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1 Corinthians
| 15:12 Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? |
| 15:13 But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: |
| 15:14 And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. | |
| 15:15 Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. | |
| 15:16 For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: |
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| 15:17 And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. |
Following up on previous posts including the Ehrman/Craig debate and Doherty's Jesus Puzzle, I'd like to post more comprehensively and argue against claims for Jesus' existence. I'd recommend that you look at my previous two links in this post in addition to this one.
Dan Barker's book, Godless, gives a great rundown regarding claims for Jesus' existence. I'll summarize his points here and offer some narration.
Here are Dan Barker's four main points for refuting the existance of Jesus:
1) There is no external historical confirmation for the New Testament stories.
2) The New Testament stories are internally contradictory.
3) There are natural explanations for the origin of the Jesus legend.
4) The miracle reports make the story unhistorical (Barker 252)
The position of various scholars and writers such as John Allegro, G.A. Wells, Michael Martin, Timothy Freke, Peter Gandy, Robert Price, Frank Zindler, and Earl Doherty (Barker 252) insist that Jesus didn't exist, but rather was the product of exaggerated, embellished, legend, revision, storytelling, and propaganda by believers for believers.
Personally, I take the stance that there may have been a preacher or several preachers during the alleged time of Jesus, but no divine man born of a virgin who performed miracles and was able to give eternal life existed. If there's no good reason to believe that Jesus existed, there's no good reason to believe in the Christian God, The truth of the Bible, etc, and Christianity falls apart as Paul suggests in Corinthians.
The Gospels or any part of the Bible is not a reliable historical document for several reasons:
- The miracle claims do not establish historical value.
- The "eyewitness testimony" is well after the events happened and shouldn't be accepted anyway because there's no good reason to suggest that the stories are true.
- Historians want to determine what probably happened. Miracles are not probable events and thus, by definition, are improbable.
- We need several sources that are disinterested, well-documented, and reliable.
- Nothing outside the NT establishes these stories as fact.
- We have no original manuscripts.
- The stories aren't even attributed to an individual!
Just as we would look at The Odyssey or The Iliad, we can notice that the miracle stories, God claims, etc are not accepted. Historians, though, note that the stories resemble something of fact, but do not accept the extraordinary claims. Why should the Bible be any different? Many other "Holy Books" also profess to be the truth and its believers also profess these claims. Books such as The Koran and The Book of Mormon fall into the same category of "Faith Profession" as the Gospels do. Religious texts are not historical documents.
Barker notes, There is not a single contemporary historical mention of Jesus not by the Romans or Jews, not by believers or unbelievers, not during his entire lifetime. The earliest candidate for extrabiblical confirmation, one small paragraph in Josephus, dates to the mid 90s C.E., which is more than 60 years after Jesus supposedly died" (Barker, 253).
This is very important because, without historical information from the time of Jesus, we've no good reason to accept the claim that Jesus existed. The further and further we go away from the time of Jesus' existence, we realize that these accounts can not be sufficient to establish reliable eyewitness testimony.
Barker continues, "The lack of contemporary corroboration does not disprove his existence, of course, but it certainly casts great doubt on the historicity of a man who supposedly had a great impact on the world. Someone should have noticed" (Barker, 253).
I already dealt with the "You can't disprove God" objection in a previous post, so don't even try that fallacious argument. What we need to establish Jesus' existence, divinity, and other claims is hard evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There should have been great documentation of Jesus from people of the early first century. Wouldn't you think that people who experienced such divinity and greatness would record this information and use it to establish the existence of Jesus as a fact...? But we see nothing.
Imagine if you were a scholar during the first century and a man came into your town claiming to be the son of a god who can perform miracles, raise from the dead, and offer grand promises, teachings, and hopes for a "new life." Wouldn't you write something down, share your findings, and work your hardest to establish this as fact? Sure, many of the people during this time were illiterate, but there were people in the area who were not. I'll delve into this later.
"The early years of the Roman Republic is one of the most historically documented times in history. One of the writers alive during the time of Jesus was Philo-Judaeus (sometimes known as Philo of Alexandria).
John E. Remsburg writes the following in his book The Christ: Philo was born before the beginning of the Christian era, and lived until long after the reputed death of Christ. He wrote an account of the Jews covering the entire time that Christ is said to have existed on earth. He was living in or near Jerusalem when Christ's miraculous birth and the Herodian massacre occurred. He was there when Christ made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. He was there when the crucifixion with its attendant earthquake, supernatural darkness, and resurrection of the dead took place -- when Christ himself rose from the dead, and in the presence of many witnesses ascended into heaven. These marvelous events which must have filled the world with amazement, had they really occurred, were unknown to him. It was Philo who developed the doctrine of the Logos, or Word, and although this Word incarnate dwelt in that very land and in the presence of multitudes revealed himself and demonstrated his divine powers, Philo saw it not.
The silence on behalf of Philo is quite telling.
What about Josephus?
Remsburg writes:
Josephus, the renowned Jewish historian, was a native of Judea. He was born in 37 A.D., and was a contemporary of the Apostles. He was, for a time, Governor of Galilee, the province in which Christ lived and taught. He traversed every part of this province and visited the places where but a generation before Christ had performed his prodigies. He resided in Cana, the very city in which Christ is said to have wrought his first miracle. He mentions every noted personage of Palestine and describes every important event which occurred there during the first seventy years of the Christian era.
Barker writes:
He [Jospehus] was a messianic Jew, now a Christian, so he could not be accused of bias. He did not spend a lot of time or space on his report of Jesus, showing that he was merely reporting facts, not spouting propaganda like the Gospel writers. [...] Josephus was a highly respected and much quoted Roman historian. He died sometime after after the year 100. His two major tomes were The Antiquities of the Jews and The Wars of the Jews (Barker, 255).
Antiquities' Book 18 Chapter 3 reads:
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.
It's very odd that this is the only place where this is mentioned, in such short detail, in Josephus' works. Don't you think this part should have much more information and laud more than one single paragraph? Barker notes, "Most scholars, including most fundamentalist scholars, admit that at least some parts of this paragraph cannot be authentic. Many are convinced that the entire paragraph is a forgery, an interpolation inserted by Christians at a later time" (Barker, 255).
The paragraph is absent from early copies of the works of Josephus. For example, it does not appear in Origen's second-century version of Josephus, in Origen Contra Celsum, where Origen fiercely defended Christianity [...] Origen quoted from Josephus to prove his points, but he never once used this paragraph, which would have been the ultimate ace up his sleeve (Barker 255).
The first person known to quote this paragraph was Bishop Eusebius in the fourth century during the time of Constantine. "Eusebius once wrote that it was permissible "medicine" for historians to create fictions - prompting historian Jacob Burckhardt to call Eusebius "the first thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity." (Barker 255)
The fact that the Josephus-Jesus paragraph shows up at this point in history - at a time when interpolations and revisions were quite common and when the emperor was eager to demolish gnostic Christianity and replace it with literalistic Christianity - makes the passage quite dubious. Many scholars believe that Eusebius was the forger and interpolater of the paragraph on Jesus that magically appears in the works of Josephus after more than two centuries (Barker, 256).
At this point, the Josephus reference seems to be demolished...but wait, there's more!
Barker notes that Josephus would not have referred to Jesus as the Christ or talk about "receiving the truth" because Josephus was a Jew - if he believed this, he would have converted or at least written more about this all-important fact! Josephus didn't convert and Origen even wrote that Josephus didn't believe in Jesus as the Christ (Barker 256).
Barker's third objection is that the Jesus paragraph is misplaces/out of context; the paragraph simply doesn't logically follow. Shouldn't Jesus get a chapter or some larger mention how he was such a calamity during this time?
Barker's fourth point is simple: it argues that the phrase "to this day" is quite peculiar: "The phrase "to this day" shows that this is a later interpolation. There was no tribe of Christians during Josephus' time. Christianity did not get off the ground until the second century" (Barker, 256).
The great PBS special about the early Christians, From Jesus to Christ, filled with various scholars, theologians, and people very knowledgeable about the roots of Christianity, describes the early Christians as very diverse, still getting their beliefs together, unsure of interpretation, and not really established. Information is found here.
Part one of the special echoes what I discussed before, "The problem for historians is simply that we don't have sources that come from the actual time of Jesus himself."
Barker notes that Josephus does not comment on Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John's Gospels, or the writings of Paul. He goes into great detail about John the Baptist, Judas of Galilee, Theudas the magician, but there's nothing about Jesus or the Gospels. Like the writings of Paul, Josephus is silent about Jesus' miracles. In all of Josephus' works, there is nothing else about any of the claims in this Jesus paragraph (Barker 257). This forgery paragraph was very obviously not written by Josephus...
The language, "the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him" and " for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure" is not typical of a historian or any of Josephus' other writings (Barker 257).
Jospehus' Antiquities mentions Jesus in one other part, but says nothing about him:
Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the Sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned...
Barker continues, This stoning was not mentioned in Acts and Christian scholars widely consider this text to be doctored. Hegesippus, a Jewish Christian, wrote a church history in 170 C.E. saying that James was killed in a riot. "Clement confirms this (quoted by Eusebius). Most scholars agree that Josephus is referring to another James here, possibly the same one that Paul mentions in Acts, who led a sect in Jerusalem. Instead of strengthening Christianity , this "brother of Jesus" interpolation contradicts history (Barker, 258).
After the first century, other cited scholars are simply too late in the game to validate Jesus' existence. We shouldn't accept testimony about 60 years after Jesus supposedly existed and performed various miracles. What, though, do we find in the second century?
Seutonius wrote Twelve Ceasars in 112 C.E. mentioning that Claudius
banished the Jews from Rome, since they had made a commotion because of Chrestus, and that during the time of Nero punishments were also inflicted on the Christians, a sect professing a new and mischievous religious belief... Notice that there is no mention of Jesus by name. [...] Chrestus does not mean Christ. It was a common name meaning "good," used by both slaves and free people and occurring more than 80 times in Latin inscriptions (Barker, 259).
Even if, for some reason, Chrestus meant Jesus, this doesn't go into detail about Jesus and only says that people were talking about Chrestus...the Jews were awaiting the Messiah. Jesus of Nazareth was not mentioned anywhere else in Seutonius' writings. Seutonius, though, is not very reliable because he wrote about how Caesar bodily rose to Heaven (Barker, 259).
"In 112 C.E., Pliny (the younger) said that "Christians were singing a hymn to Christ as to a god" (Barker, 259). This doesn't mention anything about Jesus or give evidence for Jesus' existence. This is merely a report of what he heard people singing. If people were singing about Zeus and a historian reported this, would you believe in Zeus?
Our next candidate is the Roman historian Tacitus. Professor of New Testament, Darrell J. Doughty at Drew University evaluates Tacticus' writings here: The text is full of difficulties, and there are not a few textual variations in the mss tradition (e.g., "Christianos" or "Chrestianos" or even "Christianus"? - "Christus" or "Chrestos"?) -- which at least reflects the fact that this text has been worked over.
It is not even clear what Tacitus means to say - e.g., whether he implies that the charge of setting the fires brought against Christians was false; whether some Christians were arrested because they set fires and others because of their general "hatred for humankind"; what those persons arrested "confessed" to--arson or Christianity? -- or whether they were executed by crucifixion or immolation, or some one way and some in another.
But the real question concerns the historical reliability of this information -- i.e., whether we have to do here with a later Christian insertion. When I consider a question such as this, the first question to ask is whether it conceivable or perhaps even probable that later Christians might have modified ancient historical sources; and the answer to this question certainly must be yes! Then, with regard to this particular source, I note that the earliest manuscript we have for the Annales dates from the 11th century, and must therefore have been copied and recopied many times, by generations of Christian scribes (and Christian apologists). So there were certainly many opportunities to modify what Tacitus originally wrote.
Just like Doughty notes, Barker also says that there is no historical evidence that Nero persecuted Christians.
There certainly was not a "great crowd" of Christians in Rome around 60 C.E., and the term Christian was not in use in the first century. Tacitus is either doctoring history from a distance or repeating a myth without checking his facts. Historians generally agree that Nero did not burn Rome..." (Barker 260).
Barker concludes,
All of these [second century] "confirmations" of Jesus are at best second-hand hearsay of what others were thought to have believed. They would be worthless in a court of law. It would be like a witness to a murder saying, "I did not see the act myself, but I read in a letter from someone who is now dead that they heard from a probably reliable source who is now dead from a probably reliable source that someone actually believed that a person with the same or similar name committed the crime (Barker 261).
Terullian and Justin the Martyr are also late on the scene during 197 C.E. and 150 C.E.
Parts of the Jewish Talmud that mention Jesus were produced in the second to the fifth centuries.
Other bandwagon arguments such as "So many people believe this and there are so many copies" are fallacious and do nothing to establish truth value to Jesus' existence. Millions of people also believe in Allah, the story of Joseph Smith, and Hindu gods...does this mean that these stories are also true? Of course not.
The New Testament's reliability may also be argued on the fact that it came about in a short period of time, but this also does nothing to establish truth value. We don't have original Biblical manuscripts of Gospels, we are working off translations of translations that have been edited a great deal, and the content is still questionable.
If we're going to allow this " short timespan" argument, we'd have to allow this same argument for the Book of Mormon : Joseph Smith supposedly received the Golden Plates in 1823 and published the text in 1830. There are also signed testimonies of 11 witnesses who claim to have also seen the Golden Tablets. Most scholars agree that we have the original, even, of the Book of Mormon that Joseph Smith wrote, but this still does not make its content true (Barker, 264).
I also discuss Satya Sai Baba, the living Indian guru, who has millions of followers. His followers attest to the miracle claims, there are videos of the miracles, but we still don't accept the miracle claims. Read more on miracle claims and Sai Baba here.
So, putting the historians aside, what can we salvage, if anything, from the New Testament? I already discussed that the Gospels are not historical documents, but are there some truths that can be separated from the miracles? What about Paul's writings?
It's very clear that Paul never saw Jesus. He had a vision on the road to Damascus. Barker writes,
If Jesus had been a real person, certainly Paul, his main cheerleader, would have talked about him as a man. The Jesus of whom Paul writes is a disembodied, spiritual Christ, speaking from the sky, not a flesh and blood man of history. Paul never talks about Jesus' parents or the virgin birth or Bethlehem. He never mentions Nazareth, never refers to Jesus as the "son of man," avoids recounting a single miracle or deed committed by Jesus (except for reciting the Last Supper ritual), does not fix any historical activities of Jesus in any time or place, makes any reference to the 12 apostles by name, omits the trial, and fails to place the crucifixion in a geographical location (Barker, 264).
It's very clear that Paul should have and would have used historical claims to establish truth value in his persuasion. Why wouldn't he quote Jesus, talk about how he actually existed, etc? If I were trying to persuade you that a person came onto college campus and performed miraculous deeds, wouldn't I try to establish credibility by giving you facts instead of anecdotes and promises? It's very simple... there are no real historical facts about Jesus because he didn't exist. Paul didn't have them, early Christians didn't have them, and we certainly don't have them. The silence from historians and individuals such as Paul is outstanding.
Barker continues:
The Gospels were written no earlier than 70 C.E., and most likely were written during the 90s C.E. and later. [...] The writer of Matthew, for example, refers to "Matthew" in the third person. Neither Mark nor Luke appears in any list of the disciples of Jesus, and we have no way of knowing where they got their information. The general scholarly consensus is that Mark was written first and that the writers of Matthew and Luke borrowed from Mark, adapting and adding to it.
Again, we have little reason to accept the historicity of the Gospels. But can we get any useful information about anything as a matter of fact?
There is very little that can be ascertained from the four gospels about the historic Jesus. [...] The writer of Matthew says Jesus was born "in the days of Herod the king." Herod died in 4 B.C.E. Luke reports that Jesus was born "when Cyrenius was governor of Syria," Cyrenius became governor of Syria in 6 C.E. That is a discrepancy of at least nine years. Luke says Jesus was born during a Roman census [...] This would have been when Jesus was at least nine years old, according to Matthew. There is no evidence of any other census during the reign of Augustus; Palestine was not part of the Roman Empire until 6 C.E. Matthew reports that Herod slaughtered all the first-born in the land in order to execute Jesus. No historian, contemporary or later, mentions this supposed genocide, an event that should have caught someone's attention. (Barker, 266).
This huge discrepancies do even more to hurt the credibility of the gospels. The authors can't get their facts straight and are making up events that never really happened.
Scholars agree that the last 12 verses of Mark were later added and are very dubious (full article is here. Many others can be found:
Mark 16:9-20 has been called a later addition to the Gospel of Mark by most New Testament scholars in the past century. The main reason for doubting the authenticity of the ending is that it does not appear in some of the oldest existing witnesses, and it is reported to be absent from many others in ancient times by early writers of the Church. Moreover, the ending has some stylistic features which also suggest that it came from another hand. The Gospel is obviously incomplete without these verses, and so most scholars believe that the final leaf of the original manuscript was lost, and that the ending which appears in English versions today (verses 9-20) was supplied during the second century.
The Westminster Study Edition of the Holy Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1948).
vv. 9-20. This section is a later addition; the original ending of Mark appears to have been lost. The best and oldest manuscripts of Mark end with ch. 16:8. Two endings were added very early. The shorter reads: "But they reported briefly to those with Peter all that had been commanded them. And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them from the East even to the West the sacred and incorruptible message of eternal salvation." The longer addition appears in English Bibles; its origin is uncertain; a medieval source ascribes it to an elder Ariston (Aristion), perhaps the man whom Papias (c. A.D. 135) calls a disciple of the Lord. It is drawn for the most part from Luke, chapter 24, and from John, chapter 20; there is a possibility that verse 15 may come from Matthew 28:18-20. It is believed that the original ending must have contained an account of the risen Christ's meeting with the disciples in Galilee (chs. 14:28; 16:7).
A Commentary on the Holy Bible, edited by J.R. Dummelow (New York: MacMillan, 1927), pages 732-33.
Internal evidence points definitely to the conclusion that the last twelve verses are not by St. Mark. For, (1) the true conclusion certainly contained a Galilean appearance (Mark 16:7, cp. 14:28), and this does not. (2) The style is that of a bare catalogue of facts, and quite unlike St. Mark's usual wealth of graphic detail. (3) The section contains numerous words and expressions never used by St. Mark. (4) Mark 16:9 makes an abrupt fresh start, and is not continuous with the preceding narrative. (5) Mary Magdalene is spoken of (16:9) as if she had not been mentioned before, although she has just been alluded to twice (15:47, 16:1). (6) The section seems to represent not a primary tradition, such as Peter's, but quite a secondary one, and in particular to be dependent upon the conclusion of St. Matthew, and upon Luke 24:23f.
Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (Stuttgart, 1971), pages 122-126.
Thus, on the basis of good external evidence and strong internal considerations it appears that the earliest ascertainable form of the Gospel of Mark ended with 16.8. At the same time, however out of deference to the evident antiquity of the longer ending and its importance in the textual tradition of the Gospel, the Committee decided to include verses 9-20 as part of the text, but to enclose them within double square brackets to indicate that they are the work of an author other than the evangelist.
Barker notes,
The Gospel accounts cannot be considered historical, but even if they were, they tell us that the earliest biography of Jesus contains no resurrection! They tell us that the Gospels were edited, adapted, altered and appended at later times to make them fit the particular sectarian theology of the writers. The Gospels themselves are admittedly propagandistic:
20:30 And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book:
20:31 But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.
This hardly sounds like the stuff of objective historical reporting. This verse sends up a red flag that what we are reading should be taken with a very large grain of salt (Barker, 268).
I think Dan Barker for writing his book Godless and can't wait to see him in April during the Easter break! You should buy his book and read it!
The existence of Jesus is often not widely debated. Christians just assume that there was historical evidence or just take it "on faith." With all of this evidence contrary to Jesus' existence, faith is not the rational position to take. As I've noted before, faith is no virtue; faith is merely intellectual bankruptcy. We should consider the evidence and reform our beliefs if they don't line up with reality.
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I wrote a recent short paper for my Catholicism class, so I might as well post it here. A common theme of "maybe all religions are right" appears in many contexts, so I'll analyze that claim. I may expand on my ideas later.
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