); A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (1991-2001); and Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (1999). In 2002, Theisen and Winter published The Quest for the Plausible Jesus, which uses a softer form of the CDD to envision the Jesus who might have been.[xxxv]
The danger with this line of reasoning is that, when we do a close examination of the Jewish sources, we find very little in the gospels that cannot be traced to earlier movements within Judaism. We could theorize that Jesus was the person who put these pieces together and fueled them with passion, but it is also possible to remove the hypothesis of a historical Jesus without weakening an understanding of the historical developments. Consequently, when searching for the historical Jesus with academic rigor, it is possible to go too far and actually weaken the position that there was one at all. This problem was recognized in a 1963 article printed by TIME magazine:
“We Can Know Nothing.” During the 1920s, Bultmann sealed the doom of the old quest, as far as Europe was concerned.* He argued that the Gospels were interested not in presenting a dispassionate portrait of Jesus but in expressing the kerygma—the proclamation of the early church’s faith in a Risen Christ. This meant that although the New Testament might be a primary source for a study of the early church, it was only a secondary one for a life of Jesus. Since the faith of later generations was really based upon the shining faith of the first Christians and not upon Jesus himself, theologians should forget about seeking the earthly Jesus and analyze the formation of the kerygma. “We can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus,” Bultmann wrote in one of the shaping dicta of modern theology. Bultmann himself later moved a step farther to the theological left and argued that to become credible for modern man, the kerygma must be “de-mythologized” – stripped of such unbelievable elements as its heaven-above, hell-below framework. But demythologizing, Robinson points out, threatened to end up with “the conclusion that the Jesus of the kerygma could well be only a myth.” Deprived of its link with the historical Jesus, Christianity might end up as some kind of existentialist philosophy, of which Christ was little more than a mythological symbol.[xxxvi]
The modern situation has not improved. In an article published by Christianity Today in April of 2010, professor of religion at North Park University in Chicago Scot McKnight, who has been intimately involved in “Historical Jesus Research” for the past several decades, describes how after years of passionate research the quest for the historical Jesus is at a dead end.
Illustrating this point in his classroom, he asks students to take a test about what kind of person they think Jesus was. Was he outgoing, shy, friendly, pensive, exciting, etc. Then they take the same test, only about themselves. The results show that people picture Jesus to be just like themselves; and the same is true, McKnight concludes, of religious historians. McKnight quotes Dale Allison, one of America’s top New Testament scholars, who confesses,
Professional historians are not bloodless templates passively registering the facts: we actively and imaginatively project. Our rationality cannot be extricated from our sentiments and feelings, our hopes and fears, our hunches and ambitions. Maybe we have unthinkingly reduced biography [of Jesus] to autobiography… The fragmentary and imperfect nature of the evidence as well as the limitations of our historical-critical abilities should move us to confess, if we are conscientious, how hard it is to recover the past. We wield our criteria to get what we want.[xxxvii]
In other words, with virtually no evidence regarding the historical Jesus, the best historians can do is project their interpretations of him. McKnight also admits that the majority of New Testament scholars are not orthodox Christians: they may be believers, but theirs is a mature faith, which doesn’t accept the New Testament at face value. While they maintain that Jesus was at least in part historical, they also accept that much of the New Testament is not historically accurate. At the same time, as believers, they project into their research their own preexisting theological affirmations. McKnight adds,
One has to wonder if the driving force behind historical Jesus scholarship is more an a priori disbelief in orthodoxy than a historian’s genuine (and disinterested) interest in what really happened. The theological conclusions of those who pursue the historical Jesus simply correlate too strongly with their own theological predilections to suggest otherwise.[xxxviii]
Incidentally, we might be justified in asking whether historical New Testament scholars are really the experts on the historical Jesus at all; wouldn’t someone studying mythology, comparative religion, history or sociology be better qualified to explain the motivations behind the Christian movement than someone who is seeking and inserting the savior they need to find in order to justify their beliefs?
Despite the article’s subtitle, “Why scholarly attempts to discover the ‘real’ Jesus have failed. And why that’s a good thing,” McKnight concludes without giving any indication of the benefits of the failure to discover the real Jesus. We can only guess that McKnight feels this creates a space for people to believe whatever they want to believe, without any proof or need of justification; “If there is no proof it happened, there is also no proof that it did not happen,” believers might argue. McKnight finishes his article with an unintentional demonstration of the way faith can cloud academic judgment:
As a historian I think I can prove that Jesus died and that he thought his death was atoning. I think I can establish that the tomb was empty and that resurrection is the best explanation for the empty tomb. But one thing the historical method cannot prove is that Jesus died for our sins and was raised for our justification. At some point, historical methods run out of steam and energy. Historical Jesus studies cannot get us to the point where the Holy Spirit and the church can take us.[xxxix]
Would an unbiased researcher conclude that the corpse of Jesus getting up, walking out of his grave and ascending into heaven is more rational than any other explanation, however improbable?
The main problem with the human, Jewish Jesus at the center of modern research into biblical history is that nobody really believes in him. He is a necessary hypothesis in order to preserve the possibility of Christian faith, but he is nobody’s hero or savior; only a historical premise. Moreover, in stripping away the mythical elements in the gospel, academics are also removing central concepts of Christian belief (the virgin birth, the miracles, the death and resurrection of Jesus). In proving the historical Christ, they are also, albeit indirectly, disproving the Jesus of Faith.
There have been a few contemporary researchers who disagree with the trendy insistence on the historical Jesus. These scholars are aware that the Jewish Jesus, while necessary to preserve the possibility of a historical Jesus of any kind, is very tenuously based on the Bible and the assumption that Jesus was real; and that although he remains the focus of academic investigation, a very different hypothesis, which does not presume the historical Jesus, is also possible. This hypothesis is often referred to as the “Christ-Myth Theory.”
Although the following definition does not apply equally to all writers, in brief the Christ-Myth Theory argues that there is no need for a historical founder to explain the rise of the Christian movement; that all episodes and events in the gospels can be traced to earlier traditions, and that certain early sects of Christianity began to believe (mistakenly) that the stories of Jesus Christ were about a real, historical figure. This theory may sound unbelievable at first, but bear in mind that it is already not so different from the orthodox position. Modern scholars already accept that the early Christian communities, who worshipped Jesus as the dying and resurrecting son of God, glossed over the real historical Jesus in favor of the “Jesus of Faith” – a Jesus that incorporated elements from mythology, philosophy and the theology produced by early Christian writers. The Jesus that they believed in and even died for was not the historical Jesus still being investigated by modern scholarship.
The Christ-Myth Theory is in general not supported by the academia because they have already decided to look for the historical Jesus, and acknowledge that comparative mythology cannot shed light onto the object of their investigations. Those few historians and academics that are interested in researching the mythical Christ hope to present an argument strong enough to withstand the foregone presumption of critics that the theory is outdated or has already been adequately disproved. Acharya S., author of several books on the mythical Christ whose research was a key resource for the viral documentary Zeitgeist, is forced to argue with those who doubt that the controversy over Jesus is worth exploring; when in fact, as we have seen, it has a long history.
The most enduring and profound controversy in this subject is whether or not a person named Jesus Christ ever really existed…. when one examines this issue closely, one will find a tremendous volume of literature that demonstrates, logically and intelligently, time and again that Jesus Christ is a mythological character along the same lines as the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Sumerian, Phoenician, Indian or other godmen, who are all presently accepted as myths rather than historical figures.[xl]
Meanwhile biblical historians focus exclusively on Jesus the Jew, theologians focus exclusively on Christology and theory, and the very real difficulty in putting the two together is ignored.
For the general public however, whether or not Jesus Christ as presented in the gospels was a historical figure is a source of much interest, and books on the subject have been both well-received and heavily criticized. Titles taking the Christ Myth approach include G.A. Wells’ Did Jesus Exist? (1975), as well as his later books The Jesus Legend (1996) and The Jesus Myth (1998). In 1999, three books on Christ Myth theory were published: The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Acharya S; The Jesus Mysteries: Was Jesus a Pagan God? by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy; and The Jesus Puzzle by Earl Doherty (an expanded version was published in 2009 under the title Jesus: Neither God nor Man-The Case for a Mythical Jesus). There was also Robert M. Price’s Deconstructing Jesus (2000) and The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man (2003), and more recently Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ (2005) and sequel Water Into Wine (2007).
Critics respond that modern scholars affirm the historical Jesus and that Christ-Myth Theory is centuries old and based on bad scholarship; which is generally true. Going further, they reject outright any similarities – which for them either do not exist at all (usually because, as Justin Martyr affirmed, Jesus actually existed as opposed to the others who did not) or are a case of reverse borrowing (i.e., Jesus did it first). Unfortunately, they also ignore all of the critical research that has gone into the historical Jesus, cite historical evidences that were discarded as proof by experts centuries ago, and use regurgitated arguments that have no logical foundation to prove that Jesus existed as a historical person. (In fairness, the same can be said for most online supporters of Christ-Myth theory).
Conclusions and Summary
Part of the confusion surrounding the historical Jesus is the lack of consensus on the subject matter. What is Jesus? Is Jesus the Son of God, Savior, miracle worker, who was born of a virgin, died, came back to life and ascended into heaven? Or was Jesus one of dozens of Jewish rebel leaders during the Roman occupation of Jerusalem? Among scholars, the former is generally refuted (or ignored) and the later is affirmed. As a result, conservatives often point out that no “serious” scholar doubts the historical Jesus. However, not only is the historical Jesus of modern academics completely different from the Jesus Christ of the gospels, there is also a very specific reason – one which is not based on evidence – for the current academic support of the historical Jesus.
The common, popular understanding of the historical Jesus goes something like this: scholars and academics still believe that there was a historical founder of Christianity, but disbelieve in the miracles because they aren’t scientific (or are too similar to pagan mythology). Christians believe in the historical Jesus as well – which is not irrational because they are supported by the academic community – and also have faith in the miraculous events. There is a paradox in this situation which is not often pointed out: the method and technique that scholars have been using for centuries to try and find the “historical Jesus” is to first get rid of all the blatant mythological or pagan elements in the Bible, usually because they are believed to be additions from alternative (non-Jesus) sources. They are, in effect, the very things least likely to have been said or done by Jesus, not because they are unrealistic, but because they are not unique to an authentic, Jesus-inspired tradition. The result is a historical founder of Christianity which, rather than providing a doorway or foundation for Christian faith, is actually diametrically opposed; for if the historical founder of the scholars did exist, it is only possible due to his dissimilarity from the Jesus Christ of the gospels.
At the same time, the idea that Jesus Christ was the historical founder of Christianity is so heavily defended by Christians and biblical scholars that to even raise the possibility of an alternative theory – one in which the savior figure of the gospels may not have been historical – is automatically derided. This has unfortunately led to the development of rhetoric, assumption and a great deal of obstinacy on both sides of the controversy. Before we could even begin to look at the actual similarities between Jesus Christ and other mythological traditions, we had to first explore the history of the debate in modern times and trace the historical developments that have led to the contemporary academic and popular positions on the historical Jesus.
Once we understand that various interpretations of Jesus Christ have been made, ranging from Jesus as only a physical man, to Jesus as only a supernatural deity, and that a definitive conclusion is perhaps more a matter of belief than evidence, we may be able to view the entire matter more objectively and review the evidence based on its own merits. At the same time, the difficulty of approaching this subject without presumptions or ideological baggage must be acknowledged. The idea that Jesus really existed and that the Bible is at least in part historically valid is a paradigm supported by modern culture even among the non-faithful. Due to the number of magazine articles and TV documentaries exploring the investigation into the historical Jesus, showing new archeological discoveries purporting to prove biblical testimony, reviewing the findings of biblical scholars or debating controversies such as the Turin Shroud, there is a passive acceptance that, whatever Jesus might have been, he almost certainly was historical.
At the same time, the dispersion of Christ-Myth ideas such as those found in the documentaries Zeitgeist (2007) and The God Who Wasn’t There (2005), which introduced the Christ-Myth hypothesis to record numbers of people, sparked a new level of Internet fervor over the subject. The controversy now rages stronger than ever – but both sides recycle arguments and evidence that the other side then blithely discredits or ignores. The current state of frenzied disagreement is all too often based on bias, semantics and sophistry rather than a close investigation of the evidence, and also fails to give – on either camp – a clear explanation of Christian history that fully supports the evidence available.
An objective analysis of the evidence simply cannot be done without first identifying the general ideologies and assumptions surrounding the historical Jesus, which will be done in the next chapter. After examining some of the modern ideas concerning the historical Jesus Christ, which pre-condition how adherents approach this debate, I will identify the evidence and documents used to support the idea of a historical Jesus and question whether they can be accepted as proof.
Notes
[i] Robert Taylor, The Diegesis, facs. ed. (Boston: Abner Kneeland, 1834;Kessinger,1992), 254.
[ii] T.R. Glover, Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire (London: Methuen, 1909; rpt. Boston: Beacon, 1960), 146
[iii] Quoted in Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan God? (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999), 27.
[iv]Justin Martyr, First Apology, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson,http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr-discourse.html.
[v] R.E. Witt, Isis in the Ancient World (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1971), 267.
[vi]Maurice Goguel,Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History, trans. Frederick Stephens(London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1926), 14, http://www.christianorigins.com/goguel/ch1.html.
[vii]Charles François Dupuis,The Origin of All Religious Worship(New Orleans, 1872; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2005), 251, MOA Digital Library,http://name.umdl.umich.edu/ajf3298.0001.001.
[viii]Maurice Goguel,Jesus the Nazarene, 15.
[ix]Shirley Jackson Case,The Mythical Christ of Radical Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912), 33, http://www.christianorigins.com/case/ch2.html.
[x]L. Michael White, From Jesus to Christianity (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2004), 101.
[xi]Maurice Goguel,Jesus the Nazarene, 16.
[xii] Bruno Bauer, Christ and the Caesars: The Origin of Christianity from Romanized Greek Culture(Christus und die Caesaren, 1877), trans. Frank E. Schacht (Charleston, SC: A. Davidonis, 1998).
[xiii]Hermann Detering, “The Falsified Paul: Early Christianity in the Twilight,” in The Journal of Higher Criticism, 10 no. 2 (Fall 2003):47, http://www.radikalkritik.de/FabricatedJHC.pdf.
[xiv] Kersey Graves, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors: Christianity Before Christ, 9, http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/kersey_graves/16/.
[xv] William Ricketts Cooper, The Horus Myth in its Relation to Christianity (London: Hardwicke & Bogue, 1877), 49, http://books.google.com/books?id=EA4GAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=horus+myth+in+its+relation+to+chri#v.
[xvi]Gerald Massey, “The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ,” Gerald Massey’s Lectures,accessed October11, 2009, http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/Gerald_Masseys_Lectures.pdf.
[xvii]Shirley Jackson Case,The Mythical Christ of Radical Criticism,43.
[xviii] Shirley Jackson Case,The Mythical Christ of Radical Criticism, 41.
[xix] Goguel, Jesus the Nazarene, 28.
[xx] R. Bultmann, Jesus and the World, (1926; ET New York: Scribners, 1935) 8.
[xxi]Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian(1927; rpt. in Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays, ed. Paul Edwards [New York, 1957]), http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html.<http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html.
[xxii]Robert A. Segal, Jung on Mythology (London: Routledge, 1998), 4.
[xxiii]Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams(New York: Avon Books, 1980), 296.
[xxiv]Kelly Noel-Smith, “Harry Potter’s Oedipal Issues,” Psychoanalytic Studies (2001)3: 199-207.
[xxv]Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism(Cambridge: Harvard, 1997), 167.
[xxvi]Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959), 154.
[xxvii]Robert A. Segal,Jung on Mythology,14.
[xxviii]Carl Gustav Jung, Civilization and Transition, trans. R.F.C. Hull (New York: Routledge, 1964), 265.
[xxix] Quoted in Robert A. Segal, Jung on Mythology, 38.
[xxx] Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces3rd ed. (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008), 197–98.
[xxxi]C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 66-67.
[xxxii] Rudolph Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (1921; trans. and rpt. San Francisco: Harper, 1976), 71.
[xxxiii] Ernst Käsemann,“The Problem with the Historical Jesus,” Essays on New Testament Themes, trans. W.J. Montague (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 36-37.
[xxxiv]Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 43.
[xxxv]Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter, The Search for the Plausible Jesus, trans. M. Eugene Boring (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002).
[xxxvi]“The New Search for The Historical Jesus,” Time Magazine, June 21, 1963, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,874918-1,00.html.
[xxxvii] Dale C. Allison,The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009).
[xxxviii] McKnight, Scot. “The Jesus We’ll Never Know.” Christianity Today, 9 Apr. 2010.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/april/15.22.html.
[xxxix] McKnight, Scot. “The Jesus We’ll Never Know.” Christianity Today, 9 Apr. 2010.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/april/15.22.html.
[xl]Acharya S [D.M. Murdock], “The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus Christ,” http://www.truthbeknown.com/origins.htm.
Tags: C.S. Lewis, Christ Myth, Christian history, comparative mythology, Eliade, Freud, historical Jesus, Jesus Christ, Jesus Proof, JK Rowling, Jung, Mythicism, Pagan gods, Who was Jesus
