Tag Archives: historical Jesus

Later ‘evidence’

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The Didache is an early Christian manual discussing ethical behaviour and outlining liturgical practice. Scholars disagree about when it was created, most opting for a date around 100CE. Despite referring to itself as ‘The Teaching of the Lord Through the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles’ in the only extant complete copy, the Didache doesn’t mention Jesus by name nor refer to any of the historical details of the kind provided in the gospels. Instead, it refers to ‘the Lord’ or ‘the Messiah’, the same terms Paul uses for his angelic Christ, and makes use of ‘teaching’ similar to that in the (invented) gospels, from which it almost certainly draws.

We’re now heading into a period when the gospels were in wider circulation and any reference to Jesus cannot be regarded as independent from them. We need, consequently, to be suspicious of any ‘evidence’ that appears to affirm his historical existence. Documents that appear after the gospels is unlikely to be from independent sources (not that they always reference their sources) but are merely relying on gospel data as filtered through contemporary Christian believers. Hence the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote in his Annals circa 115CE:

Nero fastened the guilt (for the fire in Rome in 64CE) and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Chrestians by the populace. Chrestus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.

Chrestians? Chrestus?

Pilate as procurator instead of prefect? Christianity as a ‘mischievous superstition’?

Actually, this last I can see. The other peculiarities are a problem for those who claim this is evidence for an historical Jesus. Written some 85 years after Jesus was supposedly active, this first extra-biblical reference to something approaching an historical figure is simply too late. Likewise everything after it.

We’ve exhausted the paltry references to ‘the Christ’ or ‘the Lord’ that exist prior to and just after the gospels. An historical Jesus there is not, in any of them. What does this all mean? 

Jesus: not worth the paper he’s printed on?

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There is broad consensus amongst respected scholars that the Jesus of the gospels didn’t exist. This is hardly surprising. Gospel Jesus, as I hope I’ve demonstrated over the past few weeks, is constructed from fragments of Jewish scripture and Paul’s (and others’) visions and dreams. There is also good evidence, which I’ve not discussed, that some Jesus stories are recreations of legends and tales of other god-men (turning water into wine and the Road to Emmaus story*, for example).

All of which raises the question suggested by David Fitzgerald in Nailed, that if there was a real Jesus who was so incredible that he gave rise to an entire religion, why was almost everything about him invented? Why could his story not have been told as it was? Why didn’t his inspiring, dynamic personality speak for itself? Personally, I don’t care whether Jesus existed or not, but if the supposedly remarkable Jesus of history did once exist, he has been totally obscured by the stories, legends and myth that were constructed around him not long after he died. The celestial Jesus that today’s Christians claim to know personally, who they say inhabits their hearts while simultaneously living in heaven, is emphatically not the man who lived, but a myth. A different myth, even, than that of the New Testament. A non-existent star-man, waiting in the sky.

Jesus belongs with all those other heroes who may or may not have existed prior to their being turned into myth and legend: Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Saint Nicholas, Robin Hood, Paul Bunyan. There is very little evidence, apart from stories and legends, that any of these figures actually existed. More, it’s entirely conceivable that Jesus belongs to a still different group of super-beings: those who were created as mythic characters, including but not confined to, Osiris (and the entire Egyptian panoply), Apollo (and all the Greek gods), Romulus, Circe, Attis, the angel Gabriel, Mithras, Aladdin, the angel Moroni, Superman, Harry Potter…

There is meagre evidence there was an historical Jesus who, even if he did exist, is now buried beneath layers of make-believe. The Jesus who has come down to us through the gospels and the rest of the New Testament is fictional. From his fairy-tale origin to his fantasy ascension and beyond, he’s completely imaginary.

I’m conscious I’ve written other posts making this same point. I find that, whatever starting point I take, invariably I end up here. Whether it’s ‘prophecy’, prayer, promises, miracles, the second coming, any aspect of the faith, none has any substance. They’re ineffectual, empty and have no bearing on reality. The character who supposedly embodies and promotes them becomes, as a result, similarly void. Either Jesus was transformed into a fantasy figure soon after he lived or he was imagined, by the likes of Paul, as a magical being to begin with. Whichever it was, from the earliest days of Christianity, there was no way for people to hear of or know about a man who actually walked the Earth.

*See Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason to Doubt, pp 480-81