The Other "Deniers"

Disclosures with Salt

I'll always answer to "atheist," but in truth  I'm more of an apatheist. Which is to say, I positively don't care about religious questions. This has been my outpost since I was a kid, when I shucked the whole grisly business of Christianity more or less along with the Tooth Fairy. Once I had the storybook gist of it down, the idea of a 2000 year old bloodgod dying for my sins struck me as quite perverse -- and worse, boring. Same with every sold version of the G-Dog from on High. Like everyone else, I've contemplated the cosmic first-order questions -- about life, the universe, the Loch Ness Monster, and everything -- but the "God" answer never seemed remotely satisfying. It always felt like a non-sequitur, really -- an empty question-begging cul-de-sac overlooking a happily hopeless void. No way, no how was that shit true, or even meaningful (except perhaps as psychology). From the time I was popping zits, I felt sure that  Heaven and Hell were as crazy as Santa's workshop. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth" didn't sound like something a reasonable person would ever say, much less believe. To me, it was just gratingly obvious that a whole lotta grown-ups were wasting a whole lotta time on a whole lotta nothing. So I stopped paying attention. Apathy seemed apposite.

When I became a grown-up myself, I wondered from time to time if I might have missed something. So I checked into the work of a few respected Christian thinkers. Got a big kick out of Chesterton's Orthodoxy, with all its brain-tickling literary precision and paradox-pumping razzmatazz. I also took to the miserablist riffs in Kierkegaard and Saint Augustine. And the pop-tract by that Narnia guy had its moments, I admit. After dipping here and there, I  came away with a dim appreciation for the mystique and pomp and crazy moral gravity of the transcendental temptation in the key of C. And as a more eccentric aside, I remember how Rene Girard's sublimely creepy text, Violence and the Sacred, left me to wonder for a few fleeting seconds whether Christianity might have been more of a positive force in history than I had allowed -- a way to tame (or sublimate) a universal sacrificial urge. Didn't really work out that way, but I suppose things could have been much worse.

But there would be no chiliastic hook. The reasons that reason does not know would never be reason enough for me. I was left with a stolid and prideless resignation, left to my cozy redoubt as a careless couldn't-give-a-shit unbeliever by default. I harbor no animus for those who celebrate and fear what I cannot grasp and do not believe. There's no hostility. No fight to pick. I'm content to ascribe it to a failure of imagination, or a lack of "faith," if that's your out. Even if I remain confident in my viscera that there is, in plain reality, no God. There's just one thing after another until it stops. Until the brakes lock or until you nest down in your deathbed, clutching the remote, enfeebled and hurting and craving release. That's enough Truth for me to believe. The best you can hope for is air conditioning.       

Jesus Denial: An Irresponsible Introduction

Of course, it is one thing to believe, as I lazily do, that the Lord and Savior is a cosmic crock. It is quite another thing to assert, as a vocal minority of troublesome theology geeks have for centuries, that Jesus Christ never existed in the flesh. When it comes to Jesus denial, I've never had a strong default instinct. If you had asked me about it a couple of years ago, I would have felt reasonably confident that the J-Man of the Gospels was probably as real as Ernest Borgnine. Not a supernatural bloodgod, but a peripatetic agitator-magician-priest bearing some crude resemblance to the canonical character. But that was before I bothered to look into the controversy. Now that I've read just enough to be dangerous, I'm more inclined to tip the odds in favor of the Jesus deniers. Off the cuff, I'd assign 60-70% confidence to the proposition that the rebel Jew of antiquity is essentially a fictional creation, a composite superhero patched together out of sundry scraps that were fatefully gathered and repackaged by scribes and opportunistic power-brokers over a period of centuries. Those odds could change in an instant, but for now my sketchily informed hunch is that it was a lucky shot, a good story drawn from the wish-fulfilling ether of Imaginationland. 

 

Jesus deniers are often ridiculed by mainstream scholars and biblical historicists, but I'm not entirely sure why. The arguments put forth by deniers -- the better of them, anyway (as usual, there are kooks in the soup) -- are well developed and come with a pedigree that dates back to the Enlightenment if not earlier. And it's not as though the consensus view  is supported by much in the way of first order evidence, despite overconfident assurances to the contrary that one immediately encounters upon visiting the controversy. Once you understand that the canonical Gospels were essentially plucked from a once robust literary genre of Jesus yarns written generations or centuries after the alleged biographical events, you see that they provide evidence only of a Christian tradition, which nobody disputes. Then you're left with little to nothing. Seriously. As far as I can gather (and please correct me), a few late 1st and 2nd century shards are what remain, and these are either muddled in ambiguity or discountable as hearsay. When you look for solid prime-time, contemporaneous historical corroboration of Jesus's life and deeds, the record is eerily silent. Scholars of antiquity agree that extant documents from the period when Jesus is believed to have lived  make no mention of the central events of his life, ministry or execution. Save one dismissibly absurd, oblique, and ambiguous line from the Mishnah, there's not a word about him, for example, in surviving Rabbinic texts from the contemporary period. (The famous slurs appear to have come much later, after the Jesus story was culturally entrenched.) No writings have ever been directly attributed to Jesus, and despite the supposed popularity of his cult -- and the spectacle of his execution -- it doesn't appear that any of his followers bothered to take notes. Maybe something will turn up, but as things stand, this is the Big Problem that the deniers' counter-narrative, in its ambitious form, seeks to resolve. Given the absence of clear-cut contemporary evidence -- and the dearth of near-contemporary evidence -- for Jesus' physical existence, it seems most reasonable that the burden should rest with those who claim otherwise to put up or cop to agnosticism on the central question. "Absence of evidence" may not be "evidence of absence," as the apologists snort, but it sure as fuck isn't evidence of an historical Jesus.

I think it's important to understand that the counter-narrative advanced by those who deny the existence of a literal Jesus is not based some crass theory of a hoax or conspiracy. For the deniers, the Christ god-man story is a long-evolved social construction formed over generations through the accretion of disparate and confluent literary and mythic clips and tropes, reconciled and amplified through the theologically uncontroversial process of syncretism. Maybe you begin with the cultural backdrop of Hellenized Judaism, where restive currents of messianic prophesy are scripted and professed by dispossessed and disappointed adherents. Against this backdrop, you soon find dissident proto-Christian Gnostics cribbing liberally from the already cross-pollinated mélange of pagan mystery-cult-rehearsed mythemes and motifs, from which they will form a germinal  image of an ethereal salvific figure that will be called the Christ. But this Christ – or "Christos" – comes with no secular baggage, no carnal biography or pretense thereof; he is more akin to a godhead (or perhaps a safely guided acid trip). For the initiated, the Gnostic Christ will provide a spiritually accessible inner path to salvation and enlightenment, ritualized within a rarefied narrative of resurrection. But such a high concept isn't easily packaged and sold to the teeming multitude, so, over time, the esoteric hook comes to be refashioned -- dumbed down and vulgarized for mass consumption.  Through allegorical stories and pageantry, a ghostly fount is given corporeal form, is anthropomorphised. Screen-tested into the more apprehensible visage of a man become godman -- a walkin,' talkin,' miracle-workin' heroic messiah built to scratch a nagging cultural itch. Something like that. Of course, it would have taken several human lifetimes for things to crystallize. 

I don't think it's difficult to imagine a situation where a high concept is rebranded for the mass appeal, where mystically layered esoterica is revamped to slake popular tastes. Think of the aesthetic and intellectual disconnect between the old Universal monster movies and the Victorian novels on which they were based. While Mary Shelley's Creature was an existentially haunted incarnation of rationalist anxiety, James Whale's Creature was a grunting monster who most viewers still believe answers to the name "Frankenstein."  And maybe that's the grain of it. People make up stories, then the stories are absorbed into the cultural mire where they are hacked and garbled and reimagined and embellished and gussied up with iconographic ornamentation, or special effects. The story of Jesus, according to the deniers, is just a spiralling clusterfuck of confusion and invention, pitched through common recital. Made to sell.

The denialist case is famously adorned with references to conspicuously similar parallel narratives and archetypes from antecedent religions and traditions where key plot-points and motifs of the Jesus story can be cornered in the manner of comparative mythology. As the heretics are quick to point out, the fetish with "dying and rising gods" long predates the Christian resurrection narrative. It goes beck to Osiris and Dionysus, and can be found in  myths across a wide range of cultures, as this working list of "life-death-rebirth deities"  from diverse religious and mythic traditions illustrates. What's more, some of the most ostensibly Jesus-centric story elements and iconic images seem to find precedent in more ancient traditions. According to theology writer Tim Callahan (who is officially not a denier [more on which below]), "Jesus’ crown of thorns, along with most of the specific details of the Passion — his being clothed in a purple robe and given a reed as a scepter, the mocking and scourging by the Roman troops, even his being put to death — were probably elements of the Zagmuku Festival, which the Jews brought back with them from Babylon after their captivity there (587–538 BCE)." And as the Bible scholar Robert M. Price -- a moderate Jesus skeptic -- notes, accounts of crucifixion survival (and empty tombs), were a staple trope in 2nd Century novels, just when gospel stories were competing for public attention. Indeed, it doesn't take long to discover probable non-Christian precursors for just about every element of the Christ story, from the Eucharist to the virgin birth to the miracles, all of which can be deconstructed in the scheme of  literary criticism.

Jesus deniers and skeptics are especially fond of drawing attention to a coterie of conspicuously Jesus-ish motifs that run through the theology of Mithraism (or "Sol Invictus" as it was called in ancient Rome), a rival religion to Christianity (with deeper roots) that held official Roman sanction prior to the Constantinian twist. Hardcore Jesus denier Ken Humphreys considers Mithraism to be a practical mirror image of early Christianity, with one crucial distinction. To wit:    

 

Mithraism's failure to have anthropomorphised its god into a man – something which was to be accomplished so successfully by Christianity – weakened the cult's appeal to the uneducated and opened the door to the competition.

Savior narratives were common enough back when, and it shouldn't be surprising that one version would have risen to top the heap, perhaps with a little prodding from officialdom down the line. I think Price sums up the problem neatly when he likens the situation to that of a modern comic book reader who acknowledges that the entire superhero pantheon is fictional, except for Superman.   

Of course, the parallels, intriguing though they are, do not in themselves demonstrate that Jesus did not exist, and the deniers do not rest their case on comparative grounds. It could be, as Jesus historicists contend, that the kernel of truth in the Jesus narrative was just grandly embellished with recurrent archetypes and culturally embedded themes. In this respect, it is interesting to note that deniers sometimes argue that the Egyptian deity Horus provides a salient example of how a legendary figure can be anthropomorphised over time. The analogy is striking, but the sword is double-edged because the transformation can certainly go in the opposite direction. And maybe that that's what happened with the Greatest Story Ever Told -- much the way the story of Santa Claus comes to us so distantly removed from the life of of "Nicholas of Myra," who probably existed; or the tenuous route through which Bram Stoker's Dracula traces to the expoits of a medieval Romanian badass. Flesh and blood figures can be and are radically and sensationally reconceived in the process of modern mythmaking, and there's certainly a credible possibility that a real Jesus could have been subject to such a cultural makeover. The problem with this, again, is that there is no clear-cut secular corroboration of the historical Jesus, when reason tells us should be . . .  something. You have two possibilities: the mythicists' account, by which an invented god is transformed into a man; and the historicists' account, by which a living man is tranformed into a god. We know who won. We don't know who's right.                  

The rest of the denialist account isn't tough to unfold. You fast forward a few generations to where the mystical origins of a narrative become obscure, to where the Christ cultists have done their thing and created their own infights and factional rifts, and somewhere in the fan club culture that emerges you end up with collection of  midrashic and novelistic narratives, developed so that once abstruse spiritual themes can be funneled into the edging form of a practiced and biographically situated savior narrative, ripe for codification.  And codification seals the deal. I suppose that would be where Constantine would fit in, along with subsequent thugs who would police the form of an emergent orthodoxy. Give the stew a  few centuries to percolate and and you end up with a body of intertextually derived storybooks that come to comprise a dominant narrative about a shitstirring god-dude who ambled around Palestine doing magic tricks and causing trouble until the bastards cut him down, all for you. Pagan and Gnostic residue will crust at the margins, but in muted form, nested against a literally insistent hagiography that gains the imprimature of a ruthless church-state. By this point, all you need are a few attentive editors to tidy things up for posterity. A bit of retrofitting and gloss, perhaps abbetted by a churchstate-sponsored cottage industry of propaganda and forgery.

The important thing is this. Once the victor's script is embedded in every nook of a culture, you've got yourself a world class religion. And with that much done and done, radical doubt about the germ of the thing can be safely branded -- and prosecuted -- as heresy. Or in modern fashion, dismissed as absurdity.  This is the context that leads me to suspect that Jesus was a spook, and nothing more. Now, rev up the time machine and prove me wrong. 

Embarrassment and Difficulty on Baker Street

When you encounter an argument that radically challenges the prevailing consensus, it's always a good idea to look up what the most respected critics have to say.  In most cases, that's where it will end. You'll find that the dissident position is deftly checked by credible research and the seductive appeal of the underdog's narrative will deflate like a patched raft. This doesn't seem to be the case with Jesus denial. Consider the defense of the historical Jesus proffered by Skeptic magazine's aforementioned religion editor, Tim Callahan, where, in the context of an otherwise competent debunking of the entertaining crackpot webumentary, Zeitgeist, he presents a scholar's response to Jesus denial.

Here's Tim:  

Was there a real Jesus? While the historical evidence is meager, it does exist. In his Antiquities of the Jews, book 20, chapter 9, item 1, referring to the execution of James, Josephus refers to him as the brother of “Jesus, who was called the Christ.” It is quite plain that Josephus didn’t see Jesus as the Christ (Christos, the Greek word meaning “anointed”), he merely recorded that James’ brother was the Jesus who had been called or was alleged to be the Christ.

Beyond this scrap, valuable though it is, we can imply the existence of a historical Jesus from the criteria of embarrassment and difficulty. The criterion of embarrassment says that people do not make up embarrassing details about someone they wish to revere. So, if they say such things about the person, they are probably true. Now let’s apply this to what the Roman historian Tacitus had to say about Jesus early in the second century. Concerning rumors that had spread that Nero had deliberately set fire to the city of Rome, Tacitus says (The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 1, Chapter 15):

To suppress this rumor, Nero fabricated scapegoats — and punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were called). Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius’ reign by the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilatus. But in spite of this temporary setback the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judea (where the mischief had started) but even in Rome. All degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish in the capitol.

That Tacitus is obviously a hostile witness makes it much more likely that he accepted Jesus as a real person. Had he reason to suspect he was nothing more than a fabrication, Tacitus would certainly have said so. That author’s claim that Jesus had been executed by Pontius Pilate could only have come from one of two possible sources: Either Tacitus knew this to be true from extant imperial records or he was repeating what Christians themselves had said of Jesus. Were Jesus a mythical character they had invented, they certainly wouldn’t have gone out of their way to invent his being a criminal who had been executed.

In like manner, people do not go out of their way to invent difficulties for a character they have invented. It is clear from the Nativity narratives of the gospels of Matthew and Luke that they were faced with having to explain why Jesus grew up in Galilee if he was born in Bethlehem. Both gospels had to invent rather convoluted means to get Jesus born in Bethlehem in accordance with the messianic prophecy in Micah 5:2, then get him moved to Nazareth. Clearly they were stuck with a real person known to have come from Galilee, when he should have come from Bethlehem. Had they been making Jesus up out of whole cloth, they would simply have said he came from Bethlehem: end of story, no complications. So the evidence for Jesus as a real, historical personage, though meager, is solid.

First, it should be kept in mind that Callahan's rejoinder is presented in the context of a review of a film promoting madly far-fetched conspiracy theories, which  is very different from appraising the more scholarly traditions of Jesus skepticism. I don't want to fault Callahan too far on this point, because such is his beat at Skeptic. However, I do think the kook-debunking context makes it a helluva lot easier for him to soft-peddle a half-hearted rejection of Jesus denial without considering the counter-responses that would inevitably come up in a more considered account of extant research.

For example, it turns out that Christ deniers have a lot to say about that drive-by reference by Josephus. Any reading of Callahan's "scrap" ("valuable though it is") should thus fairly be weighted against contrapuntal arguments of deniers, which rest on contextualization, the possibility of mistaken identity, and the credible suspicion of posthumous editorial errors -- or mischief -- made by 4th century Christian scriveners. Specifically, deniers dispute the authenticity of that "who was called the Christ" clause, which they suspect to have been spliced in to harmonize the passage with the Jewish scribe's famous Testimonium Flavianum, which is now widely believed to have been significantly altered by Christian PR men. Allegations of posthumous tampering might seem a bit paranoid on first pass, but forgery appears to have been common practice among early guardians of orthodoxy, and Josephus' surviving work comes to us through Christian provenance. It's also possible, as George Albert Wells has conjectured, that the line came about less nefariously -- as a transcription error lifted from marginalia. When you read the full text, it does seem like an awkward clause. 

 

Deniers also point to the subsequent section in the same text, where Josephus refers to one  "Jesus, the son of Damneus," or Jesus bar Damneus.  It's somewhat confusing, in part because a gaggle of "Jesuses" -- like, at least 20 -- populate Josephus' major work, but the dissident interpretation is that when the passage is stripped and arguably suspect of the oddly parsed "who was called the Christ" flourish, it can be seen that both references are to the one and the same "Jesus," that is: Jesus bar Damneus. Their point is strongly contested and I have no idea what to make of it except that it illustrates why it is important not to dangle your modifiers. This Wikipedia article provides a decent introduction the controversy that Callahan fails to mention.      

 

Apart from ignoring potential problems with Josephus, notice more generally how Callahan flirts with straw man argumentation. By angling his rejoinder against the claim that Jesus was "made up out of whole cloth" he leaves readers with a baldly conspiratorial impression of Jesus denial. But religious syncretism and social construction are central to more sophisticated strains of the Jesus-as-myth thesis, and reasoned denialist theory simply doesn't jibe with Callahan's glibly pitched account of a pure concoction. I think Callahan is either being coy or disingenuous with his phrasing, but there's no question that he knows better.
  
Because no serious proponent of the Jesus myth conceives of the story having been formed in such crude manner -- of it having simply been "made up." The deniers may be guilty of rhetorical overstatement at times, but the essence of their case is that the fixation on a living Jesus arose through the complex and largely unconscious intermelding of culture and myth over a long duration. As Ken Humphreys is careful to emphasize, "No one 'just made-up' Jesus."

 

If we step around the centuries of fabrication and glorification which informs everyone's perception of Jesus Christ and closely examine the two hundred year gestation period of the current Lord and Saviour we can see a perfectly plausible and, indeed, convincing process by which, upon the legacy of earlier times and from piety and scripture alone, the Christian godman emerged into the light. Beliefs created the man; the man did not create the beliefs.

The problems of "difficulty" and "embarrassment" that Callahan relies on to render the skeptic's position less tenable would have more persuasive force were they cited against a tightly scripted propaganda campaign, i.e. something "made up out of whole cloth." But if things unfolded more organically, as the deniers contend, the skein of Jesus lore could be expected to come with myriad knots and convolutions and problems in need of fixing. When people separated by time and geography play at editing and embellishing a story, there are going to be hanging issues and inconsistencies. Ironing them out is parcel to the sociology of myth construction and synthesis. Wikis might be relevant.

 

What's more, Callahan's ostensibly telling "criteria of embarrassment and difficulty" can be found to apply to at least one fictional personage. I'm sure you've already guessed.

I've only ever read the one about the dog that didn't bark, but my wife is au fait with the more obsessive strains of Baker Street fan culture, where Sherlock Holmes can be fairly described as a "revered figure" and where "biographers" wrestle with problems of embarrassment and difficulty as a matter of course. Consider this searching inquiry written by a very confused -- or very self-amused -- individual:

Little is known about the education of Sherlock Holmes. It's assumed from references to "the university" in "The Gloria Scott", "The Musgrave Ritual", and to some extent "The Adventure of the Three Students", that Holmes attended Oxford or Cambridge, although the question of which one remains a topic of eternal debate. Baring-Gould [1] believed textual evidence indicated that Holmes attended both, though Dorothy L. Sayers [2] thought he was a chemistry student at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, which would fit in with his evident knowledge of forensics.

He was born on January 6, 1854, which would put his student years in the 1870s, but there's no evidence of a Sherlock Holmes at the college then, though a photograph from 1878 (one of the earliest college photos ever taken) has several blanks amongst the captions, and several faces smeared by the long exposure, one of them suspiciously Holmesian.

During his detective career he visited Cambridge several times, taking the train from King's Cross. He betrays neither familiarity or ignorance of Cambridge in these episodes, though there are clues that he knew something of the surrounding area.

In "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter" he uses a tracker dog in Cambridge.

"In half an hour, we were clear of the town and hastening down a country road. ... The dog had suddenly turned out of the main road into a grass-grown lane. Half a mile farther this opened into another broad road, and the trail turned hard to the right in the direction of the town, which we had just quitted. The road took a sweep to the south of the town, and continued in the opposite direction to that in which we started. ... This should be the village of Trumpington to the right of us."

From this one might deduce that Holmes' knowledge of the centre of Cambridge seems rather vague, though Trumpington seems familiar to him. In "The Hanover Square mystery" his older brother Mycroft says

"Assuming that she comes into the town via the London road -Trumpington Street - she could cycle to Bridge Street and then to the Huntingdon road. That will get her to Girton. Alternatively, she could turn left at Silver Street which will bring her through the Backs, a more sheltered route."

Mycroft's clearly well acquainted with Cambridge. Perhaps Sherlock never was an under-graduate but visited his older brother Mycroft while Mycroft was a student. If so, it's far from unlikely that when he did so, Holmes explored Trumpington. After all, he was well-versed in the greats of literature so he may have been interested in tracking down the location of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale" - "At Trumpingtoun, not fer fro Cantebrigge"

If we could recognise existing buildings in the description of Holmes' travels then perhaps this connection with Trumpington would be confirmed. After finding Trumpington to his right, Holmes "sprang through a gate into a field" where "A footpath led across to the lonely cottage". There's really only one cottage that this could be. Coming off the M11 at junction 11 and heading towards Cambridge, Trumpington will be on your right. On your left obscured by foliage in the middle of a field is the dwelling where Godfrey Staunton's beautiful wife breathed her last. 

I defer to my wife's take on this. She writes: 

The fact the author looks to actual photographs of the period to see if he can find Sherlock Holmes among the students illustrates how fucked up the debate about Sherlock Holmes invariably is. It's like the eternal question:  Can the family understand Stewie Griffin?  Do Sherlock fans fully understand that he's fictional?

Of course, Callahan might counter that the search for Sherlock is typically engaged with a playful wink, whereas the Jesus stalkers are deadly sincere. But honestly, what would a Martian make of it? Would the irony of armchair Holmesography be apparent to a future reader? Keep in mind that that some people persist in the apparently sincere belief that  Doyle's sleuth was in fact a very real person. Such Sherlock "historicists" even cite a few curious scraps of contemporania to support their case. Newspaper clips that really shouldn't exist. (You remember that old In Search Of episode, don't you?) And the matter is yet complicated when you consider that Doyle's character was loosely inspired by a very real individual, a professor of medicine with a knack for induction.  Using Callahan's criteria, It'd be a cinch to shore up the historicity of Holmes. I think Callahan is a topnotch scholar, but the evidence he summarizes doesn't strike me being close to "solid." I think it's shaky. Built on tenuous, unsupported assumptions and questionable source a material. I frankly suspect that Callahan is aware of this.  Loath to associate himself with a fringe view, I think he dons the mask of a cynical defense attorney and lets it lay. It's all done in good faith, but without conviction. Like when David Hume pulled his punches, with better reason.   

Apathy and Fog

Apatheist that I am, I'm sure I'm missing a lot. Frankly, I don't know the hell I'm talking about. But unless there's crushing blow that has escaped my perusal (and please tell me if there is), I see no reason to scoff at  Jesus denial. The paucity of compelling secular evidence for Christ's existence just doesn't make sense. And the deniers' arguments, so lazily caricatured, seem in every respect to merit serious consideration. Before you dismiss the dissident view, it is worthwhile to reflect on how it all would  have taken place through a subtle process of borrowing and retrofitting over a period of centuries. Think about the meaning of just one century in your own experience -- then transpose that frame of reference to antiquity, when channels of information and communication would have been subject to caprice, oral adaptation, and manipulation. Had it been Mithra who came to us in like manner, we would probably find his "history" as well.

Since the 2nd century, non-Christian historians have written voluminously about Christianity and Christendom, but they have had little original to say about the wizard behind the curtain. What we are told about the life of Jesus Christ comes overwhelmingly through removed and profoundly biased Christian sources, and the story is perhaps hopelessly entangled in borrowed iconography and mythic trappings of obscure etiology. Beyond this, the received account is polluted with so many fantastic supernatural claims that it's hard to know what would remain. And even the most generous secular appraisal cannot pretend to confirm a single word spoken by Jesus himself. It all comes second-hand, through ghostwriters of a different time. At the core of the legend, there might be a man, or there might be only an idea, which is to say, nothing at all. Inevitably, we visit the question under the spell of history ordained. This alone is reason to consider the second possibility.       

The professional historicists will busy themselves poring over orts and retracing circles. When they're troubled to address the deniers, they will unpack the usual sarcastically intoned assurances. Scholars have reputations to preserve, and Jesus denial, however delicately its seasoned, comes with a bitter stigma. It seems gauche, disrespectful, and superficially unsatisfying. Because everyone knows what they know. Because Jesus the Man is clotted in the intricate cogwork of  too much cherished history and superstition to be dethroned without a fight. If the deniers are right, their vindication will be slow in coming. And it may never come at all. 

At least they no longer face persecution. It's the other "deniers" for whom such special treatment is now reserved. Times change. And these things take time.

___________________

Links and Resources

If you're curious about what Jesus deniers and skeptics have to say, the following resources may be of interest.

Books

• Jesus Never Existed, edited by Ken Humphreys (a second volume is in the offing.)
• The Jesus Puzzle, by Earl Doherty 
• The Jesus Myth, by G.A. Wells
• The Christ Conspiracy, by Acharya S
• The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels
  

Links

• Jesus Never Existed (companion site to the book)
• Robert M. Price
  
• Earl Doherty
• G.A. Wells
  
• Wikipedia article on "Christ Myth Theory"
  
• Wikipedia portal on "Jesus and History"
• Jesus Police
• The Jesus Seminar

Films

• The God Who Wasn't There
• Life of Brian
  

Post-bleg: If anyone knows of good non-apologetical sites or print resources devoted to rebutting/debunking Jesus denial (something like Nizkor for Christ myth theory), please let me know and I will append the list with a "rebuttals" section.   

Memento mori.

Comments

[jim]

There is absolutely no reason to scoff at this stuff, Chip. Naturally, there's a spectrum of scholarship from just above conservative, to kooky. I think the approach is only considered a maverick one because these guys voice the question that's stuck in the throat of their somewhat more conservative brethren (fundamentalists are on another planet in this regard, btw). One thing is clear- whether or not there's a germ of a real person at the core of Christianity, the Jesus as portrayed in the gospels is a syncretistic invention. There's really no questioning that.

[Chip Smith]

Thanks for chiming in, Jim. I know this is your beat, so if you have any links to suggest for the "sources" section, let me know and I'll plug them in.

Also, I just re-edited the post a bit -- mostly to correct typos.

[jim]

Well, believe it or not, the first work I usually reference is 'The Age of Reason' by Thomas Paine. It's not particularly scholarly, nor was it meant to be. But it gives a good, Everyman's overview of the obvious fictitious nature of parts of the bible. There are passages that always make me laugh out loud. Here's a sample concerning the rising up from the graves of various saints and prophets, right after the resurrection:

"It is an easy thing to tell a lie, but it is difficult to support the lie after it is told. The writer of the book of Matthew should have told us who the saints were that came to life again, and went into the city, and what became of them afterward, and who it was that saw them — for he is not hardy enough to say he saw them himself; whether they came out naked, and all in natural buff, he-saints and she-saints; or whether they came full dressed, and where they got their dresses; whether they went to their former habitations, and reclaimed their wives, their husbands, and their property, and how they were received; whether they entered ejectments for the recovery of their possessions, or brought actions of crim. con. against the rival interlopers; whether they remained on earth, and followed their former occupation of preaching or working; or whether they died again, or went back to their graves alive, and buried themselves.

Strange, indeed, that an army of saints should return to life, and nobody know who they were, nor who it was that saw them, and that not a word more should be said upon the subject, nor these saints have anything to tell us! Had it been the prophets who (as we are told) had formerly prophesied of these things, they must have had a great deal to say. They could have told us everything and we should have had posthumous prophecies, with notes and commentaries upon the first, a little better at least than we have now. Had it been Moses and Aaron and Joshua and Samuel and David, not an unconverted Jew had remained in all Jerusalem. Had it been John the Baptist, and the saints of the time then present, everybody would have known them, and they would have out-preached and out-famed all the other apostles. But, instead of this, these saints were made to pop up, like Jonah's gourd in the night, for no purpose at all but to wither in the morning. Thus much for this part of the story."

[Chip Smith]

Thanks, Jim. Paine's unpacking of Matthew is entertaining, but I've never had much interest in the inerrancy debate since I begin with the assumption that the Bible is laced with fabulous bullshit. I don't believe in miracles or supernatural healing powers or resurrection or any of it, and if someone tries to convince me that such accounts are literally true, I will become very sleepy. The historical Jesus stuff is different, I think, because it's just plain fishy (no pun). To introduce a bit of perspective, I've never believed that Socrates was a real person; when you read the Greek dialogs and the account of his trial and death, it seems obvious that he was a literary creation conceived as a device through which to do philosophy and impart moral lessons. But Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics and other ancient scribes left behind bodies of writing that are easily distinguished. They existed. Someone did. Jesus reminds me of Socrates.

Of tangential relevance, check out Heather Mac Donald's comment and link over at the Secular Right blog on the "Third Man" phenomenon experienced by people in extreme situations. Makes me think about the "Footsteps" poster at grandma's:

http://secularright.org/wordpress/?p=2567

Key up the Depeche Mode, I suppose.

[TGGP]

I figured Jesus was a real guy puffed up through oral tradition. I think I've mentioned before Koenraad Elst's "Psychology of Prophetism" which tries to use some literary analysis to distinguish the original material from the mythic fabrications. An interesting take:
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/books/pp/index.htm

I just learned that an atheist participant in "The God Who Wasn't There" has converted to Christianity. Razib blames social influence, more specifically Dawn Eden (whom Udolpho seemed to have a special interest in):
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/08/john_mcwhorter_michael_behe_bl_1.php#comment-1885413

I thought much of the "sayings" of Socrates were made up by Plato, but he was nevertheless real. It would make sense that Plato had a teacher, just as Aristotle had Plato. I think Socrates also appears in some Athenian plays, though in a less flattering light.

My understanding was also that the Gnostic gospels were all written later than the more canonical ones. Also, many Gnostics denied that Jesus had ever died or been resurrected. That would make him too mortal a figure. I've heard others theorize that the original (Jamesian?) Christians did not make Jesus into a deity, but merely a great man (in keeping with the usual Jewish take on the Messiah and how blasphemous it was to try to expand the godhead).

[Chip Smith]

TGGP,

I don't doubt that Plato had a teacher who may have been the inspiration for Socrates -- and may even have been Socrates. My reading is simply that Socrates translates more as a presonification than as a real individual. And of course, it's interesting that he didn't write anything. If the relationship between the literary Socrates and the "real" man were known to be as tenuous as that between Dr. Bell and Sherlock Holmes, or between Samuel Wilson and Uncle Sam, I would say that he is essentially an invention. The Trial and Death "feels" more like a cautionary parable than an historical account. And throughout the dialogues -- as I remember them; it's been a while -- Socrates "feels" more like an embodiment of pure thought. A minority of scholars have held this view for a long time. I don't know that it is correct; I only know that it sounds about right to me.

The dating of the Nag Hammadi texts is hugely controversial in theo-nerd circles, but there seems to be grudging agreement among a plurality of scholars that Christian Gnosticism probably arose from earlier gnostic traditions, and probably most significantly from Jewish gnosticism. I wouldn't hang too much on this, though. I think it's most credible to consider how Christianity could have arisen out of preoccupations simmering in the world of Hellenized Judaism, as a messianic projection. Perhaps there was a guy -- or perhaps there were a number of guys -- who came to be garbled into the iconic Christ figure. But the alternative view that it could have been just another mythic tale rooted in sundry traditions and removed history seems at least as plausible to me. More so when you consider the problem of special pleading; again, if Mithraism had taken root and received the endorsement of the state, I think it's likely that Mithra would have been reified in corporeal form to satisfy the public appetite for a literal foothold. And the same argument would emerge.

The Psychology of Prophetism has been on my long list for a while. Don't know what to make of the Raving Atheist. Ravers rave, I guess.