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Refuting the myth that Jesus never existedIntroductionThe thesis that Jesus never existed has hovered around the fringes of research into the New Testament for centuries but never been able to become an accepted theory. This is for good reason, as it is simply a bad hypothesis based on arguments from silence, special pleading and an awful lot of wishful thinking. It is ironic that atheists will buy into this idea and leave all their pretensions of critical thinking behind. I will adapt what has become popular usage and call people who deny Jesus' existence 'Jesus Mythologists'. A huge amount has been written on the web and elsewhere which you can find in the further reading section below. Not all Jesus Mythologists are lunatics and one at least, Earl Doherty, is extremely erudite and worth reading. Nevertheless, he is still wrong and, as I have seen myself, he reacts badly to those who demonstrate it. It is not my intention to study the minutiae of the argument but instead focus on three central points which are often brought up on discussion boards. These are the lack of secular references, the alleged similarities to paganism and the silence of Paul. Finally I want to bring all these together to show how ideas similar to those that deny Jesus' existence can be used on practically any ancient historical figure. With this in mind I set out to prove that Hannibal never existed. Roman HistoriansOccasionally people ask why there is no record of Jesus in Roman records. The answer is that there are no surviving Roman records but only highly parochial Roman historians who had little interest in the comings and goings of minor cults and were far more concerned about Emperors and Kings. Jesus made a very small splash while he was alive and there was no reason for Roman historians to notice him. Christianity is mentioned by the historian Tacitus in the early second century. But he talks about it only because Christians were unfortunate enough to be made scapegoats by the Emperor Nero for the great fire of Rome. Tacitus is interested in the Emperor, not his victims about whom he gives very limited information. Still, he does tell us that Jesus existed and was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Jesus Mythologists counter this by claiming that he could have got his information from Christians which means his evidence is not independent. So, we have a very convenient situation for the Jesus Mythologists. Until Christianity had spread no one except Christians would be interested in Jesus but all later records are ruled out of court as they are tainted by association with Christianity. This sort of special pleading is one of the reasons that modern historians have no time for these theories as they are set up to be impossible to disprove. In fact, Christian evidence for a human Jesus who was crucified is trustworthy because it ran counter to the myths of the time and suggested that he had suffered a humiliating death. If they made it up and then suppressed the truth with clinical efficiency, why did they come up with a story which even the Christian apologist, Tertullian, admitted was absurd? It seems far more likely that they had a large number of historical facts that they had to rationalise into a religion rather than creating all these difficulties for themselves. Sometimes Jesus Mythologists will produce long lists of writers none of whom have the slightest reason to mention an obscure Jewish miracle worker and somehow think this strengthens their point. In fact, it has all the relevance of picking fifty books off your local library shelf and finding that none of them mention Carl Sagan. Does that mean he did not exist either? Jesus was not even a failed military leader of the kind that Romans might have noticed - especially if he had been defeated by someone famous. JosephusThe only historian who we might expect to mention Jesus is Josephus, a Jew who wrote a history of his people up to 66AD, which is called 'Jewish Antiquities'. In fact, Josephus does mention Jesus twice and so Jesus Mythologists have to devote a lot of attention to attacking the relevant passages. Their job is made easier because Josephus, a Pharisee, probably felt nothing but contempt for Jesus which meant later Christians tried to 'correct' his negative wording. The majority opinion on Josephus is that the parts of the passage from book 18 of 'Jewish Antiquities' which are in red below are the additions of a Christian scribe trying to make Jesus appear in a better light.
Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 18, 3, 3
To support this idea we can look at the works of the Christian father Origen who was writing in the mid-third century. This was while Christianity was still a minor cult with no power or influence. It was generally ignored by the authorities as long as it kept its head down. Therefore there is no way that Christians this early could have either knobbled Josephus so that no undoctored copies were available or got away with quoting something from Josephus that was not there. We have no reason to suppose that a bright chap like Origen would even have tried and so can be sure that the copy of Josephus he read and quoted from was unamended by earlier Christians. We can be doubly sure of this because Origen flatly contradicts the modern version of Josephus where the Jewish historian is made to say Jesus was the Messiah. Origen makes clear he said no such thing. What use would the early fathers have had for a passage in Josephus saying Jesus was not the Messiah? An educated Jew saying this would not be helpful in an apologetic sense as it would demonstrate that the prophecies in the Old Testament were not nearly as clear cut as early Christians would have liked to have believed. And because no one ever challenged Jesus' existence, they never had reason to point to a critical Jewish source to prove he did. Hence Josephus was not quoted by the few earlier Christian writers. So what exactly did Origen say? Here are two passages which say basically the same thing and which reinforce each other:
Origen - Matthew X, XVII
Origen, - Against Celsus I, XLVII
This tells us that the later passage about 'James, brother of Jesus called Christ' certainly existed in Josephus in Origen's time because he uses the phrase 'called Christ' twice. It cannot be a Christian interpolation as they called James either 'James the Just' or 'James the Brother of the Lord'. The reference to 'James, brother of Jesus called Christ' is still found in Antiquities 20 and this by itself torpedoes the idea that Jesus never existed. The idea that Christians were going around doctoring copies of Josephus while they were still a persecuted minority is just laughable. Origen also says that Josephus did not believe Jesus was the Messiah so our present day passage on Jesus in Antiquities 18 cannot have existed although the passing reference to Jesus in Antiquities 20 is further evidence that he was actually mentioned in less flattering terms. It should be pointed out that Origen himself reads too much into Josephus who does say the people thought the killing of James was wrong but does not go quite so far as to blame the entire Jewish War on the event. Pagan similaritiesAllegations that Christianity is an adaptation of a pagan religion have been around for ages. In the 19th century, Kersey Graves wrote his notorious The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviours - a book so poor that even the Internet Infidels admit (in rather more diplomatic language) that it is a load of old cobblers. Just recently the tradition was carried on in The Jesus Mysteries by Peter Gandy and Timothy Freke. These two amateurs are equally willing to play fast and loose with the facts using carefully pruned quotations, mis-translation and anachronism to produce a woefully inaccurate picture. With this is in mind I present "Bede's Guide to the Production of a Best-seller that Undermines the Roots of Christianity". With this I can guarantee that you will be able to find all the parallels you like between paganism and Christianity or indeed, properly adapted, between any other two unrelated subjects that you care to name.
Using this guide you should be able to produce as many parallels as you require to convince even the most blinkered of readers. As you can probably tell from the above I am not impressed by the pagan myth hypothesis. It is interesting to note that despite his vast amount of reading, hostility to orthodox Christianity and willingness to allege that most the New Testament is fictional, not even John Dominic Crossan has any time for the idea that Jesus was made up of pagan motifs. Nor indeed do the vast majority of liberal scholars - the pagan myth hypothesis is firmly outside the pale of scholarship and with good reason. The Non - Silence of PaulThe whole idea that Jesus did not exist started with the fact that Paul does not say very much about his life or ministry. It is instructive to first find out what he did say so here is a list. You can read the relevent snippet biblical text by holding your mouse over the red scripture references.
It turns out that careful analysis of the letters shows that Paul was not actually all that silent at all. The first reaction to all this from the Jesus Mythologist is to dispute that Paul wrote very many of these letters. But actually seven of his letters are completely undisputed and all facts about Jesus's life shown above are from these. It is ironic that the pastoral epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, that liberals insist are late (and date from after the synoptic Gospels), contain practically no details about the life of Jesus at all. As there are still rather a lot of details about the historical Jesus in the undisputed letters, the Jesus Mythologist will use special pleading to try and explain them away. But as we can see, Paul is not attempting to tell Jesus's life story, he is just using the odd snippet about Jesus where it is helpful to illustrate his point. He knows that his readers are aware of what happened because all of his letters are to people who are already Christians. He is not trying to convert them and he is not engaged in apologetics. If we look at the letters of the early Christian fathers, they rarely have details about the life of Jesus except in passing because they know their readers are familiar with the Gospels. What we today call the Gospels had not, of course, been written down at the time that Paul was preaching but oral communication was considered to be more reliable than the written word at the time. When these people had heard about Jesus they did not need a revision primer when Paul wrote to them but specific advice about problems and controversies. Of course, none of this will convince the Jesus Mythologist who just cannot understand why Paul does not just repeat verbatim to his correspondents what he has already told them in person. Did Hannibal really exist?I want to wrap up by showing how easy it is to produce a scenario where we can deny the historicity of a major public figure. When I published this spoof on the Secular Web's discussion board it was taken seriously even though with hindsight it seems ridiculous. The comments in italics are annotations to bring out points of similarity with the various Jesus Myth ideas in currency. I would invite any Jesus Mythologist to explain to me the substantial differences between their theory and the spurious one below.
ConclusionIn history there is little that is certain but there is also a level of scepticism that makes the task of the historian impossible. Furthermore, the thesis that Jesus never existed requires selective scepticism about which sources are reliable and how others are interpreted. In the end, if Jesus did not exist, it makes Christianity a much more incredible phenomena than if he did. Further readingBooks:
Web sites:
Back to contents� James Hannam 2001.
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