Lena Einhorn on the Claudian Christ Theory
Editor, physician and documentarian Lena Einhorn has written a book, A Shift in Time,
arguing a new theory of the historical Jesus: that he actually was a
violent rebel from the era of Claudius, who was later whitewashed into a
pacifist from the era of Tiberius. My brief review here will cover her
argument, its merits and problems, and what this tells us about the
methods we need to deploy in studying this question.
Normally I
wouldn’t bother with another amateur treatise on this subject. And in
fact, please don’t send me yours. As a rule, I have no interest in such
works. I barely have interest in expert treatises on the
subject, as there are hundreds, all contradicting each other, and they
tediously just reflect what each historian wants to be true rather than
what is (just peruse James Crossley’s Jesus in an Age of Terror and Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism, Mark Powell’s Jesus as a Figure in History, or Craig Evans’s Fabricating Jesus). There is no coherent or reliable methodology being deployed in Jesus studies. As John Dominic Crossan wrote in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography,
Jesus scholarship is often “a disguise to do theology and call it
history, do autobiography and call it biography, do Christian
apologetics and call it academic scholarship.” Ironically. Because
Crossan then proceeded to do exactly the same thing himself. As Donald
Denton wrote of him, “it is frequently suspected that in his portrait of
Jesus Crossan is…actually seeing his own face at the bottom of a deep
well,” attempting to recreate the historical Jesus into a form that
would resonate with Crossan’s own politics, and aid his dreams for a
reformed Christianity better suited to modern times (Historiography & Hermeneutics in Jesus Studies, p. 11).
So, in short, even most expert work on
Jesus is eye-rolling confabulation not worth the reading. Amateur work
is only worse. The paradigmatic garbage of the genre is Joseph Atwill’s. There are very few exceptions. Earl Doherty is one.
Even though I think he is wrong about a lot, he is also right about a
lot, and mostly applies a careful and competent method, and he knows
what he’s talking about. Lena Einhorn now joins this list. I would have
not bothered, but for the fact that a preliminary look at an advance
paper from which the book was crafted told me she does her homework,
knows what she’s talking about, and applies adequate caution (even if
her conclusions are overstated in the end, they are stated more
cautiously as she proceeds). Indeed, she presented her preliminary paper at the Society for Biblical Literature and reviews from experts were not dismissive. I concur with Neil Godfrey
that her argument is an interesting possibility that ultimately does
not rise to a high enough probability to credit as likely. But that’s
true of pretty nearly every single theory of historicity throughout the
Jesus studies establishment. So she’s in good company.
My overall objection to her paper’s
thesis matches my overall conclusion regarding her book, which aims to
extend the same thesis more broadly. In her paper she argued that Jesus
of Nazareth is actually The Egyptian in the narrative of Josephus (see OHJ,
p. 70), and that the Gospel authors were just erasing the militaristic
aspects of the truth of their would-be savior and relocating him in time
to conceal that fact. Neat idea. And not implausible. But the
similarities between Jesus and The Egyptian are too few and too generic
to be that telling, and in fact they sooner suggest the Gospel authors
were just borrowing “modern” ideas with which to construct their stories
of Jesus.
Just as they lifted the story of Jesus ben Ananias, from the era of Nero, to fabricate a plot for their Jesus ben Joseph (OHJ,
pp. 428-30), they may well have done the same for The Egyptian, and
indeed may have borrowed from all the Josephan Christs to build their
mosaic (all of whom were portraying themselves as a Jesus Christ, i.e. a
messianic Joshua reborn: OHJ, pp. 67-73, 245-46). That does not in any way mean Jesus of Nazareth is Jesus ben Ananias, and thus actually lived under Nero.
He very certainly is not, and did not. Nor, therefore, can it mean he
“is” The Egyptian, if he was built out of him, too. Rather, the stories
that accumulated from famous Jesuses and other prophets in the three
decades between when the sect began its new gospel in the 30s and the
Jewish War of the 60s were simply thrown in a hamper and drawn from,
collectively, when finally there came the thought of building the
mythical Jesus of the Gospels. The tendency to use the more recent
memories of the times more frequently in constructing that narrative
would explain all the other evidence Einhorn amasses.
This in fact better explains why the chronology of the Gospels is so incoherent.
Einhorn’s book’s central thesis is that
when you gather up all the datable references and events in the Gospels
and Acts, there appears to be an abiding incoherence between a
collection of facts from the 30s and 40s A.D. (like the presence of
Pilate and Caiaphas and John the Baptist and Herod Agrippa I) and a
collection of facts from the 50’s and 60’s A.D. (which she enumerates
chapter by chapter). Her conclusion is that Christianity actually began
(and Jesus actually lived) in the 50’s AD., and that the Gospels conceal
this by trying to relocate it to the 30’s A.D. in order to hide certain
uncomfortable political truths about what actually happened. But they
couldn’t fix everything, so the original chronology is still there,
under the veneer of the fake one.
Such is her thesis. But this does not
take into account the best alternative theory, and methodologically it
is not logically possible to argue for a hypothesis in isolation from
competing hypotheses. The probability of a hypothesis being true is
always relative to its best competitors. Hypotheses therefore must be compared. (See my article, If You Learn Nothing Else, point 1.)
The best competing hypothesis is simply:
the Gospel authors are making Jesus up. That is, there was no
historical Jesus. He didn’t walk anywhere or do anything on earth (in belief
there was still a historical Jesus, undergoing historical events in
outer space according to ancient cosmology, but not as a part of human
history, which is the Doherty Thesis, and the thesis of my book On the Historicity of Jesus). So he didn’t “actually” or “originally” belong to any
decade of history. And indeed, there were Christians dating him even to
the 70’s B.C., so variable could they be with where to put him (OHJ,
Ch. 8.1). So when the Gospel authors created a historical Jesus out of
other heroes and prophets (from Moses to Elijah to Jesus ben Ananias
and, we may even suppose, John the Baptist), they were not particularly
concerned with chronological precision. They saw the whole period from
the 30s to the 60s as simply one and the same time, and borrowed from
all those decades whatever resonated for them the most. And for this
they all drew on Josephus (particularly Mark on the Jewish War and Luke on the Jewish Antiquities), who is also
Einhorn’s only source for comparison, thus explaining all the
convenient agreements. The end result would be exactly the same evidence
Einhorn points to.
So in the end, Einhorn’s theory does not
achieve probability. There isn’t any evidence that can tip in favor of
it over any alternative. And that’s even if we assume Jesus existed at
all. If, as I find in OHJ, he probably didn’t, we have a much better
theory than hers to explain all this weird inconsistency in the
evidence. Ultimately, her theory is not impossible. It’s not absurd. But
it’s not likely enough to be true. At least on the scant and
problematic evidence we now have. But again, to put this result in
context, I would aver that her theory of historicity stands on much
better evidence, and is far more probable, than Bruce Chilton’s (see OHJ, pp. 24-25), and he’s a well-respected and fully-fledged expert in Jesus studies.
Unlike Atwill, Einhorn is well-informed,
careful in demarcating evidence from conjecture, is modest in her
conclusions, openly admits uncertainty, has a good grasp of the cultural
and political context she is talking about, and has a fair enough
understanding of the relevant linguistic issues—even though she is not
expert in the languages, she relies competently on available
English-language tools. Like many a historian, where she goes wrong, as I
already mentioned, is in failing to compare her thesis against others
in respect to explanatory power. Also like many a historian, she
cherry-picks the evidence her thesis explains well, and does not address
evidence it doesn’t (such as assimilating events not just in the 30s
and 50s, but even in the 60s and 40s, and before the 30s, as if they all
happened in the 30s, thus not singling out any one decade; or the
absence of any historical Jesus in the letters of Paul—though she has
another thesis about that in another book, The Jesus Mystery, wherein she argues Paul is Jesus, that’s so wildly implausible I won’t even bother addressing it).
Einhorn also brings into evidence a lot
of interesting facts, and writes well, so by and large her book is a
good and edifying read. Even if ultimately these facts don’t entail
much, they are still educational, and as best I could tell she is
usually accurate in what she presents. She also, again, tends to do a
good job distinguishing facts she ascertained from the scholarship and
her own opinions or conclusions—unlike many other amateur writers in
this genre. But she also sometimes slips into incoherence (I could not
make sense of the logic of her chapter on “enigma six,” pp. 77-84) or is
overly dismissive of a sound historical consensus—such as doubting that
Josephus routinely identifies past high priests as retaining the title,
being in effect high priest emeritus (the same way in the U.S.
we still call ex-presidents Mr. President). This is no great mystery,
nor a chronological confusion. Josephus even says at times that several
high priests would work together, even though only one actually held the
appointment (not knowing this similarly led astray the much less competent
Tim O’Neill; and because of this even Einhorn at one point also
confuses the younger and elder Ananus—though to be fair, the authors of
the Gospels may have as well). But at least she acknowledges the
dominant position and makes clear she is dissenting from it and why.
A related example of the same
methodological defect (of not entertaining alternative theories) occurs
when Einhorn makes too much of the fact that Matthew puts Jesus in
Egypt—something no other Gospel does, not even Luke (in fact Luke
effectively says Jesus never left Judea). In far more probable fact,
Matthew did that to assimilate Jesus mythically with Moses, as nearly
the entire biblical studies establishment would agree. It’s therefore
not a clue to Jesus being The Egyptian. But what her argument here
reflects, as well as many other arguments she makes (such as when she
makes much of material added in John that’s missing from the Synoptics),
is a common amateur mistake: assuming the Gospels are a coordinated
harmony of stories.
In fact, the Gospels are arguments
against each other. When Luke has Jesus stay in Judea and not go to
Egypt like Matthew does, Luke is arguing against Matthew. It’s
not as if Luke just forgot to mention that or assumed his readers had
read Matthew and knew that part of the story so he didn’t have to repeat
it. To the contrary, Luke is refuting it, by changing the
story. Similarly, when John invents Lazarus, he does so to refute Luke’s
parable of Lazarus, a parable that never existed before Luke wrote it
down (see OHJ, pp. 502-05). When we recognize that what’s in the Gospels is made up,
theories like Einhorn’s begin to dissolve. And Jesus studies has made a
lot of progress in identifying how the Gospels fabricate their accounts
(even if many in the field still refuse to accept such obvious
conclusions), such as Matthew’s penchant for assimilating Jesus to Moses
even more thoroughly than Mark did. When you eliminate these
fabrications, there isn’t really much left in the Gospels to assess as
history (see Ch. 10 of OHJ).
Similarly, Einhorn tries to pile up
“arguments from amazing coincidence” a bit too much without a
disciplined way of ascertaining if the coincidences she sees are
actually all that unlikely. I discuss the methodology of this, and the
need for more discipline in deploying it lest it just become so much tea
leaf reading, in Proving History
(pp. 192-204). Atwill went insane with this kind of absurdity. Einhorn
at least admits the speculative and tentative nature of what she is
seeing. But there are just too many instances where the things she sees
are not unlikely enough to indicate support for her thesis. And not only
because “borrowing from Josephus” explains them all and is just as
likely on the theory the Gospels are making everything up—even the
thesis that something was borrowed from or correlates with Josephus at
all is often under-motivated by her evidence (as when assimilating Jesus
to Moses already explains all the evidence she adduces; and we already
know for a fact the Gospel authors were wont to assimilate Jesus to
Moses, so precedent is already against the novelty of her thesis,
therefore requiring more definite evidence for her conclusion than she
has).
In conclusion, Einhorn exhibits a lot of
good methodological principles most amateurs, and even many experts,
don’t consistently employ. But she also exhibits some methodological
failings, albeit again the same ones we can often find even in the
expert literature. Her thesis is at least as well-argued and respectable
as most expert alternatives proposed and defended in the field of Jesus
studies. That she is wrong is no more to her discredit than the fact
that they all must be wrong as well—after all, they all contradict each
other, so all but one of them must be as incorrect as Einhorn, and maybe
not even one. With the methodological correctives I elucidate above,
amateurs, and even some experts, can benefit from her book as a model of
both how and how not to argue.
I would only add that most of Einhorn’s
argument is speculation; and gets more speculative as the book
progresses. And I don’t like people confusing speculation for
conclusions. What’s possible is not the same as what’s probable. If we
don’t know, we don’t know. I think most of Jesus studies needs to learn
that lesson. But because they haven’t, they can’t criticize Einhorn for
the same folly. Her thesis thus warrants the same expert attention as
any other theory the academy deems respectable.
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