By DOUG SHAVER
November
2004
(Sometime after I wrote this, Doherty posted his own response to Muller on his own Web site. It is in three parts and begins at http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/CritiquesMuller1.htm.)
The best response yet that I've seen from someone who thinks Doherty is plain wrong has been by one Bernard Muller, a formerly Catholic humanist who has made a hobby of developing a theory about the historical Jesus. His Web site is at http://historical-jesus.info/.
Muller offers a good rebuttal, but not good enough, in my estimation.
First some observations regarding qualifications. Muller is not a historian or a New Testament scholar, and neither am I. He is an engineer. I am a former journalist currently studying philosophy. He admits to knowing no ancient languages. So do I. He has made a hobby of studying the origins of Christianity. So have I; however, Muller seems likely to have done more reading than I have of primary sources and scholarly commentary.
So, Muller probably knows a few things more than I do about early Christianity. However, his critique does not make it clear that his knowledge justifies his disagreement with Doherty. Muller refers to a review of Doherty's book by Richard Carrier, a historian who certainly knows much more about the subject than either Muller or I. Carrier finds no substantial fault with Doherty's argument. Muller says Carrier is mistaken, but he does not present any evidence clearly supporting that assertion.
Muller's argument seems threefold.
I believe that even if all three points were stipulated, Doherty still has a good case.
Christianity's historical paper trail proves nothing conclusive about Jesus one way or the other. What we have to ask is:
(a) What did Christians believe about Jesus;
(b) When did they believe it; and
(c) Why did they believe it?
The No. 1 problem for the disinterested researcher is that even most skeptical scholars have taken the following answers for granted:
(a) Jesus was a Galilean teacher crucified in Jerusalem by Pontius Pilate;
(b) Christians have always believed this;
(c) Because the first Christians were men who had known him.
The great divide between believers and skeptics has usually been over the resurrection. Believers say the first Christians believed in the resurrection because they saw Jesus alive after his death. Skeptics say they saw no such thing, but nevertheless somehow came to believe they had.
(Some skeptics do have other ideas, but we don't have space to discuss them all. We'll let the majority viewpoint stand in for the others.)
Let us now consider some facts that are not, to my knowledge, disputed by anyone qualified to have an opinion.
And from these facts we infer:
None of the Jerusalem Christians wrote anything that has survived. All we know about them with even a vague semblance of certainty is what Paul says about them, and that is very little beyond a claim that they endorsed his message.
So, what do we know that they believed about Jesus the Christ? They believed he had been crucified and buried, and that he had risen from the dead, and that in so doing he had redeemed the world from sin.
And that he was the divine son of God.
Now, these were Jews. What could any man have done to make them think anything of that sort?
We're used to people believing that a man was god incarnate, even if we don't believe it ourselves. Jews in the first century CE were not used to it. It was anathema to them. They could have become convinced that a man had risen from the dead. They probably were not going to believe, even if they thought he rose from the dead, that he was God.
But what about a man who was extraordinarily charismatic?
That much charisma would not have gone unnoticed. A man who did whatever it would have taken to convince a historically significant number of Jews that he was God Almighty would have gotten plenty of attention, and not only from those who believed him.
There is no contemporary record, nor any reference to a contemporary record, of such a man. Except for Josephus, no document known to have been written during first century makes any reference even to Christians or to anyone else who thought there was such a man. The closest we get to secular testimony for his existence is three early-second-century references (Pliny, Tacitus, and Suetonius) -- not references to the man himself, but to Christians who believed that such a man had lived and been crucified.
Now we can grant that the place was not overrun with journalists and historians, and that an awful lot of documents failed to survive -- absence of evidence and all that. But we still do have an awful lot of documentation about people who, by any criterion, were considerably less interesting than a man who could have made some Jews think he was God in the flesh.
And it gets worse. We're not talking just about people who knew this man and who decided he was God incarnate. We're talking about Jews who never met the guy becoming convinced that he was God incarnate -- those who became Christians after hearing the preaching of the original disciples. Charisma is not transmissible. Conceivably, a few Jews who knew Jesus might have decided he was God. But there was no way they were going to convert other Jews to that idea.
Or so it would seem. Of course, however impossible it seems, if the facts say it must have happened, then we need to make some accommodations in what we think is possible.
If the intellectual landscape, there and then, had been like it is here and now, we might be forced to conclude that they did find a way. Paul was talking about a lot of people, including himself, coming to believe that someone called Jesus had died and risen from the dead. Whom could he have been talking about, if not Jesus of Nazareth?
But the intellectual landscape was not the same. Except for some vestiges, Platonism is long gone from the Western world, but it was alive and well in Paul's world. What Doherty is saying is that this gives us a plausible alternative to an implausible scenario. The issue is not whether Paul's writings prove that he was referring to a mythical Christ who never lived in Galilee or anywhere else in this world. The issue is whether Paul's writings can reasonably be so construed. If they can -- and I think Doherty demonstrates that they can -- then a lot of puzzles are not so puzzling anymore.
If this alternative raises any implausibilities of its own, then of course we're no better off, but I don't think Muller has shown us any such implausibilities.
Here are some comments on a few of his specific objections.
Actually, the Platonic heaven was very vaguely described by Plato, as an upper space inhabited by ethereal "universals", "forms"/"ideas", representing "images" of earthly things, and by an "unknowable" creator god, the Demiurge.
Well, that's a pretty good start toward the kind of multilayered spirit realm described by Doherty. And, since Plato lived in the 5th century BCE, Greek (and Greek-influenced) intellectuals had about five centuries to plug in a few details before Paul came along.
That comes after three pages of convoluted rhetorical speculations leading to some mythical upper world, with nothing suggesting it was believed by anyone in the first three centuries.
The main issue is whether anybody believed it in the first century. Doherty is inferring from Paul's writings that Paul believed it even if nobody else did.
If nobody else did -- if Doherty has to claim that Paul had to make it all up by himself -- then Doherty has a problem, although hardly insurmountable. Darwin revolutionized the modern intellectual world when he published the Origin of Species, but most of the book was little more than a summary of facts that were already common knowledge within the scientific community of his day. Paul could likewise have gotten a great deal of mileage out of a small philosopical innovation. But if, as Doherty claims, these or similar ideas were part of the intellectual climate of Paul's day, then Muller has a problem.
Whether Doherty's theorizing is "convoluted" is perhaps a matter of personal judgment. It looks straightforward enough to me.
And the question remains: how could a descendant of David not be considered an earthly human?
The Christ's Davidic ancestry was not a premise of Paul's argument. It was an inference. The whole notion of the dying savior was not a Jewish invention. Hellenized Jews borrowed it from the mystery religions, and then some adapted it to the messiah concept. But to be the Jewish messiah, he had to be a descendant of David. Very well. He was the messiah, because this had been revealed, and therefore he was David's descendant, because scripture said the messiah would be David's descendant.
Let's now examine the stories of Attis, Mithras and Osiris. Because I am not an expert on ancient mythology, I'll rely on the writings of others.
Doherty argues that there was precedent in various pre-Christian mythologies for what he thinks was Paul's thinking. Muller quotes, from standard sources, various accounts of those myths to show that they clearly imply events happening in this world, not any ethereal realm.
However, it is surely risky to infer from a modern rendition what was on the minds of the ancients who believed those tales. Furthermore, even if a modern version accurately recounts what some ancients believed, it is positively rash to assume that all ancient believers held precisely the same belief. No modern major religion is monolithic. There are many sects within Christianity, Islam and Judaism, and some of the sects are so in conflict with each other that nothing but a common name makes them members of the same religion. Christianity itself was already fragmenting into factions during the first century. We have no reason at all for supposing that the Mithraists of that time, for just one example, were in any better agreement among themselves.
Doherty is making a center piece of ICorinthians2:6-8, trying to demonstrate that for Paul "the rulers" are heavenly authorities. However his main argument comes from epistles ('Ephesians' & 'Colossians') not written by Paul but later by others . . . . This would nullify his argumentation.
No, it would not. In all languages at all times, the meaning of any word is established by usage. Paul was writing in Greek. So was whoever wrote Ephesians and Colossians. If the latter used archon to mean rulers in the spirit world, then Paul could have used it that way, too, unless his context ruled out such a usage.
he calls on two 4th century writers, Sallustius and emperor Julian "the Apostate", but they lived no less than three centuries after Paul!
A more contemporary reference would have been nice, yes, but absent a 1st century citation that contradicts Doherty's point, I think this one works.
Furthermore these authors were not reporting on the beliefs of their days, but only stated their own from some "higher reading"
The point is not whether the belief was prevalent. The point is that if Paul believed it, then he was not the only one.
From here Muller begins a critique of Doherty's interpretation of dozens of passages from the extracanonial Ascension of Isaiah and the Epistle to the Hebrews. This section amounts to little more than Doherty saying "It means X" and Muller saying "No, it means Y." Muller's interpretations are eminently plausible if the documents are read in isolation. However, any theory about the origins of Christianity has to account for all the evidence and it has to account for it all at the same time. It doesn't matter if historicity most parsimoniously explains one book. It has to be the most parsimonious explanation for all the books and the rest of the evidence as well, considered as a whole package of data.
In any case, it is not as obvious to me as it seems to be to Muller what the author of Hebrews was thinking when he wrote, for example, "how much rather shall the blood of the Christ, who by the eternal Spirit offered himself spotless to God, purify your conscience from dead works to worship [the] living God?"
I rely on the evidence first. And from ancient pagan writings before Julian's times (331-363), there is no testimony presented in 'the Jesus Puzzle' about the concept of an upper world between heaven & earth, where the fleshy meets demonic powers, a place where Jesus would have been crucified.
This is not about looking for a proof text. This is about finding an account of Christianity's origins that makes the fewest possible and most plausible assumptions about who wrote what, when they wrote it, why they wrote it, and what they were thinking when they wrote it. It must also, at the same time, explain why certain documents either did not get written or did not survive if they were written.
It must also explain Paul's silence about the man now known as Jesus of Nazareth. The historicist position can do that only by assuming a remarkable oblivion on Paul's part to anything that happened to Jesus other than the bare facts that he died, was buried, and rose again. Paul does not say one word about when they happened or where they happened, and there is no reference to who killed him beyond the cryptic "rulers of this age."
Doherty notes, commenting on the epistle to the Romans, that Paul's reference to Jesus' being "of David's seed according to flesh" is, if a historical datum, "the only one Paul ever gives us, for no other feature of Jesus' human incarnation appears in his letter." According to Muller, there are in fact several other such references. And indeed there are, but they all repeat the same datum: Jesus is descended from David according to the flesh.
Muller accuses Doherty of ignoring contrary evidence. It is a fatuous complaint.
Like Christian apologists, Muller tries to make much of Paul's referring to James as "brother of the lord" on the assumption that it must have meant "sibling of Jesus." Doherty suggests that James was one of a group of leaders within Jerusalem's Christian community who called themselves, or were called by those who knew them, "brothers of the lord."
Muller objects: "But we do not have any evidence on that whatsoever." And no, we don't. But if the totality of evidence suggests that Jesus was mythical, then historicity cannot be hung on such a slender thread as this throwaway line. In a religious community, it is scarcely incredible that some group that was considered deserving of honor would be known as brothers of the lord. As a defense of historicity, the point to be proven about "brother of the lord" is not that Paul could have meant "brother of Jesus" but that he could not plausibly have meant anything else. Until the alternative construals are ruled out, the phrase simply does not prove anything one way or the other.
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