Questioning Jesus’ Historicity

Why would human rulers of the age (i.e. pagan rulers like Rome and also the Jewish leadership in Palestine) want Christian salvation? They didn't at all, they actively were against Christianity. So if they had known what would happen, why would they want to go through with it and aid their rivals whom they persecuted? Even if we took the archons as demonic powers, that also does not negate earthly presence by any means at all, since Paul clearly thinks they interact with the world (such as in 1 Cor. 10:20-21 where they are behind false worship). You have simply cherry picked your preferred interpretation, without much substantiation. I'd add that, Romans 13:3-6 seems to indicate these archons are earthly principalities, given that this is Paul speaking of earthly powers with the ability to inflict harm and fear on the followers of Jesus in a physical setting. The sixth verse makes this clear noting that because these powers are instituted by God, you must pay your taxes and all that good jazz. Lataster's reading is convoluted and not thought through.

Your reading seems unnecessarily forced and simply untenable.

Like all sympathetic to mythicism, your readings are made by pulling absurdities out of thin air as a convoluted explanation.

Finally, I find it ironic that in order for one to reject a historical Jesus, they must first invent full scratch, by largely misinterpreting biblical passages, a mythical Jesus, which has no attestation.

Thank you for your comments. This is all addressed in the book. Very quickly, this is not *my* reading, it is the reading of many scholars, including even Christian scholars. And, of course, the case for agnosticism and mythicism does not hinge on this one passage. It is just one in a long line of passages that should cause one to think about removing their Gospel-tainted glasses when reading the Epistles.

I think that the principle of logic, that existence is not a predicate, ought always to be remembered. ‘Did x exist?’ is an informal way of asking ‘Did anything (anyone) exist having predicates a,b,c etc.?’.
What predicates need to apply if someone is to be recognised as ‘a Jesus’? Maybe, for the sake of argument, we say ‘a) taught in a pacifist spirit b) was believed to have worked miracles c) suffered under Pontius Pilate’. At that rate, did any such person exist? The answer to this form of question can in some senses be a matter of degree - perhaps several people who suffered under PP were alleged miracle workers but none were pacifists. Even if our answer at this stage is close to Yes it is a further question whether only one such person existed - possibly there were many who qualified as ‘a real Jesus’ and ‘the real Jesus of history’ is a conflation of some of them.
We talk of one Jesus or no Jesus but the third logical possibility, more than one Jesus, ought not to be ruled out without a minute’s consideration. At that rate the real story would be less about an individual teacher than about a school of thought, perhaps one that suffered violent repression.
The question ‘Did Jesus exist?’ is a richer question than is always recognised. The next analytic step is to identify the predicates that are relevant - what would someone have to have done in order to have been Jesus? - and that in itself is not the easiest question.

Hi Raphael, I was directed here by someone asking me to address your post and those of some of the commentors. I'm the author of "Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed".

As the title to my book suggests, I've moved past the point of agnosticism on the issue and believe that the case against Jesus' existence is at least as strong at the case of the theory of biological evolution. I'd say that it's actually easier to prove that Jesus never existed than just about anyone else in history due to the quality of the documentation that we have.

My understanding of the Gospels and the rise of Christianity is a bit different than what you lay out here. The case I put forward in my book is essentially that early Jesus worship developed out of prophetic scriptural interpretation. The "Jesus" (Joshua) that Paul talks about is a figure revealed by Jewish scriptural diviners along the lines of what we see taking place in the DSS (Dead Sea Scrolls). Paul is talking about ecstatic revelatory experiences that put him in touch with a Jesus only known to others via scriptural divination.

The Gospel of Mark, however, was written by a well practiced Jewish scriptural diviner and master of Jewish story-telling. The writer of Mark was in possession of a collection of Paul's works , was himself perhaps a Paulinist, and was inspired to write his allegorical tale after the fall of the temple in 70 CE. "Mark's" story is an allegory, written using many of the advanced techniques of allegorical Jewish storytelling. The story of "Mark" was a commentary on the War. The Jesus character is based directly on Paul himself. The message of the story is that the Jews brought the destruction of the war upon themselves by not following PAUL'S teachings of reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles. The writer of Mark was not writing for a community of people who believed in a human Jesus. "Mark's" story was intended to be taken as allegory. The entire story of Mark is an invention from the mind of the writer. There was no prior narrative about Jesus at all.

The writer of Matthew came into contact with Mark's story and was impressed by it. This is because Mark's story is a masterpiece of complex hidden symbolism and literary puzzles. These literary puzzles were seen by many in the Roman word at this time as signs of divinity and truth. We know this because we have similar reactions to other such works from Romans at this time. I believe that the author of Matthew was engaging in knowing fraud when he wrote his piece. This was actually very common at this time. "Mark" wasn't engaging in fraud, he was writing "fiction" with no intention of it being taken literally. The writer of Matthew, however, was making stuff up with the intent that it be taken literally. He was intentionally trying to persuade people of the truth of the events. But why? I think purely for profit. There was no real church at this time. The tiny cults of Jesus worship that existed before the War had been largely destroyed and there really was no meaningful Jesus worshiping community to speak of at the time Matthew was writing. Matthew's story was written to sell it for short-term gain. There was a significant trade is such prophetic stories in Rome at this time, and Matthews story appears to have been written for this market.

The same goes for the Gospel of John. Like Matthew, "John" was simply trying to make a buck and his story is written with the intent of fooling people into believing that it was something it was not. As for Luke, I believe that "Luke" was a Roman scholar who was fooled into thinking that these accounts were real and who wrote his own version at the request of a paying patron to try and clarify the "real facts". Luke, in essence, is the first well-documented dupe.

Now, as for the question, "Why would human rulers of the age (i.e. pagan rulers like Rome and also the Jewish leadership in Palestine) want Christian salvation?"

Actually, what happened was this: 2nd-3rd century Roman scholars came into contact with the Gospel stories primarily Matthew, and believed them to be supreme evidence of real prophetic power. The reason that the Roman elites adopted Christianity was purely because of their misunderstanding of the Gospels and what they saw as irrefutable evidence of ancient prophetic truth. At this time, the Romans were absolutely obsessed with prophecy and using prophecy as the premier way to establish truth.

When they saw the relationships between the Jewish scriptures and the Gospel accounts they were convinced those relationships were evidence of fulfillment of divinely hidden ancient Jewish prophecies. All of this stems from how the author of Mark used literary references in crafting his narrative and how the Gospel writers all copied from Mark, thus copying, and in some cases intentionally expanding upon, those literary references. This was a at a time when the Sibylline Oracles were protected by the Roman Senate as the most important documents in the world. The Gospel were compared to the Sibylline Oracles and deemed to evidence of superior prophetic power. And that's why the Romans adopted Christianity.

So the whole thing really arose out of a series of confusion and misunderstanding about how the Gospels were produced really. Most of this is laid out in detail in my book, showing step by step how all this took place. I'm working on a new book now that goes farther back in time to to get better context for how the Greeks, Romans and Jews viewed prophecy and how prophetic writing were produced in these cultures and the ways that literary prophecy shaped Hellenistic culture, etc.

Thank you Hughes. These are all possibilities as well. Carrier and I like to focus on the Celestial Jesus theory because it fits the evidence (particularly the pre-Gospel evidence) really well. And thank you Price. It seems that you agree quite a bit with us. We also think that pre-Christian Jewish exegesis and revelations of a purely celestial being (the archangel called Jesus, or perhaps he was called Michael before...) were involved, and that Mark is an allegorisation of Paul's writings (as many non-mythicist scholars are now accepting). All we need to explain the whole 'Jesus story' is one pre-Pauline Jew/Christian imagining that the Celestial Messiah that several Jews at the time already believed in spoke to her/him, explaining that his name is Jesus and that he has fulfilled his mission (dying for our sins, and rising). And, of course, many religions started with such 'revelations', so there is nothing implausible about this scenario. As time has gone on, much of the extra evidence we have found has only made this theory more probable. As for the Historical Jesus theory, as time has gone on it has become less probable as we learn how unreliable the Gospel sources really are.

To clarify, the thesis I lay out in my book is that there was no narrative about Jesus or belief that Jesus was a real person until the Gospel of Mark was written. The story of Mark is what created the belief that Jesus was a real person. The writer of Mark was not working from existing accounts of Jesus, the writer of Mark invented the entire narrative himself as an allegory, which was later misinterpreted as a literally true story, mostly because of the revised version called Matthew.

I can only agree; if you even consider Mark to be a 'somewhat detailed biography' (hardly, as it skips most of his life), we have nothing comparable before it.

Also see: https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/when-critics-miss-point-about-….

I largely agree with the OP, but things can be quite a bit more concrete than that.

I think what's clear that so-called "mainstream" scholars have really dug themselves into a hole. The approach taken by myself, and others such as Tom Dykstra and David Oliver Smith, is to show the real complexity of how the Gospels were written. And much of this complexity has been denied by mainstream scholars for years and many such mainstreamers have gone to great lengths to try to conjure up Gospel authors as sort of simple laymen engaged in their first ever writing attempts, or humble field journalists jotting down oral accounts, etc. But any real study of the texts shows this is impossible.

The case I make in Deciphering the Gospels is that it is provable that the narrative of Mark was entirely invented by a single individual AFTER the First Jewish-Roman War. I go through all of the evidence that supports such as case. Well, not all, as in fact now I see that my case could have been made 10 times stronger, though I believe I put forward the strongest case to date when I published in 2018. But actually much more could have been said about the writing techniques used in Mark.

But clearly, the author of Mark was a sophisticated writer using a lot of complex symbolism and techniques that we also see in the DSS material. The writer of Mark wasn't some simpleton jotting down things he was being told, he was a master story teller writing a very complex narrative using chiastic structures, multiple layers of symbolism, parables like those found only at Qumran, hundreds of deep sculptural references, numerology and other advanced methods of Hellenistic prophetic writing. The whole plot is actually maddeningly complex with multiple layers of hidden foreshadowing and secretly coded hints about the future and the nature of Jesus. This is, very clearly, a literary masterpiece crafted by a literary genius, not some field report of urban legends.

But again what I come back to in all of my analysis is that none of it makes any sense from a pre-war perspective. Every aspect of the story, every scene, is clearly rooted in POST-WAR symbolism. The story cannot have any basis is any pre-war account of a real person.

But that's just the Gospel of Mark though, what about everything else? Well clearly once you realize that every scene in Mark is a post-war invention then obviously you have to acknowledge that every single account of the life of Jesus derives from this single story. As I show in DtG, every account, including every non-canonical account, of Jesus can be tied back to the Gospel of Mark. There is no account of Jesus the man that is independent of Mark. It all started with that one story and just evolved from there. And there was never any knowledge of Jesus apart from the Gospels and 2nd century scholars make very clear.

The case I make then is that it would only be the case that every account of Jesus the person would be derived from an entirely fictional post-war account if there was no real Jesus person to begin with. This is especially true when we get to Luke because clearly "Luke" was trying to find other sources, but the best Luke could do was make use of Mark, Matthew and Paul. Those are Luke's sources. Everything in Luke can be accounted for from those three sources, as David Oliver Smith and Mark Goodacre's work shows. So we have a researcher in Luke who was trying to find everything he could and all he could come up with is Mark, Matthew and Paul.

But what about Paul and other epistles? As I show, and other like Dyksra have shown, the Gospel of Mark is based on the letters of Paul. The continuity between Paul's letters and the Gospels is because the Gospels are derived from Paul's letters. Again, its all literary borrowing. But didn't Paul clarify that Jesus was a person? Well this is ironic because 20th century biblical scholarship was all about dismissing Paul as someone who clearly didn't know about Jesus and stating that the Gospels were all based on "pre-Pauline" sources. We had the development of the "oral traditions" explanation and Q. Paul was pushed out of the way, and it became all about how scholars could divine the "original sources" underlying the Gospels. Clearly that whole effort was a massive farce.

The real original sources underlying the Gospels are the letters of Paul and the LXX + the imagination of the writers. This is provable and demonstrable, whereas Q and oral traditions are not. Paul obviously knew nothing about any real Jesus and was talking about a heavenly Jesus who was revealed via scriptural divination a-la what we see taking place at Qumran. Indeed the DSS shows us exactly how "Jesus" (Joshua) was "discovered". The scriptural interpretations we see in the DSS are exactly how Paul describes the "revelation" of Jesus via "prophets".

So we have a Paul telling us that Jesus was made known by scriptural diviners (prophets) and that Jesus was revealed to him ecstatically or via dreams, and Paul's letters are then used as the basis for creating an allegory about Jesus after the destruction of the temple, to show that the Jews were destroyed by the Romans because they didn't listen to Paul's message about reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles.

And regardless, it is proven beyond any doubt that NOTHING described in the Gospels ever happened or is based in any way on the life of a real Jesus person. Even if you try to argue that Paul was talking "some Jesus person", Paul tells us nothing ABOUT that Jesus person other than that he was crucified. The Jesus worshiped by Christians is the Jesus of the Gospels, not the Jesus of Paul. The Jesus of the Gospels is a fictional literary invention full stop.

And if you want to argue that "Paul's Jesus" was real, then you have to explain why Paul tells us nothing meaningful about him, relays none of his teachings, and why Paul and others think that a real person died and rose from the grave - when clearly that wouldn't have actually happened.

http://www.decipheringthegospels.com/

The book looks interesting. But I am tempted to give it a one-star review on Amazon for its price. About 200 USD/EUR is simply ridiculous.

Please keep in mind that authors tend to have no control over the price, that is up to the publishers.

@ Jörg. Unfortunately, it is the nature of the beast that scholarly work published by a major academic publisher, will be priced beyond the reach of the average layperson. A peruse of Amazon for similar will demonstrate this to be the norm. As an example, a 2013 book on Amazon by Bart Ehrman, also published by Brill, is priced similar. Though it is being offered with a discount from £151 to £131, it is still beyond the means of most layperson. Being on a very low income through personal circumstances, I'm as disappointed as you are, but that's no reason to mark the contents down. What can we do?

When I first came across the following in Bertrand Russell's "Why I am not a Christian", a lecture he gave in 1927, I was surprised: "Historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one." Now it seems very naive of me to have assumed a philosopher would say such a thing if he didn't have good reasons, but I do wonder what scholars he was thinking of who might have looked at the difficult historical question.