Should We Still Be Looking for a Historical Jesus?
By Richard Carrier, Ph.D.
August 2014
Last year I had an erudite and friendly debate on
London radio with an excellent and well-respected professor of New
Testament studies, in which he claimed that in 1 Corinthians 15, the
Apostle Paul wrote that he received the gospel he summarizes there “from
those who were in Christ before him.” Indeed this professor insisted
that “from those who were in Christ before him” was in the text. This
was perplexing, because I knew that wasn’t the case. In fact, quite the
opposite. Paul rather conspicuously never says this in any
of his letters. He even explicitly denies it in one (Galatians 1). My
opponent was a bit nonplussed when we looked at the text, and to his
astonishment, the phrase he was sure was there, was not.
This is not an isolated story. This has happened
to me countless times. A superbly qualified scholar will insist some
piece of evidence exists, or does not exist, and I am surprised that I
have to show them the contrary. And always this phantom evidence (or an
assurance of its absence) is in defense of the historicity of Jesus.
This should teach us how important it is to stop repeating the phrase
“the overwhelming consensus says…” Because that consensus is based on
false beliefs and assumptions, a lot of them inherited unknowingly from
past Christian faith assumptions in reading or discussing the evidence,
which even secular scholars failed to check before simply repeating them
as certainly the truth.
It’s time to rethink our assumptions, and look at the evidence anew.
There are at least six well-qualified experts,
including two sitting professors, two retired professors, and two
independent scholars with Ph.D.’s in relevant fields, who have recently
gone on public record as doubting whether there really was a historical
Jesus. I am one of them.[1] And I have recently published the first-ever peer reviewed academic study making the case for this conclusion. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt
was published this year by the University of Sheffield
(Sheffield-Phoenix, 2014). It continues the case I began in a prior
peer-reviewed book, Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus
(Prometheus Books, 2012), on why the methods employed in Jesus studies
today are not logically valid, and what must replace them.[2]
Of course overthrowing centuries of assumptions
cannot be done in a mere two thousand words. Hence the book. But I can
here summarize the reasons for suspecting we’ve been wrong all along
about how the Christian religion began. Objections one might then raise
are of course answered in my book. Meanwhile, as Philip Davies recently
said, “a recognition that [Jesus’s] existence is not entirely certain
would nudge Jesus scholarship towards academic respectability.”[3]
I think it is more likely that Jesus began in the
Christian mind as a celestial being (like an archangel), believed or
claimed to be revealing divine truths through revelations (and, by
bending the ear of prophets in previous eras, through hidden messages
planted in scripture). Christianity thus began the same way Islam and
Mormonism did: by their principal apostles (Mohammed and Joseph Smith)
claiming to have received visions from their religion’s “actual” teacher
and founder, in each case an angel (Gabriel dictated the Koran, Moroni
provided the Book of Mormon).
On this model, Christianity, as a Jewish sect,
began when someone (most likely Cephas, perhaps backed by his closest
devotees) claimed this “Jesus” had at last revealed that he had tricked
the Devil by becoming incarnate and being crucified by the Devil (in the
region of the heavens ruled by Devil), thereby atoning for all of
Israel’s sins, so the Jerusalem temple cult no longer mattered, the sins
of Israel could no longer hold back God’s promise, and the end of the
world could soon begin. On this theory, Christians did not go looking
for proof-texts after their charismatic leader died, but actually
conjured this angelic being’s salvific story from a pesher-like reading
of scripture, finding clues to the whole thing especially in the
conjunction of Daniel 9, Jeremiah 23 & 25, Isaiah 52-53, and
Zechariah 3 & 6. Because it solved a major theological and political
problem of the time: how the world could be saved when God’s temple
(and thus atonement for Israel’s sins) remained in the hands of a
corrupt elite “obviously” rejected by God.
It would be several decades later when subsequent
members of this cult, after the world had not yet ended as claimed,
started allegorizing the gospel of this angelic being by placing him in
earth history as a divine man, as a commentary on the gospel and its
relation to society and the Christian mission. The same had already been
done to other celestial gods and heroes, who were being transported
into earth history all over the Greco-Roman world, a process now called
Euhemerization, after the author Euhemerus, who began the trend in the
4th century B.C. by converting the celestial Zeus and Uranus into
ordinary human kings and placing them in past earth history, claiming
they were “later” deified (in a book ironically titled Sacred Scripture).
Other gods then underwent the same transformation, from Romulus
(originally the celestial deity Quirinus) to Osiris (originally the
heavenly lord whom pharaohs claimed to resemble, he was eventually
transformed into a historical pharaoh himself).
Contrary to an oft-repeated myth in contemporary
scholarship, before Christianity began both Romulus and Osiris were
believed by their devotees to be slain deities subsequently resurrected
to heavenly glory (as were many others of the type, from Zalmoxis to
Dionysus to Adonis to Inanna), who now could bring glory or salvation to
their followers.[4]
Of these Osiris presents the most apt theological parallel: as Plutarch
explains in his treatise on the cult, in public stories Osiris was
placed in history as a historical king subsequently deified, but in
private exegesis these were explained as allegories for the actual truth
of the matter, which was that each year Osiris descends and becomes
incarnate and is slain not on earth, but in the lower heavens, and then
rises from the dead and reascends to power in the upper heavens, having
gained power over death by this cosmic ritual, which he then shares with
his earthly devotees. In the earliest redaction we can reconstruct of
the Ascension of Isaiah this appears to be exactly what was imagined to happen for Jesus, only once for all, not yearly.[5]
On this theory, when Paul says “the scriptures” tell us that Jesus “died” and “was buried” and only then
was he ever “seen” by Cephas and the apostles (1 Cor. 15:3-5), he means
exactly what he says. Just as in this and all other summaries of the
gospel Paul provides (from here to Philippians 2) there is no mention of
a ministry, or of Jesus being seen by anyone (much less anyone taught
and hand-picked by him in life), because these things did not yet exist
in Christian conception. They would be allegorical fictions contrived
later by the authors of the Gospels. When Paul wrote, the death and
burial of Jesus were known only from hidden messages in scripture, just
as Romans 16:25-26 says. And this knowledge was facilitated by this
Jesus then at last appearing to the apostles to inform them of all this,
and what it meant. In fact, being thus visited by the celestial Christ
is what secured one’s status as an apostle (1 Cor. 9:1; Gal 1:11-12).
Just as Satan was declared the Archon “of the
powers of the air” (Eph. 2:2) and the God “of this Age” (2 Cor. 4:4), so
when Jesus is said to have been crucified by the “Archons of this Age”
(1 Cor. 2:8), we might be seeing what would later be described in the
earliest redaction of the Ascension of Isaiah: a reference to
Satan and his demons crucifying Jesus, not the Jews and Romans. And just
as Adam was in some accounts buried in the heavens (as in chapter 40 of
the Greek text of the Life of Adam and Eve), so possibly was
Jesus imagined to have been. The incarnation, in a body of Davidic
flesh, still would have been imagined as necessary to fulfill scripture.
But as depicted in the Ascension of Isaiah, this would have happened in “the sky.”
This “Jesus” would most likely have been the same
archangel identified by Philo of Alexandria as already extant in Jewish
theology.[6]
Philo knew this figure by all of the attributes Paul already knew Jesus
by: the firstborn son of God (Rom. 8:29), the celestial “image of God”
(2 Cor. 4:4), and God’s agent of creation (1 Cor. 8:6). He was also
God’s celestial high priest (Heb. 2:17, 4:14, etc.) and God’s “Logos.”
And Philo says this being was identified as the figure named “Jesus” in
Zechariah 6. So it would appear that already before Christianity there
were Jews aware of a celestial being named Jesus who had all of the
attributes the earliest Christians were associating with their celestial being named Jesus. They therefore had no need of a historical man
named Jesus. All they needed was to imagine this celestial Jesus
undergoing a heavenly incarnation and atoning death, in order to
accomplish soteriologically what they needed, in order to no longer rely
upon the Jewish temple authorities for their salvation.[7]
Such is the theory. Why might we conclude it’s
the more likely explanation? Because the sequence of evidence aligns
with it. As Bart Ehrman himself has recently confessed, the earliest
documentation we have shows Christians regarded Jesus to be a
pre-existent celestial angelic being.[8]
Though Ehrman struggles to try and insist this is not how the cult
began, it is hard to see the evidence any other way, once we abandon
Christian faith assumptions about how to read the texts. The earliest
Epistles only ever refer to Jesus as a celestial being revealing truths
through visions and messages in scripture. There are no references in
them to Jesus preaching (other than from heaven), or being a preacher,
having a ministry, performing miracles, or choosing or having disciples,
or communicating by any means other than revelation and scripture, or
ever even being on earth. This is completely reversed in the Gospels.
Which were written decades later, and are manifestly fictional. Yet all
subsequent historicity claims, in all subsequent texts, are based on
those Gospels.
We also have to remember that all other evidence
from the first eighty years of Christianity's development was
conveniently not preserved (not even in quotation or refutation). While a
great deal more evidence was forged in its place: we know of over forty
Gospels, half a dozen Acts, scores of fake Epistles, wild legends, and
doctored passages. Thus, the evidence has passed through a very
pervasive and destructive filter favoring the views of the later Church, in which it was vitally necessary to salvation to insist
that Jesus was a historical man who really was crucified by Pontius
Pilate (as we find obsessively insisted upon in the letters of
Ignatius). Thus to uncover the truth of how the cult began, we have to
look for clues, and not just gullibly trust the literary productions of
the second century.
Jesus belongs to a fraternity of worshipped
demigods peculiar to the Greco-Roman era and region. All were “savior
gods” (literally so called). They were all the “son” of God
(occasionally his “daughter”). They all undergo a “passion” (literally
the same word in the Greek, patheôn), which was some suffering or
struggle (sometimes even resulting in death), through which they all
obtain victory over death, which they share in some fashion with their
followers. They all had stories about them set in human history on
earth. Yet none of them ever actually existed. Jesus can be shown to
belong to several other typically mythical classes of person as well,
unlike almost every other figure of antiquity (even the greatest of
emperors and kings).[9]
These people were, more often than not, not historical. Yet all were
depicted as such in stories written by their believers. We cannot
therefore simply declare Jesus the unusual exception. We need a reason.
We need evidence. And when we look for it, it dissolves.
No evidence outside the Bible can be shown to be
based on anything but the Gospels or Christian testimony derived from
the Gospels. And inside the Bible we have (1) forgeries (which, being
fake, cannot count as evidence), (2) the earliest Epistles that seem
strangely silent or ambiguous as to the earthly existence of Jesus, and
(3) the most suspiciously mythical Gospels. Not exactly good evidence to
go by.
Of course there is much to debate. When Paul
twice refers to “Brothers of the Lord,” does he mean biological kin, or
baptized Christians (who were all Brothers of the Lord: Rom. 8:15-29)?
When Paul says Jesus “came to be” (genomenos) from the “sperm of David” does he mean descended from David, or manufactured by God, literally from the sperm of David? When Paul says Jesus “came to be” (genomenos)
“from a woman” does he mean literally, or allegorically (as in Gal.
4:24)? When Paul says Jesus was “tempted in every way,” does he mean as
an ordinary man, or merely resisting the temptation to seize absolute
divine power (as in Phil. 2:5-9)? When Paul says Jesus was “declared”
the “Son of God in power” from his resurrection, is he referring to a post-hoc rationalization of a cult leader’s death, or to God’s heavenly re-bestowment of a humbled archangel’s prior status?
We need to ask these questions. Because the old
way of looking at the evidence does not fit so well as has been thought.
And even among secular scholars this has until now been driven by
Christian faith assumptions, rather than a new and genuinely objective
look at what the evidence tells us.[10]
When we look instead without those assumptions, that Christianity may
have been started by a revealed Jesus rather than a historical Jesus is
corroborated by at least three things: the sequence of evidence shows
precisely that development (from celestial, revealed Jesus in the
Epistles, to a historical ministry in the Gospels decades later), all
similar savior cults from the period have the same backstory (a cosmic
savior, later historicized), and the original Christian Jesus (in the Epistles of Paul) sounds exactly like the Jewish archangel Jesus, who certainly did not exist. So when it comes to a historical Jesus, maybe we no longer need that hypothesis.
Notes
[1] For a list (which I will continue to update), see item 22 in Richard Carrier, “Ehrman on Historicity Recap,” Richard Carrier Blogs (24 July 2012): http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/1794#22.
[2] Richard Carrier, “Bayes’ Theorem and the Modern Historian: Proving History Requires Improving Methods,” The Bible & Interpretation (April 2012): http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/car368023.shtml.
[3] Philip Davies, “Did Jesus Exist?” The Bible & Interpretation (August 2012): http://www.bibleinterp.com/opeds/dav368029.shtml.
[4]
The evidence for these being dying-and-rising gods (usually with
associated personal salvation cults) is overwhelming, and it is a
scandal that anyone who should know the facts of the matter would still
be claiming the contrary. I collect the evidence and scholarship in
Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 45-47, 56-58, 96-108, 168-73.
[5] Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 36-48.
[6] Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 200-05.
[7] Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 143-45, 153-59.
[8] Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (HarperOne, 2014).
[9] Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 168-73, 222-34.
[10] After reviewing the extensive new look at the evidence now surveyed in Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus,
see also Richard Carrier, “List of Responses to Defenders of the
Historicity of Jesus” (18 June 2014):
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/5730.
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