I was debating the historicity of Jesus in various forums long before I created this Web site. Following are some excerpts from those discussions, revised for change of context.
Your belief that Jesus never lived is simply absurd.
It may well be mistaken. It is not absurd unless my reasoning is patently illogical.
So far as I have been able to determine, there is only one first-century reference to Jesus outside of the New Testament. It was supposedly written by Josephus, and there are two problems with it. One is that it does not even purport to be an eyewitness account, but rather corroborates only the existence of believers in Jesus. The other problem is a scholarly consensus that this particular passage in Josephus's writings was a forgery inserted by early church leaders.
The next earliest secular reference is from around 115 CE and is attributed to Tacitus. It too only reports the fact that certain people were followers of a certain preacher named Christ. And while most scholars accept it as authentic, some think they have good reason to doubt that Tacitus was the real author.
If there exists any document, known to have been written during Jesus’ lifetime, attesting to his existence, I would like to know where I can find it. Short of that, I would like to know of any document produced by someone claiming to have firsthand knowledge about Jesus, which historians agree was in fact written by the purported author.
If the evidence for Jesus were as solid as the evidence for Julius Caesar, then it would be absurd to say the man never lived, but it is not. I don't deny that there is evidence, but it is very weak evidence, and it leaves plenty of room for reasonable doubt.
You might as well deny the existence of any ancient historical figure.
Name any historical figure and we'll compare the evidence for him or her with the evidence for Jesus. Then we can talk about whether I'm being consistent or not.
Is there any academic scholarship — work subject to peer review, etc. — proving Jesus did not exist?
Not that I know of, and I'd hate to be the scholar trying to find conclusive proof of his nonexistence. Although it is not true that you cannot prove a negative, this particular negative would be damnably hard to prove without a time machine.
What I have discovered is that the evidence for historicity is, at best, no better than the evidence against it. And in Doherty's work I think we have a well-reasoned argument that the evidence against it is actually more persuasive.
I would not be greatly surprised if, next week, someone discovered a reliably dated execution order signed by Pontius Pilate for "Jesus of Nazareth, guilty of sedition against the empire" or whatever, with comments to the effect that the criminal in question was also an itinerant rabbi famous for healing people. It really would make hardly any difference in anything else I believed. Until that kind of evidence is discovered, though, we should go where the evidence that we do have leads us.
How many other fictitious people inspired enormous religions?
Fictitious people do not inspire any religions, obviously, but real people can inspire religions by telling stories about fictitious people who are alleged to be real.
Does your theory not imply an enormous conspiracy among a lot of people who had nothing to gain and much to lose from worshiping Jesus?
This assumes that the founders of Christianity were teaching something about Jesus that was similar to what today’s Christians believe. They might not have been. The earliest extant writings of the church fathers do not show them in general to have been familiar with a historical Jesus. Also, the comment about "much to lose" assumes the truth of legends about how Christians were violently persecuted from Day One.
I really see no reason to suppose that a conspiracy is needed to maintain a system of untrue beliefs. In the United States today, there are probably more people who take their horoscopes seriously than believe that Jesus rose from the dead, but nobody to my knowledge says astrologers are engaged in some conspiracy to defraud people. Once the stories about Jesus of Nazareth started making the rounds, people would have been no less inclined to believe them than they are nowadays to believe in astrology.
You are supposing that the gospels were a collaboration of frauds. That is not a credible supposition.
I am not assuming fraud. Fraud implies intent to deceive. I think the gospels record stories that started circulating after Christianity was founded, and which the authors could well have believed were true, or, alternatively, which they might not have expected anyone to assume were factual.
But you have no evidence that Jesus was actually fictitious.
I am not claiming he was fictitious in the sense that the gospel authors thought of themselves as novelists. I do not think they wrote the stories intending to peddle them as history while knowing that they were fabrications. They were more likely thinking as Kahlil Gibran was thinking when he wrote The Prophet. They thought people needed to get the message, not worship the messenger.
You're saying that stories about Jesus spontaneously spread around the Christian world, and there was no real Jesus, but nobody deliberately invented the stories. You're not being consistent.
The first people to tell the various anecdotes that were eventually compiled into the gospels told those stories deliberately. We need not think that those people's deliberations included contemplating the idea that belief in the literal truth of the stories would become a requirement for membership in the Christian religion.
You are relying on a theory of human nature for which there is no evidence.
Which theory is that? The one about people telling stories about people who are not real? Or the one about people believing those stories even though they are not true?
I mean the one about major religions having fictional founders.
Abraham was probably fictional, but three major religions are based on stories about him.
Your theory has early Christians making up a story about God becoming a man and making that story the central tenet of their faith even though the man never even existed. Don't you see the contradiction?
I am not suggesting that any individual Christian knew that Jesus was not real while simultaneously believing that he had lived in Galilee and was crucified by Pilate. I am suggesting that at some time during Christianity's formative years, some Christians believed one thing and some believed another, until in due course belief in the historical Jesus prevailed among those who controlled the church. Those who still held to alternative beliefs were then condemned as heretics. If this is what happened, we may also reasonably suppose that just about all documents arguing for those alternative beliefs were destroyed whenever certain church officials could get their hands on them.
What could possibly have motivated the originators of the stories?
Lots of people like to tell stories, and some people also happen to be good at making them up.
I find the origin of the stories no harder to explain than the origin of the King Arthur stories. Somebody — whether or not he was inspired by legends about a real warlord during early Medieval times — assembled a bunch of anecdotes about a mythical king called Arthur and started passing them on. The originator was not concerned about the way things really used to be. He was concerned about the way he thought things were supposed to be. He imagined a time when they were like that, and he told people about it. Maybe he was hoping to inspire some effort to make the story come true. Perhaps he just enjoyed the attention he got from his audiences by giving them good entertainment. I suspect it was both.
That itself is a good story, but it's utter speculation.
It is not my speculation. I stole it from some historians who have done some serious research about it.
Christianity would be absolutely unique if it had started the way you think it did.
Christianity also would be absolutely unique if its claims were true. Indeed, many apologists argue that it must be true precisely because it is unique.
My theory asserts nothing unique about Christianity's origin, and even if it does, uniqueness alone would not invalidate it. The origin might be unprecedented among major religions, but unprecedented does not mean impossible.
Maybe not, but it does mean improbable.
However you slice it, Christianity is unprecedented in some way. The conventional theory assumes some pretty wild improbabilities, too.
Would monotheistic Jews have believed in a purely divine Jesus right from the get-go?
If that seems strange, what about monotheistic Jews believing that a man of flesh and blood was God incarnate?
The Jews, by the time we are talking about, had become as rigidly monotheistic as any religion before or since. They did not deify men. They killed men who claimed any divinity. According to the gospels, Jesus' claim to divinity was the priests' excuse for wanting him executed. What in the world could have given Paul, or Peter, or James, or any of the other early Jewish Christians the notion that some charismatic rabbi was actually God in the flesh?
You are saying that the early Christians did not base their ideas on the teachings of Christ as recorded in the gospels. That is preposterous.
Starting with Paul, check the early Christian writings in chronological order. When you find where one of them attributes a teaching to the man called Jesus of Nazareth, either directly or by explicit attribution to one of the gospels, tell me when it was written, and how we know it was written then. The historical paper trail does not contradict the notion that the first Christians never heard of a historical Jesus. Whatever else is wrong with the notion, then, it is not preposterous.
The conventional theory is that the historical Jesus didn't actually generate much historical evidence while he was alive. What is so implausible about that?
If he was just another wandering preacher, there is no reason we should expect any contemporary evidence of his existence. I do think, though, that we could expect early Christians in general, and Paul in particular, to have had more to say about the man who inspired their religion — if there had been such a man.
Why did Ignatius, for instance, belabor the point that Jesus "was truly born, ate and drank, was truly persecuted under Pontius Pilate"? Was it not taken for granted? Ignatius is arguing not for Jesus' divinity but for his humanity. Could that be because, in the early second century, it was still a new idea, not yet considered established beyond reasonable doubt?
Ignatius was arguing against numerous heresies that had sprung up by then. Gnostics and others were saying that Jesus was all divine and in no part human, or that he was only a little bit human. There were wars over this.
Yes, and they are called heresies now because guess who won those wars.
The point is, those debates occurred, and that explains Ignatius' remarks without assuming that Jesus' humanity was a new idea.
To call the losers of a debate heretics implies, even if you agree with them, that their ideas arose sometime after the orthodoxy that they were attacking, which begs the question of which was the original belief. The people against whom Ignatius was warning the Trallians might have represented the original Christianity, over which the church as we now know it became triumphant.
Of course, if we look only at Ignatius' writings, he could have been responding to an argument that Jesus, although he appeared in this world and was historic in that sense, was not truly a human being. However, we do not know the exact doctrine that Ignatius was rebutting, because we do not have the other side's actual argument. We have what Ignatius says is their argument.
I am not suggesting that he misrepresented his opponents, but we just don't know how much of their argument he left out for the sake of making his own point. His opponents could have been saying that Jesus' suffering and death were a charade because they did not happen in this world, but rather in the spirit world. If that was the case, then Ignatius was arguing, in effect: No, it all had to be real, because it did happen in this world.
Gnostics and other dualists who believed that the spiritual was superior to the material felt that it was not theologically possible for God to become man. They had to deny Jesus' humanity.
If it was undisputed that a man called Jesus of Nazareth had lived in this world, and the Gnostics believed he could not have been both God and man, then it seems to me they would more likely have argued that he was not God than that he was not a man.
Paul talks about Jesus all the time.
Yes, but what does he say about Jesus? What does he say about when and where Jesus lived? What does he say about when and where Jesus died? What does he say about what Jesus taught his disciples? What does he say about Jesus' actual teachings? Paul never once says, "As Jesus told his disciples. . ." or anything like it.
His readers already knew. Paul was writing to Christians.
Why should we assume that his readership already knew everything there was to know about Jesus? The churches today are full of Christians who know practically nothing of what is in the gospels.
So what if Paul didn't get into the nitty-gritty of Jesus' life? All it means is he did not consider it necessary to write another gospel.
It would not have been another gospel. None had been written at that point.
Of course it is possible that Paul simply had no interest in Jesus' biography. That is the conventional explanation for his silence about Jesus' earthly life. But it is not the only possible explanation. Another is that Jesus had no life for Paul to know of or write about.
It is not just biographical minutiae that Paul and other New Testament writers omit. There are several statements in Paul's and other NT writings similar if not identical to things later attributed to Jesus in the gospels. But no teaching is attributed to Jesus by Paul or in any other Christian document known to have been written during the first century. That is very, very strange.
Here is an especially strange omission, as noted by Doherty:
Paul is anxious to show that the Jews have no excuse for failing to believe in Christ and gaining salvation, for they have heard the good news about him from appointed messengers like Paul himself. And he contrasts the unresponsive Jews with the gentiles who welcomed it. But surely Paul has left out the glaringly obvious. For the Jews — or at least some of them — had supposedly rejected that message from the very lips of Jesus himself, whereas the gentiles had believed second-hand. In verse 18 Paul asks dramatically: "But can it be they never heard it (i.e., the message)?" How could he fail to highlight his countrymen's spurning of Jesus' very own person? Yet all he refers to are apostles like himself who have "preached to the ends of the earth." (http://www.jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/partone.htm)
And another one: Paul mentions having met Peter and James, among other church leaders, and one would think he would have learned something about Jesus from those men. In his letter to the Galatians, though, Paul explicitly denies having learned anything about the gospel from any man.
Real historical figures are often misquoted, or have words put in their mouths by historians. Just because the gospels are unreliable doesn’t mean the man they describe never existed.
Yes, of course. If he was real, he was probably misquoted. But this is not itself evidence that he was real. If King Arthur was real, he almost certainly never said, "Don't let it be forgot that once there was a spot for one brief, shining moment that was known as Camelot." That doesn't mean the musical Camelot is evidence for a historical Arthur, though.
Christianity wasn't founded by idiots. The first ones might not have believed in the resurrection, but they must have based their religion on the life and teachings of a real person.
Assuming that the historical Jesus died sometime around 30 CE and stayed dead, we still have according to the conventional theory a group of devout Jews claiming less than two decades later that he had returned from the dead and was God. Many Christian apologists say that is almost as hard a story to swallow as the resurrection itself — and I think they have a point there.
This Earl Doherty you are quoting is a self-admitted amateur.
How is this relevant to his argument?
It is relevant to whether anyone should trust his methodology.
His methodology, as far as I can tell, is the same as that followed by people entitled to put PhD and other letters after their names.
The people he is disagreeing with are mostly experts.
If the experts have a better argument than he does, they can present it. Until they do, their credentials don't mean squat.
You seem to believe everything he says.
I don’t. I'm suspending judgment on lots of the details because I lack the background knowledge I would need to make a good judgment. But I think I know enough to have an informed opinion on his core argument, and it looks pretty cogent to me.
What about the theories of the scholarly majority who disagree with him?
The theories of those who disagree with him have been around for two millennia. If there is a cogent argument for historicity that I have not heard yet, I shall be more than happy to look it over.
Has Doherty’s work been peer-reviewed?
There has been plenty of time, and more, for credentialed experts to have taken their shots at it. If Doherty were just blowing smoke, I suspect we would have heard some convincing rebuttals by now.
There are people with adequate credentials in New Testament studies who believe that anyone who takes Doherty seriously is going to burn in hell. Those people are not going to stay publicly silent if they can prove, or think they can prove, that his work is faulty. Maybe Christians with relevant academic credentials don't have any Web sites of their own. But evangelical Christians who do have Web sites would know about their evidence, and they would put the rebuttal arguments on their sites. If they have, though, I haven't found those sites, and I have looked hard for them.
But he didn't publish his work academically. Why would the academic community pay any attention?
Why this fixation on academic commentary? The evidence he presents either proves his case or it doesn’t, and I think I'm smart enough to figure out which is the case without a bunch of professors holding my hand. If, by virtue of their training, they have some insights that would help me, then I'll welcome their comments if they wish to make them. If they cannot be bothered, then I'm on my own. And maybe I'll be wrong. I can live with that.
Plenty of opposing viewpoints have been published in the mainstream press.
Yes, there are plenty of people saying Doherty is wrong. What they are not doing is presenting a cogent refutation of his case. They are not presenting contradictory evidence that he ignored. They are not showing where his arguments are fallacious.
Are all those books contradicting him just irrelevant?
The number of those books is irrelevant, yes. A thousand books saying something do not make it so.
What would be relevant would be a single book, or a single Web site, or a single document of any other kind, presenting evidence ignored by Doherty that contradicts his theory, or demonstrating a logical error in the reasoning by which he infers his theory from the evidence that he does present.
Critique of a humanist's view of DohertyReturn to Was There a Real Jesus?
This page last updated on August 12, 2010.