Seeking the Truth Of Things: July 2015

Thursday 30 July 2015

Stop press! New evidence Jesus existed discovered in ditch!

Imagine that headline! Imagine the excitement, giving way to scepticism, and then endless disagreements!

Imagine, in a ditch in the middle east, an abandoned box of ancient things is opened. This is what comes out:

a statue of Jesus
a previously unknown book by Philo mentioning Jesus
an independent eyewitness report of Jesus' miracles by a Roman soldier
the first draft manuscript of Mark's gospel signed by St Peter
a previously unknown letter by St Paul detailing Jesus' early life in Galilee
a letter written and signed by Jesus in koine Greek
a letter written and signed by Jesus in Aramaic
a warrant for Jesus' arrest signed by the high priest
Pontius Pilate's personal notes from his trial of Jesus, calling the accused 'Jesus'

After initial excitement in the media, things take a new turn when Cedric the Sceptic turns to the internet to share his findings. Over to you, Cedric!

A statue of Jesus

"We know this is fake because the Jews' were opposed to graven images. A fraud. Proof of the desperate lengths some Christians will go to in order to fake evidence, not proof of Jesus." [We're giving Cedric a tick for that one.]

A previously unknown book by Philo mentioning Jesus

"Hearsay, and therefore inadmissible. Philo was in Egypt, so he only heard this second or third hand. And he probably heard it from Christians, so it is not independent evidence anyway. Proves nothing. If St Paul is second-hand, this is even more worthless. Not evidence at all."

An independent eyewitness report of Jesus' miracles by a Roman soldier

"Miracles don't happen. Therefore the witness is delusional. No court would accept his evidence. Neither should we."

The first draft manuscript of Mark's gospel signed by St Peter

"The Bible doesn't count. It's not independent evidence. If that's the best you can do, your evidence is very very poor."

A previously unknown letter by St Paul detailing Jesus' early life in Galilee

"Hearsay. Therefore inadmissible."

A letter written and signed by Jesus in koine Greek

"Jesus would have spoken Aramaic, not Greek. Obviously fake."

A letter written and signed by Jesus in Aramaic

"Jesus is never shown with the ability to write even a sentence in the gospels. So this is fake. You've got nothing."

A warrant for Jesus' arrest signed by the high priest

"This is clearly a stage prop from the performance of a celestial Jesus mystery play. This isn't proof that he existed. It's proof that he didn't! Obviously!"

Pontius Pilate's personal notes from his trial of Jesus, calling the accused 'Jesus'

"Clearly a reference to the Jesus Barrabas of Matthew 27, not Jesus Christ. Your evidence is baseless."

Cedric poking at the bottom of the box discovers a secret compartment. He opens it and in it he finds four things. He is the first person in centuries to see them. This is what he found:

a Pharisee's eyewitness report following Jesus' movements around Galilee
Jesus' signed confession of being the Son of God
a disciple's original wax tablets recording Jesus' teachings as he heard them from Jesus' lips
a previously unseen book by Seneca with a brief mention of him meeting Jesus

Over to Cedric again for his views on what he found:

A Pharisee's eyewitness report following Jesus' movements around Galilee
"This is probably a copy of a copy of a copy, not the original report. What worries me is that there has been more than enough time for the text to be tampered with. That's what Christians always did. This isn't something anyone could rely on because we don't know what the original said."

Jesus' signed confession of being the Son of God
"This is useless as evidence since we have no other signature of Jesus to compare it with. So we can't verify the authenticity of the signature. And the Greek and Aramaic letters don't count. I've said why."

A disciple's original wax tablets recording Jesus' teachings as he heard them from Jesus' lips

"Since at least one item in this box has been exposed as fake, it calls into question everything in the box."

A previously unseen book by Seneca with a brief mention of his meeting Jesus

"The mention of Jesus is an interpolation. Because I say so. No, I don't need to show evidence why it is an interpolation. The fact that I say it's an interpolation settles the matter. That's a fact."

In an unexpected turn of events, a second box is found. When opened, this is what it is found to contain:

Jesus' thumbprints on file following his arrest

Jesus' birth certificate

a photograph of Jesus with his friends Peter, James and John, arms round each other, smiling into the camera, with the signatures of all four written on the front, which was taken by a Time Lord who brought the camera back in time from the future

Mary Magdalene's make-up

Jesus' laptop

Cedric the Sceptic quickly sets to work on this second box. His astonishing conclusions are here shared with the world:

Jesus' thumbprints on file following his arrest

"Another prop from the stage play. See above. You still don't have proof that Jesus Christ existed."

Jesus' birth certificate

"God hasn't been put down on the certificate as the Father, so this obviously is the wrong Jesus. And they didn't do birth certificates back then. So this is a fraud. Christians will stoop to anything."

A photograph of Jesus with his friends Peter, James and John

"Since the camera is from the future, then the photo could be from the future too. A fake to fool the gullible. Proof of time-travel, though."

Mary Magdalene's make-up

"Sexist. If Jesus was perfect, he wasn't sexist. So what is this doing in the Jesus box? So Jesus never existed."

Jesus' laptop

"Jesus definitely would have used a Mac. This is Windows. So it didn't belong to Jesus. Therefore Jesus never existed."

Flushed with success, triumphant sceptics go on to prove that Barabbas was driven past a grassy knoll. The boxes and their contents sell on ebay for £0.73 pence because the owner forgot to put a reserve price on them, and disappear, never to be found again. This sparks a frenzy of conspiracy theories about a Vatican cover-up of something or other. This proves Jesus never existed.

Don't be like Cedric. He doesn't get out much.

Sunday 26 July 2015

Did Jesus exist? 6. Do the gospels believe in a historical Jesus?

What are people challenging when they say that the gospels are not evidence that there was ever any such man as Jesus of Nazareth? They are challenging a depiction of Jesus with the following notable features:

This Jesus is a man of his time and place, a first century Israelite in his mission and ways, an observant Jew.

This Jesus was only really semi-public. He was elusive, often telling people not to mention anything special about him, often hitting the road and staying in the countryside to avoid the authorities. (See Mark’s gospel at 1:45, 3:7, 6:31-32, 6:45, 6:53, 7:24, 7:31, 8:10, 8:22, 9:30 and 33.[1])
He was someone that people had heard of for only three years, 30-33AD. He spent relatively few days in Jerusalem even then.
He was never appointed to public office.

How does one begin to assess the historicity of a figure like this? We should start with someone who has done so before. The first person in history to say directly that he had investigated these things did not himself know Jesus personally. His work is now referred to as a gospel, but the writer didn't call it a 'gospel' himself. This is how he introduced his work:

"Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account"

Although he didn't call this a gospel, someone else after him called it The Gospel According To Luke. So we take the author's name to be Luke. There is no evidence to the contrary.

Sceptics sometimes say we know nothing about how any of the gospels came to be written. This obviously isn’t true because Luke first-hand as an author tells us how he came to write his. You might have been expecting me to start this blog by claiming this or that gospel was written by an eyewitness. I’m not going to. I’m starting with this gospel that actually tells us up front that it is not by an eyewitness and says exactly how it came to be written. As a historian, I can say that that is a very good way to start. This is just what a historian needs – a document that is up front about how it was put together. Luke 1:1-3 tells us the following things.

Others had tried to write an account of Jesus, and these written accounts were handed to Luke by eyewitnesses. With these in his possession, Luke set about turning these into an ‘orderly’ account. See it in the passage again, broken down like this:

"Many have undertaken to draw up an account
of the things that have been fulfilled among us,
just as they [such accounts] were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses
and servants of the word. With this in mind, since
I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning,
I too decided to
write an orderly account" (emphasis added)

Luke is telling us straight that he is a ‘secondary witness’ (as historians call it), taking the written accounts passed to him by eyewitnesses (who obviously were not dead yet) and combining them into one continuous account – he adds that he has himself ‘carefully investigated everything’.

Luke's three sources

Modern textual criticism has borne out that this is how Luke worked: because at least three different sources have been detected in Luke’s gospel by scholars.[1] They are – and each of these would be a separate scroll:

the gospel of Mark, which Luke has used but shortened;
some stories and sayings that are in common with Matthew’s gospel, which scholars call ‘Q’; and
parables that are found only in Luke, not in the other gospels.

So Luke has told the truth about how he has done this. There are probably more than three sources: for example, Luke’s first two chapters about Jesus’ birth read quite differently from the rest of the book, as if from a different source again. So Luke is not claiming to write something substantially new. He is claiming to be putting these sources into one account. We can’t assume he got his hands on these scrolls all at the same time, but possibly from time to time, until he started combining them.

Eyewitnesses and documents

Of course, we would all wish that Luke had put notes in his 'gospel' to say which bits are from which documents or which eyewitnesses, by name. He doesn’t tell us that. But he has been candid about his way of working, and that makes his work more credible.

What we have got from Luke already is that there are multiple eyewitnesses, multiple sources, reflected in his account. This makes his account of a historical Jesus more credible too. The more witnesses there are to someone’s existence, the more credible it is that that person existed. Behind Luke, there are at least three such documentary sources, as well as eyewitnesses, lending a good deal of credibility to Jesus' existence.

The fact that Luke says eyewitnesses are among his sources needs to be heard too. He is rather like a news reporter facing the camera and telling us what he has learned from his eyewitnesses, his investigations and from documents he has seen. And as he has done so, he has given us his own access to at least three documents about Jesus that are older than his own. And what is clear is that he absolutely believes that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person. If he did so, with him having done all that background work, then sceptics need a pretty good reason if they are to deny that he was right about Jesus existing.

[1] Paul Barnett, Finding the Historical Christ, 9.

[1] Paul Barnett, Finding the Historical Christ, 94-5.

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