John Dominic Crossan, Will the Real Jesus Please Rise? Part 4 on Religion For Life, June 7-11

From May 17th through June 18th on Religion For Life I am broadcasting a four-part series on the historical Jesus. It is called “Will the Real Jesus Please Rise?” For four weeks, I interview four of the most prolific and provocative scholars in the United States, Bishop John Shelby Spong, Dr. Bart Ehrman, Dr. Robert M. Price, and Dr. John Dominic Crossan.

My final guest in this series is Dr. John Dominic Crossan. He is the current president of the Society of Biblical Literature. He along with Robert Funk founded the Jesus Seminar and he has written over 20 books on early Christian origins. He believes that Jesus did exist. He was not an apocalyptic prophet, however. He believes the parables are the key to understanding Jesus and his message about the kingdom of God, that comes gradually as we participate in it. Dr. Crossan speaks about his new book, The Power of Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus. Here is my review. This interview will be broadcast beginning June 7th. After broadcast, podcasts will be available here.

Listen via livestream…

Thursday, June 7th at 8 pm on WETS, 89.5.
Sunday, June 10th, at noon on WEHC, 90.7.
Sunday, June 10th, at 2 pm on WETS, 89.5.
Monday, June 11th at 1 pm on WEHC, 90.7.

Robert M. Price, "Will the Real Jesus Please Rise?" Part 3, May 31 - June 4

From May 17th through June 18th on Religion For Life I am broadcasting a four-part series on the historical Jesus. It is called “Will the Real Jesus Please Rise?” For four weeks, I interview four of the most prolific and provocative scholars in the United States, Bishop John Shelby Spong, Dr. Bart Ehrman, Dr. Robert M. Price, and Dr. John Dominic Crossan.

Dr. Robert M. Price is my third guest. He is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, a scholarly think tank that during the 1980s and 1990s evaluated all the traditions regarding Jesus to extricate his words and deeds from later fictional elements attributed to him. Even though the Seminar determined that less than 20% of the material attributed to Jesus went back to an historical person, Dr. Price thinks that was too conservative. Dr. Price is the author of The Christ Myth Theory and Its Problems. Here is my review. He makes the case that when you try to separate the mythical elements from Jesus, you are left with myth and no remainder. He thinks that everything about Jesus has antecedents in the Hebrew scriptures or from pagan literature. His interview will be broadcast beginning May 31st. After broadcast, podcasts will be available here.

Listen via livestream…

Thursday, May 31st at 8 pm on WETS, 89.5.
Sunday, June 3rd, at noon on WEHC, 90.7.
Sunday, June 3rd, at 2 pm on WETS, 89.5.
Monday, June 4th at 1 pm on WEHC, 90.7.
Via podcast beginning June 5th.

Your Own Personal [Historical] Jesus

It is entertaining watching the fur fly regarding Jesus.   The mythicists and the historicists are going at it accusing each other of tainted scholarship and dullardry all over the interwebs.   How timely it is that my series "Will the Real Jesus Please Rise?" is now airing.  

Special thanks to Progressive Christianity for promoting this series and to Bishop Spong for interviewing with me and promoting the interview.   That was a nice shot in the arm for Religion For Life.   You can catch my interview with Bishop Spong via podcast. 

Thanks to Gavin at Otagosh for this great plug! 

Bart Ehrman started all the hubbub with his new book, Did Jesus Exist?   Because of that book I thought I would check out the opposition and read Robert Price's The Christ Myth Theory.   Both of those scholars are coming up on the show.  John Dominic Crossan finishes the series discussing his book, The Power of Parable:  How Fiction by Jesus became Fiction About Jesus.    All were gracious and the interviews are engaging.

I wonder how much of the disagreement is over something rather small?   The gospels as I understand these four scholars, are mostly fiction, aren't they?  If there was a guy, you won't find out much about him by reading the gospels.   It is the gospels' authors who steal the show.  

I like the grit and guts of Frodo Baggins, but the real genius is Tolkien, right? 

Here is a secret.  None of the scholars will admit it, but it is my own personal Jesus, my ishta-deva, who is the man.  

Thanks also to Gavin for this diagram via Triangulations.     
   

Along with Gavin, I am the red egg with the little yellow yoke in the top right. 

This one is a bit more detailed with some nice images of the son of god:

I am behind door number two, "fictionalized myth based on some real person."   A "Skeptical Non-Christian" Christian.  

How about you?

Enjoy the show!

Dr. Bart Ehrman, "Will the Real Jesus Please Rise? Part 2", May 24-28 on Religion For Life

From May 17th through June 18th on Religion For Life I am broadcasting a four-part series on the historical Jesus. It is called “Will the Real Jesus Please Rise?” For four weeks, I interview four of the most prolific and provocative scholars in the United States, Bishop John Shelby Spong, Dr. Bart Ehrman, Dr. Robert M. Price, and Dr. John Dominic Crossan.

The second interview in the series is with Dr. Bart Ehrman. Dr. Ehrman teaches religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written over 25 books on early Christianity. His latest is called Did Jesus Exist? The Case for the Historical Jesus. Here is my review. He is responding to the “mythicist” movement that says Jesus is a fictional character from beginning to end. Erhman says that Jesus did exist, even though he is not the Jesus we learned in Sunday School. He thinks Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who predicted God’s dramatic intervention that never came. His interview will be broadcast beginning May 24th. After broadcast, podcasts will be available here.



Listen via livestream…

Thursday, May 24th at 8 pm on WETS, 89.5.
Sunday, May 27th, at noon on WEHC, 90.7.
Sunday, May 27th, at 2 pm on WETS, 89.5.
Monday, May 28th at 1 pm on WEHC, 90.7.
Via podcast beginning May 29th.

Will the Real Jesus Please Rise?

Beginning May 17th I will be broadcasting a four-part series on the historical Jesus on Religion For Life. It is called “Will the Real Jesus Please Rise?”  For four weeks, I will interview four of the most prolific and provocative scholars in the United States, Bishop John Shelby Spong, Dr. Bart Ehrman, Dr. Robert M. Price, and Dr. John Dominic Crossan.

The series begins with Bishop John Shelby Spong.  The retired Episcopal Bishop who has written over twenty books on religion, with such titles as Why Christianity Must Change Or Die, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, and Jesus for the Non-Religious talks about his new book, Reclaiming the Bible for the Non-Religious World.  Bishop Spong explains the concept of midrash in understanding how the stories about Jesus came to be written.  His interview will be broadcast May 17th.

Dr. Bart Ehrman teaches religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written over 25 books on early Christianity. His latest is called Did Jesus Exist? The Case for the Historical Jesus.  Here is my review.  He is responding to the “mythicist” movement that says Jesus is a fictional character from beginning to end. Erhman says that Jesus did exist, even though he is not the Jesus we learned in Sunday School.  He thinks Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who predicted God’s dramatic intervention that never came.  His interview will be broadcast beginning May 24th. 

Dr. Robert M. Price is my third guest. He is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, a scholarly think tank that during the 1980s and 1990s evaluated all the traditions regarding Jesus to extricate his words and deeds from later fictional elements attributed to him. Even though the Seminar determined that less than 20% of the material attributed to Jesus went back to an historical person, Dr. Price thinks that was too conservative. Dr. Price is the author of The Christ Myth Theory and Its Problems.   Here is my review.  He makes the case that when you try to separate the mythical elements from Jesus, you are left with myth and no remainder. He thinks that everything about Jesus has antecedents in the Hebrew scriptures or from pagan literature. His interview will be broadcast beginning May 31st.

My final guest in this series is Dr. John Dominic Crossan. He is the current president of the Society of Biblical Literature. He along with Robert Funk founded the Jesus Seminar and he has written over 20 books on early Christian origins. He believes that Jesus did exist. He was not an apocalyptic prophet, however. He believes the parables are the key to understanding Jesus and his message about the kingdom of God, that comes gradually as we participate in it. Dr. Crossan speaks about his new book, The Power of Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus.   Here is my review.  This interview will be broadcast beginning June 7th.


Religion For Life can be heard Thursdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 2 pm on WETS 89.5 FM and WETS HD-1, Johnson City, TN and Sundays at noon and Mondays at 1 pm on WEHC, 90.7, Emory, VA.

You can find information about upcoming programs and links to podcasts at www.religionforlife.me and you can follow Religion For Life on Facebook and Twitter.

Don't miss "Will the Real Jesus Please Rise" and do tell your friends about Religion For Life!

Was Jesus a Parable? A Review of John Dominic Crossan's New Book

John Dominic Crossan's latest book is a reminder of why I like him so much.



More than any other individual scholar, Dr. Crossan has enabled me to remain in the Christian tradition and to discover a credible Jesus within it.





Does that mean that beyond a doubt his reconstruction of the historical Jesus is "the guy?" No. It could be that the historical Jesus was a deluded apocalyptic fanatic. It could be that the historical Jesus never existed. It could be that the historical Jesus resembled one of or a combination of any variety of portraits that have been painted.

Who knows? That is the point. Nobody knows. I tend to think that Jesus the prophet of distributive justice through non-violence was not only credible then but credible now.   His vision inspired action then and it inspires action now.  His movement was hopeful then. It is hopeful today. That is the Jesus I can preach.  I find it reasonable that a Jesus that can preach in the present also was credible in his own time as someone to follow.







You will find that Jesus in The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus by John Dominic Crossan.









His book consists of two parts with an interlude.  In chapters one through six, he discusses the parables that Jesus told.   He describes three types of parables, riddle, example, and challenge.   Dr. Crossan demonstrates that the parables of Jesus were shaped by the gospel writers. 

A riddle is a puzzle to figure out such as when Mark has Jesus tell the parable of the seed that fell into the various types of ground.  The riddle is that each type of ground represents a type of person.   If you have insider information, you will get the riddle.    That is not the way Jesus told the parable.  That is how Mark mis-understood the parables of Jesus.

An example is a parable that teaches behavior such as the way Luke has Jesus tell the parable of the Good Samaritan ("go and do likewise").   An example parable is like a visual aid.  The real point is the exhortation, be good, pray often, don't give up trying, etc.   That is not the way Jesus told the parable.  That is how Luke mis-understood the parables of Jesus.

The preferred type of parable told by Jesus is the challenge parable.  An example of this parable is found in  the stories of Ruth, Jonah, and Job in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Challenge parables are not attacks.   They are not examples or riddles.  They challenge by surprise.

For instance, in the time of Ezra/Nehemiah when Israel was forming itself after the exile, the men were to divorce foreign women (such as Moabite women).   In that context arises the nice story of faithful and courageous Ruth, who by the way, we learn in the last few verses, is the ancestor of David.   What would have happened if Boaz had not married a foreign woman?  No David.

A challenge parable doesn't insist.  It is subtle and therefore, powerful. 

They want to seduce you into thought rather than beat you into silence and batter you into subjection.  p. 137

The "Good Samaritan" is a challenge parable as opposed to Luke's bracketing of it as an example parable.  A "good" Samaritan is an oxymoron.   Pick a category of a person you truly despise as a lifelong or generation after generation enemy and tell a story of that person being good, in fact, better than your own kind.  And do it subtly so that people are forced to think before simply reacting or feeling browbeaten.   That is the artistry of Jesus who both in content and form articulated his kingdom vision.

My answer is that the challenge parables are a profoundly appropriate rhetoric--even, indeed, an absolutely necessary one--for the two aspects of Jesus's vision of that kingdom, namely, its collaborative and nonviolent characteristics.  p. 133

Dr. Crossan sees Jesus announcing that God's kingdom is not a future, supernatural, violent event that God will bring.  Instead it is among you if you will take up the challenge:

Jesus is not just announcing to his audience that God's kingdom is now present.  He is announcing that is only present if and when it is accepted, entered into, and taken upon oneself.  p. 134

Jesus told parables.  He told fictional stories about fictional characters.  We have these stories as they have been collected and retold by the authors of the gospels.  The gospels are parables as well.  They are fictional stories about an historical figure, Jesus.   In the interlude, Dr. Crossan recounts Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon.  Is that parable or history?   It is parable, but parable about an historical event.  

The entire earthly life, death by assassination, and heavenly ascension of Julius Caesar were rampant with parabolic history and historical parable.  So were the earthly life, death by execution, and heavenly ascension of Jesus Christ.   p. 152

In Part 2, chapters seven through ten, Dr. Crossan discusses each of the four gospels as megaparables about Jesus.  As opposed to myth, he prefers the term parable.  But what kind of parables are they?   Are they challenge parables in the way that Jesus told challenge parables?  Sometimes.  They are also attack parables.  Such as when Jesus rants and raves about the hypocrites who are all going to hell.  Probably not Jesus.  More likely the gospel writer using Jesus as a mouthpiece to take on his/her own enemies.   At times the gospel writers are consistent with the vision of Jesus and at times not.  Each has a story to tell and a challenge to offer.

Mark's parable is a challenge to the leadership of the Jesus movement who chose the wrong path as seen in the choice of Barabbas over Jesus.  This is parable not history.  History was the choice of violent resistance to Rome by the Jews in 66-70 CE.  That is when Mark is written.  Mark creates the parable of Jesus trial, death, and resurrection as a challenge to leadership to stay in Galilee and choose the non-violent resistance of Jesus as opposed to the violent resistance of Barabbas.

Matthew's parable is an attack parable.  He creates a fantastic portrait of Jesus on the Sermon on the Mount and then turns him into a raving psychotic in chapter 23.   This attack has unfortunate consequences throughout the centuries against Jews and all others who are "to be cast into outer darkness."

What about Luke-Acts?  Dr. Crossan calls it "an attack on Judaism but also a challenge to Rome."  p. 218   Christianity will have a Roman future.  Luke-Acts paved the way for the eventual marriage of church and empire.  The challenge to Rome was not distributive justice as Jesus preached, but charity. 

John's parable is an attack on Judaism and also Christianity.  It also (like all the gospels) challenge the Roman Empire.  John more than Luke-Acts wants to transform Rome's violence rather than accommodate it.
   
This book is packed with interesting insights into the gospels and how they shaped the historical Jesus.  It provides a plausible account of a person whose vision and style of articulating that vision created a movement that endured beyond his violent death.  Dr. Crossan's Jesus is a real person even as he has been made into a parable by the gospel writers.  In the epilogue, Dr. Crossan takes on the question of whether or not Jesus existed at all by appealing to external and internal evidence.  

Externally, therefore, two historians at the turn of the first to second century explain "Christ" as the founder of a movement that was not stopped by his execution, but spread in time and place--whether as "an unbroken love" with Josephus or as a "pernicious superstition" with Tacitus.  That is the external proof of the factuality of Jesus, but, for me at least, the internal one is even more decisive.  p. 249

The internal evidence for Dr. Crossan is that Jesus himself morphed from a challenge parable to an attack parable.  The attack escalates from riding a donkey into Jerusalem to riding a war horse in Revelation.

The nonviolent incarnate Jesus has become the violent apocalyptic Jesus.  p. 250

How is that again?

Here is the point:  If you are inventing a non-historical figure, why invent one you cannot live with, but must steadily and terminally change into its opposite?  In other words, I find it much more likely that Jesus was an actual historical figure whose radical insistence on nonviolent distributive justice was both accepted and negated by the tradition it engendered.  I conclude that Jesus was an actual, factual, historical figure and not a metaphorical, symbolic, or parabolic invention by his first-century Jewish contemporaries.  p. 251

Dr. Crossan asks one more question.  Would it matter for the Christian faith if Jesus was a fictional character from top to bottom?   Dr. Crossan offers this interesting answer.  If Jesus were real, it means his vision could be enacted:

If it were done, it could be done again--and by others.  That, of course, is the challenge of Jesus as an actual, factual, historical figure.  If any one human being can do anything in life and death, other human beings can do likewise....The power of Jesus's historical life challenged his followers by proving at least one human being could cooperate fully with God.  And if one, why not others?  If some, why not all?  "Ashes denote," wrote Emily Dickinson, "that fire was."  And if fire ever was, fire can be again.  p. 252

I might quibble over this last paragraph.  I think there have been people throughout history who have followed this vision of Jesus in some form or another however imperfectly.   In fact, I think there are people today who do so.  Some may even be reading the words of this blog.   They may or may not do so because Jesus actually existed.  They might have been inspired by the mythos or parable of Jesus, or they may have lived it because they think it is a good way to live.  

I like Crossan's Jesus (with a little mix of Funk, the Five Gospels, Horsley, Herzog, and Wink).  But if he fades into fiction and leaves nothing but a smile, I will have to manage somehow.  And I will.  Until then, this Jesus preaches.  

Bob Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar used to say:   

“Beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you.”

I am pretty sure that goes back to the Historical Funk.  That is good advice.   It is true that Crossan's "peacenik" Jesus is more congenial to me than  Ehrman's "looney" Jesus or Price's "nobody's home" Jesus. 

Does the criterion of congeniality alone make Crossan's Jesus less credible?

Not really.  One could equally redact the Historical Funk to say:

"Beware of finding a Jesus entirely despicable to you."

The Historical Funk was speaking with the assumption that scholars actually liked Jesus.  That assumption no longer holds.  There are scholars whose theology or a-theology would benefit by finding a Jesus who either doesn't exist or is someone few would care to admire let alone follow.   A more reprehensible or non-existent Jesus is not necessarily more historical.     

I think the Jesus of distributive justice reflects a long-standing tradition within human history and literature including the Bible.   I think it is credible that an individual captured that vision and hope and inspired others to do the same.   

Is Jesus Christ a Myth? A Review of Robert Price's, "The Christ Myth Theory and Its Problems"

Dr. Robert Price is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar. From his perspective the Jesus Seminar was far too conservative regarding the voice print of the historical Jesus.  Dr. Price doesn’t think anything in the gospels goes back to an historical person. Jesus is not the son of God, the Christ, the son of man, a deluded apocalypticist, a clever cynic, or even just a dude in the wrong place at the right time. He is a creative fiction from start to finish. The gospels are works of fiction. The biography of Jesus is not biographical at all but pieced together from stories in the Greek Old Testament and Greek literature.





Dr. Price is one of the “mythicists” Dr. Ehrman warned you about.  Who are these mythicist bad boys?  What are they saying? Do they have a case? Do they have a partial case?







If I knew nothing about the Bible or Jesus and were to channel surf and see the Gospel of Luke (or any of the gospels) acted out on the Dish Network, I might ask myself, "What am I watching?"  Is this more like a PBS documentary on early Roman history or is it more like Xena: Warrior Princess?   Is this the Biography Channel or is it Masterpiece Theater?  Given those choices, the answer is, "Xena and Masterpiece."

It begins with a bucolic scene with poor shepherds and a stable.  The camera focuses on the face of a baby who is a "son of god" born of a virgin and "the holy spirit" to the accompaniment of singing angels.  As a precocious adolescent he astonishes his parents in the temple doing "his father's business" (wink, wink).  He speaks to and casts out demons, raises people from the dead, cures blindness with his spit, feeds five thousand people with five bagels and a can of sardines, walks on water, calms the sea by command, outwits his adversaries with clever aphorisms, dies for the sins of the world, rises from the dead, and then ascends bodily to heaven.   What are we watching?

Let's be like Judas' opening number in Jesus Christ Superstar and "strip away the myth from the man."   This has been the project of higher criticism for centuries.  Rudolf Bultmann called it demythologizing.  He thought that the gospels made a myth of the man.  The mythicists see the gospels as historicizing a myth.   It is six of one and one half dozen of another to me.    A case could be made for either direction.  As Robert Price writes:

There may once have been an historical Jesus, but for us there is one no longer. If he existed, he is forever lost behind the stained glass curtain of holy myth.  p. 23.

Certainly we know that the gospels are in some degree fictional. Only the truest believer would suggest that Jesus did and said everything that the gospels said he did and said.   Yet even most believers, I would think, would recognize that some of the activities attributed to Jesus are exaggerated.  They might even say, legendary.   Dare we say, fiction?   Go ahead, say it.  Fiction.  Jesus is at least in part a fictional character.   Be careful.  Once you go down that slippery slope you might next be asking yourself, "Is he mostly fiction?"   And that is just a short slide to smoking cigarettes and listening to jazz in a back alley barroom with the local hoodlums, er mythicists.


 


The Christ Myth Theory and Its Problems is a fine introduction to “The Quest of the Mythical Jesus” as Dr. Price puts it. The book is a collection of nine articles written by Robert Price on the various themes of the Christ Myth Theory.

I have not tried to amass every argument I could think of to destroy the historicity of Jesus. Rather, I have summarized the series of realizations about methodology and evidence that eventually led me to embrace the Christ Myth Theory.  P. 23

He does a fine and thorough job of it in this collection of essays.

First things first.  Dr. Price in addition to being an incredibly bright guy (he has two Ph. D's), is a hoot.  He is entertaining in person, on the radio, and in print.    He is especially clever with titles, such as the title of one of his books, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man.   One of my favorite books of his is The Reason Driven Life which is his response to Rick Warren's multi-zillion dollar best seller A Purpose Driven Life.    I think the world would be far less goofy if more people bought Price's book over Warren's.   

On to business.

The basic thrust of the Christ Myth Theory as I understand it is that Jesus Christ is a mythical figure in the pattern of the dying and rising God mytheme.  This mythical figure became "historicized" in the gospels and the later Christian tradition.   For Paul, Jesus Christ is crucified and risen.  Paul cares not about Jesus the person, but Christ Jesus, in whom we have salvation.  Paul knows Jesus through mystical visions.   By the time we get to the gospels, Jesus takes on the archetype of the hero and has attached to him stories mostly from the Old Testament.

Dr. Price's book is 397 pages and 200 of those pages are in a section entitled, "New Testament Narrative as Old Testament Midrash."  In this section, he attempts to find literary antecedents to many of the stories in the gospels and in Acts.   For instance, does this story sound familiar?

A man came from Baal-shalishah, bringing the man of God bread of the first fruits, twenty loaves of barley, and fresh ears of grain in his sack.  And Elisha said, "Give to the men, that they may eat."  But his servant said, "How am I to set this before a hundred men?"  So he repeated, "Give them to the men, that they may eat, for thus says the Lord, 'They shall eat and have some left.'"  So he set it before them.  And they ate, and had some left, according to the word of the Lord."  p. 93

That is from 2 Kings 4:42-44.  We know this story in the gospels as Jesus doing even better than the "man of God" by feeding 5,000 men (plus women and children) with five loaves and two fish.  Twelve baskets were left over.  That is but one example of midrash.   As Dr. Price explains:

We must now envision proto-Christian exegetes "discovering" for the first time what Jesus the Son of God had done and said "according to the scriptures" by decoding the ancient texts.  Today's Christian reader learns what Jesus did by reading the gospels; his ancient counterpart learned what Jesus did by reading Joshua and 1 Kings.  It was not a question of memory but of creative exegesis.  p. 61

This is not a new insight in scholarship.  Those who think Jesus was an historical person also show that Jesus had legends attached to him by the authors of the gospels who went back to their scriptures and re-wrote the old stories with Jesus as hero.   The difference with Dr. Price is that 

"...the result is a new perspective according to which we must view the gospels and Acts as analogous with the Book of Mormon, an inspiring pastiche of stories derived creatively from previous scriptures by a means of literary extrapolation."  p. 61

It's midrash all the way down.   According to Dr. Price, when you try to separate the myth from the man you are left with myth and no remainder.   OK, but aside from the miracle stories, what about the sayings and deeds of Jesus that the Jesus Seminar colored red or pink?   In his chapter, "Dubious Database:  Second Thoughts on the Red and Pink Materials of the Jesus Seminar," Dr. Price finds that none really makes the cut:

I have more than once drawn attention to D.F. Strauss's critical axiom that, once we expose the mythical Tendenz of a gospel story, we have no right to try to salvage specifics, secondary details, from it.  That is just a lame attempt to try to make bad evidence into good, and it partakes of a kind of Euhemerism, arbitrarily positing a more modest, possibly original version underlying that which we can in good conscience no longer accept.  If we can no longer affirm as historians that Jesus walked on water, we cannot pretend that the story in which he did is still good as evidence that knew where the stepping stones were.  There is no reason to insist that that secondary details, there just to background or advance the story, have an independent historicity when the main story dissolves under critical scrutiny.  p. 313

Or to put it more directly:

The story wants to preach to us a divine savior who entered this world from heaven and shortly returned there, betrayed, repudiated, martyred, but  vindicated.  We are having none of that.  We can tell that is myth, pure and simple.  So we ask what bits would make sense if we abstracted them from their familiar context and made them mean something else, as if the Atheist should take the Psalm verse out of context, stripping away the introduction, "The fool has said in his heart," then triumphantly quoting what is left:  "There is no God!"  p. 314

In other essays, Dr. Price addresses other thorny issues, such as Jesus' family members (ie. Paul's claim that James was "the brother of the lord").   That would make Jesus real, unless of course, "brother of the lord" means something other than biological kin.   

If you are going to read Dr. Ehrman's book as you should, I recommend this one by Dr. Price as well.  Even if you reject the arguments by Dr. Price and reject the Christ Myth Theory, you will gain insight into how the gospels were shaped.

I majored in English literature in college.  To this day, I remember my professor, Roger Sale of the University of Washington, telling us that when we read casually we care about the characters.  But reading literature critically requires us to care about the authors.   This may be especially true when we are reading stories about Jesus.  We care about Jesus.  We care so much that we have forgotten that he was created (or at least mightily shaped) by his authors.    The genius of Jesus might not have been in Jesus but in his creators.  In his chapter "The Abhorrent Void," Dr. Price writes:

There is just no reason Christian writers could not have composed the Sermon on the Mount if they created The Dialogue of the Savior.  If they could have fabricated Pistis Sophia, they could much more easily have fabricated the Gospel of John.  Whether they did is another matter, the discussion of which starts here, not stops.  p. 331

What is at stake in all of this?    Does the very edifice of Christendom rise or fall on the historicity of Jesus?   For some of course it does.  But that doesn't mean much.   Some require the foundation of Christianity to be built on an inerrant Bible.   If Jonah wasn't swallowed by a big fish then our faith is futile and we are still in our sins.

But for most thoughtful people who are taken by the Jesus Romance, we recognize that the mythical character of Jesus is the way the "mystery" has been revealed.   It takes a myth to tell this marvelous truth.   Ask Episcopalians, they get holy myth (at least many of them do).   The question is which myth?   Paul's myth or the myth of those who forged letters in Paul's name?  Mark's myth?  Luke's?  Mathew's?  John's?  Q's?   The myth of The Gospel of Judas or The Gospel of Mary Magdalene?  The myth of the Nicene Creed?  They are all different.   Take your pick or invent your own.  If there was a guy, he was framed immediately by everyone in a different way. 

I say, "Let the framing continue!"  I frame Jesus, too.   I think of him as a smart-mouthed critic of the world who loved to challenge convention.   He lived his life by standing up for what he believed in, inspired the marginalized, and lampooned the authorities.   Did that guy exist?  In my mind.  It is my myth of the historical Jesus.  And I can color a number of his sayings red or pink that go along with that myth.   I like to think he was real.  I can make a case that he is credible.  He is my Jesus.   He is my ishta deva and he's just all right with me.   If my views change and he fades into fiction, that's all right too.  He's still a great story.

What I find weird is the certainty over something that doesn't seem certain to me at all.   Either way.   If you insist he is a myth from start to finish, that's fine.  You may be right.  If you want to tell me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the historical Jesus existed and did this, said that, and believed in whatever, well, that's fine, too.  But unless I thrust my hand into his side I [probably] will not believe. 

Did Jesus Exist? A Review of Bart Ehrman's New Book

• He never wrote anything.
• He never served in public office.
• Except for brief comments by Josephus and Tacitus, there is nothing outside the New Testament and other Christian literature that even mentions him.
• Paul seems only to care about him as a theological figure.
• That goes for the gospels as well.
• Many of the stories about him are either fantastic or appear to have antecedents in other literature.
• The gospels do seem to read as stories in which Jesus is a character as opposed to biographies in which Jesus is a real person.

So...did Jesus exist, or was he from start to finish a product of creative imagination?

Wait a minute.  Do people really doubt the existence of Jesus?  

 

Apparently enough do to capture the interest of one the foremost scholars of early Christian literature, Dr. Bart Ehrman.  

 

He has written a book about it, Did Jesus Exist?  The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. 

He even has delayed plans on writing a book that he really cares about (how did Jesus become God)  to deal with this issue.   He writes:

Every week I receive two or three e-mails asking me whether Jesus existed as a human being.  When I started getting these e-mails, some years ago now, I thought the question was rather peculiar and I did not take it seriously.  Of course Jesus existed.  Everyone knows he existed.  Don't they?

But the questions kept coming, and soon I began to wonder:  Why are so many people asking?  My wonder only increased when I learned that I myself was being quoted in some circles--misquoted rather--as saying that Jesus never existed.  I decided to look into the matter.  I discovered, to my surprise, an entire body of literature devoted to the question of whether or not there ever was a real man, Jesus.  p. 2

He goes on to say that none of this literature is produced by 

"scholars trained in New Testament or early Christian studies teaching at the major, or even the minor, accredited theological seminaries, divinity schools, universities, or colleges of North America or Europe (or anywhere else in the world)."  p. 2

Who are these folks?  Dr. Ehrman writes:  

"The authors of this skeptical literature understand themselves to be "mythicists"--that is, those who believe that Jesus is a myth."  p. 3

From Dr. Ehrman's point of view, Jesus most certainly existed.

Jesus did exist.  He may not have been the Jesus that your mother believes in or the Jesus of the stained-glass window or the Jesus of your least favorite televangelist or the Jesus proclaimed by the Vatican, the Southern Baptist Convention, the local megachurch, or the California Gnostic.  But he did exist, and we can say a few things, with relative certainty, about him. p. 6

In addition to the argument that the "mythicists" are outside the academic beltway, Dr. Ehrman makes his case in three movements that constitute the three sections of his book.   

In the first section, chapters one through five, he presents the evidence for the historical Jesus.  Some of this evidence includes:

• Non-Christian sources, Tacitus and Josephus mainly.
• Seven surviving gospels "that are completely independent of one another or independent in a large number of their traditions.  These all attest to the existence of Jesus.  Moreover, these independent witnesses corroborate many of the same basic sets of data--for example, that Jesus not only lived but that he was a Jewish teacher who was crucified by the Romans at the instigation of Jewish authorities in Jerusalem." p. 92
• Later Christian sources: Papias, Ignatius of Antioch, 1 Clement, Acts (Jesus tradition and speeches), non-Pauline epistles, and Paul:  "Paul does indeed show that he knew Jesus existed....Paul mentions that Jesus was born; that he was a Jew, a direct descendant of King David; that he had brothers, one of them named James; that he had a ministry to Jews; that he had twelve disciples;that he was a teacher; that he anticipated his own death; that he had the Last Supper on the night he was handed over; that he was killed at the instigation of Jews in Judea; and that he died by crucifixion.  He also refers on several occasions to Jesus's teachings."  pp. 129-130
• Suffering messiah.  "The single greatest obstacle Christians had when trying to convert Jews was precisely their claim that Jesus had been executed.  They would not have made that part up.  They had to deal with it and devise a special, previously unheard of theology to account for it." p. 173

In section two, chapters six and seven, he presents and rejects the views of various "mythicists".  These first four claims he calls "irrelevant":

• The Gospels are Highly Problematic as Historical Sources.  Dr. Ehrman's response:  "...the evidence of the historical Jesus does not in the least depend exclusively on whether this, that, or the other Gospel story is historically accurate.  It is based on other considerations, which I set out in the earlier chapters, including the witness of Paul and the speeches of Acts, which long predate the Gospels."  p. 190
• Nazareth did not exist.  Dr. Ehrman's response: "The historicity of Jesus does not depend on whether Nazareth existed.  In fact, it is not even related to the question.  The existence (or rather, nonexistence) of Nazareth is another mythicist irrelevancy."   p. 197
• Gospels are paraphrases of Old Testament.  Dr. Ehrman's response:  "It is one thing to say that a story has been shaped in light of an account in the Hebrew Bible.  It is another thing to say that the event never happened at all or, even more, that the person about whom the story is told never existed."  p. 206
• The Nonhistorical "Jesus" is Based on Stories About Pagan Divine Men.  Dr. Ehrman's response:  "There certainly are similarities between what pagans were saying about their divine men and what Christians were saying about Jesus....But the parallels are not as close and as precise as most mythicists claim.  Nowhere near as close.  True, some similarities are significant.  But that is not relevant to the question of whether there really was a Jewish teacher Jesus who was crucified under Pontius Pilate....When Christians told stories about Jesus, they shaped the stories in light of stories they already knew." p. 215

He then addresses some "Mythicist Inventions" such as that Jesus was invented as a dying and rising god, that we was invented as a personification of Jewish Wisdom, that he was an unknown Jew that lived 100 years before Paul, and others. Dr. Ehrman finds none of these claims persuasive.   For instance in regards to Jesus as an invention of the dying/rising god, Dr. Ehrman writes, "The earliest Christians did not think Jesus was God."  p. 230   

In section three, chapters 8 and 9, he provides a sketch of his version of the historical Jesus.   This is a great section in which he describes the historical method, discusses the historical situation including Jewish Apocalypticism, and agrees for the most part with Albert Schweitzer:

"As Jesus fads come and go, as new Jesuses come to be invented and then pass away, as newer Jesuses come to take the place of the old, the real, historical Jesus continues to exist, back there in the past, the apocalyptic prophet who expected that a cataclysmic break would occur within his generation when God would destroy the forces of evil, bring in his kingdom, and install Jesus himself on the throne.  This is the historical Jesus.  And he is obviously far too historical for modern tastes.  That is why so many Christians today try to reform him."  p. 336

Dr. Ehrman's book deserves to be read.  He also provides a helpful bibliography of both mythicist literature and historical Jesus (and related topics) literature.   Dr. Erhman believes that he has provided a rock solid case.   It could very well be that Dr. Ehrman is right.

I find his apocalyptic Jesus really depressing.   That Jesus is hard to preach.  I am not sure if we have to have Jesus resemble Harold Camping to be a real guy.   We might be skeptical of a Jesus we admire, but we might also be skeptical of a Jesus we despise.  It may be equally hard to accept that Jesus is an onion.  Peel off each layer of fiction until you get to...nothing?  Give this country preacher a break!  I have to encourage the folks, you know?     

I do think this book will open this debate wider, not settle it.  All I mean by saying that is that movements that are outside the academy grow when they get a response from someone "inside the beltway" like Dr. Ehrman.   The mythicist movement is certainly uneven.   Much of it as Dr. Ehrman points out is amateurish.  But there are credible academics (Carrier, Price, Thompson and others) whose arguments may get better, more refined, and more accepted over time.   More may join them.  

I have one quibble with this book.  I do not think it is fair to call those who question the historicity of Jesus conspiracy theorists as the dust jacket states.  Now and then Dr. Ehrman's tone is a bit harsh:

It is striking that virtually everyone who has spent all the years needed to attain these qualifications is convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical figure.  Again, this is not a piece of evidence, but if nothing else, it should give one pause.  In the field of biology, evolution may be "just" a theory subscribed to, for good reason, by every real scientist in every established university in the Western world.  p. 5

Evolution gets stronger every day.   Evidence for the historical Jesus?  Hardly on par.   Again, Dr. Ehrman could be exactly right.  What can I know?  I am not a scholar.  That truth leads me to this observation:  Dr. John Dominic Crossan also thinks Jesus is an historical person.   He devotes a few pages to the historical question of Jesus near the end of his new book, The Power of Parable:  How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus.   

But the Jesuses these two scholars (Dr. Ehrman and Dr. Crossan) come up with seem to be two different guys.   Both Drs. Crossan and Ehrman have all the credentials and they both have access to evidence and they possess the tools and the skills to evaluate that evidence that I will never have.   But these experts disagree on some pretty significant things.  For example, are the apocalyptic "son of man" sayings from the historical Jesus or are they fictional?   When the experts disagree about what is historical about the historical Jesus, amateurs like me are easily confused.   It shouldn't be a surprise that we might make the next step (whether it is logical or not) and say to ourselves:

"If this one thinks this part is fiction and that one thinks that part is fiction, then maybe both are partly right, and it is all fiction." 

I am not there.  I am just saying that I understand how people can get there.   As I see it, there is a great deal of uncertainty in this work.   

There is a personal issue at stake.  Jesus to me is more than an historical person (or an interesting fiction).   If I am going to spend time with him, I am going to find a way to make him matter.   In the end maybe we all shape Jesus, even if unconsciously, to an image that we need, whether good, bad, or non-existent?   If each of the gospel writers, and Paul, and others reformed him, why not continue that good work?  

Thanks to Dr. Ehrman for bringing this scholarship to the public.  The cost of doing so is that we amateurs might take it where scholars never intended.

This review is a stop on the TLC Book Tour.