One of the core tenets of the Jesus myth theory (aka "mythicism") is that the first Christians got the Gospel from private revelations or reading Scripture rather than from the historical Jesus.

In one sense, this is a no-brainer. If Jesus never existed, then of course the Gospel didn’t really come from him. However, there is in fact more to this than simply a logical corollary of the theory itself.

Many mythicists believe that the New Testament actually contains traces of the real origin of the Gospel, and they think they can prove it. Specifically, they point to passages in the epistles that seem to affirm this.

In this article, I want to look at two of these passages, the two that I think present the best evidence for the theory of mythicism, and see if the argument holds up.

The Gospel from Revelation?

In the opening chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, he explicitly tells us that the Gospel he preached was given to him by direct revelation from Jesus Christ:

“For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 1:11-12)

On the surface, this looks like very strong evidence for the mythicist position, and the case becomes even stronger when we compare this passage with another one from Paul’s letters:

“Now I would remind you, brethren, in what terms I preached to you the gospel, which you received, in which you stand…For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.” (1 Corinthians 15:1, 3-4)

Popular mythicist Richard Carrier points out several verbal parallels between these two texts. They’re both about the “gospel” that Paul “received” and then “preached,” implying that they’re referring to the same set of information.¹ In other words, when we look at these two texts together, it seems that Paul is claiming to have received the Gospel about Jesus’ death and resurrection via direct revelation from Jesus Christ, not from human witnesses to those events.

What Was Paul’s Gospel?

At first glance, this may seem like an airtight case, but let’s take a closer look at Paul’s claim in Galatians. Is he really talking about the basic message about Jesus’ death and resurrection, or is “the gospel which was preached by me” something else? If we look closely at the surrounding context, it seems like it’s actually the latter.

To begin, the whole letter is about whether or not Christians need to be circumcised and follow the Jewish Law. Paul argues that we do not, and his opponents claim that we do. With this in mind, take a look at something Paul says a few verses earlier:

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel…If any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed.” (Galatians 1:6, 9)

What is this “different gospel” that Paul is writing about? Is it a denial of the death and resurrection of Jesus? No, in the context of the entire letter, it’s obviously a Gospel that requires its adherents to follow the Jewish Law. Paul is here contrasting this with the Gospel that he preached, which didn’t require such obedience.

Once we realize this, we can understand what he means when he says that he received the Gospel directly from Jesus. He’s not talking about the basic message of the death and resurrection of Jesus; rather, he’s talking about the point of contention between him and his opponents. He’s saying that Jesus revealed to him that Christians no longer need to follow the Jewish Law.

As a result, Carrier’s connection between the passages in Galatians and 1 Corinthians doesn’t hold up. Yes, they both use similar language, but they’re about two different things. One is about the basic message of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and the other is about the freedom from the Law that Christians enjoy. When Paul said in 1 Corinthians that he received the Gospel about Jesus’ death and resurrection, there is nothing to indicate that he received it directly from Jesus himself.

The Gospel from Scripture?

The second text I want to look at comes from Paul’s most famous letter, to the Romans:

“Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed and through the prophetic writings is made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith— to the only wise God be glory for evermore through Jesus Christ! Amen.” (Romans 16:25-27)

Like the passage from Galatians, this one also tells us that the Gospel Paul preached came from somewhere other than historical witnesses, and again, mythicists sometimes argue that this supports their case.² The one difference is that in this text, the Gospel comes from the Old Testament (what Paul calls “the prophetic writings”) rather than direct revelation.

However, like that previous passage, this one too is about the freedom of Christians from the Jewish Law, so in the context of the entire letter, that is most likely what Paul means by the phrase “my gospel.”

However, there is one other element in this passage that we need to look at as well. Paul says that “the preaching of Jesus Christ” is now “through the prophetic writings…made known to all nations,” which some take to mean that he learned about Jesus’ own preaching only from Scripture.³ Again, on the surface, that looks like strong evidence for the mythicist position, but it’s actually pretty innocuous. The Greek phrase translated as “the preaching of Jesus Christ” is ambiguous. It can mean the preaching that Jesus himself did, or it can mean the preaching of others about Jesus. On purely grammatical grounds, it could go either way, but in context, the latter is more likely. All throughout Romans, Paul describes the Gospel he preached about Jesus, but he doesn’t say anything about Jesus’ own preaching, so this phrase is almost certainly referring to the preaching of others about Jesus.

What Now?

At the end of the day, there is simply no evidence that any early Christians learned about Jesus’ death and resurrection solely from direct revelation or Scripture rather than from historical witnesses to those events.

Granted, this doesn’t prove that they did learn those things from historical witnesses or that Jesus even existed, but it does clear away some arguments for mythicism. As a result, the debate will have to move to other evidence. Simply put, Paul’s statements about the origin of his Gospel provide no evidence against the existence of Jesus.

What year was Jesus born? The answer may surprise you.

You might think that Jesus was born in the Year Zero–between 1 B.C. and A.D. 1. You often hear that Jesus was born around 6-7 B.C. The evidence from the Bible and the Church Fathers, however, support a different year.

Here’s what the evidence says . . .

Not in Year Zero

There is a good reason why Jesus wasn’t born in Year Zero: there wasn’t one. The sequence of years before Christ ends at 1 B.C. and the A.D. series picks up the very next year with A.D. 1. This is a bit surprising to us, since we’re used to working with number lines that have a zero on them, but zero wasn’t a concept on the intellectual scene when our way of reckoning years was developed.

If it helps, you can think about it this way: suppose you have a child and you want to date events relative to that child’s birth. The first year before the child was born would be 1 B.C. (Before the Child), and the first year after his birth (that is, the year ending with his first birthday) would be the first year of the child. If the child happens to be the Lord, that would be the first year of the Lord, which in Latin is Anno Domini, from which we get A.D. Thus there is no Year Zero between 1 B.C. and A.D. 1.

(By the way, please note that the “A.D.” goes before the number. “A.D. 2013″ = “The Year of the Lord 2013,” which is an intelligible phrase. If you write “2013 A.D.” that would be “2013 the Year of the Lord,” which is gibberish.)

So what year was Jesus born?

1 B.C.?

The guy who developed the way we reckon years was a 6th-century monk named Dionysius Exiguus (“Dennis the Short”). He apparently thought Christ was born in 1 B.C. (actually, it’s a bit more complex than that, but we’ll keep this simple).

Today most think this date is a little too late and that the evidence supports a date a few years earlier.

6-7 B.C.?

For a little more than a century, the idea has been popular that Jesus was born in 6-7 B.C. The reasoning goes like this: Jesus was born late in the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 B.C. Furthermore, the wise men saw the star rise in the east two years before they came to visit Jerusalem, where they met Herod. Back up two years from 4 B.C. and you get 6 B.C. Back up another year in case Herod didn’t die immediately after they visited, and you get 7 B.C.

So: 6 or 7 B.C.

The problem, as we saw in a previous post, is that the arguments that Herod died in 4 B.C. are exceptionally weak.

3-4 B.C.?

Let’s take the same logic as above and plug in the more likely date of Herod’s death.

As we saw in a previous post, the evidence points to him dying in 1 B.C. So . . . back up two years from that and you get 3 B.C. Back up another year for cushion and you get 4 B.C.

Thus: 3-4 B.C.

That’s not an unreasonable estimate, but there are two issues with it:

1. It’s got a couple of problematic assumptions.
2. Other evidence, including other evidence from the Bible, suggests it’s a little too early.

The problematic assumptions are that the star was first visible in the east at the moment of Jesus’ birth and that it was visible for a full two years prior to the magi’s arrival.

The first of these assumptions is problematic (among other reasons) because its appearance could be connected with another point in Jesus’ life, such as his conception. If that were the case, you’d need to shave nine months off to find the point of his birth. It’s also problematic because Matthew doesn’t say that the star appeared two years earlier. What he says is that Herod killed all the baby boys in Bethlehem that were two years old and under, in accord with the time he learned from the magi. That means that there is some approximating going on here.

Herod would certainly want to make sure the child was dead, and he would err on the side of . . . well, the side of caution from his perspective. That is, he would to some degree over-estimate how old the child might be in order to be sure of wiping him out. Thus all the boys two and under were killed. That means Jesus was at most two years old, but he was likely younger than that.

What may well have happened is Herod may have been told that the star appeared a year ago and he decided to kill all the boys a year on either side of this to make sure of getting the right one.

And then there’s the fact that the ancients often counted parts of a year as a full year in their reckoning, so “two years” might mean “one year plus part of a second year.”

All this suggests that two years was the maximum amount of time earlier that Jesus was born, and likely it was less than that.

Thus . . .

2-3 B.C.?

This date would be indicated if we start with Herod’s death in 1 B.C. and then, taking into account the factors named above, backed up only one year, suggesting 2 B.C. Then, if we back up another year to allow for the fact Herod didn’t die immediately, that would suggest 3 B.C. So, sometime between 2-3 B.C. would be reasonable, based on what we read in Matthew.

Do we have other evidence suggesting this date?

We do, both inside and outside the Bible.

The Gospel of Luke

Although Luke offers some helpful clues about the timing of Jesus’ birth, we don’t know enough to make full use of them. The date of the enrollment ordered by Augustus is notoriously controversial, for example, and too complex to go into here. However, later indications he gives in his gospel are quite interesting.

He records, for example, that John the Baptist began his ministry in “the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar” (3:1). Tiberius became emperor after Augustus died in August of A.D. 14. Roman historians (e.g., Tacitus, Suetonius), however, tended to skip part years and begin counting an emperor’s reign with the first January 1 after they took office. On that reckoning, the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar would correspond to what we call A.D. 29. (Remember, the 15th year is the time between the completion of the 14th year and the completion of the 15th year, the same way a child’s first year is the time between his birth and his first birthday.)

Jesus’ ministry starts somewhat after John’s, but it doesn’t appear to be very long. Perhaps only a few weeks or months. If so, Jesus’ ministry also likely started in A.D. 29.

That’s important, because Luke gives us a second clue: He says Jesus was “about thirty years of age” when he began his ministry (Lk 3:23). So, if you take A.D. 29 and back up thirty years, when does that land you? You might think in 1 B.C., but remember that there’s no Year Zero, so it would actually be 2 B.C. or the end of 3 B.C. if Luke was counting Tiberius’s reign from when he became emperor rather than from the next January 1.

Thus: 2-3 B.C. is a reasonable estimate.

That’s still only an estimate, though, because Jesus could have been a little less or a little more than thirty.

(For purposes of comparison, note that when Luke describes the age of Jairus’s daughter, he says she was “about twelve” (Lk 8:42). So Luke doesn’t seem to go in for rounding things to the nearest 5 years; he tries to be more precise than that. When Luke says Jesus was “about thirty,” he’s probably not envisioning anything between 25 and 35 but a range narrower than that.)

To confirm our estimate, it would be nice if we had an exact naming of the year Jesus was born, and in fact we do . . .

The Fathers Know Best

There is a startling consensus among early Christian sources about the year of Jesus’ birth.

Here is a table adapted from Jack Finegan’s excellent Handbook of Biblical Chronology (p. 291) giving the dates proposed by different sources:

 
As you can see, except for a few outliers (including our influential friend, Dionysius Exiguus), there is strong support for Jesus being born in either 3 or 2 B.C.

Note that some of the sources in this table are quite ancient. Irenaeus of Lyon, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Julius Africanus, and Hippolytus of Rome all wrote in the late 100s or early 200s.

We thus have strong indication–from a careful reading of Matthew, from Luke, and from the Church Fathers–that Jesus was born in 3 or 2 B.C.
 
 
 
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 JimmyAkin.com. Used with permission.

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.

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.

What do atheist skeptics and liberal Scripture scholars have in common? They both love to find alleged “contradictions” in Scripture. Though there are many of these alleged “contradictions,” one of the favorites of both of these camps is one that you can expect to find being re-hashed again and again on the Internet:—especially now that we are approaching Christmas—the “contradictions” found in what are commonly referred to as “the infancy narratives” of St. Matthew and St. Luke.

The late Fr. Raymond Brown, S.S., for example, who definitely made positive contributions to biblical study in the Church, also made some not-so-good contributions. In his book, The Birth of the Messiah, p. 46, for example, he flatly declares the two infancy narratives “are contrary to each other.”

Oy vey!

So What Gives?

The two “infancy narratives” are found in Luke 2:1-39 and Matthew 1:18-2:23. We’ll use St. Luke’s account as our beginning point of reference and from there we’ll move forward inserting the alleged “contradictions” as we go.

I’ll give you a very important pointer here at the outset for clarity’s sake: keep your eyes on the words I put in bold print as I lay out the narrative for St. Matthew and St. Luke's Gospels. These are the problem areas. And also keep in mind that these problems are not created by the texts of Scripture. They are created in the imaginations of those creating the so-called “contradictions.” Here we go:

According to St. Luke’s account, Mary and Joseph traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem because of the census called for by Caesar Augustus. It would be there that Mary “gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger…” (2:1-7) Are we good, so far?

Well, maybe not!

According to St. Matthew’s Gospel, there is no account of a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. And this is true. But skeptics claim St. Matthew portrays the Holy Family to have been living in Bethlehem, not Nazareth. There would have been no way for there to have even been a journey to Bethlehem if Matthew’s scenario were true. The Holy Family was already there!

Moreover, Jesus is not found in St. Luke’s “manger,” but Matthew 2:11 says the Wise Men found him in a “house” in Bethlehem where the Holy Family was not staying in the Inn—or more precisely, the manger attached to an Inn—that we find in Luke’s Gospel. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is depicted as being born in the family home of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem where they had lived all along, contradicting St. Luke’s account. Herein we find the first of these narratives’ supposed irreconcilable contradictions.

A Biblical Response:

There are two crucial assumptions made here that have nothing to do with the actual text of Scripture.

1. Because there is “no account of a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem” in St. Matthew’s Gospel, this does not mean St. Matthew’s Gospel excludes it as a possibility. It doesn’t. It just means St. Matthew chose not to mention it.

2. And this is the most crucial error that, when understood properly, will end up dispelling most of the misconstrued contradictions we find out and about in cyberspace. The assumption is made that St. Matthew’s recording of the Wise Men following the star leads them to the Holy Family at the time of Jesus’ actual birth, and in Bethlehem. But the text does not actually say this.

Let me explain.

First, let’s look at Matthew 2:1:

"Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, Wise Men from the East came to Jerusalem…"

Critics nearly unanimously interpret this to mean that St. Matthew is claiming the Wise Men arrived in Bethlehem at the time Christ was born. The truth is: it doesn’t say that. It simply says Christ was born during the days of King Herod and that the Wise Men came in those days to see—as they themselves asked upon their arrival in Jerusalem—where they could find “he who has been born king of the Jews” (Matt. 2:2).Matthew 2:1-2 does not specify how much time had transpired since the actual birth of Jesus.

However, having said that, though Matthew 2:1-2 doesn’t specify the time of Christ’s birth, we do have clues elsewhere that indicate the Wise Men did not arrive at the time Christ was actually born; rather, one to as much as two years later.

Little Drummer Boy History

I know what you’re thinking. Or, at least, what you should be thinking. I love “The Little Drummer Boy,” too! (Yes, that was said “tongue and cheek,” folks!) My family and I watch it every year at Christmas! And multiple times (we have the DVD).

(It's great having young children in the house. It gives me an excuse to watch all those kid-oriented Christmas specials!)

But unfortunately, “The Little Drummer Boy,” as well as a whole slew of atheists and liberal theologians, has his (and their) time-line all wrong here. Perhaps there is a lesson here about getting one’s theology, or history, through children’s Claymation television shows?

At any rate, the Nativity is commonly portrayed with Magi, Shepherds, and yes, maybe even the little drummer boy, all together at the manger with the Holy Family and the new-born baby Jesus. But that is not the way the Bible portrays it.

First of all, when the Magi “saw his star” in the East that indicated the birth of the “king of the Jews,” it was only then that they began their journey to Israel, according to Matthew 2:2. And remember, this was before you could jump on a commuter jet. Coming from Persia, most likely, they would have had to travel around 970 miles to get to Jerusalem. At least, that’s the distance from modern Tehran, anyway. Even if you move eastward as far as modern Bagdad as their starting point, they would have still had to travel at least 500 miles.

Why is this significant?

Matthew 2:3-7 tells us that after the Wise Men arrived in Jerusalem and began asking about the location of  “he who has been born king of the Jews” (notice, they did not say “new-born king” as many assume, they said, “he who has been born king of the Jews…”), Herod was troubled, for obvious reasons. He was corrupt and didn’t want another “king” to threaten his position of power. So, after “assembling all of the chief priests, and scribes” (v. 4), and asking them where the Messiah was to be born, they informed him of Micah’s prophecy (Micah 5:2) that foretold Bethlehem as the birthplace of the coming king. Herod then decided to pretend he was interested in welcoming, and worshipping, this new “king of Israel” just as the Magi were. He really wanted to find out precisely where this king was located, so he could eliminate the threat… permanently.

But notice what Matthew 2:7 says:

"Then Herod summoned the Wise Men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star appeared, and he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.”"

Herod wanted to know “when the star appeared” so he could know the approximate age of the child. This indicates that the star appeared to the Magi when Jesus was born, before their journey to Israel. This eliminates the possibility of the Magi meeting the shepherds and the Holy Family at the manger.

Moreover, after God warned the Magi “not to return to Herod” in Matthew 2:12, and Herod later realizes they were not coming back to give him his desired information about the location of Jesus, in 2:16, “in a rage” he determined to “kill all of the children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the Wise Men" (emphasis added).

Thus, if we allow for Herod hedging his bet to make sure he kills the right child, the information he garnered from the Magi would probably have placed the birth of Christ at about a year or so before the Magi’s arrival. Herod would probably want a cushion on each side of the approximate time of Christ’s birth.

Most importantly, this would indicate Christ would have been 1 to at most 2 years-old (though I would again say it would be unlikely Christ would have been a full two years-old) at the time the Wise Men arrived in Jerusalem to find the Christ-child. This would have been 1 to 2 years after the nativity of St. Luke’s Gospel.

Many will say at this point that a journey of 500 to 1,000 miles would not take that long. If you say the caravan of the Wise Men could travel about 5 to 10 miles per day, it would have taken anywhere from two to seven months of travel. This is true, but this does not take into account many variables. You didn’t just jump into a car or airplane and go. It would have taken time to plan the trip, gather supplies, security, etc. These and more contingencies are simply not revealed to us in the text. But we do get hints here about what Herod concluded from his personal interview of the Magi themselves. The text of Scripture indicates it was the Magi that revealed the time of Christ's birth to have been long before the Magi's arrival in Nazareth.

Check Your Assumptions at the Door

Once we get the above timeline right, the “contradictions” between “infancy narratives” are not so contradictory any longer. We are not going to get to all of the “contradictions” claimed, but as one other example, the claim is also made that when the Wise Men were sent to Bethlehem by Herod, then that would naturally have been where they ended up finding the Holy Family when they arrive at the place “where the child was” in Matthew 2:9. This is the foundation for the “contradiction” between St. Luke’s “manger” and St. Matthew’s “house,” and more. The problem is: the text doesn’t say the Wise Men actually found the Christ-child in Bethlehem. This is another non-biblical assumption.

In fact, Matthew 2:9 tells us that after Herod ordered the Magi to go to Bethlehem, it would be the miraculous star that would actually guide them to Christ. The text doesn’t explicitly say this, but we can reasonably assume the star would not lead them to the wrong location! If the Wise Men would have then headed to Bethlehem, the Holy Family would have been long gone. The star would have led them to Nazareth, where, St. Luke tells us, in 2:39, “[the Holy Family] returned,” but only after “they had performed everything according to the law of the Lord.”

Back to St. Luke’s Gospel

It is crucial to understand that other than the mention of Christ’s actual birth in Matthew 2:1, there is no overlap with Luke’s infancy narrative and Matthew’s. Here’s a time-line:

Matthew 2:1 mentions Christ’s actual birth in Bethlehem. This sole overlap parallels Luke 2:6-7.

But because we know St. Matthew’s Gospel then leaps forward to the story of the Magi, one to at most two years after Christ’s birth, the story of the shepherd and the angels finding Christ in Bethlehem in Luke 2:8-20, the circumcision of Christ while the Holy Family was still in Bethlehem in Luke 2:21, the “Presentation of the Lord” in the temple of Luke 2:22-36 (a six-mile trip that would take the better part of a day to walk), and the “return to Nazareth” of Luke 2:39, all happen within about 40 or so days after Christ’s birth, and long before the Magi arrive at Nazareth in search of the “king of Israel.”

With this in mind, we can now eliminate the above-mentioned “contradictions” quite easily:

1. The “home” in Matthew 2:11 does not conflict with the “manger” in Luke 2:7. The “home” was in Nazareth where the Holy Family had traveled well over a year before the coming of the Magi.

2. Matthew’s Gospel never actually says the “home” mentioned in 2:11 was in Bethlehem.

3. The Wise Men were “sent” to Bethlehem by Herod, but the text never says that is where they ended up. We know, in fact, they would have ended up in Nazareth where Christ actually was, not Bethlehem.

Another Assumption Exploded

As I said above, in this brief post, we are not going to eliminate all of the errors that are out there claiming contradictions between the infancy narratives. In fact, there are some who argue for contradictions even within the narratives themselves. But if you keep in mind the historical timeline laid out here, you can deal with most of the claimed anomalies.

Here is one final example:

Matthew 2:23 tells us the Holy Family never went to live in Nazareth until after the coming of the Magi and the flight into Egypt. It was only then, the text says, “[Joseph and the Holy Family] went and dwelt in a city called Nazareth.” Yet, St. Luke says, it was after the 40 days of purification after the birth of Christ that “[the Holy Family] returned into Galilee, to… Nazareth.”

Actually, Matthew 2:23 does not say the Holy Family “first” went to Nazareth after the flight into Egypt. That is another unbiblical assumption. After being warned by God to flee Herod’s wrath and travel to Egypt in Matthew 2:13-14, and then after being told by an angel of the Lord to return to Israel, in Matthew 2:20, it appears St. Joseph’s desire was to go back to his family’s native Bethlehem in Judea, but because Herod’s son, Archela’us, was reigning there, “he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream” he went to Nazareth instead (Matthew 2:22-23).

We have to remember that the inspired authors place emphases on particular aspects of the life of Christ and the Holy Family for particular theological reasons. St. Matthew is writing to a Jewish Christian community; thus, he emphasizes both Christ’s birth in Bethlehem to fulfill the Old Testament prophecy of Micah 5:2 (Matthew 2:5-6), and the fulfillment of the Oral Tradition, or word “spoken by the prophets,” that Christ would be “called a Nazarene” (Matthew 2:23). St. Luke, the only inspired Evangelist who was also a Gentile, did not seem as interested in pointing those things out.

For St. Matthew’s purpose, it would not suffice for him to simply mention Jesus' brief sojourn in Bethlehem as an infant and toddler; he had to be raised in Nazareth in order to be “called a Nazarene.” Thus, the emphasis of St. Matthew is on Christ and the Holy Family coming to Nazareth where Christ would be raised in order to fulfill the prophecy “spoken by the prophets” (Matthew 2:23). But he never says this was the “first” time they had been there.

Final Thought

There is much more to be done here—multiple alleged “contradictions” to clear up. But to do that, we must establish a true context for Scripture free from assumptions that don’t jive with the entirety of the text.
 
 
Originally appeared at Catholic Answers. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Wikimedia)

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.

Biblical skeptics often surmise that the earliest New Testament books tell a very different story than the later books: that the story of Jesus grew with time, becoming more and more incredible, and less and less historical. In other words, the New Testament evolved from history to religious mythology.

Recently, I've seen this argument raised about both the Resurrection and the divinity of Christ. First, retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong (who denies the Resurrection) attacked the historicity of the Gospels, and in particular, the Resurrection account. He makes extensive recourse to the evolving-Bible:

"If we line up the gospels in the time sequence in which they were written - that is, with Mark first, followed by Matthew, then by Luke and ending with John - we can see exactly how the story expanded between the years 70 and 100.[...] In the first gospel, Mark, the risen Christ appears physically to no one, but by the time we come to the last gospel, John, Thomas is invited to feel the nail prints in Christ’s hands and feet and the spear wound in his side."

Second, a commenter on my own blog recently said in response to C.S. Lewis' “Lord, liar, lunatic” trilemma,

"That was clearly on the assumption that the gospel of John represents actual history because only in John does he claim to be God. Based simply on the Synoptic gospels, we can say that if Jesus is not God he can still be considered a good man or a moral teacher. C.S. Lewis' false-dilemma require absolute faith in John to work."

Yet we know John doesn't belong with the other gospels, or at least that it isn't as historical as they are. Aside from John alone making Jesus claim to be God, we see how it disagrees on how, when, and where Jesus called his disciples. Is there any merit to either of these evolving Bible claims? Let's look at each one in turn.

The Resurrection

 
Bishop Spong, in his CNN article, stacks the deck in two different ways. First, he focuses just on the Gospels, rather than the New Testament as a whole. Second, he claims that in Mark's Gospel, “the risen Christ appears physically to no one.”

The reality is that the earliest New Testament documents describe Christ as (a) physically Resurrected, and (b) appearing to innumerable people. In St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, he writes (1 Cor. 15:3-20),

"For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
 
Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.
 
Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised.
 
If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep."

So St. Paul tells us that Christ physically rose from the dead. He banks everything on the reality of the Resurrection: if it's not true, the Apostles are liars, Christians are pathetic, and the Gospel is proclaimed in vain. To validate this claim that Christ physically rose from the dead, Paul appeals to numerous post-Resurrection appearances, apparently well known to his Corinthian audience: Jesus appeared to Peter (Cephas), to the Twelve, to a group of five hundred brethren, and then to St. Paul himself.

In other words, Paul's not just saying, “the Tomb is empty, Jesus must have risen!” but that he had actually seen the Resurrected Christ, as had numerous others, many of whom were still alive and could vouch for this testimony.

Why does this matter? Well, Spong himself dates this passage from First Corinthians to the mid-50s, decades before when he thinks any of the Gospels were written. You can see this on page 201 of his book The Sins of Scripture. This completely destroys his claim that the earliest Resurrection accounts didn't have any post-Resurrection appearances, and that these were added “between the years 70 and 100.” What does Spong do in response? He simply ignores Paul's writings, and focuses on the Gospels alone.

Here, we get to the second way that he stacks the deck. He claims that in Mark's Gospel, “the risen Christ appears physically to no one.” The truth is that there's controversy over whether or not Mark 16:9-20 are part of Mark's original Gospel, because some of the earliest manuscripts don't include this passage. There are three theories:

1. Mark 16:9-20 was written by Mark, but the section was lost in an early manuscript (and any manuscripts copied from that one).
2. Mark originally had a different ending, which was lost; Mark 16:9-20 was appended to replace it.
3. Mark originally ended his Gospel at Mark 16:8; Mark 16:9-20 is a later addition.

Spong assumes theory #3 is true, without actually telling his readers he's doing this, or justifying this choice.

But even if theory #3 is true, that doesn't mean that Mark denied post-Resurrection appearances. It would just mean that he stopped his Gospel quite abruptly at the empty Tomb on Easter morning. More likely, such an abrupt ending would be a way to begin an in-person dialogue: that readers would ask whoever gave them a copy of the Gospel what had happened at the Empty Tomb.

So Spong's suggestion that Mark was unaware of any post-Resurrection appearances doesn't follow at all. At most (and this is assuming theory # 3 is true), we can say simply that the post-Resurrection appearances postdated the events he's describing in his Gospel. Likewise, it's not unusual that the Gospels don't record details about Pentecost or the life of the early Church, or that Churchill biographies don't record details about the life of Thatcher. These things are simply outside of the scope of the work. Again, this is true only if Mark really did end his Gospel abruptly in verse 8, which is by no means certain.

So it's not clear that Mark's Gospel originally ended at verse 8, and there's no reason to believe in any case that he was unaware of post-Resurrection appearances. On the contrary, the earliest New Testament evidence is quite clear about the post-Resurrection appearances. Paul, who predates Mark, writes quite clearly about specific post-Resurrection appearances, as do Matthew (Mt. 28:9-10, Mt. 28:16-20), Luke (Lk. 24:13-53; Acts 1:1-11), and John (Jn. 20:10-11:25).

Of these, the one who lists the most post-Resurrection appearances is actually St. Paul. So this bears none of the marks of a big fish story that gets progressively larger over time. Everyone writing after Paul simply fleshes out specific accounts that he mentions in passing.

Jesus' Divinity

 
What about the claim that only John's Gospel depicts Christ as claiming to be Divine? Fr. Robert Barron debunks this claim pretty exhaustively, noting that when Christ claims to be greater than the Temple (Mt. 12:6), and to have the ability to forgive sins (Mark 2:5; Mk. 2:10), He's making claims that a Jewish audience would recognize as claims to Divinity (as they do: Mark 2:7). Likewise when He declares, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Luke 6:5; Mk. 2:28).

But I want to take this in a slightly different direction, instead. Let's look at just the Gospel of Matthew, for now. In Matthew 2, the Magi come to worship the Christ Child (see Mt. 2:2, Mt. 2:11). Various other people worship Christ throughout this Gospel as well: a leper (Mt. 8:2), “a certain ruler” (Mt. 9:18), a Canaanite woman (Mt. 15:25), the mother of James and John (Mt. 20:20), the disciples who witnessed Jesus walking on water (Mt. 14:33), the women who see the Resurrected Christ (Mt. 28:9), and many members of the crowd to which He appears in Mt. 28:9. In exactly none of these cases does Jesus “correct” the acts, which, if mistaken about His Divinity, would be blasphemous.

So even if Jesus is being ambiguous in what He's claiming about Himself, we see innumerable people taking this as a declaration that He's Divine, and responding by worshiping Him. When people mistakenly begin to worship two of the Apostles (Acts 10:25-26) or an angel (Rev. 19:10), the recipients of this misplaced worship immediately stop them. Not so with Christ. It's no mistake that He's proclaimed by His followers to be God, because that's exactly what He claimed, and the sort of worship He accepted, during His lifetime.

There's plenty more where that came from, too. For example, “the Son of Man” is a Divine title, which is made transparent by the interaction in Mt. 26:62-65, in which the high priest condemns it as blasphemous. The fact that Jesus uses it repeatedly, throughout all four Gospels (see, e.g., Mt. 11:19; Mk. 2:28; Lk. 22:48; Jn. 3:13) only supports the notion that Christ claimed to be Divine.

But again, that's just Matthew. We could also look to the writings of St. Paul, where he describes Christ as being equal with God, and having the very nature of God (Phil. 2:6), a passage which Paul concludes (in Phil. 2:10-11) by applying the words of Isaiah 45:22-23 to Christ. Read Isaiah 45:22-23, and you'll see why that's important. Likewise in the Letter to the Hebrews, the angels are commanded to worship Christ (Heb. 1:6).

Remember that Paul's writings are generally held to be the earliest New Testament documents, yet the letter to the Philippians is really clear that Jesus is God. So again, there's no evidence (at all) that this is an idea that only slowly emerged within Christianity. Like the Resurrection, this is at the core of the Faith from the very beginning.
 
 
(Image credit: Jeff Clarke)

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))

"No other formula in the alchemy of logic has exerted more astonishing powers. For it has established the existence of God from the premiss of total ignorance; and it has measured with numerical precision the probability the sun will rise tomorrow."

Probability carries with it “a smack of astrology, of alchemy.” Comte, Keynes reminds us, regarded the application of the mathematical calculus of probability as “purement chimérique et, par conséquent, tout à fait vicieuse" ("purely chimerical, and therefore, quite vicious".)

Note the last word, vicious, a word which was laughed off in the mad rush towards the utopia of Quantification an era which Comte, incidentally, and despite his intentions, helped usher in. We are very close to the moment when a number must by law be attached to every judgment of uncertainty.

Therefore, you may not be surprised to learn there is not one, but two books which argue that a fixed, firm number may be put on the proposition, "God exists." The first, by Stephen Unwin, is called The Probability of God: A Simple Calculation That Proves the Ultimate Truth, in which he uses Bayes’s theorem to demonstrate, with probability one minus epsilon, that the Christian God exists.

This is countered by Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus by Richard Carrier, who uses Bayes’s theorem to prove, with probability one minus epsilon, that the Christian God does not exist because Jesus himself never did.

So here we have probability proving two diametrically opposite conclusions. Comte was right: Alchemy, indeed.

Carrier of course has the harder task, and he attacks it with great gusto. He identifies as a mythicist, which he defines as someone who believes the historical Jesus was a myth. Carrier doesn’t just deny the divine Jesus, but asserts that the man called Jesus never existed.

He's convinced Jesus was a first-century creation, invented whole cloth, likely born of a conspiracy to create a new religion. I won’t dig into the details of Carrier’s points—I believe other contributors will be doing that at Strange Notions in the near future. But if you are interested, here is a link to a several-thousand-word essay in which Carrier “takes apart” a minor blog post written by a historian who claims Jesus lived.

On the other hand, an early review of Unwin’s work, which I have read and which is mercifully brief (and in large font with small pages), asks just the right question: “Can you imagine anyone arguing that the existence of evil in the world, given that God exists, is 23% as opposed to 24%, for instance?” Indeed. Too bad this kind of question is not asked in science.

The reviewer also recognized that probability questions have an order. That is, the probability that evil exists given God does is different from the probability that God exists given evil does. This crucial distinction Unwin minds attentively.

The real question is this: how can probability prove a thing and its opposite simultaneously? The answer is simple: the same way logic can prove a thing and its opposite. This does not prove that logic should be lumped with pseudoscience, however. You can’t blame the tool for its misuse.

All arguments of certainty and uncertainty are conditional. For example, is the proposition “Jesus was divine” true? Well, that depends on the evidence. If you say, “Given Jesus lived, died, and was resurrected as related in the Gospels” then the proposition has probability one (i.e., it is true.) But if you say, “Given Jesus was a myth, created as a conspiracy to flummox the Romans and garner tithes” then the proposition has probability zero (i.e., it is false.)

Given still other evidence, the probability the proposition is true may lie between these two extremes. In no case, however, is probability or logic broken. It does explain why focusing on probability is wrong, though.

These authors would help themselves better, and contribute to a more fruitful discussion about Jesus, by explicating the evidence and eschewing unnecessary quantification.
 
 
(Image credit: Witty Sparks)

NOTE: This it the second of a two part series. Before reading this be sure to check out Part 1.
 

 
Many Christians accept that a historical Jesus existed because they never thought to question the idea in the first place, or because they are convinced that the gospels can be read as (more or less) historical accounts and so don't need to be seriously doubted on this point.  But why do the overwhelming majority of non-Christian scholars also accept that Jesus existed?

The Total Lack of Evidence for a "Mythic Christianity"

 
Essentially, it's because it's the most parsimonious explanation of the evidence we have.  Early Christianity and the critics of early Christianity agree on virtually nothing about Jesus, except for one thing - that he existed as a historical person in the early first century.  If there really was an original form of Christianity that didn't believe this, as all versions of the "Jesus Myth" idea require, then it makes no sense that there is no trace of it.  Such an idea would be a boon to the various Gnostic branches of Christianity, which emphasized his spiritual/mystical aspects and saw him as an emissary from a purely spiritual world who aimed to help us escape the physical dimension.  A totally non-historical, purely mystical Jesus would have suited their purposes perfectly.  Yet they never taught such a Jesus existed - they always depict him as a historical, first century teacher, but argued that he was "pure spirit" and only had the "illusion of flesh".  Why?  Because they couldn't deny that he had existed as a historical person and there was no prior "mythic Jesus" tradition for them to draw on.

Similarly, the memory of an earlier, original Christianity which didn't believe in a historical Jesus would have been a killer argument for the many Jewish and pagan critics of Christianity.  Jesus Mythicists claim this mythic Jesus Christianity survived well into the second or even third century.  We have orthodox Christian responses to critiques by Jews and pagans from that period, by Justin Martyr, Origen, and Minucius Felix.  They try to confront and answer the arguments their critics make about Jesus - that he was a fool, a magician, a bastard son of a Roman soldier, a fraud etc - but none of these apologetic works so much as hint that anyone ever claimed he never existed.  If a whole branch of Christianity existed that claimed just this, why did it pass totally unnoticed by these critics? Clearly no such earlier "mythic Jesus" proto-Christianity existed - it is a creation of the modern Jesus Mythicist activists to prop up their theory.

Indicators of Historicity in the Gospels

 
The main reason non-Christian scholars accept that there was a Jewish preacher as the point of origin of the Jesus story is that the stories themselves contain elements that only make sense if they were originally about such a preacher, but which the gospel writers themselves found somewhat awkward.  As noted above, far from conforming closely to expectations about the coming Messiah, the Jesus story actually shows many signs of being shoehorned into such expectations and not exactly fitting very well.

For example, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is depicted as going to the Jordan and being baptized by John the Baptist (Mark 1: 9-11), after which he hears a voice from heaven and goes off into the wilderness to fast.  For the writer of Mark, this is the point where Jesus becomes the Messiah of Yahweh and so there is no problem with him having his sins washed away by John, since prior to his point he was man like any other.  The writer of the Gospel of Matthew, however, has a very different Christology.  In his version, Jesus has been the ordained Messiah since his miraculous conception, so it is awkward for him to have the chosen one of God going to be baptized by John, who is a lesser prophet.  So Matthew tells more or less the same story as he finds in Mark, which he uses as his source, but adds a small exchange of dialogue not found in the earlier version:

"But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Jesus replied, "Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness." Then John consented." (Matt 3:14-15)

When we turn to the latest of the gospels, the Gospel of John, we find a very different story again.  The writer of this gospel depicts Jesus as being a mystical, pre-existent Messiah who had a heavenly existence since the beginning of time.  So for him the idea of Jesus being baptized by John is even more awkward.  He solves the problem by removing the baptism altogether.  In this latest version, John is baptizing other people and telling them that the Messiah was to come and then sees Jesus and declares him to be the Messiah (John 1:29-33).  There is no baptism of Jesus at all in the Gospel of John version.

So in these three examples we have three different versions of the same story written at three times in the early decades of Christianity.  All of them are dealing with the baptism of Jesus by John in different ways and trying to make it fit with their conceptions of Jesus and at least two of them are having some trouble doing so and are having to change the story to make it fit their ideas about Jesus.  All this indicates that the baptism of Jesus by John was a historical event and known to be such and so could not be left out of the story.  This left the later gospel writers with the problem of trying to make it fit their evolving ideas about who and what Jesus was.

There are several other elements in the gospels like this.  The Gospels of Luke and Matthew go to great lengths to tell stories which "explain" how Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem despite being from Nazareth, since Micah 5:2 was taken to be a prophecy that the Messiah was to be from Bethlehem.  Both gospels, however, tell completely different, totally contradictory and mutually exclusive stories (one is even set ten years after the other) which all but the most conservative Christian scholars acknowledge to be non-historical.  The question then arises: why did they go to this effort?  If Jesus existed and was from Nazareth, this makes sense.  Clearly some Jews objected to the claim Jesus was the Messiah on the grounds that he was from the insignificant village of Nazareth in Galilee and not from Bethlehem in Judea - John 7:41-42 even depicts some Jews making precisely this objection.  So it makes sense that Christian traditions would arise that "explain" how a man known to be a Galilean from Nazareth came to be born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth - thus the contradictory stories in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew that have this as their end.

If, however, there was no historical Jesus then it is very hard to explain why an insignificant town like Nazareth is in the story at all.  If Jesus was a purely mythic figure and the stories of his life evolved out of expectations about the Messiah then he would be from Bethlehem, as was expected as a Messiah.  So why is Nazareth, a tiny place of no religious significance, in the story?  And why all the effort to get Jesus born in Bethlehem but keep Nazareth in the narrative?  The only reasonable explanation is that Nazareth is the historical element in these accounts - it is in the story because that is where Jesus was from.  A historical Jesus explains the evidence far better than any "mythic" alternative.

But probably the best example of an element in the story which was so awkward for the early Christians that it simply has to be historical is the crucifixion. The idea of a Messiah who dies was totally unheard of and utterly alien to any Jewish tradition prior to the beginning of Christianity, but the idea of a Messiah who was crucified was not only bizarre, it was absurd.  According to Jewish tradition, anyone who was "hanged on a tree" was to be considered accursed by Yahweh and this was one of the reasons crucifixion was considered particularly abhorrent to Jews.  The concept of a crucified Messiah, therefore, was totally bizarre and absurd.

It was equally weird to non-Jews.  Crucifixion was considered the most shameful of deaths, so much so that one of the privileges of Roman citizenship is that citizens could never be crucified.  The idea of a crucified god, therefore, was unthinkable. This was so much the case that the early Christians avoided any depictions of Jesus on the cross - the first depictions of the Crucifixion appear in the Fourth Century, after Christian emperors banned crucifixion and it began to lose its stigma.  It's significant that the earliest depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus that we have is a graffito from Rome showing a man worshipping a crucified figure with the head of a donkey with the mocking caption "Alexamenos worships his god".  The idea of a crucified god was, quite literally, ridiculous.  Paul acknowledges how absurd the idea of a crucified Messiah was in 1 Corinthians 1:23, where he says it "is a stumbling block to the Jews and an absurdity to the gentiles".

The accounts of Jesus' crucifixion in the gospels also show how awkward the nature of their Messiah's death was for the earliest Christians.  They are all full of references to texts in the Old Testament as ways of demonstrating that, far from being an absurdity, this was what was supposed to happen to the Messiah.  But none of the texts used were considered prophecies of the Messiah before Christianity came along and some of them are highly forced.  The "suffering servant" passages in Isaiah 53 are pressed into service as "prophecies" of the crucifixion, since they depict a figure being falsely accused, rejected and given up to be "pierced .... as a guilt offering".  But the gospels don't reference other parts of the same passage which don't fit their story at all, such as where it is said this figure will "prolong his days and look upon his offspring".

Clearly the gospel writers were going to some effort to find some kind of scriptural basis for this rather awkward death for their group's leader, one that let them maintain their belief that he was the Messiah.  Again, this makes most sense if there was a historical Jesus and he was crucified, leaving his followers with this awkward problem.  If there was no historical Jesus at all, it becomes very difficult to explain where this bizarre, unprecedented and awkwardly inconvenient element in the story comes from.  It's hard to see why anyone would invent the idea of a crucified Messiah and create these problems.  And given that there was no precedent for a crucified Messiah, it's almost impossible to see this idea evolving out of earlier Jewish traditions.  The most logical explanation is that it's in the story, despite its vast awkwardness, because it happened.

Non-Christian References to Jesus as a Historical Figure

 
Many Christian apologists vastly overstate the number of ancient, non-Christian writers who attest to the existence of Jesus.  This is partly because they are not simply showing that a mere Jewish preacher existed, but are arguing for the existence of the "Jesus Christ" of Christian doctrine: a supposedly supernatural figure who allegedly performed amazing public miracles in front of audiences of thousands of witnesses.  It could certainly be argued that such a wondrous figure would have been noticed outside of Galilee and Judea and so should have been widely noted as well.  So Christian apologists often cite a long list of writers who mention Jesus, usually including Josephus, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Suetonius, Lucian, Thallus and several others.  But of these only Tacitus and Josephus actually mention Jesus as a historical person - the others are all simply references to early Christianity, some of which mention the "Christ" that was the focus of its worship.

If we are simply noting the existence of Jesus as a human Jewish preacher, we are not required to produce more mentions of him than we would expect of comparable figures.  And what we find is that we have about as much evidence for his existence (outside any Christian writings) as we have for other Jewish preachers, prophets, and Messianic claimants of the time.  The two non-Christian writers who mention him as a historical person are Josephus and Tacitus.

Josephus

 
The Jewish priestly aristocrat Joseph ben Matityahu, who took the Roman name Flavius Josephus, is our main source of information about Jewish affairs in this period and is usually the only writer of the time who makes any mention of Jewish preachers, prophets, and Messianic claimants of the first century.  Not surprisingly, he mentions Jesus twice: firstly in some detail in Antiquities of the Jews XVIII.3.4 and again more briefly when mentioning the execution of Jesus' brother James in Antiquities XX.9.1.  The first reference is problematic, however, as it contains elements which Josephus cannot have written and which seem to have been added later by a Christian interpolator.  Here is the text, with the likely interpolations in bold:

"Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of paradoxical deeds, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ And when Pilate at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day."

There has been a long debate about what parts of this reference to Jesus are authentic to Josephus or even if the whole passage is a wholesale interpolation.  Proponents of the Jesus Myth hypothesis, naturally, opt for the idea that it is not authentic in any way, but there are strong indications that, apart from the obvious additions shown in bold above, Josephus did mention Jesus at this point in his text.

To begin with, several elements in the passage are distinctively Josephan in their style and phrasing.  "Now (there was) about this time ..." is used by Josephus as a way of introducing a new topic hundreds of times in his work.  There are no early Christian parallels that refer to Jesus merely as "a wise man", but this is a term used by Josephus several times, e.g., about Solomon and Daniel.  Christian writers placed a lot of emphasis on Jesus' miracles, but here the passage uses a fairly neutral term παραδόξων ἔργων - "paradoxa erga" or "paradoxical deeds".  Josephus does use this phrase elsewhere about the miracles of Elisha, but the term can also mean "deeds that are difficult to interpret" and even has overtones of cautious skepticism.  Finally, the use of the word φῦλον ("phylon" - "race, tribe") is not used by Christians about themselves in any works of the time, but is used by Josephus elsewhere about nations or other distinct groups.  Additionally, with the sole exception of Χριστιανῶν ("Christianon" - "Christians") every single word in the passage can be found elsewhere in Josephus' writings.

The weight of the evidence of the vocabulary and style of the passage is heavily towards its partial authenticity.  Not only does it contain distinctive phrases of Josephus that he used in similar contexts elsewhere, but these are also phrases not found in early Christian texts.  And it is significantly free of terms and phrases from the gospels, which we'd expect to find if it was created wholesale by a Christian writer.  So either a very clever Christian interpolator somehow managed to immerse himself in Josephus' phrasing and language, without modern concordances and dictionaries, and create a passage containing distinctively Josephean phraseology, or what we have here is a genuinely Josephean passage that has simply been added to rather clumsily.

As a result of this and other evidence (e.g., the Arabic and Syriac paraphrases of this passage which seem to come from a version before the clumsy additions by the interpolator) the consensus amongst scholars of all backgrounds is that the passage is partially genuine, with additions made in a few obvious places.  Louis H. Feldman's Josephus and Modern Scholarship (1984) surveys scholarship on the question from 1937 to 1980 and finds of 52 scholars on the subject, 39 considered the passage to be partially authentic.

Peter Kirby has since done a survey of the literature and found that this trend has increased in recent years.  He concludes "In my own reading of thirteen books since 1980 that touch upon the passage, ten out of thirteen argue the (Antiquities of the Jews XVIII.3.4 passage) to be partly genuine, while the other three maintain it to be entirely spurious. Coincidentally, the same three books also argue that Jesus did not exist."

The other mention of Jesus in Josephus, Antiquities XX.9.1, is much more straightforward, and much more of a problem for Jesus Mythicists.  In it Josephus recounts a major political event that happened when he was a young man.  This would have been a significant and memorable event for him, since he was only 25 at the time and it caused upheaval in his own social and political class, the priestly families of Jerusalem that included his own.

In 62 AD the Roman procurator of Judea, Porcius Festus, died while in office and his replacement, Lucceius Albinus, was still on his way to Judea from Rome.  This left the High Priest, Hanan ben Hanan (usually called Ananus), with a freer reign than usual. Ananus executed some Jews without Roman permission and, when this was brought to the attention of the Romans, Ananus was deposed.  This deposition would have been memorable for the young Josephus, who had just returned from an embassy to Rome on the behalf of the Jerusalem priests.  But what makes this passage relevant is what Josephus mentions, in passing, as the cause of the political upheaval:

"Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so (the High Priest) assembled the Sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Messiah, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned."

This mention is peripheral to the story Josephus is telling, but since we know from Christian sources that Jesus' brother James led the Jesus sect in Jerusalem in this period, and we have a separate, non-dependent, Christian account of James' execution by the Jerusalem priesthood, it is fairly clear which "Jesus who was called Messiah" Josephus is referring to here.

Almost without exception, modern scholars consider this passage genuine and an undisputed reference to Jesus as a historical figure by someone who was a contemporary of his brother and who knew of the execution of that brother first hand.  This rather unequivocal reference to a historical Jesus leaves Jesus Mythicists with a thorny problem, which they generally try to solve one of two ways. They either claim:

(i) "The words "who was called Messiah" are a later Christian interpolation"

Since it is wholly unlikely that a Christian interpolator invented the whole story of the deposition of the High Priest just to slip in this passing reference to Jesus, Mythicists try to argue that the key words which identify which Jesus is being spoken of are interpolated.  Unfortunately this argument does not work.  This is because the passage is discussed no less than three times in mid-third century works by the Christian apologist Origen and he directly quotes the relevant section with the words "Jesus who was called the Messiah" all three times: in Contra Celsum I.4, in Contra Celsum II:13 and in Commentarium in evangelium Matthaei X.17.  Each time he uses precisely the phrase we find in Josephus: αδελφος Ιησου του λεγομενου Χριστου ("the brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah").  This is significant because Origen was writing a whole generation before Christianity was in any kind of position to be tampering with texts of Josephus.  If this phrase was in the passage in Origen's time, then it was clearly original to Josephus.

(ii) "The Jesus being referred to here was not the Jesus of Christianity, but the 'Jesus, son of Dameus' mentioned later in the same passage."

After detailing the deposition of the High Priest Ananus, Josephus mentions that he was succeeded as High Priest by a certain "Jesus, son of Damneus".  So Mythicists try to argue that this was the Jesus that Josephus was talking about earlier, since Jesus was a very common name.  It certainly was, but we know how Josephus was careful to differentiate between different people with the same common first name.  So it makes more sense that he calls one "Jesus who was called Messiah" and the other "Jesus son of Damneus" to do precisely this.  Nowhere else does he call the same person two different things in the same passage, as the Mythicist argument requires.  And he certainly would not do so without making it clear that the Jesus who was made High Priest was the same he had mentioned earlier, which he does not do.

The idea that the Jesus referred to as the brother of James was the later mentioned "Jesus son of Damneus" is further undercut by the narrative in the rest of Book XX.  In it the former high priest Ananus continues to play politics and curries favour with the Roman procurator Albinus and the new high priest by giving them rich presents.  This makes no sense if Jesus the brother of the executed James was also "Jesus the son of Damneus", since the new high priest in question is the same Jesus ben Damneus - the idea that he would become friends with his brother's killer just because he was given some nice gifts is ridiculous.

Mythicists are also still stuck with the phrase "who was called Messiah", which Origen's mentions show can't be dismissed as an interpolation.  They usually attempt to argue that, as a High Priest, Jesus the son of Damenus would have been "called Messiah" because "Messiah" means 'anointed" and priests were anointed with oil at their elevation.  Since there are no actual examples of any priests being referred to this way, this is another ad hoc argument designed merely to get the Mythicist argument off the hook.

So the consensus of scholars, Christian and non-Christian, is that the Antiquities XVIII.3.4 passage is authentic despite some obvious later additions and the Antiquities XX.9.1 passage is wholly authentic.  These references alone give us about as much evidence for the existence of a historical "Jesus, who was called Messiah" as we have for comparable Jewish preachers and prophets and is actually sufficient to confirm his existence with reference to any gospel or Christian source.

Tacitus

 
The mention of Jesus in the Annals of the aristocratic Roman historian and senator Publius Cornelius Tacitus is significant partly because of his status as one of the most careful and skeptical historians of the ancient world and partly because it comes from someone who is obviously a hostile witness.  Tacitus absolutely despised Christianity, as he make clear when he mentions how the emperor Nero tried to scapegoat them after the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD.  He also gives an account to his readers as the origin of the Christian sect and their founder in Judea:

"Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular." (Tacitus, Annals, XV.44)

Again, this clear reference to Jesus, complete with the details of his execution by Pilate, is a major problem for the Mythicists.  They sometimes try to deal with it using their old standby argument: a claim that it is a later interpolation.  But this passage is distinctively Tacitean in its language and style and it is hard to see how a later Christian scribe could have managed to affect perfect second century Latin grammar and an authentic Tacitean style and fool about 400 years worth of Tacitus scholars, who all regard this passage and clearly genuine.

A more common way of dismissing this passage is to claim that all Tacitus is doing is repeating what Christians had told him about their founder and so it is not independent testimony for Jesus at all.  This is slightly more feasible, but still fails on several fronts.

Firstly, Tacitus made a point of not using hearsay, of referring to sources or people whose testimony he trusted and of noting mere rumour, gossip or second-hand reports as such when he could.  He was explicit in his rejection of history based on hearsay earlier in his work:

"My object in mentioning and refuting this story is, by a conspicuous example, to put down hearsay, and to request that all those into whose hands my work shall come not to catch eagerly at wild and improbable rumours in preference to genuine history." (Tacitus, Annals, IV.11)

Secondly, if Tacitus were to break his own rule and accept hearsay about the founder of Christianity, then it's highly unlikely that he would do so from Christians themselves (if this aristocrat even had any contact with any), who he regarded with utter contempt.  He calls Christianity "a most mischievous superstition...evil...hideous and shameful...(with a) hatred against mankind" - not exactly the words of a man who regarded its followers as reliable sources about their sect's founder.

Furthermore, what he says about Jesus does not show any sign of having its origin in what a Christian would say: it has no hint or mention of Jesus' teaching, or his miracles, or anything about the claim that he rose from the dead.  On the other hand, it does contain elements that would have been of note to a Roman or other non-Christian: that this founder was executed, where this happened, when it occurred ("during the reign of Tiberius") and which Roman governor carried out the penalty.

We know from earlier in the same passage that Tacitus consulted several (unnamed) earlier sources when writing his account of the aftermath of the Great Fire (see Annals XV.38), so it may have been one of these that gave him his information about Jesus.  But there was someone else in Rome at the time Tacitus wrote who mixed in the same circles, who was also a historian and who would have been the obvious person for Tacitus to ask about obscure Jewish preachers and their sects.  None other than Josephus was living and writing in Rome at this time and, like Tacitus, associated with the Imperial court thanks to his patronage first by the emperor Vespasian and then by his son and successor Titus.  There is a strong correspondence between the details about Jesus in Annals XV.44 and Antiquities XVIII.3.4, so it is at least plausible that Tacitus simply asked his fellow aristocratic scholar about the origins of this Jewish sect.

Conclusion

 
The original question we concerned ourselves with was whether historians regard the existence of Jesus to be "historical fact".  The answer is that they do as much as any scholar can do so for the existence of an obscure peasant preacher in the ancient world.  There is as much, if not slightly more, evidence for the existence of Yeshua ben Yusef as there is for other comparable Jewish preachers, prophets, and Messianic claimants, even without looking at the gospel material.  Additionally, that material contains elements which only make sense if their stories are about a historical figure.

The arguments of the Jesus Mythicists, on the other hand, require contortions and suppositions that simply do not stand up to Occam's Razor  and continually rest on positions that are not accepted by the majority of even non-Christian and Jewish scholars.  The proponents of the Jesus Myth hypothesis are almost exclusively amateurs with an ideological axe to grind and their position is and will almost certainly remain on the outer fringe of theories about the origins of Christianity.
 
 
Originally posted at Armarium Magnum. Used with permission.
(Image credit: DDMCDN)