Ted begins his concluding essay with a quotation in which Doherty sums up his case. Doherty's argument is simple: If Christianity had begun among the followers of a preacher so charismatic as to make those followers believe he was the son of God and savior of the world, then the failure of Paul and the other epistle writers to say anything about that man's life makes no sense. The "Top 20" was just a list of places where we would especially expect references to Jesus' earthly life, given an assumption that the writers were talking about the same Jesus that the gospel writers talked about. In his responses, Ted has argued that "Most of the passages Mr. Doherty has cited do not raise a reasonable expectation for the . . . issues he says are missing." What I have attempted here is to show how Ted has failed to support that conclusion.
Ted remarks that "It is one thing to say that a mention would fit a given passage. It is quite another to have a high expectation for a mention." Of course a high expectation must be justified. But in this case an ordinary understanding of human nature provides all the justification anyone needs. When a person does something or says something that impresses other people, those people talk about what that person said and did. Jesus, if real, must have said or done something quite spectacular, but whatever that spectacular thing was, Paul doesn't say, and neither does any other first-century Christian writer.
OK, they believed he rose from the dead. Isn't that spectacular enough? Yes, if it had really happened, it would have been, but we have no good reason to believe it did. And so we have to explain why his followers thought he rose from the dead, and the explanation must have something to do with something he said or did during his lifetime. It is not plausible, because it is not consistent with human nature, that the early Christians would have been so fixated on Jesus' resurrection that they would have lost all interest in whatever happened during his lifetime to make them believe in the first place that the resurrection had happened.
Let anyone who disagrees try this. Identify one other founder of some movement or sect—religious, philosophical, political, whatever—about whom the following are true: (1) His historical existence is undisputed; (2) he was killed by certain of his adversaries; (3) there are extant documents about him, written within a few decades of his death by members of the sect he founded; and (4) although they mention the means by which he died, none of those documents say anything about the founder's life, none make any unambiguous references to his killers, and none of them explicitly attribute any of the sect's teachings to him.
Ted tries to turn the tables with his own "top 20 silences" but then betrays their irrelevance by observing, "It is reasonable to assume that the authors knew the answers to all or almost all of my top 20 silences." But the question is not about whether they knew. The question is about whether is reasonable to think they would have told what they knew.
Ted shows again, in the next section of his conclusion, that he is missing the point.
Doherty wants to set aside preconceptions one gets from reading the gospels. And, he does this to more than just the 4 gospels of the New Testament. Nowhere in this discussion do we see reference to the early hypothetical Passion Narrative, or Lost Sayings Gospel Q, or the Signs Gospel. Nor the other gospels which now exist or that we know did exist: The Gospel of Thomas, Oxyrhynchus 1224 Gospel, Egerton Gospel, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of the Egyptians, Gospel of the Hebrews. Nor does he include the Epistle of Barnabas which references a number of gospel traditions.
To begin with, hypothetical documents cannot be evidence for anything. A document that does not now exist and whose contents are not known, with as much certainty as if it did exist, cannot prove anything.
As for the others, they are not even relevant as counterexamples to Doherty's argument unless there is good evidence that they were written during the same period as the New Testament epistles that Doherty is discussing. The documents that Ted wants to bring into the discussion are, according to him, "typically dated within a range that overlaps the dates given to the early writings Doherty quotes from here, with the only exception being Paul's letters." In the first place, I don't know that, and I'm not taking Ted's word for it, if only because I have no idea which scholars he considers typical. In the second place, most of Doherty's comments are on Paul's letters, so that's a pretty significant exception. In the third place, the typical dating may well be questionable.
As Ted observes, the gospels are typically dated between 70 CE (Mark) and sometime between 90 and 100 CE (John). Doherty thinks that's too early by a few decades, and he thinks, as I do, that the consensus rests on historicist assumptions. Ted begs to differ: "The belief of perhaps most scholars . . . that GMark was written around 70AD is for reasons other than preconceptions about a historical Jesus." Obviously, they must have some reasons other than "Jesus was real" for picking that date, but it is reasonable to doubt that those reasons would be compelling if not conjoined to the historicist assumption. Ted refers vaguely to "internal clues" but doesn't say what they are.
I could comment on those clues if I knew what they were, but I have no
idea, and it isn't because I haven't tried to learn. For some years now, I have
been trying to find out what is the evidence—internal, external, whatever—on which scholars base their consensus that Mark was written around 70 CE. I
have spent many hours in the attempt, and I happen to be pretty good with a
search engine. So far, I have found nothing. I don't mean "nothing I agree
with." I don't mean "nothing that convinces me." I mean I have found no
information on that subject.
My personal failure to find what I was
looking for proves nothing, of course, but it is odd, and here is why. There are
countless Web sites operated by evangelical Christians, and at least a few of
the site authors are thoroughly familiar with what the scholarly community has
to say about Christianity's origins. If there were some fact or set of facts
that any scholar, anywhere, was using to defend an early composition date for
Mark, some apologist would have posted it somewhere on the Internet, and other
apologists would have copied it to their Web sites. That they seem not to have
done so suggests strongly that there are no such facts.
Against this silence is a datum that I have not seen effectively disputed: The existence of any written gospel, canonical or otherwise, is not clearly and definitely attested before the middle of the second century, when Justin Martyr refers to four documents he calls "memoirs of the apostles," and it would be another three decades before anybody claimed they had been written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I am not here arguing that they were all written in the second century, but to my knowledge none of the evidence is inconsistent with that hypothesis.
Even if they were written so late, I would not suppose that the stories originated then. I think it is beyond reasonable doubt that stories about Jesus of Nazareth were circulating, at least orally and probably in some written versions as well, during the late first century. What nobody knows at this point is (a) how widespread was their circulation at that time and (b) how widespread was the belief among Christians of that time that they were historically factual stories.
And, yet more to the point, nobody knows whether
any of those stories were already circulating in Paul's time. Doherty's point is that if
they were, then Paul and the other epistle writers seem never to have heard any
of them, and their apparent ignorance is inexplicable under any assumption of
Jesus' historicity. Ted has utterly failed to give us any good reason to think
otherwise.
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This page last updated on June 15, 2015.