The Gospel of Matthew tells us that Jesus Christ was born in the final years of the tyrant known as Herod the Great. He tells us that when Jesus was born, Herod panicked and had all the baby boys in Bethlehem killed. Fortunately, the Jesus' family escaped to Egypt and remained there until Herod was dead.

They didn't have to stay long, though. Here's when Herod the Great actually died . . .
 

Setting Aside a Common Mistake

 
For just over a hundred years, the question of when Herod the Great died has been dominated by a proposal by the German scholar Emil Schurer. He suggested that Herod died in 4 B.C., and this view took off in scholarly circles. But in recent decades, it's been challenged and, as we saw in a previous post, the arguments for this position are exceptionally weak.

So when did Herod actually die?
 

The Length of Herod's Reign

 
Here is how the Jewish historian Josephus describes the timing of Herod's death:

"So Herod, having survived the slaughter of his son [Antipater] five days, died, having reigned thirty-four years, since he had caused Antigonus to be slain, and obtained his kingdom; but thirty-seven years since he had been made king by the Romans."  [War of the Jews, 1:33:8 (665); cf. Antiquities of the Jews 17:8:1 (191)]

In this place, Josephus dates Herod's death by three events:

1. Five days after the execution of his son Antipater.
2. Thirty-four years after he "obtained his kingdom" (i.e., conquered Jerusalem and had its Hasmonean king, Antigonus, killed).
3. Thirty-seven years after "he had been made king by the Romans."

The death of Antipater isn't a particularly helpful clue, but the two ways of reckoning the length of his reign are.

First, though, we need to answer one question . . .
 

How Is Josephus Counting Years?

 
Kings don't tend to come into office on New Year's Day, and so they often serve a partial year before the next calendar year begins (regardless of which calendar is used). They also don't die on the last day of the year, typically, so they also serve a partial year at the end of their reigns. This creates complications for historians, because ancient authors sometimes count these additional part-years (especially the one at the beginning of the reign) as a full year. Or they ignore the calendar year and treat the time that a king came into office as a kind of birthday and reckon his reign in years from that point.

What scheme was Josephus using?

Advocates of the idea that Herod died in 4 B.C. argue that he was named king in 40 B.C. To square that with a 37-year reign ending in 4. B.C., they must count the part year at the beginning of his reign and the part year at the end of it as years. That's the only way the math will work out.

The problem is that this is not how Josephus would have reckoned the years. Biblical chronology scholar Andrew E. Steinmann comments:

"[T]here is no evidence for this [inclusive way of reckoning the partial years]--and every other reign in this period, including those of the Jewish high priests, are reckoned non-inclusively by Josephus." (From Abraham to Paul, 223)

In other words, Josephus does not count the partial first year when dating reigns in this period.

Knowing that, what would we make of Josephus's two ways of dating Herod's reign?
 

Herod Appointed King

 
As we saw in the previous post, Josephus gave an impossible date (one that did not exist) for Herod's appointment as king. He said it was in the 184th Olympiad, which ended in midyear 40 B.C. and that it was in the consulship of Calvinus and Pollio, which began in late 40 and extended into 39. Those can't both be right, but one of them could be.

Which one? The evidence points to 39 B.C., because we have another source on this: the Roman historians Appian and Dio Cassius. Appian wrote a history of the Roman civil wars in which he discusses the appointment of Herod in the midst of other events. By comparing this set of events to how they are dated in Dio Cassius's Roman History, it can be shown that the events in question--including the appointment of Herod--took place in 39 B.C.

Given how Josephus dates reigns in this period, he would not have counted Herod's partial first year in 39 B.C. but would have started his count with 38 B.C.

Count 37 years forward from that and you have 1 B.C.
 

Herod Conquers Jerusalem

 
As we saw in the previous post, Josephus gives contradictory dating information for Herod's conquest of Jerusalem. Some of the dating information he provides points to 37 B.C. and some points to 36 B.C. Josephus said Herod died 34 years after the event.

Bearing in mind that Josephus wasn't counting partial first years, that would put Herod's death either in 2 B.C. (if he conquered Jerusalem in 37) or in 1 B.C. (if he conquered the city in 36).

There are various ways to try to resolve which, but some are rather complex.

At least one, however, is quite straightforward . . .
 

Herod's Lunar Eclipse

 
We saw in the previous post that Josephus said Herod died between a lunar eclipse and Passover. While there was a partial lunar eclipsed before Passover in 4 B.C. there was a total lunar eclipse before Passover in 1 B.C. Further, the lunar eclipse in 1 B.C. better fits the situation Josephus describes (see the previous post for details).

Since 4 B.C. is outside the range indicated above, and since the 1 B.C. lunar eclipse fits the situation better, that lets us decide between 2 B.C. and 1 B.C. in favor of the latter. There was no lunar eclipse in 2 B.C., pointing us toward 1 B.C.
 

Final Answer?

 
Putting together the pieces above, we have:

• Reason to think Herod died in 1 B.C. based on the amount of time he served after being appointed king by the Romans.
• Reason to think Herod died in either 2 or 1 B.C. based on the amount of time he served after conquering Jerusalem.
• Reason to think Herod died in 1 B.C. because of the lunar eclipse that occurred before Passover.

More specifically, he would have died between January 10, 1 B.C. (the date of the lunar eclipse) and April 11, 1 B.C. (the date of Passover).

Most likely, it was closer to the latter date, since Josephus records a bunch of things Herod did after the eclipse and before his death, some of which required significant travel time.

There is also one more reason that we should reject the death of Herod in 4 B.C. in favor of a 1 B.C. date . . .
 

We Know When Jesus Was Born

 
We don't have to restrict our knowledge of when Herod died to the sources and events mentioned above. We can also date his death relative to the birth of Christ. For some reason, moderns seem to think that the dating of Herod's death should govern when Jesus was born, but the logic works both ways: if we know when Jesus was born, that tells us something about when Herod died.

And we, in fact, have quite good information about the year in which Jesus was born.

It was after 4 B.C., ruling out that date.

So . . . what year was Jesus born?

Stay tuned for my post tomorrow on Christmas Day. . . 
 
 
 
PS. If you like the information I've presented here, you should join my Secret Information Club. If you're not familiar with it, the Secret Information Club is a free service that I operate by email. I send out information on a variety of fascinating topics connected with theology, science, history, and more.

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Originally posted at National Catholic Register. Used with permission.

NOTE: Christians around the world celebrated Good Friday and Easter last week, which commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus we began a six-part series on these events by Dr. Peter Kreeft in which he examines each of the plausible theories attempting to explain what happened to Jesus at the end of his life, particularly whether he rose from the dead.

Part 1 - 5 Possible Theories that Explain the Resurrection of Jesus
Part 2 - Rejecting the Swoon Theory: 9 Reasons Why Jesus Did Not Faint on the Cross
Part 3 - Debunking the Conspiracy Theory: 7 Arguments Why Jesus’ Disciples Did Not Lie
Part 4 - Refuting the Myth Theory: 6 Reasons Why the Resurrection Accounts are True
Part 5 - Real Visions: 13 Reasons the Disciples Did Not Hallucinate
Part 6 - Answering 5 More Common Objections to the Resurrection
 

 
No alternative to a real resurrection has yet explained six key facts: the existence of the Gospels, the origin of the Christian faith, the failure of Christ's enemies to produce his corpse, the empty tomb, the rolled-away stone, or the accounts of the post-resurrection appearances. Swoon, conspiracy, hallucination, and myth have been shown to be the only alternatives to a real resurrection, and each has been refuted.

What reasons could be given at this point for anyone who still would refuse to believe? At this point, general rather than specific objections are usually given. For instance:

Objection 1: History is not an exact science. It does not yield absolute certainty like mathematics.

Reply: This is true, but why would you note that fact now and not when you speak of Caesar or Luther or George Washington? History is not exact, but it is sufficient. No one doubts that Caesar crossed the Rubicon; why do many doubt that Jesus rose from the dead? The evidence for the latter is much better than for the former.

Objection 2: You can't trust documents. Paper proves nothing. Anything can be forged.

Reply: This is simply ignorance. Not trusting documents is like not trusting telescopes. Paper evidence suffices for most of what we believe; why should it suddenly become suspect here?

Objection 3: Because the resurrection is miraculous. It's the content of the idea rather than the documentary evidence for it that makes it incredible.

Reply: Now we finally have a straightforward objection—not to the documentary evidence but to miracles. This is a philosophical question, not a scientific, historical or textual question.

Objection 4: It's not only miracles in general but this miracle in particular that is objectionable. The resurrection of a corpse is crass, crude, vulgar, literalistic, and materialistic. Religion should be more spiritual, inward, ethical.

Reply: If religion is what we invent, we can make it whatever we like. If it is what God invented, then we have to take it as we find it, just as we have to take the universe as we find it, rather than as we'd like it to be. Death is crass, crude, vulgar, literal, and material. The resurrection meets death where it is and conquers it, rather than merely spouting some harmless, vaporous abstractions about spirituality. The resurrection is as vulgar as the God who did it. He also made mud and bugs and toenails.

Objection 5: But a literalistic interpretation of the resurrection ignores the profound dimensions of meaning found in the symbolic, spiritual, and mythic realms that have been deeply explored by other religions. Why are Christians so narrow and exclusive? Why can't they see the profound symbolism in the idea of resurrection?

Reply: They can. It's not either-or. Christianity does not invalidate the myths, it validates them, by incarnating them. It is "myth become fact," to use the title of a germane essay by C.S. Lewis (in God in the Dock). Why prefer a one-layer cake to a two-layer cake? Why refuse either the literal-historical or the mythic-symbolic aspects of the resurrection? The Fundamentalist refuses the mythic-symbolic aspects because he has seen what the Modernist has done with it: used it to exclude the literal-historical aspects. Why have the Modernists done that? What terrible fate awaits them if they follow the multifarious and weighty evidence and argument that naturally emerges from the data, as we have summarized it here in this series of posts?

The answer is not obscure: traditional Christianity awaits them, complete with adoration of Christ as God, obedience to Christ as Lord, dependence on Christ as Savior, humble confession of sin, and a serious effort to live Christ's life of self-sacrifice, detachment from the world, righteousness, holiness, and purity of thought, word, and deed. The historical evidence is massive enough to convince the open-minded inquirer. By analogy with any other historical event, the resurrection has eminently credible evidence behind it. To disbelieve it, you must deliberately make an exception to the rules you use everywhere else in history. Now why would someone want to do that?

Ask yourself that question if you dare, and take an honest look into your heart before you answer.
 
 
Excerpted from “Handbook of Catholic Apologetics", copyright 1994, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, published 2009 Ignatius Press, used with permission of the publisher. Text reproduced from PeterKreeft.com.

(Image credit: Unsplash)

NOTE: Christians around the world celebrated Good Friday and Easter last week, which commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus we began a six-part series on these events by Dr. Peter Kreeft in which he examines each of the plausible theories attempting to explain what happened to Jesus at the end of his life, particularly whether he rose from the dead.

Part 1 - 5 Possible Theories that Explain the Resurrection of Jesus
Part 2 - Rejecting the Swoon Theory: 9 Reasons Why Jesus Did Not Faint on the Cross
Part 3 - Debunking the Conspiracy Theory: 7 Arguments Why Jesus’ Disciples Did Not Lie
Part 4 - Refuting the Myth Theory: 6 Reasons Why the Resurrection Accounts are True
Part 5 - Real Visions: 13 Reasons the Disciples Did Not Hallucinate
Part 6 - (Coming soon!)
 

 
Last week, we introduced five possible theories attempting to explain the resurrection accounts of Jesus of Nazareth. Today we'll examine what's often called the "swoon theory," which suggests that Jesus never really died on the cross—he simply fainted, or swooned, and was presumed dead.

Nine pieces of evidence refute the swoon theory:

(1) Jesus could not have survived crucifixion. Roman procedures were very careful to eliminate that possibility. Roman law even laid the death penalty on any soldier who let a capital prisoner escape in any way, including bungling a crucifixion. It was never done.

(2) The fact that the Roman soldier did not break Jesus' legs, as he did to the other two crucified criminals (Jn 19:31-33), means that the soldier was sure Jesus was dead. Breaking the legs hastened the death so that the corpse could be taken down before the sabbath (v. 31).

(3) John, an eyewitness, certified that he saw blood and water come from Jesus' pierced heart (Jn 19:34-35). This shows that Jesus' lungs had collapsed and he had died of asphyxiation. Any medical expert can vouch for this.

(4) The body was totally encased in winding sheets and entombed (Jn 19:38-42).

(5) The post-resurrection appearances convinced the disciples, even "doubting Thomas," that Jesus was gloriously alive (Jn 20:19-29). It is psychologically impossible for the disciples to have been so transformed and confident if Jesus had merely struggled out of a swoon, badly in need of a doctor. A half-dead, staggering sick man who has just had a narrow escape is not worshiped fearlessly as divine lord and conquerer of death.

(6) How were the Roman guards at the tomb overpowered by a swooning corpse? Or by unarmed disciples? And if the disciples did it, they knowingly lied when they wrote the Gospels, and we are into the conspiracy theory, which we will refute shortly.

(7) How could a swooning half-dead man have moved the great stone at the door of the tomb? Who moved the stone if not an angel? No one has ever answered that question. Neither the Jews nor the Romans would move it, for it was in both their interests to keep the tomb sealed: the Jews had the stone put there in the first place, and the Roman guards would be killed if they let the body "escape."

The story the Jewish authorities spread, that the guards fell asleep and the disciples stole the body (Mt 28:11-15), is unbelievable. Roman guards would not fall asleep on a job like that; if they did, they would lose their lives. And even if they did fall asleep, the crowd and the effort and the noise it would have taken to move an enormous boulder would have wakened them. Furthermore, we are again into the conspiracy theory, with all its unanswerable difficulties (we'll deal with this theory in a couple days.)

(8) If Jesus awoke from a swoon, where did he go? Think this through: you have a living body to deal with now, not a dead one. Why did it disappear? There is absolutely no data, not even any false, fantastic, imagined data, about Jesus' life after his crucifixion, in any sources, friend or foe, at any time, early or late. A man like that, with a past like that, would have left traces.

(9) Most simply, the swoon theory necessarily turns into the conspiracy theory or the hallucination theory, for the disciples testified that Jesus did not swoon but really died and really rose.

It may seem that these nine arguments have violated our initial principle about not presupposing the truth of the Gospel texts, since we have argued from data in the texts. But the swoon theory does not challenge the truths in the texts which we refer to as data; it uses them and explains them (by swoon rather than resurrection). Thus we use them too.

On Wednesday, we'll deal with the slightly more popular "conspiracy theory" alternative.
 
 
Excerpted from “Handbook of Catholic Apologetics", copyright 1994, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, published 2009 Ignatius Press, used with permission of the publisher. Text reproduced from PeterKreeft.com.

(Image credit: Passion of the Christ film)

St. Luke begins the second chapter of his Gospel with a chronological note about when Jesus was born, writing:

"In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria." (Luke 2:1-2)

This passage has been subject to a lot of criticism, because Luke has already linked the birth of Jesus to reign of Herod the Great (Luke 1:5), and Quirinius did not become governor of Syria until years afterwards.

What Happened When?

Precisely when Herod’s reign ended is a matter of dispute. Historically, the most common view—which is also in accordance with the Church Fathers—is that Herod died in 1 B.C.

Just over a hundred years ago, however, a German scholar named Emil Schürer argued that Herod died in 4 B.C., and this became the most popular view in the 20^th century. More recent scholarship, however, has supported the idea that Schürer was wrong and that the traditional date of 1 B.C. is correct.

After Herod’s death, his kingdom was divided, and his son Archelaus became the ruler of Judaea (Matt. 2:22). Archelaus, however, was a terrible ruler, and in A.D. 6 he was removed from office by the Romans and banished to what is now France. In his place, a Roman prefect was appointed to govern the province, which is why Pontius Pilate—rather than one of the descendants of Herod the Great—was ruling Judaea at the time of Jesus’ adult ministry.

According to the Jewish historian Josephus, Quirinius (aka Cyrenius) was sent to govern Syria after the banishment of Archelaus. He also took a tax census of Judaea at this time and made an accounting of Archelaus’s finances (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18:1:1).

The Sequence

From the above, the overall sequence of events is clear:

1. Herod the Great dies (1 B.C. or 4 B.C.)
2. Archelaus becomes his successor in Judaea
3. Archelaus is deposed
4. Quirinius does his census (A.D. 6)

Given that sequence, if Luke identified Jesus’ birth with a census conducted in A.D. 6 then we would have an implicit contradiction with Luke 1, which links Jesus’ birth to the reign of Herod the Great, and an even clearer contradiction with Matthew 2, which is explicit about the fact that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great.

Finding a Solution

Scholars have proposed a number of solutions to this. There isn’t space to review them all here, but I’d like to look at one of them. In his book Who Was Jesus? the former Anglican bishop N. T Wright states:

"The question of Quirinius and his census is an old chestnut, requiring a good knowledge of Greek. It depends on the meaning of the word protos, which usually means ‘first’.
 
Thus most translations of Luke 2:2 read ‘this was the first [protos] census, when Quirinius was governor of Syria’, or something like that.
 
But in the Greek of the time, as the standard major Greek lexicons point out, the word protos came sometimes to be used to mean ‘before’, when followed (as this is) by the genitive case." (p. 89)

The genitive case is a grammatical feature in Greek. It is often used to indicate possession (as in “Jesus’ disciples”) or origin (as in “Jesus of Nazareth”). Wright, however, is pointing to a special use of the genitive when it follows the word protos and protos ends up meaning “before.” He writes:

"A good example is in John 1:15, where John the Baptist says of Jesus ‘he was before me’, with the Greek being again protos followed by the genitive of ‘me’."

In a footnote, Wright continues:

"The phrase is repeated in John 1:30; compare also 15:18, where Jesus says ‘the world hated me before [it hated] you’, where again the Greek is protos with the genitive.
 
Other references, in biblical and non-biblical literature of the period, may be found in the Greek Lexicon of Liddell and Scott (Oxford: OUP, 1940), p. 1535, and the Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament of W . Bauer, revised and edited by Arndt, Gingrich and Danker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 725f. 19.
 
This solution has been advanced by various scholars, including, interestingly, William Temple in his Readings in St John’s Gospel (London: Macmillan, 1945), p. 17; cf. most recently John Nolland, Luke 1–9: 20 (Dallas: Word Books, 1989), pp. 101f."

Wright’s Solution

Wright then explains how this can relate to the enrollment of Quirinius:

"I suggest, therefore, that actually the most natural reading of the verse is: 'This census took place before the time when Quirinius was governor of Syria.'"

He also notes:

"This solves an otherwise odd problem: why should Luke say that Quirinius’ census was the first? Which later ones was he thinking of?
 
This reading, of course, does not resolve all the difficulties. We don’t know, from other sources, of a census earlier than Quirinius’. But there are a great many things that we don’t know in ancient history.
 
There are huge gaps in our records all over the place. Only those who imagine that one can study history by looking up back copies of the London Times or the Washington Post in a convenient library can make the mistake of arguing from silence in matters relating to the first century.
 
My guess is that Luke knew a tradition in which Jesus was born during some sort of census, and that Luke knew as well as we do that it couldn’t have been the one conducted under Quirinius, because by then Jesus was about ten years old. That is why he wrote that the census was the one before that conducted by Quirinius."

An Objection

An objection that some have raised about this solution is why, on this theory, Luke would bother mentioning Quirinius’s census.
 
Think about it for a moment: It can sound a little strange to say, “This census took place before the time when Quirinius was governor of Syria.”

Why would Luke do that?

There are at least three reasons . . .

Avoiding Confusion

The census of Quirinius was famous enough that Luke’s audience would have heard of it—otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered mentioning it.
 
Given that it was well known, Luke would have wanted to avoid people confusing it with the enrollment during which Jesus was born.
 
He would especially want to avoid confusion in light of what he had established about King Herod...

Herod’s Death

Previously, in Luke 1:5, the Evangelist established that John the Baptist was conceived by his mother Elizabeth during the reign of Herod the Great.

Then, in 1:26 and 36, he established that Gabriel announced the conception of Jesus “in the sixth month” (i.e., what we would call the fifth month) of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. This means that Jesus would have been conceived much too early to have been born during Quirinius’s census.

Since Luke has already established this, it gives him a reason—when he records the fact that Jesus was born in connection with an enrollment—that it was not the famous census of Quirinius. It was an earlier one, in keeping with the timeframe Luke has already established.

But there is another reason why Luke would want to point this out...

In the Fifteenth Year of Tiberius Caesar

Luke 2 begins with a time cue that connects the birth of Jesus to the reign of Augustus Caesar. Luke 3 begins with an even more elaborate time cue linking the beginning of Jesus’ adult ministry to the reign of Augustus’s successor, Tiberius.

Luke writes:

"In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, in the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness." (Luke 3:1-2)

The fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar is what we would call A.D. 28/29.

After John’s ministry begins, Jesus quickly comes and is baptized, thus beginning his own ministry. When that happens, Luke informs us:

"Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age." (Luke 3:23)

If you back up 30 years from A.D. 28/29 (remembering that there is no “year 0” so you skip from A.D. 1 directly to 1 B.C.), you land in 2/3 B.C., which is the year that the early Church Fathers overwhelmingly assign Jesus’ birth to.

People back then knew when Tiberius reigned, and they could do the math as well as we. In fact, since they were used to dating years in terms of the emperor’s reign, they would realize even more quickly than we the year in which Luke 3 indicates Jesus was born.

Thus, on Wright’s theory, Luke would have an additional motive to make sure there was no confusion about Jesus being born during the famous census of Quirinius.

Think about it from Luke’s point of view: After years of gathering his research, he’s now drafting his Gospel, and, when he reaches Luke 2, he includes a time cue for the birth of Jesus during an enrollment ordered by Augustus. He already knows, however, that he is planning on beginning Luke 3 with a time due identifying the beginning of John the Baptist’s ministry and that he’s going to give Jesus’ approximate age at the time of his own ministry’s commencement.

Since the later time cues he’s planning to give point to a date earlier than the famous census of Quirinius, Luke would want to head off any potential confusion by stressing that this happened before that census, in keeping with the implications of Luke 3.
 
 
 
PS. If you like the information I've presented here, you should join my Secret Information Club. If you're not familiar with it, the Secret Information Club is a free service that I operate by email. I send out information on a variety of fascinating topics connected with theology, science, history, and more.

Just sign up at www.SecretInfoClub.com or use this handy sign-up form:

If you have any difficulty, email me at jimmy@secretinfoclub.com.

Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with permission.
 
 
(Image credit: Wikipedia)

You know how people often say that Jesus was born in 4 B.C., 6 B.C., 7 B.C., or a time earlier still? The calculations that lead to these dates are all based on a proposal that was made just over a hundred years ago.

But now scholars are challenging this proposal, because it looks like it's wrong. And it's been distorting our understanding of when Jesus was born for over a hundred years.

Here's the story. . . .

When Herod Died

 
The Gospel of Matthew records that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great. Luke doesn't say it explicitly, but he does indicate that the birth of John the Baptist was foretold during Herod's reign. If Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great then he must have been born before Herod died. (He wasn't a zombie king.)

Here's where the problematic proposal comes in: In the late 1800s, a German scholar named Emil Schurer proposed that Herod died earlier than previously thought.

Specifically, he claimed that Herod died in 4 B.C. This view caught on among scholars, and so now it's common for people to date the birth of Jesus no later than 4 B.C.

If a scholar takes seriously the account of the slaughter of the holy innocents then, since Herod killed all the baby boys two years old and under, that would push Jesus' birth up to two years earlier, landing us in 6 B.C.

And it could have happened even before that.

So that's why people often date Jesus' birth in this way, even though it is not when the Church Fathers indicated Jesus was born.

Why 4 B.C.?

 
Why do advocates of the Schurer view hold that Herod died in 4 B.C.? Here are several reasons:

1. Based on statements in the Jewish historian Josephus, Herod was first appointed king in 40 B.C. and then reigned for 36 years (so, he died in 4 B.C.).
2. Again based on Josephus, after Herod was appointed king, he conquered Jerusalem in 37 B.C. and reigned for 33 years (again, dying in 4 B.C.).
3. Again based on Josephus, Herod died between a lunar eclipse and Passover. In 4 B.C., there was a partial lunar eclipse 29 days before Passover.
4. We have various lines of evidence suggesting that Herod's sons took office in 4 B.C.

Sounds like a solid case, right?

Not exactly. It's shot through with problems.

Let's take a brief look at each of the four arguments . . .

1. When Herod Was Appointed King

 
Since the B.C./A.D. system of dates hadn't been invented yet, Josephus used ancient methods of dating that we no longer use.

One method was dating events in terms of which Olympiad they took place in. An Olympiad was a four-year period based on when the Olympic Games took place. (Yes, the ancients were huge sports fans.) Each Olympiad began in midyear and ran for four years.

Josephus says that Herod was appointed king during the 184th Olympiad, which ran from July 1, 44 B.C. to June 30, 40 B.C.

He also says that he was appointed during the consulship of Calvinus and Pollio. Consuls were Roman officials who reigned during specific years, and it was common to date events by the consuls who were in office at the time.

Calvinus and Pollio began their consulship after October 2, 40 B.C. That's in the 185th Olympiad.

See the problem?

The 184th Olympiad ended before Calvinus and Pollio were consuls. Josephus has given us an impossible date. He must be wrong on this one.

2. When Herod Conquered Jerusalem

 
Josephus says that Herod conquered Jerusalem in the 185th Olympiad during the consulship of Marcus Agrippa and Caninius Gallus. That does point to 37 B.C.

But Josephus also says that Herod conquered Jerusalem exactly 27 years--to the day--after it fell to the Roman general Pompey. But Pompey conquered Jersualem in 63 B.C., and 27 years later would be 36 B.C., not 37 B.C.

Furthermore, he says that the government of the Hasmoneans (who ruled Jerusalem prior to Herod conquering the city) for 126 years. According to 1 Maccabees and Josephus himself, they began ruling in 162 B.C., which would put the date of Herod's conquest in 36 B.C. (162 -126 =36).

So Josephus, again, gives contradictory information about when Herod conquered Jerusalem, indicating in some places that it was in 37 and in others that it was 36.

3. When the Lunar Eclipse Was

 
There was, indeed, a partial lunar eclipse in 4 B.C., which took place 29 days before Passover.

However, this was not the only lunar eclipse in the period. There was another lunar eclipse in 1 B.C., which was 89 days before Passover.

Now here's the thing:

1) Since there is more than one eclipse in this period, you can't cite the 4 B.C. eclipse as evidence supporting a 4 B.C. date in particular. You have to consider other eclipses in the right time frame and see which best fits the evidence.

2) The lunar eclipse in 4 B.C. was only partial, but the lunar eclipse in 1 B.C. was full. Josephus doesn't say it was a partial lunar eclipse. He says it was a lunar eclipse, and a full eclipse fits that description better.

3) The 4 B.C. span of 29 days between the eclipse and Passover is too short. Josephus doesn't just say that Herod died between the eclipse and Passover. He also names a bunch of things Herod did during that period, including trips that required travel time.

As contemporary biblical chronologer Andrew E. Steinmann points out:

"[A]ll of the events that happened between these two [the lunar eclipse and Passover] would have taken a minimum of 41 days had each one of them taken place as quickly as possible. A more reasonable estimate is between 60 and 90 days" (From Abraham to Paul, 231)

Thus, again, the 1 B.C. lunar eclipse--89 days before Passover--better fits what Josephus describes.

4. When Herod's Sons Began to Reign

 
It is true that we have multiple lines of evidence indicating that Herod's sons began to reign in 4 B.C.

That's doesn't mean Herod died then.

It was very common for aging rulers to take their successors as co-rulers during the latter part of their reign. This both took some of the pressure off the aging ruler and helped ensure a smooth succession when he died by lessening the chance of a power struggle after his death (people were already used to the new ruler, who was already in office).

That means that when you have ask whether a particular ruler's assumption of office was as co-ruler or as sole ruler. It could have been either one, so this argument does not prove that Herod died in 4 B.C.

Furthermore, we have evidence that Herod did start giving his sons governing authority before his death.

I'm trying to keep this post as short as possible though, so . . .

The Case for 4 B.C. Is Exceptionally Weak

 
All four of the main arguments proposed are problematic:

1. The first argument names an impossible date (one that did not exist) for the beginning of Herod's reign.
2. Josephus contradicts himself about when Herod conquered Jerusalem.
3. There is another lunar eclipse that fits what Josephus says even better.
4. We have evidence that Herod began giving his sons rulership roles before he died.

And there is much more that could be said (as there always is with biblical chronology). My favorite resources on this question are Jack Finegan's outstanding Handbook of Biblical Chronology (2nd ed.) and Andrew Steinmann's informative From Abraham to Paul. Both of those are hard to get and/or expensive, though.

Fortunately, if you'd like to tear into the evidence in mind-numbing depth, you can also read this paper by Steinmann for free.

This still leaves us with the big questions: When did Herod the Great actually die? And when was Jesus Christ born?

Stay tuned for my next post on Wednesday....
 
 
 
PS. If you like the information I've presented here, you should join my Secret Information Club. If you're not familiar with it, the Secret Information Club is a free service that I operate by email. I send out information on a variety of fascinating topics connected with theology, science, history, and more.

Just sign up at www.SecretInfoClub.com or use this handy sign-up form:

If you have any difficulty, email me at jimmy@secretinfoclub.com.
 
 
Originally posted at National Catholic Register. Used with permission.

Last week I wrote a post here on David Hume, miracles, and the resurrection of Jesus. Some of the commenters took issue with my claim that "all the alternatives to the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead are more incredible than the miracle." I'd like to elaborate on that here.

Christians claim that the historical human being Jesus of Nazareth was executed then physically rose from the dead and stayed alive. He was seen by many people and then was seen to vanish into the invisible realm. Here we have the most revolutionary and radical question of human history. Did it really happen?

There are only three plausible options: that Jesus rose from the dead as Christians contend; that Jesus of Nazareth didn’t really die; or that he died, but that somehow his body disappeared and his disciples came to believe that he rose from the dead. The first question therefore is, did Jesus really die?

Alternative #1: Jesus Didn't Die

 
After his trial, Jesus of Nazareth was tortured by flogging. The punishment was not only severe, it was public. The Romans flogged a criminal with whips that had pieces of glass, pottery, and metal tied into the cords. Not only was Jesus flogged to within an inch of his life, but his executioners were professionals whose jobs depended on them doing a thorough job. His flogging was public and so was his execution. He was taken through the city streets and crucified in a public place.

Furthermore, his enemies themselves were present to make sure the job was done. This is recorded in the gospels, but the basic facts match what we know of Roman customs of the time and there is no reason why they should be doubted.

Using David Hume’s idea that we must believe that option which is easiest to believe, saying that Jesus was killed is certainly easier to believe than saying he was not killed on that dark afternoon. If he was not killed, then the disciples made up the story of his execution, but why would devotees of a religious preacher make up the story that he was executed as a criminal, especially since it was a public event? Many people saw it take place. We must conclude that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and died.

Nevertheless, some people, including many Muslims, theorize that it wasn’t really Jesus who died. It was perhaps his brother James who resembled him, or it was Judas, or a celebrity lookalike who stood in for Jesus. Again, it takes more faith to believe in these theories than the simple truth. The reason Judas kissed Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane was to confirm his identity. Also, Peter was certain who he was denying and the crowd before Pilate knew who they were accusing. The scribes and Pharisees were intent on Jesus' death and interrogated him personally. Are we to believe that an impostor fooled them all? Was the man killed a stand in? Surely when things became deadly the patsy would have denied that he was Jesus of Nazareth.

Other non-Christians theorize that it was Jesus on the cross, but he didn’t really die. Perhaps he was drugged with painkillers and simply passed out. The gospel says a soldier offered him a painkiller, but he refused it. If Jesus only passed out we must believe that the man was flogged so that the torture ripped great chunks of flesh from his body. After dragging the heavy cross through the city streets, he was nailed to it by professional executioners who, instead of breaking his legs to hasten his death, stabbed him with a spear through the heart. Water and blood came from the wound and modern medical experts testify that this only happens after death.

But we’re to believe that he only passed out or went into a coma? Again, this is more difficult to believe than the reported story. But if we go with this theory, as the story progresses it gets even more difficult to believe.

Let us just suppose that Jesus did somehow survive the flogging, the crucifixion, and the thrust of the spear. After he was taken down he was buried. Now we have to believe that he woke up in a freezing tomb on a chilly Spring morning. Having suffered a huge blood loss, horrific wounds, a spear in the side and terrible shock and trauma. Despite all this he stops to unwrap his own tightly wound shroud and head cloth and he takes care to fold them neatly at the foot of his bed. Then (from the inside) he rolls back a stone on the outside of the tomb that weighs a couple of tons.

He then stumbles out, totally naked, and limps up to the disciples on his bloody feet, with his back looking like a butcher shop. His head is covered with puncture wounds and contusions. His side has a gaping wound. He shows the disciples his hands, and gasps out a greeting. What would you have done? You would have shrieked in horror and realized that your friend had somehow survived a most terrible ordeal, then you would take him home, call the doctor and put him to bed.

Instead we are supposed to believe that the disciples said, “He is risen! Alleluia! Let’s start a new religion!”

Again, it takes more faith to believe such an outrageous theory than to accept the simple events as they were related. Hume was right. We must believe the option which is most probable.

Alternative #2: Jesus Died, But Didn't Rise Again

 
That brings us to the next category of resurrection deniers who say Jesus really did die, but something else happened to his body. Consequently his disciples came to believe that he had risen from the dead.

Was his body hurriedly abandoned and thrown on the dump to be devoured by dogs? We know from other evidence that the Jews were very careful about burying the bodies of their loved ones, and the details of the story are there in the gospels. His friends took the body to bury it. If the body had not been buried why did Jesus’ enemies ask Pilate for guards for the tomb?

Maybe the disciples stole the body. Shall we believe that the eleven men who fled in terror when their friend was arrested suddenly got back together and planned a heist worthy of a "Mission Impossible" film? Why would they do that? They were as surprised as everyone else by the resurrection. Would they really plan such a heist to perpetrate a hoax? Is this the sort of hoax anyone would believe? No. You only plan a hoax if the hoax is something people might just fall for. A hoax to make people believe someone had risen from the dead?

Did they perpetrate the hoax to start a new religion? Why would they do that? What was in it for them? There was no such thing as starting a religion to be a prosperity preacher back then. As history proved, the only thing they got out of it was the loss of all their worldly goods, persecution, imprisonment, torture, homelessness, and eventually slow torture and martyrdom. They welcomed all that for a hoax?

Perhaps, some propose, the disciples went to the wrong tomb. But if they had, would they have drawn the conclusion that Jesus had risen from the dead? No. They would have said, “Whoops, wrong tomb. Hey, we messed up again!” Had Jesus been in another tomb all his enemies would have produced the body and pointed out the disciples’ foolish mistake. Once again, to believe the alternative theory is more difficult than to believe the traditional account.

Then we have the modernist theologian’s answer. For the modernist Christian, the resurrection was not a “crudely physical” event, but a “spiritual reality”. In other words, in some sort of wonderful way the teachings and example of Jesus continued to live in the hearts and minds of his followers and this, if you like, is what resurrection is really all about.

The problem here is that the simple meaning of the word “resurrection” is that a body that was dead came back to life again. There are spiritual meanings to be derived from this fact to be sure, but if there were no physical fact, then the spiritual meanings would be meaningless. Saying that the resurrection was not physical but a “spiritual event” is like a woman on her wedding night denying her husband the consummation of their marriage by saying, “We needn’t be quite so crudely physical as to have sexual intercourse. Marriage is, after all, simply a beautiful spiritual idea!”

The modernist theologian’s reductionist explanation doesn’t account for the simple facts of the whole story. Shall we believe that the apostles went on to follow lives of hardship, suffering, and deprivation, finally being tortured and killed for what was merely a “spiritual meaning” or a “beautiful theological idea”? I don’t think so.

When faced with the slow torture of crucifixion or being flayed or boiled alive don’t you think they would have said, “Hold on! All that resurrection Son of God stuff? You misunderstood! It didn’t really happen! It was only a spiritual meaning! It was a metaphor! It was a theological construct!”

Finally, we have the Biblical scholars’ theory that St. Paul and the gospel writers made up all the resurrection stories to bolster their new religion. There are too many implausible details to go into at this point, but the main obstacle to this conspiracy theory is that St. Paul died only thirty years after the death of Jesus himself, and he reported that the stories he had about the resurrection were facts he himself had received from eyewitnesses. If St. Paul or the gospel writers had made it all up, there were still plenty of eyewitnesses alive who would have corrected them—not least the murderous enemies of the new religion.

The fact of the resurrection is a good starting point for the debates about God’s existence. Arguments between Catholics and atheists can move forward in an intriguing way because the arguments surrounding the resurrection are more concrete and literal than philosophical arguments. They bring the argument about God down to earth...which is what the Christian religion is all about in the first place.
 
 
(Image credit: Wikimedia)

Most Catholics and atheists agree that if God does not exist, then the material world must be a closed system. If there is no God, the world is self-creating and self-reliant. If there is no God, then there cannot be interruptions in nature. The material world works according to the laws of physics, and even if there are mysteries that cannot presently be explained, they will be one day. In fact, if there is no God, then the physical world must work according to the laws of nature and nothing else.

If however, it can be shown that there is a force which interrupts and alters the ordinary working of nature, and if that force operates in an intelligible and rational way, then there must be an intelligent being that religious people have always identified as God.

This intelligible and rational interruption in the laws of nature is what we call a “miracle.”

The interruption is intelligible and rational if it has a reason and an understandable purpose. An interruption which is purely random or arbitrary would not indicate a super-physical intelligence.

All that to say this: if there are miracles, then there is a God. The problem with many miracles is that they might be attributed to natural causes or to natural causes which we do not yet understand. This is where the Easter miracles comes in. Firstly, if one miracle can be shown to have happened, then the case is proven. One miracle breaks the whole idea that the world is self-contained, self-creating, and self-reliant, and the one miracle which atheists should most seriously consider is the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The eighteenth century skeptic David Hume argued that when weighing up the evidence for a miracle one had to consider which was more probable–that a person would lie or that a given miracle would take place. So he writes in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

"The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), 'That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish….’

When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion."

In other words, if someone believes a miracle has taken place he is either lying himself or has been lied to. If the claimed miracle is greater than the possibility of a person being deceived or deceiving, then that claimed miracle must be rejected. Hume’s argument seems watertight because it is based on the assumption that the physical world is watertight. His conclusion rests on his first premise that the physical world is a closed system. What Hume is really saying is that miracles are impossible because miracles are impossible.

But the definition of a miracle is that it is an interruption in what was expected to be a closed system. That’s why it’s a miracle.

By its very definition a miracle breaks into the closed system, and to deny a miracle by simply presuming it can’t happen is to skirt the argument. Hume uses the example of a dead man rising again because he knows this is the central miracle. If this miracle, then any miracle. And if any miracle, then the system is not closed. And if the system is not closed, then there is a being greater than the system and that being we recognize as God.

Hume’s argument against miracles has been a cornerstone of the atheist position on miracles but it is rarely examined closely. Hume does not discuss evidence for such a miracle. He simply places the possible miracle over against the testimony of a person who claims the miracle. What he avoids in the Easter miracle is that it is not one man claiming a miracle, but many, and that their testimony is backed up by evidence that cannot be plausibly interpreted in any other way.

When the evidence is examined, Hume’s reductionist argument—that we must believe the theory that is most likely to be true—actually helps prove the resurrection. This is because all the alternatives to the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead are more incredible than the miracle.

It therefore all stands or falls on the miracle of the resurrection. St. Paul, a skeptic turned believer, addresses this very question his first letter to the Corinthians.

"Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved…Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.

 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also…

And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised…and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile." 

Put very simply, if Christ is not raised from the dead, then the whole Christian religion is vain. It’s all or nothing, and the all or nothing depends on the evidence for Easter.

Did the first century Jewish preacher Jesus of Nazareth rise from the dead or not? If he did, then miracles are possible and God exists.

An article titled "5 Reasons to Suspect that Jesus Never Existed" was posted last week at Salon.com and was featured in the Yahoo news feed. The article itself does not contain anything groundbreaking to anyone who follows this debate, but it presents the most common objections.

Below are five reasons author Valerie Tarico gives, and how to answer them.

1. No first century secular evidence whatsoever exists to support the actuality of Yeshua ben Yosef.

 
Tarico uses only an extensive quote from skeptical Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman in which he explains that there are no first century non-Jewish, non-Christian sources that mention Jesus. If this is proof that a historical Jesus never existed, then someone needs to tell this to Professor Ehrman.

In his book, Did Jesus Exist?, Ehrman argues that a historical Jesus did exist. He explains:

"[N]o Greek or Roman author from the first century mentions Jesus. It would be convenient if they did, but alas, they do not. At the same time, the fact is again a bit irrelevant since these same sources do not mention many millions of people who actually did live. Jesus stands here with the vast majority of living, breathing human beings of earlier ages." (pg. 43)

The fact that there are no non-Christian or Jewish accounts of Jesus seems somewhat irrelevant to me. As a former mythicist, I never found this argument to hold as much weight as some do. It implies that the first century documents contained in the New Testament are unreliable simply because they were written by Christians. But as Ehrman also points out, this would be a bit like “dismissing early American accounts of the Revolutionary War simply because they were written by Americans” (pg.74)

2. The earliest New Testament writers seem ignorant of the details of Jesus’ life, which become more crystalized in later texts.

 
To make this point, Tarico picks on the fact that St. Paul never mentions certain details about Jesus’ life including his Virgin Birth, the wise men, or a star in the East. She goes on to explain:

"He virtually refuses to disclose any other biographical detail, and the few cryptic hints he offers aren’t just vague, but contradict the gospels. The leaders of the early Christian movement in Jerusalem like Peter and James are supposedly Jesus’ own followers and family; but Paul dismisses them as nobodies and repeatedly opposes them for not being true Christians!"

The “few cryptic hints he offers” are major points about the life of Jesus. He really existed (Gal. 4:4), was the “Son of God” (Rom. 1:4), was crucified under Pontius Pilate (1 Tim. 6:13), and that he rose from the dead (Rom 1:4).

It’s true that Paul does not give us more specific details about the life of Jesus, but that doesn’t mean he was unaware of them. Claiming that he "virtually refuses" to disclose further details is speculative. He had no reason to rehash the Gospel narrative in any of his letters.

Paul was writing to specific churches as praise for right conduct and adherence to sound doctrine, or as correction to those who had strayed from the Faith. Since his audience was already Christian, he may have assumed they were aware of the details about Jesus and saw no reason to elaborate.

This is true in modern Church documents. When a pope or other clergy member writes a letter to another church, it’s not likely they would feel the need to explain the life of Jesus in every detail to an audience already familiar with the story. They might reference specific details to make a point as Paul did, but letters of praise or correction from one Christian to another are not going to contain a complete retelling of the Gospel narrative. And it would be absurd to expect them to.

3. Even the New Testament stories don’t claim to be first-hand accounts.

 
With this objection, Tarico claims that none of the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses, and that the attribution of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not designated until one hundred years or more after Christianity began.

If it was actually the case that author attributions were not chosen until many years after the time of Christ, then it is a curious thing that they did not choose more prominent disciples like Peter or James.

The authors of the Gnostic gospels chose the names of prominent disciples to lend credibility to their writings, but we know these couldn’t have been written by the people they are attributed to because they don’t appear until two or three hundred years later. The overwhelming majority of Biblical scholars, on the other hand, place the authorship of at least three of the Gospels within a generation of Jesus, and all four of them definitely within the first century (Did Jesus Exist?, pg. 75).

My colleague Jimmy Akin argues that Matthew and John were both eyewitnesses of the ministry of Christ, and that a strong case can be made that Mark and Luke both received their information from eyewitnesses. You can read more on that here.

4. The gospels, our only accounts of a historical Jesus, contradict each other.

 
Oceans of ink have been spilled on the subject of contradictions in the Bible from both sides of the Christian/non-Christian debate. But the question remains: Do these contradictions indicate that there may not have been a historical Jesus upon which the core of the Gospels are based? I would argue that these contradictions—valid or not—have no bearing on the existence of a historical Jesus.

Tarico points to discrepancies in the Resurrection accounts as an example. Even if we are to concede that these accounts contain details that are impossible to reconcile, it still does nothing to prove that there was no Jesus. At best, it would only prove that one or all of the authors of the Gospels got their facts wrong about the Resurrection, in particular.

The core facts of the Gospels (that Jesus existed, preached and won disciples, and was crucified by Roman authorities) is attested to in the writings of Paul, the early Church Fathers, the Jewish historian Josephus, and several other non-Christian authors. Even the enemies of Christianity never denied the existence of its founder.

5. Modern scholars who claim to have uncovered the real historical Jesus depict wildly different persons.

 
This is probably the weakest of Tarico’s points. If we asked ten people to tell us about the life of a person they knew, and all of their descriptions deviated from one another in very important details, this would not in any way mean the person in question did not exist. Tarico continues her point:

"Jesus appears to be an effect, not a cause, of Christianity. Paul and the rest of the first generation of Christians searched the Septuagint translation of Hebrew scriptures to create a Mystery Faith for the Jews, complete with pagan rituals like a Lord’s Supper, Gnostic terms in his letters, and a personal savior god to rival those in their neighbors’ longstanding Egyptian, Persian, Hellenistic and Roman traditions."

There is a lot to unpack here. Many skeptics have claimed that there are parallels with the pagan religions of the time in the details about the life of Jesus and Christian rituals. In my own research, I have not found these parallels to be compelling (you can read my articles on these kinds of claims here).

What I do find compelling is that the Christian movement managed to spread so quickly. The Jewish historian Josephus confirms that the movement began in Judea, while Tacitus, Seutonius, and Pliny the Younger tell us that it spread all the way to Rome and Bithnya. According to the writings of the early Christians, these new communities were started by apostles who had been sent by the movement’s founder, Jesus. (You can read more on this here.)

Conclusion

 
Certainly there are more sophisticated arguments against the existence of Jesus than what is presented by Tarico. Most of her points are based on arguments made by mythicist author David Fitzgerald in his book Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All.

One of the points that I have heard Fitzgerald make in both his writing and in recorded interviews is that most scholars believe Jesus existed because most of them have been Christian (or formerly Christian). One could argue that all mythicists are atheists, but neither point really addresses the issue.

The Christ myth theory has circulated for nearly 200 years, going in and out of style. I have been criticized by some for paying any attention to it at all, but from my perspective there is a growing number of people who believe Jesus never existed, and thus it is something worth taking seriously.
 
 
(Image credit: Jaroslav74 via Shutterstock))

NOTE: Last week we featured a brief reflection by Fr. Robert Barron on biblical skeptic Bart Ehrman's new book, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (HarperOne, 2014). Today we feature a more in-depth review by Trent Horn.

 
Most Christians say the apostles came to believe Jesus was God after seeing how Christ’s resurrection vindicated his claims to divinity. But Bart Ehrman’s newest book, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, offers another theory.

Ehrman is popular New Testament textual critic who was once a Fundamentalist Christian and is now an agnostic. Ehrman’s big claim to fame came with his 2005 book Misquoting Jesus, where he argued that the text of the New Testament was corrupted through the scribal copying process. He then argued that this corruption jeopardizes our orthodox understanding of the Bible. The book has sold millions of copies, and you’ve no doubt seen or heard Ehrman on late-night television, including the Colbert Report.

Ehrman’s thesis in his latest book is that the divide between human and divine in the ancient world was not as clean cut and “uncrossable” as it is for modern religious believers. According to Ehrman, in the ancient world it was common for the divide to be crossed in either the “gods come down in the likeness of men” direction or the “men go up and become gods” direction. Within this cultural milieu it was not improbable for the apostles to believe that their good rabbi had become “God.”

I enjoyed the book, and I think it's disappointing how many Christians jump into an automatic “pan-the-heretic” mode before reading it. Don’t misunderstand me: I think Ehrman is wrong, but his book is well-written.

Gods and men in the Ancient World

 
The first two chapters describe the malleable barrier between gods and men. The first few pages left a sour taste in my mouth. Ehrman begins with a story about a first-century miracle worker whose disciples believed he was the Son of God and had survived his own death. But, surprise! Ehrman’s not talking about Jesus but another supposed miracle-worker and contemporary of Jesus named Apollonius of Tyana. This sets the stage for Ehrman to talk about how in the ancient world men who become gods and vice-versa were really a dime a dozen.

However, Ehrman neglects to mention that although we have multiple sources for the life of Jesus we only have one source for Apollonius. Ehrman says this source, Philostratus, recorded what eyewitnesses said about Apollonius, but neglects to mention that the only eyewitness mentioned is one Damis from Nineveh, a city that didn’t even exist in the first century (which means Damis probably did not exist either). Ehrman also doesn’t mention how the wife of emperor Severus commissioned Philostratus to write the biography of Apollonius over a century after Apollonius’s “death.” The Life of Apollonius was probably created as a competitor to the Gospel accounts of Jesus which, by that point, were in wide circulation across the Roman Empire.

Ehrman acknowledges this theory in a footnote but then claims that all he is doing is showing how belief in “God-men” was easily accepted in the Roman cultural context; but I find this answer unsatisfying. If belief in a God-man like Apollonius was only easily accepted because it was crafted to imitate Jesus, it still doesn’t explain how Jesus’ divinity came about.

Perhaps the most striking concession Ehrman makes in this section is that Apollonius is the only story of a true “God-man” like Jesus. Ehrman writes, “I don’t know of any other cases in ancient Greek or Roman thought of this kind of “God-man,” where an already existing divine being is said to be born of a mortal woman." If the story of Apollonius is parasitic upon the story of Jesus, then that makes the story of the “God-man” Jesus all the more exceptional and difficult to explain without recourse to a miracle.

The Resurrection of Jesus

 
In chapter three we get a crash course in “historical Jesus studies” or the use of objective criteria to find what the nineteenth-century Biblical critic Martin Kähler called “The Jesus of History” (as opposed to the supposedly non-historical “Christ of faith” who inhabits the catechism). At about this point I noticed that some of what Ehrman was discussing also popped up in his previous book, Did Jesus Exist?

I think it was New Testament critic Burton Mack who said that the greatest mystery of Christianity is the question of how Jesus came to be worshipped as God so quickly after his death. Mythicists who deny Jesus existed have a simple answer: he was always worshipped as God and the human part was added later. Ehrman rejects that view, but has to find a way to get Jesus up the "ontological totem pole" at a very fast rate. Ehrman claims to be able to do this in his analysis of the Resurrection, an “event” that he says was necessary for Jesus not to be remembered as just another failed messiah.

Ehrman is adamant that this was not a fluffy “resurrection of Easter faith,” nor was it a “spiritual resurrection” as other critics try to make it out to be. It was instead a real bodily resurrection that the apostles proclaimed. He is careful to say, however, that it was belief in the resurrection that caused the apostles to think Jesus was God, and not the resurrection itself. Ehrman then devotes two chapters to providing a natural explanation for how this belief in the resurrection came about.

His main point is that although he once believed that we could know Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus, he has now changed his mind and says we can’t know that for sure. He says we simply can’t know what happened to the body of Jesus. We can know, however, that the apostles had visions of Jesus after his death, but that was probably because they were bereaved and such visions are actually quite common. He says the answer to the question of whether or not these visions were real or hallucinatory is beyond the reach of the historian.

My Thoughts on the Resurrection

 
I’m not convinced by Ehrman’s arguments against the authenticity of the burial tradition. He says that because Joseph and the empty tomb are not mentioned in the creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, this shows it was probably a legendary development. But the creed’s use of the word buried (in Greek, hetaphe) implies something formal and ceremonial, not a mere chucking of a body into a ditch. In addition, there’s no reason to include those details in 1 Corinthians because they were not needed. When the creed says “Christ appeared” it’s natural to ask “to whom did he appear?” The creed answers this question with a list of witnesses. When it says Christ was buried, we don’t need to know who buried him, just as we don’t need to know who killed Christ (something the creed in 1 Corinthians also doesn’t mention).

In regards to the visions, how do we know that the disciples would have been bereaved and not angry that Jesus turned out to be a fraud instead of the messiah? I’m sure the disciples of John the Baptist mourned his death and may have felt guilty for not aiding him during his imprisonment, buttheir grief did not lead them to proclaim he had risen from the dead.

Overall, Ehrman’s treatment of the resurrection is good when he goes in depth about a subject and poor when he gives an off-hand response to an objection. For example, his cursory write-off of the resurrection accounts being contradictory and therefore not being reliable is not compelling because the accounts only differ in secondary details. Many ancient histories do the same. For example, among Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio we have three different accounts of where Nero was when Rome burned, but that doesn’t mean Nero wasn’t in the city when it happened.

The Path to Orthodoxy

 
In chapters eight and nine Ehrman narrates the struggles within the early Church as Christians sought to lay out in specific detail what they believed about God and Jesus. If you ever take the time to read the canons from councils like Nicea and Chalcedon, then you see how it’s really difficult to describe orthodoxy correctly. It’s really easy, however, to make your view a heresy. What is the Trinity? Are the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each gods? Nope! That’s tri-theism. Are the Father, Son and Holy Spirit each a part of God? Nope! That’s modalism. While Ehrman’s description of the early Christological controversies is fairly useful, there are parts where I think he oversimplified to the point of error.

One of those would be his assertion that the third-century popes endorsed the heresy of modalism, which claims that there is one God who is one person and that this person appears in different “modes” or roles. In this view of God, there is no relationship between the Father and the Son since they are the same person (God) just as my role as “husband” has no personal relationship as “son.” Ehrman says that Pope Callistus I (218-223) endorsed this view, but our only source for this charge is Hippolytus, who, Ehrman neglects to tell his readers, was a bitter opponent of Callistus—making his charges unreliable. Callistus was certainly no modalist because he excommunicated Sabellius, one of modalism’s primary proponents (another name for modalism is Sabellianism). J.N.D. Kelly’s Oxford reference book on the popes gives a good description of the matter here.

Closing Thoughts

 
There’s a lot more to discuss here (especially Ehrman’s view of Paul’s Christology), but overall I think Ehrman’s work represents the typical “Jesus was a failed end-times prophet” approach that is popular within historical Jesus studies. Ehrman does part ways with some of his like-minded colleagues, such as Dale Allison (see page 185 of How Jesus Became God), and at those points it’s nice to see Ehrman put forward a compelling argument instead of just lobbing an assertion.

For readers who want a fuller treatment of the arguments in opposition to Ehrman’s case, I’d recommend the following resources:

How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature—A Response to Bart Ehrman. As the tile suggests, this book represents the viewpoints of five authors who disagree with Ehrman’s thesis. Kind of a mixed bag when it comes to quality, but Craig Evans’s essay on Jesus’ burial is worth the whole price.

Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. This book by Richard Bauckham is a must-read for anyone who glosses over Ehrman’s claim that the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses and so cannot be trusted.

The Resurrection of the Son of God. The well-known New Testament scholar N.T. Wright gives one of the most comprehensive treatments of both the resurrection and the surrounding cultural context that makes a natural “legend-based” explanation of the resurrection very implausible.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Huffington Post)

In April last year, Grundy, the author of the Deity Shmeity blog, wrote a post titled "History Isn't My Area". He commented on the release of Bart Ehrman's critique of Mythicism, Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth.  Unlike the majority of actual historians, many prominent atheists find Jesus Mythicism convincing and many of them are unhappy with the generally sceptical and highly renowned Ehrman for criticizing this idea.  Grundy, for his part, stated frankly "I honestly have little knowledge as to whether or not Jesus existed", though he added "I tend to think he did".  That said, he made it clear why the overwhelming consensus of historians and other relevant scholars that the Jesus Myth idea is junk was underwhelming for him:
 

"History sucks. Okay, that’s unfair, but it was never my subject. My confidence of the accuracy of historical events goes down exponentially with the paper trail. The idea that history is written by the victors highlights the biases of the past. Books are burned. Records fade. Who should I trust for an accurate portrayal of events two thousand years ago?"

 
Since history actually is my area, I responded by making some critical comments on this attitude and some points about how history , as an academic discipline, is studied.  Grundy was happy to listen, and even invited me to expand on my points, which I'm doing here.

Atheists and Historical Illiteracy

 
I should begin, however, by pointing out that I am an atheist.  I have been an atheist for my entire adult life, am a paid up member of several atheist and skeptical organizations and have a 21 year online record of posting to discussions as an unbeliever.  I note this because I've found that when I begin to criticize my fellow atheists and their grasp of history or historiography, people tend to assume I must be some kind of theistic apologist (which doesn't follow at all, but this happens all the time anyway).

After 30+ years of observing and taking part in debates about history with many of my fellow atheists I can safely claim that most atheists are historically illiterate.  This is not particular to atheists:  they tend to be about as historically illiterate as most people, since historical illiteracy is pretty much the norm.  But it does mean that when most (not all) atheists comment about history or, worse, try to use history in debates about religion, they are usually doing so with a grasp of the subject that is stunted at about high school level.

This is hardly surprising, given that most people don't study history past high school.  But it means their understanding of any given historical person, subject or event is (like that of most people), based on half-remembered school lessons, perhaps a TV documentary or two and popular culture: mainly novels and movies.

Worse, this also means that most atheists (again, like most people) have a grasp of how history is studied and the techniques of historical analysis and synthesis which is also stunted at high school level - i.e. virtually non-existent.  With a few laudable exceptions, high school history teachers still tend to reduce history to facts and dates, organized into themes or broad topics.  How we can know what happened in the past, with what degree of certitude we can know it, and the techniques used to arrive at these conclusions are rarely more than touched on at this level.  This means that when the average atheist (yet again, like the average person generally) grasps that our knowledge of the past is not as cut and dried and clear as Mr. Wilkins the history teacher led us to understand, they tend to reject the whole thing as highly uncertain at best or subjective waffling at worst.  Or, as Grundy put it, as "crap".

This rejection can be more pronounced in atheists, because many (again, not all) come to their atheism via a study of science.  Science seems very certain compared to history.  You can make hypotheses and test them in science. You can actually prove things.  Scientific propositions are, by definition, falsifiable.  Compared to science, history can seem like so much hand-waving, where anyone can pretty much argue anything they like.

History and Science

 
In fact, history is very much a rigorous academic discipline, with its own rules and methodology much like the hard sciences.  This does not mean it is a science.  It is sometimes referred to as one, especially in Europe, but this is only in the broader sense of the word; as in "a systematic way of ordering and analyzing knowledge".  But before looking at how the historical method works, it might be useful to look at how sciences differ from it.

The hard sciences are founded on the principle of probabilistic induction.  A scientist uses an inductive or "bottom up" approach to work from observing specific particulars ("mice injected with this drug put on less fat") to general propositions ("the drug is reducing their appetite").  These propositions are falsifiable via empirical testing to rule out other explanations of the particulars ("the drug is increasing their metabolism" or "those mice are more stressed by being stuck with syringes") and so can be tested.

This is all possible in the hard sciences because of some well-established laws of cause and effect that form a basis for this kind of induction. If something is affecting the mice in my examples above today, it will affect them in the same way tomorrow, all things being equal.  This allows a scientist to work from induction to make an assessment of probable causation via empirical assessment and do so with a high degree of confidence.  And their assessment can be confirmed by others because the empirical measures are controlled and repeatable.

Unfortunately, none of this works for the study of the past.  Events, large and small, occur and then are gone.  A historian can only assess information about them from traces they may, if we are lucky, leave behind.  But unlike a researcher from the hard sciences, a historian can't run the fall of the Western Roman Empire through a series of controlled lab experiments.  He can't even observe the events, as a zoologist might observe the behavior of a gorilla band, and draw conclusions.  And there aren't well-defined laws and principles at work (apart from in a very broad and subjective sense) that allow him to, say, simulate the effects of the rise of the printing press or decide on the exact course of the downfall of Napoleon the way a theoretical physicist can with the composition of a distant galaxy or the formation of a long dead star.

All this leads some atheists, who reject anything that can't be definitively "proven", who reject the idea of any degree of certainty about the past.  This is an extreme position and it's rarely a consistent one.  As I've noted to some who have claimed this level of historical skepticism, I find it hard to believe they maintain this position when they read the newspaper, even though they should be just as skeptical about being able to know about a car accident yesterday as they are about knowing about a revolution 400 years ago.

The Historical Method

 
Just because history is not a hard science does not mean it can't tell us about the past or can't do so with a degree of certainty.  Early historians like Herodotus established the beginnings of the methods used by modern historical researchers, though historians only began to develop a systematic methodology based on agreed principles from the later eighteenth century onwards, using the techniques of Barthold Niebuhr(1776-1831) and Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886).

The Historical Method is based on three fundamental steps, each of which has its own techniques:

1. Heuristic - This is the identification of relevant material to use as sources of information.  These can range from the obvious, such as a historian of the time's account, who records events he witnessed personally, to the much less obvious, like a medieval manor's account book detailing purchases for the estate.  Everything from archaeological finds to coins to heraldry can be relevant here.  The key word here is "relevant", and there is a high degree of skill in working out which sources of information are pertinent to the subject in question.

2. Criticism - This is the process of appraising the source material in light of the question being answered or subject being examined.  It involves such things as determining the level of "authenticity" of a source (Is it what is seems to be?), its "integrity" (Can its account be trusted?  What are its biases?), its context (What genre is it?  Is it responding or reacting to another source?  Is it using literary tropes that need to be treated with skepticism?)  Material evidence, such as archaeology, architecture, art , coins, etc. needs to be firmly put into context to be understood.  Documentary sources also need careful contextualization - the social conditions of their production, their polemical intent (if any), their reason for production (more important for a political speech than a birth certificate, for example) , their intended audience and the background and biases of their writer (if known) all have to be taken into account.

3. Synthesis and Exposition - This is the formal statement of the findings from steps 1 and 2, which each find support by reference to the relevant evidence.

The main difference between this method and those used in the hard sciences is that the researcher lays all this material, its analysis, and his conclusions out systematically, but the conclusions are a subjective assessment of likelihood rather than an objective statement of probabilistic induction.  This subjectivity is what many trained in the sciences find alien about history and lead them to reject history as insubstantial.

But the key thing to understand here is that the historian is not working toward an absolute statement about what definitely happened in the past, since that is generally impossible except on trivial points (e.g., there is no doubt that Adolf HItler was born on April 20, 1889).  A historian instead works to present what is called "the argument to the best explanation".  In other words, the argument that best accounts for the largest amount of relevant evidence with the least number of suppositions.  This means that the Principle of Parsimony, also known as Occam's Razor, is a key tool in historical analysis; historians always favor the most parsimonious interpretation that takes account of the most available evidence.

Which finally brings us back to the existence of Jesus.  It is far more parsimonious to conclude that Christianity's  figure of "Jesus Christ" evolved out of the ideas of the followers of a historical Jewish preacher, since all of our earliest information tells us that this "Jesus Christ" was a historical Jewish preacher who had been executed circa 30 CE.  People have tried to propose alternative origins for the figure of "Jesus Christ", positing an earlier Jewish sect that believed in a purely celestial figure who became "historicized" into an earthly, historical Jesus later.  But there is no evidence of any such proto-Christian sect and no reason such a sect would exist and then vanish without leaving any trace in the historical record. This is why historians find these "Jesus Myth" hypotheses uncompelling - they are not the most parsimonious way of looking at the evidence and require us to imagine ad hoc, "what if" style suppositions to keep them from collapsing.

Ways Atheists (Sometimes) Get History Wrong

 
Managing this process of systematic historical analysis requires training, practice, and a degree of skill.  Without these, it's very easy to do something that looks a bit like historical analysis and arrive at flawed conclusions.

Take the initial heuristic process, for example.  I've come across many atheists who don't accept that a historical Jesus existed on the grounds that "there are no contemporary references to him and all references to him are later hearsay" or even that "there are no eyewitness accounts of his career".  So they rule out any evidence we do have referring to him on the basis that it is not contemporary and/or from eyewitnesses.  But if we ruled out any reference to an ancient, medieval, or pre-modern person or event on these grounds, we'd effectively have to abandon the study of early history: we don't have contemporary evidence for most people and events in the ancient world, so this would make almost all of our sources invalid, which is clearly absurd.  Given that we have no eyewitness or contemporary sources for far more prominent figures, such as Hannibal, expecting them for a peasant preacher like Jesus is clearly ridiculous.  No historian of the ancient world would regard this as a valid historical heuristic.

Atheists can often make similar, elementary errors in the criticism of sources as well.  There is no shortage of lurid material on the horrors of the Inquisition, with whole books detailing vile tortures and giving accounts of hundreds of thousands of wretched victims being consigned to the flames by the Catholic Church.  In the past, nineteenth century writers took these sources at face value, and until the early twentieth century this was essentially the story of the Inquisition to be found in textbooks, especially in the English-speaking (i.e. substantially Protestant) sphere.

But much of this was based on sources that had severe biases - mainly sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestant polemical material, usually produced in England which, as a political, religious and economic enemy of Spain, was hardly going to produce unbiased accounts of the Spanish church and crown's use of the Inquisition.  Uncritical use of this material gives a warped, enemy's-eye-view of the Inquisition that has been substantially overturned by more careful analysis of the source material and the Inquisition's own records.  The result is that it is now known that in the 160 years of its operation in Spain, the Inquisition resulted in 3,000-5,000 executions, not the hundreds of thousands alleged by uncritical nineteenth century writers like Henry Charles Lea.  Basing an argument on the earlier, uncritical accounts of the Inquisition might suit many atheists' agendas, but it would be bad history nonetheless.

Finally, historical synthesis and exposition requires at least an attempt at a high degree of objectivity.  An analyst of the past may have personal beliefs with the potential to bias their analysis and incline them towards certain conclusions.  Worse, these beliefs could make them begin with assumptions about the past and so make them select only the evidence that supports this a priori idea.  Historians strive to avoid both and examine the evidence on its merits, though polemicists often don't bother with this objective approach.  All too often many atheists can be polemicists when dealing with the past, only crediting information or analysis that fits an argument against religion they are trying to make  while downplaying, dismissing, or ignoring evidence or analysis that does not fit their agenda. Again, this is bad history and rarely serves any function other than preaching to the converted.

For example, until the early twentieth century the history of science was popularly seen as a centuries-long conflict between forward thinking scientific minds trying to advance knowledge and human progress but constantly being persecuted and suppressed by retrograde religious forces determined to retard scientific progress.  Again, in the mid-twentieth century historians of science reassessed this general idea and rejected what is now referred to as the "Conflict Thesis", presenting a far more complex, nuanced and well-founded analysis of the development of science that shows that while there were occasional conflicts, which were rarely as simple as "science versus religion", religion was usually neutral on the rational analysis of the physical world and often actively supportive of it. Overt conflicts, such as the Galileo Affair, were exceptions rather than the rule and, in that case as in many others, more complicated than simply “religion” repressing “science”.

Objectivity, Bias, and Historical Fables

 
We atheists and freethinkers regularly deride believers for their irrational thinking, lack of critical analysis and tendency to cling to ideas out of faith even when confronted by contrary evidence.  Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to talk about being rational, and criticize others for not being so, than it is to practice what we preach.  Everyone has their biases, and “confirmation bias”  - the tendency to favor information that confirms our prior beliefs - is an innate psychological propensity that is hard to counter even when we are aware of it.  This means that atheists can, in many cases, be as bad as believers in accepting appealing ideas without checking their facts, holding to common misconceptions in the face of contrary evidence, and liking neat, simple stories over messy, complex, and more detailed alternatives that happen to be more solidly supported by the evidence.

The idea that the medieval Church taught the earth was flat, that Columbus bravely defied their primitive Biblical superstition and proved they were wrong by sailing to America, is a great story.  Unfortunately, it’s also historical nonsense – a fable with zero basis in reality.  It’s bad enough that I have had the experience of intelligent and educated atheists repeating this story as an example of the Church holding back progress without bothering to check if it’s true.  What’s worse is that I’ve also experienced atheists who have been shown extensive, clear evidence that the medieval Church taught the earth was round, and that the myth of medieval Flat Earth belief was invented by the novelist Washington Irving in 1828, and they have simply refused to believe that the myth could be wrong.

Neat historical fables such as the ones about Christians burning down the Great Library of Alexandria (they didn’t) or murdering Hypatia because of their hatred of her learning and science (ditto) are appealing parables. Which means some atheists fight tooth and nail to preserve them even when confronted with clear evidence that they are pseudo historical fairy tales.  Fundamentalists aren’t the only ones who can be dogmatic about their myths.

One of the main reasons for studying history is to get a better understanding of why things today are as they are by grasping what has gone before.  But it only works with a good grasp of how we can know about the past, the methods of analysis used, and the relevant material our understanding should be based on.  It also only works if we strive to put aside what we may like to be true along with any preconceptions (since they are often wrong) and look at the material objectively.  Atheists who attempt to use history in their arguments who don’t do these things can not only end up getting things badly wrong, but can also wind up looking as misinformed or even as dogmatic as fundamentalists.  And that’s not a good look.
 
 
Originally posted at Armarium Magnus. Used with permission.
(Image credit: WH Static)