I suppose allegorists or believers who relegate the historical Jesus to myth have survived. I’m half way through On the Historicity of Jesus and William Blake has come back to mind. He believed in a celestial or imaginative Jesus, an eternal reality that animates the human imagination: “the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus.” So God is the human imagination. A celestial revelation that Paul had seems akin to a kind of Blakean divine awakening, allegorized by the “historical” Jesus. Literalism of the kind that binds Christianity to a historical god-man was anathema to Blake. Northrop Frye called Blake a “literalist of the imagination.” This seems to mash into Paul’s “Christ in me,” in the sense that Paul and Blake aren’t “hallucinating” realities outside of themselves but rather manifesting the literal truth of their own inventions. Blake is like an early mythicist in terms of his own stance on historicity but like an early Christian in terms of his celestial or imaginative belief in revelation, independent of historical saviors from the mundane world.

I would contend that the spread of the early message and the way it was spread, the assertion of the core historic fact of a man called Jesus’s life – his death in Jerusalem – makes his historical existence more likely than not.

I don’t quite understand the argument.

The supposition that the man they preached for the first 40 years was someone “who died in Jerusalem” is precisely the hypothesis being questioned; it is not evidence that we have.

To the contrary, the evidence suggests this is not what anyone was preaching until Mark invented it, and it is questionable whether even he meant anyone to really believe it (it was then still a shibboleth, per Mark 4:10–13). We don’t have a clear declaration of historicity until the final redaction of John, which is quite late (see Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians). I suspect that trend started earlier (probably around the time of Matthew: see How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?). And that it was viciously debated (with accusations of heresy and shunning and the like) in the second century (see my new chapter on Docetism in Obsolete Paradigm). So it was new, and the historicist model had to be fought for.

Any alternative story is speculation. If we had actual evidence that Peter and Paul (and Thomas, if he really did go to India—that’s all bollocks, but suppose that were all real and we had evidence proving it) were preaching “Jesus died in Jerusalem at the hands of Pilate,” then that would be indeed the kind of evidence we need to prove historicity probable. The problem is, rather, that we don’t have that evidence. That is precisely why historicity is doubtable.

This is a point I made in OPH in respect to Robyn Walsh’s argument for historicity: she thinks we are arguing that the historicizing myth existed in Paul’s day, and can’t believe that is likely to have survived; but in fact we agree: if we knew that, mythicism would indeed be unlikely and for that very reason. We just don’t know that. The evidence indicates in fact no such story existed in Paul’s day. What they were selling was instead a mystical vision-and-scripture based story (Galatians 1:11-12 and 3:1, 1 Corinthians 15:1–8, Romans 16:25–26).

By the time Mark turned it into a Jerusalem preacher story, a whole generation had passed; and even then insiders could still sell that as a “cleverly devised myth” (cf. 2 Peter) while others started insisting it was real, leading to the clashing views in the second century. So the first generation, no such story. Second generation, the story is being sold only as allegory to insiders and as literal to outsiders specifically to mislead them. By the third or fourth generation, factions started flipping and believing the literal story and denigrating the allegorists. By the fifth or sixth generation, the literalists dominated the market due to its rhetorical advantages and better funding and appeal. By the tenth generation any remaining allegorists were being hunted by the state as heretics and all their literature was destroyed.

My interest was not for a historical Jesus but how an evangelist coming to a new city would tell his story and what his back up was. The core of the message as I understand it was that a man called Jesus had been crucified, dead and buries and resurrected three days later in Jerusalem, and believing in him and following a simple code of behaviour would ensure the benefits of future eternal life based on faith that this was true and that one could have a direct relationship with this resurrected being (no sacrifices, priests etc required).

The obvious potential targets were listeners attending the local Jewish places of worship and the task was easier because the various prophecies esp Isaiah of the Messiah could act as a clinching backup. Since the Jewish community regarded these scriptures as sacred the declaration that they supported the idea of Jesus was a powerful argument. The vignette in Acts of Philip and the Ethiopian Acts 8.24-40 is a good example. “then Philip opened his mouth and preached Jesus to him”

As a good “doubting historian” you will deny that this ever happened on the Gaza road, but might agree with me that if it had happened, this would be an example of the early evangelical approach and all over the 30-50 CE ancient world wherever jewish communities existed from celtic realms to China the word was spread not for instant conversion like allegedly on the Jerusalem Gaza road, but creating the basic knowledge of a “Jesus”. There is much more detail to be added and argued over but I would contend that the spread of the early message and the way it was spread, the assertion of the core historic fact of a man called Jesus’s life – his death in Jerusalem – makes his historical existence more likely than not.

Given the paucity of relevant surviving documents in this period I do not find it surprising that we have none from the period and even those relevant documents we know of as existing in past are lost and some even deliberately destroyed.

Tony

P.S. As I note in Literalism:

This was essentially the program set forth by Plato in The Republic: myths must be tightly controlled by an organized priesthood, and sworn to be true; and anyone who attempts to change them or question their truth, outlawed. Just read Ibid. 3.414b-415d, where Plato has Socrates tell us that the guardians of society must “induce men to believe” well-crafted tales that nevertheless “have not happened and perhaps would not be likely to,” hence myths thereby dubbed “useful lies,” because only believing such myths true will make the people “more inclined to care for the state and one another.”

Origen and Eusebius both indicate they believe Plato was correct about this. So religions, including their own, came to be built on this Platonic model, believing it correct (reflecting a primitive early awaereness of the Noll Effect). Christians succeeded over other religions and sects by being more conservatively extremist (literalists and exclusivists, thus closing canons and access to authority), and thus eventually more attractive to a fascist political elite (like Constantine).

Alternative versions simply couldn’t compete in this marketplace. They therefore died out.

I already cataloged and responded to arguments like yours in the sequel A Few More Attempts to Rescue Jesus (check out the answers to Arguments P24 and P34). But in short…

Who would resist? The Gospels were written in a foreign language and in a foreign land, after all indications are the original witnesses had all died. The eyewitnesses won’t likely have even heard of them or had means to challenge them to faraway audiences, much less in any way we’d hear of now.

And how would we know they didn’t resist? No documents reacting to the change were preserved at all (not even positive ones). So we have no access to “what people were saying” about the Gospels, either way. Therefore we cannot make any claims about what they were or were not saying.

(Though it happens that we actually have hints of resistors, whose opinions survive in the polemics against them from the second century. I discuss some of this evidence on OHJ, but even more in my forthcoming book.)

The process also likely went through exactly the phase you suggest. When Mark wrote, he is writing explicit allegory intended to hide the truth behind “literalized stories” to keep it from the public and non-initiates. This and his reliance on the letters of Paul to structure and reify his tales indicates that when he wrote, the “upper secret” version was still being taught to ranking initiates (just as in Osiris cult).

Matthew then starts to historicize it with claims of fulfilled prophecy, though that may again be a furtherance of this same “double truth” model (as explicitly described by Origen in the 3rd century: see Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians), since Matthew is trying to make the story look like a book from the OT (e.g. Daniel, Tobit, Enoch, or the Kings literature)

Luke is the first author who starts concretizing the story by making it resemble “histories” and insisting it’s “true” (though even he is evasive as to just what he means to be “true”), and scholars are now dating Luke to the early second century, so almost a century after the religion began, and an average lifetime after Mark began Gospelizing the story at all (the historical Jesus does not exist in earlier works like 1 Clement, Hebrews, or Paul’s authentic writings, as each discussed in OHJ).

A decade or two after that, John then pushes the Lukan model with explicit intimations of damnation for anyone who does not take it literally (he also fixes Luke’s possible endorsements of the Markan model, for example by reifying Lazarus into exactly the opposite lesson about evidence and truth, as shown in OHJ, Ch. 10.7), indicating an ideological war between factions in the church (reflected also in 1, 2, and 3 John and 2 Peter), against the “two truthers” (your and my proposed middle stage) and in favor of “hard literalism,” and the latter faction won (likely for political and financial reasons, per the Noll thesis, below). So the process took over a century and was driven by common social forces and political maneuvering.

As to why this happens, I discuss the Noll thesis in OHJ. It is a universal social dynamic, that happens to all religions (they more historicize their myths over time, to lock down channels of authority and concretize belief, since abstract beliefs are harder to maintain and appeal to larger audiences). For example, modern scientists documented it for the Cargo Cults: dispersed mystical experiences got replaced with a fabricated “singular historical founder,” and in the same span of time (30-40 years). I discuss this throughout OHJ.

By contrast, the Gospels cannot be oral lore, because they are deliberate literary constructs, and follow deliberate literary procedures (e.g. Matthew copies Mark, not “oral lore,” and Luke copies Mark and Matthew; and what they add can be shown to be late inventions and not early, etc.). They do not follow the structure of oral lore. I discuss this in ch. 10 of OHJ (and more in my forthcoming book) but other scholars are starting to notice (see, for example, Robyn Faith Walsh and the Gospels as Literature and Was the Entire New Testament Forged in the Second Century? and Mark’s Use of Paul’s Epistles and How We Know Acts Is a Fake History and All the Fantastical Things in the Gospel according to Mark, just for starters).

For more, see my direct answer to questions like yours in How Did Christianity Switch to a Historical Jesus?

Jesus is not special except in the sense that he exemplifies (or models) the dying to self and the awakening to divinity (for lack of a better word).

He’s not special even in that. Comparable deities and sages exist across global history, many well predating Jesus. Of course, you just described a modern invented role for Jesus (it didn’t exist in any prior version, much less the original religion), but insofar as you can gerrymander that to fit the original, you can likewise any other pre-Christian sage, from Buddha to Dionysus and Osiris.

Thanks again, Richard, for taking the time to answer my questions. Your generosity and teacherly patience is very much appreciated. All the best in the new year!

Eldon

What do you make of the argument that the teachings of Jesus arising from the gospels are so profoundly radical and singular that only an historical personage could have embodied them? Or conversely, were these teachings accessible within the prevailing culture and not unique to early Chistianity?

The latter. And that’s a good question (as was your first question about oral lore), because the “myth” today is precisely what you describe: that somehow Jesus is special. Of course, that serves the Christian apologetical agenda (it’s just like Muslim’s claiming the Koran is inhumanly perfect and thus cannot have been made by mere men).

In truth, there is only one way Jesus could be special: that he was especially smart and creative. But we know that describes hundreds of people in his any any subsequent generation. So if Jesus could come up with clever new things, so could Paul, Peter, Clement, etc. There is no inherent reason why anything clever in the Gospels has to come from Jesus rather than just any clever and creative innovator whatever.

So I think the “Jesus is special” argument is an intentional equivocation fallacy meant to bolster the faith. By talking as if it were respectably mainstream (“Oh, we mean, he was just a remarkable innovator”) they can, when needed, bootstrap that to the supernatural (“No other man could do that; therefore he must have been more than a man”), when in reality “he was just a remarkable innovator” describes Paul, Peter, Clement, the authors of the Gospels, etc. And so it doesn’t get you to Jesus, much less Miraculous Jesus.

As to specifics:

For an example, the mainstream consensus is that most of the Sermon on the Mount was invented by Greek speaking Jewish Christians a lifetime after Jesus would have lived, based on mere snippets of ideas supposedly going back to him (I discuss Dale Allison’s case for this in Ch. 10 on OHJ; I think “Sermon on the Mount” may be in the index). That destroys the “only Jesus could have invented it” argument. The authors of Matthew were just as or even more clever than any historical Jesus there may have been.

For other examples:

The Beatitudes that are supposed to be so remarkable there, actually are just a typical rewrite of a whole existing genre of literature discovered at Qumran (Qumran kind of destroyed a lot of this “special Jesus” stuff, as almost everything supposedly special about him, was already mainstream there, a century or more before him).

Many of the supposedly most radical teachings are just rehashes of Cynic philosophy—which led to the Cynic Philosopher thesis in mainstream Jesus studies, although one need not posit influence, since if the Cynics could invent all that, so could anyone else similarly situated. Jesus is then no more remarkable than Diogenes.

And some of the “radical” teachings attributed to Jesus don’t even exist. For instance, the claim that he “was God” is actually nowhere in the Gospels. Read in context, he says nothing more remarkable than other prophets and messianic claimants (that God made him and is in him and anointed him with divine roles). Which does not conflict with known models of Jewish thought at the time (even if they were fringe and frowned upon by the mainstream elite), and thus is not “special.”

And so on.

James Mackey’s Jesus, the Man and the Myth had quite an impact on me when I was younger. I never considered “myth” outside its pejorative meaning as “fantastical” or “false”; for Mackey, myth is what is really real or what is actually going on behind the narrative. I don’t necessarily believe that there is an inexorable march to atheism once religion is deconstructed and exposed. I can imagine that even when, say the gospels, are stripped bare, and Paul’s revelatory halucinations and their theological underpinnings are found lacking or pedestrian, that the divine still speaks, if only because we ourselves are the divine revelation. The kingdom is within, as gospel Jesus would have it. Perhaps what is even more upside-down than a mythical Jesus is what Blake calls the human form divine. All those fanciful cosmic mechanations and the myths that prop them up might still be eternity through a glass darkly.

Please forgive that meandering tangent. Your work, which I’ve only just discovered in the past few days, has really inspired me and rekindled my lost passion for biblical studies. One further question(s) coming out this: What do you make of the argument that the teachings of Jesus arising from the gospels are so profoundly radical and singular that only an historical personage could have embodied them? Or conversely, were these teachings accessible within the prevailing culture and not unique to early Chistianity? Thanks much!