The Historicity of Jesus
My Positions
- A Galilean preacher called Yeshua, baptised by John, who gathered followers and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, probably existed. This is the view of almost every historian in the field, including the agnostics and atheists among them, and I see no reason to dissent from it.
- Almost nothing else about him can be established. The birth narratives are fiction, the miracles are claims, and the sayings reach us through decades of oral transmission and theological editing.
- Mythicism, the view that no such person existed, is possible but is not the best explanation of the evidence. It is not more sceptical to hold a worse-supported view because it is more inconvenient for Christians.
Notes
- The evidence for a man. Paul's letters, written within about twenty-five years of the crucifixion, refer to Jesus as born of a woman, descended from David, crucified, and having a brother, James, whom Paul says he met (Galatians 1:19). Josephus, writing in the 90s, mentions "James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" in a passage most scholars accept as genuine, whatever has been done to his other, more famous paragraph. Tacitus, around 116, records that Christus was executed under Pilate. The gospels, whatever else they are, are evidence that a movement existed within forty years that remembered a founder with a hometown, a family and an execution.
- The criterion of embarrassment. The early Christians were stuck with facts they would not have invented: a messiah from Nazareth, which required a fictional census to get him born in Bethlehem; a baptism by John, which implied subordination and which Matthew and Luke visibly struggle to explain; and crucifixion, the death of a slave, which Paul calls "a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks". Inventors of a god do not usually give him an embarrassing biography and then spend their energies apologising for it.
- The mythicist case and why it falls short. It rests on the absence of contemporary records (true, and true of every other Galilean peasant), on reading Paul's Jesus as a purely celestial being (which requires explaining away the woman, the law, the brother), and on parallels with dying-and-rising pagan gods, most of which, when checked, turn out to be fabricated or wildly overstated. Richard Carrier has produced the most rigorous version, and it remains the view of one scholar against a field that includes Bart Ehrman, who left the faith and wrote a book defending the existence of the man precisely because he thought the mythicists were embarrassing the sceptical side.
- What cannot be known. Whether he said most of what is attributed to him; the Jesus Seminar's voting suggests perhaps a fifth of the sayings go back to him, and the method is itself contested. Whether he thought he was the messiah. What happened to the body (Historical evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus). Anything supernatural, for the reasons under Argument from Miracles. The gospels disagree with one another and with the physical evidence too often to be read as reportage (Biblical Literalism and Inerrancy).
- Why the distinction matters. That Jesus existed is no more evidence for Christianity than Muhammad's existence is for Islam or Joseph Smith's for Mormonism. Founders exist; the claims made about them are another matter. Conceding the man costs the sceptic nothing and removes the one argument on which the apologist is on firm ground.
- Why I bother. This is a calibration test. If my scepticism only ever lands on the side that discomfits believers, it is not scepticism; it is a team. Here the evidence points, modestly, to a historical figure, and so that is where I point.
Sources
- Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (2012)
- Carrier, R., On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (2014)
- Casey, M., Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? (2014)
- Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1; Tacitus, Annals 15.44