JESUS IS DEAD

ROBERT M. PRICE 144 JESUS IS DEAD Smith describes how scholars early speculated from the fragmentary Tammuz texts that he had been depicted as dying and rising, though the evidence was touch and go. Then more texts turned up, vindicating their theories. Again, we must wonder why Smith is so quick to assume that speculations that make a god dead and risen are automatically suspect. But Smith quibbles even here. Though new material unambiguously makes Ishtar herself to die and rise, Smith passes by this quickly, only to pick the nit that Tammuz is ―baaled out‖ of death only for half a year while someone else takes his place. Death, Smith remarks, is inexorable: you can only get a furlough for half a year. That makes it not a resurrection? Anxiety of Influence The general structure of Smith‘s arguments sounds as if, instead of trying to explode a baseless theory as he claims, he were trying to defend an established one against challenges. The tendency of his argument seems to be ―there is not enough circumstantial evidence to sustain a conviction.‖ And then you realize that is in fact just what he is doing: defending an old theory. But which one? Obviously not the one derived from Sir James Frazer‘s twelve-volume anthropological magnum opus, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion of 1906–15! Rather, he seems to be defending the old apologetic line that there was no pagan prototype for the Christian resurrection myth (with the implication that it wasn‘t a myth). And he seems to be doing this, not so much for the sake of traditional Christianity, but rather to rule out once and for all the old opportunistic use of the Mystery Religions as a polemical tool against Christianity. He wants to make that game impossible, so henceforth the Mystery Religions may be discussed on their own terms, free of theological or anti-theological polemics. But in doing so he bends over backwards so far that he winds up playing the game himself, taking the field as a pinch hitter for the Christian apologists. There is no reason to give the benefit of the doubt to a reconstruction whose only merit would seem to be its function of overthrowing Frazer‘s hypothesis and allowing Christian apologetics to breathe a little easier. In other words, it is special 10. Jonathan Z. Smith 145 pleading. And why? Is it necessary to maintain that there were no Christianpagan parallels or Christian borrowings? That the old polemicists fabricated or hallucinated everything? What is it Smith is trying to prove? I suspect it is part of his scorched-earth campaign against Frazer in Drudgery Divine and elsewhere. Ultimately, in Drudgery Divine, Smith does come down, it seems to me, as an advocate of the principle of analogy. He champions the creative work of Burton Mack who, in A Myth of Innocence, suggests that the Sitzen-im-Leben of the various gospel pericopes may be as disparate as the pericopes themselves. That is, they may have emanated from quite different types of Christ cults or Jesus movements for whom very different aspects of the teaching or stories of Jesus were important. Smith asks if this implied diversity does not parallel the diversity of the Attis myth and cult. There were traditions of an Attis who did not rise as well as those in which he did. Different groups cherished them. Can we be sure that, e.g., the Q community believed in a resurrected Jesus? Perhaps some did and some didn‘t. It hardly seems that the historical Jesus was important for the communities of the Pauline epistles. Smith suggests that we might be able to learn something about emergent Christianities as well as about the Mystery Religions if we can figure out what social or psychological factors lead a group to adopt or to dispense with a resurrected savior. The same factors may prove to have been at work in analogous fashion in the cases of the Attis cult and of the Christian cult, with or without direct borrowing. All of Smith‘s books are gems, and we as biblical students should be grateful for the attention given our subject by this wide-ranging anthropologist and historian of religion. Gregory J. Riley’s Resurrection Reconsidered Thomas and John in Controversy (Fortress, 1995) John versus Thomas think those biblical scholars serve us best who cause us, like an unpredictable old Zen master, to view familiar things in a different way. Gregory J. Riley does the trick pretty well in Resurrection Reconsidered: Thomas and John in Controversy. He tries to demonstrate the dialogical relationship of the gospels of John and Thomas, reflecting the disputations of the communities supposed to have produced the two documents. The book is a wonderful example of the great utility of those gospels and revelations banned by fourth-century inquisitors and hidden away by desert monks to await rediscovery in 1945 in Chenoboskion, Egypt. The Gospel of Thomas is one of the Nag Hammadi texts, the surface of which has scarcely been scratched for all the attention paid them. Riley shows how illuminating the texts anciently excluded from the canon of official scripture can be for the ones included. One begins to see how the very fact of a canonical selection not only conceals the teaching of the one group of texts but distorts our understanding of the other. Thomas, as Riley reads it, makes John sound suddenly quite different. It is as if we had finally gotten hold of the transcript of the other side of a phone conversation we had heard and long puzzled over. It is a shame that Riley‘s sharp-eyed book did not attain the public acclaim of Elaine Pagels‘s 2004 volume Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas the central chapter of which seems wholly derivative from Riley‘s and without acknowledging it. Riley reminds us of the Fourth Gospel‘s co-optative use of John the Baptist, to make a rival sect‘s figurehead seem to espouse the Christian view instead. Shouldn‘t it be just as obvious that John‘s pointed use of Thomas as a doubter I 148 JESUS IS DEAD of correct belief, lately converted to the same, is of a piece with the polemical rewriting of the Baptist? Just as John the Baptist symbolizes the Baptist sect, Doubting Thomas stands for Thomasine Christianity. And the chief points of Thomasine ‗heresy‘ are targeted in the scenes in which John features Thomas. Chief among the points over which they differed was the fleshly reality of the resurrection of Jesus. Riley provides an interesting survey of ancient Israelite, Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian belief about the fate of the dead. From these data emerge the assessment that the notion of fleshly resurrection emerged late and piecemeal within some strands of Judaism, was unheard of everywhere else, and dominant in no form of Judaism or Christianity we know of until formative Catholic Orthodoxy mainstreamed the belief in the second century and later. Riley shows that those polemicists who did accept the doctrine had fellow Christians, not just outsiders, to argue with. Many converts to the Christian faith naturally interpreted their belief according to their inherited assumptions and thus believed Jesus had risen in spiritual form. (1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Peter 3:18 certainly seem to presuppose the spiritual body version of resurrection.) Riley shows how such traditional belief in soul survival was easily compatible with belief in postmortem apparitions in which the dead might be identified by the death wounds they still visibly bore — even though they lacked physical substance. One recurring theme (not without occasional qualification) was that the dead, however lifelike they might appear, could not be touched or embraced. When the mourners tried to touch their loved one, they found themselves clasping empty air. Riley argues plausibly that Thomas Christians believed Jesus was spiritually resurrected (sayings 28–29, 71). This, we are told, John rejected, as he did the Thomasine preference for saving gnosis that made the illuminatus the equal/twin of the Living Jesus, and their consequent lack of any demand for saving faith. Whereas Jesus tells the Thomas of the ‗Fifth Gospel‘ he must no longer call him Master, having attained unto the same plateau of spiritual enlightenment (saying 13), in the Fourth Gospel Thomas is patted on the head for worshipping Jesus as ―My Lord and my God.‖ (20:28). 11. Resurrection Reconsidered 149 Hidden Agenda All this makes good sense to me. But let me now propose a few ‗friendly amendments‘ to Riley‘s reconstruction. I wonder if the issue separating the Johannine and Thomasine traditions was really that of the fleshly resurrection of Jesus. My hesitations begin with the resurrection appearance scene in John 20. Riley reads the passage as affirming the fleshly resurrection of Jesus, over against the supposedly Thomasine notion of a spiritual resurrection. Why does he see it so? Because of the business about Thomas vowing he will not believe unless allowed to probe the open wounds of Jesus for himself. This element of tangibility seems to Riley to push the issue beyond what might otherwise look like a post-mortem apparition. But is this issue really broached in the passage? I think not. What is it that Thomas swears he will not accept till he can touch the wounds? Thomas is skeptical of the claim of his fellow disciples to ―have seen the Lord.‖ No one is said to be debating the Pauline question, ―But how are the dead raised? With what sort of body do they come?‖ We do not read that the other disciples told Thomas, ―The Lord is physically raised! It wasn‘t some ghost, you can count on that!‖ Neither do we hear that Thomas replied, ―Okay, a ghost I could accept! See ‘em all the time. No big deal there. But fleshly resurrection? You‘re going to have to do better than that!‖ The story doesn‘t get into that sort of detail. I suspect Riley is reading in, from Luke 24:37, the disciples‘ initial fear that they were seeing a ghost. But nothing of the kind figures in John 20. The issue there is simply whether it was really Jesus the disciples saw. ―We have seen the Lord!‖ ―I will not believe.‖ He will not believe that they really saw Jesus. What the telltale wounds will convince Thomas of is that the dead Jesus has manifested himself, period. Does John really mean to picture the manifested Jesus as appearing in the flesh? As Riley admits, even many in the early church did not read the passage so. After all, John makes a point of saying the doors were closed and locked (20:19–26), surely pointless unless to highlight the ghostly passage of Jesus through them, like Jacob Marley in Dickens‘ A Christmas Carol. What about the tangibility factor? Note that the point of Thomas‘ exasperated vow is that he must see for himself. 150 JESUS IS DEAD Actual touching proves unnecessary once Jesus appears and simply shows him the identifying marks. Thomas recoils abashed like Job: ―I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see thee; therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes‖ (Job 42:3b, 5–6). Literal touching must not have been the issue. Riley too quickly couples John 20 and Luke 24. Both have reworked a common reappearance tradition, but the point in Luke 24 seems to me quite different. There, Jesus does specifically call attention to his fleshly corporeality. ―No spirit has flesh and bones as you see me having.‖ (As Riley points out, Ignatius had independent access to the same tradition: ―Take hold of me and see, I am no bodiless demon.‖) But there is a form-critical point to be remembered here. Such scenes as Luke depicts (and Ignatius alludes to) appear elsewhere in the neighborhood. They are typically reunion scenes between friends or lovers, or master and disciples. In all such cases the point is that the unexpected return of the one feared lost does not mark a return from the dead, i.e., the apparition of a ghost, but rather denotes unexpected survival, escape from death. The parallel between Luke 24: and Philostratus‘ Life of Apollonius of Tyana is especially close. Apollonius‘ disciples, having fled the scene of his trial before Domitian, are gathered mourning their master who can scarcely have escaped the tyrant‘s ire. But lo and behold, Apollonius himself suddenly appears in their midst. He is no ghost as they first suspect, but has simply teleported miraculously from Rome, just as Philip does from Gaza to Ashdod in Acts 8:39–40). He invites them to handle and prove to themselves it is really he, and no ghost. In other words, they should thus satisfy themselves that he is not back from the dead but has instead cheated death. Luke 24 and Ignatius seem to rely upon a version of the Passion in which the suffering righteous one, Jesus, was delivered out of the hand of his enemies by premature removal from the cross, another standard feature of Hellenistic romances, whose heroes rather frequently get themselves sentenced to the cross or actually crucified, and then escape. Note how often Lukan redactional material has Jesus ―suffering‖ or being ―delivered into the hands of men,‖ instead of actually 11. Resurrection Reconsidered 151 and explicitly dying. Jane Schaberg (The Illegitimacy of Jesus) raises the possibility that the virginal conception of Jesus is not a New Testament doctrine/myth at all, but has been read into the texts of Matthew and Luke through the conventions of second-century patristic theology. In the same way, I wonder if it is really John and Luke, as Riley thinks, who argued for a fleshly resurrection of Jesus, or rather perhaps Riley is still too willing to take the second-century Christians‘ word for what Luke and John meant. At any rate, it seems clear that John has reworked the Luke/Ignatius tradition. The original form of the story stressed tangibility so as to prove Jesus had not actually died. John clearly supposes Jesus had died. The Johannine Jesus does not stress fleshly corporeality but rather identifying marks. Luke‘s closed doors provided the occasion for the flabbergasted disciples to erroneously suspect him a ghost. John‘s closed doors denote that the post-mortem Jesus is a ghost, back from a genuine death. The point is quite different. The Living Jesus Riley does an admirable bit of detective work matching up clues from the Gospel of John on the one hand with those from the Thomas canon (Gospel of Thomas, Book of Thomas the Contender, Acts of Thomas) to indicate points where the two theologies collided, but I wonder if perhaps we cannot find a few more and, in the process, hypothetically reconstruct some theological evolution within Thomas Christianity. I suggest John is trying to correct Thomas Christians at two stages. First, let us suppose that the Thomas Christians believed in a ‗Living Jesus‘ who had neither died on the cross (despite being crucified) nor ascended to heaven shortly thereafter. We are acquainted with similar beliefs among Gnostic Christians who believed Jesus remained among his disciples for 18 months to 11 years after his resurrection. Similarly, Matthew‘s ‗Great Commission‘ (Matt 28:19–20) says nothing of any ascension but rather pictures Jesus accompanying his disciples on their missionary journeys (of course, harmonizing, we never read it that way). 152 JESUS IS DEAD The Ahmadiyya sect and various others (including, recently, Barbara Thiering) pictured Jesus surviving or escaping the cross and leaving the Holy Land to continue his teaching elsewhere. Apart from whether such a thing happened, we may ask whether there is any textual evidence that any New Testament era Christians thought it happened. And there is some. As it happens, John, who habitually places what he considers current misunderstandings on the lips of Jesus‘ opponents, has someone mis-understand Jesus as predicting, not that he will ascend to heaven, but that he will ―go to the Diaspora among the Greeks and teach the Greeks‖ (7:35). I submit that this means John knew some believed this is just what Jesus did. I‘m hazarding the guess that the Thomas Christians believed this. The second stage of John‘s anti-Thomas polemic would include the attempted refutation of the idea of a ppost-crucifixion Jesus (either a surviving or a resurrected Jesus) continuing to travel and preach. Let us take a look at the same three Johannine references to Thomas that Riley examines. He sees much. Taking his hint, we may be able to see more. First there is the Lazarus story in chapter 11. Riley notes that here Thomas is made implicitly to doubt the resurrection of Lazarus, just as in chapter 20 he will be made explicitly to doubt the resurrection of Jesus. How is that? Because, as Riley strikingly points out, Thomas‘ fatalistic sigh, ―Let us go, too, so we may die with him‖ refers to dying not with Jesus (since Jesus has just assured Thomas that he is not yet in any danger), but to Lazarus. Jesus has announced his intention to raise Lazarus up (11:11), but all Thomas expects is Lazarus‘ death (and their own, in an ambush). On the one hand, we may ask Riley why it is that Thomas should take Jesus‘ word that Jesus is in no danger and yet expect that he and his fellow disciples will die in Bethany. On the other, we may ask if Riley‘s argument proves too much. If it is the fleshly nature of the future resurrection of believers (of whom Lazarus is an advance specimen) which is at stake here, does John mean that the dead will be merely resuscitated like Lazarus, whom we must imagine to have died again some time later, perhaps at the hands of the Sanhedrin (12:10)? 11. Resurrection Reconsidered 153 I suspect that the point of chapter 11 is to furnish a dress rehearsal for the death and resurrection of Jesus himself, and that the goal is to demonstrate the reality of the death of Lazarus explicitly and of Jesus implicitly. This is why John tells the tale of Lazarus rather than those of the daughter of Jairus or the son of the widow of Nain. Those did not pass muster precisely because it was not completely clear that the patient was really dead. Of Jairus‘ daughter Jesus actually says ―The child is not dead but sleeping‖ (Mark 5:39), and in a number of contemporary stories (featuring Asclepiades the physician, Apollonius of Tyana, and several others) the point is that someone not yet dead is rescued at the last possible moment from being buried prematurely by people who lacked the keen diagnostic eye of the master physician. Form-critically, then, we ought to expect that any such story in which someone very recently dead is said merely to sleep is not a resurrection miracle but rather a rescue from premature burial. So the Jairus and Nain stories would very likely have been read by the ancients as Scheintod, apparent death, stories. This was not good enough for John, who did not like the fact that some, including Thomas Christians, understood the crucifixion of Jesus the same way, as only an apparent death. So he supplies the Lazarus story as a prelude to the Passion of Jesus and as a guide for interpreting it. His point is to rule out the possibility that the death was only apparent. He seems first to set up the possibility (― ‗Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awake him out of sleep‘ ‖ 11:11), only to knock it down (―Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that he meant taking rest in sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, ‗Lazarus is dead‘ ‖ 11:13). This is obviously why John has Jesus stay put so that when he finally does arrive, Lazarus has been moldering in the tomb long enough that he must by now be a rotting corpse (11:39). The point is not just that Jesus has rescued Lazarus from the tomb (which would still be the case even if Lazarus had been prematurely buried as in the other stories), but that Lazarus died and came back. (Even after all this, it must be pointed out, John has not completely succeeded, since we only hear that Martha expected there to be a stench. She assumed her brother was decomposing, but if he lay in a cataleptic state, he 154 JESUS IS DEAD wouldn‘t have.) Are we to infer, then, that John also envisioned a grossly physical resuscitation of Jesus, since Lazarus returns physically? Apparently not, since, again, no one in the early church wanted Jesus raised in that way — a resurrection unto mere mortality. So John probably doesn‘t want Lazarus‘ resurrection to anticipate Jesus‘ in every respect. But he must have the reality of the death itself in mind, since this is where he goes out of his way to make that point. In the Farewell Discourse of John 14:5, John assigns Thomas these lines: ―Lord, we do not know where we are going; how can we know the way?‖ Of course Jesus replies that he himself is the way, but this scarcely contains all of John‘s answer to the question, an answer he certainly feels (as Riley says) the Thomas Christians do not know. And that, I suggest, is the way of the cross. ―… if it dies, it bears much fruit … If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there shall my servant be also; if anyone serves me, the Father will honor him … I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself‖ (12:24, 26, 32). It is perhaps Thomas Christians who are in view at 19:34–35, where the narrator swears up and down that he saw Jesus fatally wounded and wants you to believe. Believe what? Simply that, as in The Wizard of Oz, Jesus was ―morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably, and reliably dead.‖ As we have seen, finally, when the risen Jesus appears to Thomas, the point of showing the wounds (which conspicuously do not get touched!) is probably to show at once that Jesus did die but is now back, not in the first instance, how he is back. Traveling Man Perhaps the Thomas Christians pictured Jesus, like Elijah or al-Khadr (‗the evergreen one‘), as ―with you always, even unto the consummation of the age‖ (Matt 28:20). No ascension rounded off their myth of Jesus such as wrapped up Luke‘s. John‘s emphasis on Jesus‘ ascension as an item likely to offend (John 6:61–62) might have been aimed at the Thomas Christians. 11. Resurrection Reconsidered 155 So my guess is that the Thomas Christians first believed that Jesus had survived the cross and set out to the East to resume his preaching, going as far as Syria or, as some would later say, Kashmir and India. Against this belief John aims (or preserves) the polemic that Jesus was ―not only really dead, but most sincerely dead.‖ The Thomas Christians then accepted this belief from the majority of Christians. But then what of their belief in the missionary travels of the post-cross Jesus? At this point they would have believed in the (saving?) death of Jesus, but not in his resurrection. So the bearer of their faith to the far reaches of Syria, Edessa, and India must not have been Jesus (martyred and seated in heaven at the right hand of the Father) but rather someone who might have been mistaken for Jesus, say, a twin brother of Jesus who carried on in his name. This stage of the Thomas tradition remains visible in the Acts of Thomas in the several places where Jesus is said to appear in the form of his brother Thomas as well as those in which Thomas is said explicitly to resemble his brother Jesus. (Keep in mind, the name Thomas means ‗twin.‘) This was not good enough for the Johannine community, who sought to correct the belief by means of the Doubting Thomas pericope. As an exegete of an earlier day (alas, I cannot recall whom) suggested, the reason the risen Jesus must appear to Thomas in particular is to counteract the belief of some that the resurrection was a case of mistaken identity, that people saw Jesus‘ twin brother Thomas and took him for Jesus himself returned from the dead. By showing the risen Jesus and Didymus Thomas (‗Twin-Twin‘!) side by side, as in a Superman cartoon wherein the Man of Steel contrives to be seen side by side with Clark Kent (probably a robot double), John means to show that the two cannot be the same. The subsequent orthodox overlay on the Acts of Thomas (which Riley discusses) implies that eventually the Thomas Christians were drawn into the Johannine orbit, and the theological gaps closed. Part of this redaction was the scene in which the reader again is shown Jesus side by side with Thomas, as the former orders the latter to missionize India, making it clear that even though it was Thomas who had missionized India, he was not replacing a dead Jesus but acting on behalf of a risen one. 156 JESUS IS DEAD Thomas the renegade left his mark in the New Testament. Riley notes how only Judas Thomas and Judas Iscariot are characterized in the New Testament as ―one of the Twelve,‖ and needless to say, both are shown in a dubious light. I suggest this is because they were originally one and the same character. From the ‗Orthodox‘ side, Thomas‘ heresy became narratively transformed/concretized into Judas‘ betrayal of Jesus, while the subsequent cooptation of Thomas Christianity created the repentant Thomas of John 20. Gary R. Habermas’ “The Resurrection Appearances Of Jesus” In: R. Douglas Geivett and Gary R. Habermas, eds., In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God’s Action in History (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997) ary Habermas is the closest thing to a New Testament critic one will ever find teaching in the hallowed, but far from hollow, halls of Jerry Falwell‘s Liberty University. Exceedingly well read, Professor Habermas is the epitome of what James Barr called the ―maximal conservative‖ approach to New Testament scholarship. The maximal conservative proposes to examine an issue in a neutral scholarly way but always comes out defending the traditional view, often explicitly appealing to the (inappropriate) rationale: ―innocent until proven guilty,‖ as if the orthodox view of any matter must claim the benefit of the doubt. That is to say, he poses as an objective researcher into open questions regarding the early Christian literature and history, but his conclusions are determined in advance by a dogmatic agenda. As a member of the Liberty University faculty, Dr. Habermas is honor-bound to believe in the absolute inerrancy of the Bible, the dogma that the Bible is free from all historical errors, and even that its authors never expressed differences of opinion on religious matters. The inerrantist believes either that the text of the Bible was verbally dictated by the Almighty (whether or not the human penman knew it at the time) or that at least the result was the same as if God had dictated it, even if ‗all‘ he did was to oversee the writing process providentially. Someone with a view like this adopts the posture of the biblical critic not because he or she believes it will shed new light on ancient texts but rather in order to defend traditional, orthodox readings of the text from ‗heretical‘ new research that threatens by its very nature to render such readings obsolete, depriving orthodox dogma of its seeming proof texts. G 158 JESUS IS DEAD The unstated goal is to beat the genuine critic at his own game so as to defend the party line. That is the business Gary Habermas is in. That is the approach of the many books he has written. They are all exercises in apologetics, the scholastic defense of the faith. The position is an ironic one, since such attempts to clamp the lid on the open Bible would have prevented just the sort of bold, open-ended investigation that led to the Protestant Reformation and the Biblical Theology Movement. Three major difficulties beset this erudite and clearly written essay. The first is the character of the whole as essentially an exercise in the fallacious argument of appeal to the majority. Habermas does not want to commit this logical sin, so he admits in the beginning that the mere fact of the (supposed) consensus of scholarly opinion to which he repeatedly appeals does not settle anything, and as if to head off the charge I have just made, he says he supplies sufficient clues in his endnotes to enable the interested reader to follow up the original scholars‘ arguments, which, he admits, must bear the brunt of the analysis. I‘m sorry, but that is simple misdirection like that practiced by a sleight-of-hand artist. You can say you reject the appeal to consensus fallacy, but that makes no difference if all you do afterward is to cite ‗big names‘ on the subject. And that is what happens here. The second besetting sin is Habermas‘ neglect of much recent scholarship that has put well into the shade much of the reasoning of Joachim Jeremias, C. H. Dodd, and even Rudolf Bultmann, to which he appeals. I am not trying to play posturing here, as if to score points against Professor Habermas. For all I know, he is quite conversant with these works and is just not impressed by them. Who knows? All I am saying is that I am impressed by them. And if you are, too, you will know that contemporary studies of Acts are increasingly inclined to treat the narrative as a tissue of secondcentury fictions and legends no different in principle and little different in degree from the Apocryphal Acts, though it is better written than these others (see Richard I. Pervo, Profit With Delight: The Literary Genre of the Acts of the Apostles, 1987). You will know that J. C. O‘Neill (The Theology of Acts in its Historical Setting, 1961) and others regard the supposed 12. Gary R. Habermas 159 bits of early tradition found in the speeches in Acts to be signs of a late date, of the Christology and theology of the Apostolic Fathers, not of the primitive church. You will know that many regard the so-called Semitic flavor of Acts not as a sign of an underlying early Aramaic tradition, but as an attempt to pastiche the Septuagint and so lend the book a biblical flavor. You will be familiar with the fact that a number of scholars (not just I!) have spotlighted the appearance list in 1 Corinthians 15:3–11 as a later interpolation into the text, an alternate explanation for all the non-Pauline linguistic features Habermas invokes as evidence that Paul is quoting early tradition (Arthur Drews, Winsome Munro, R. Joseph Hoffmann, William O. Walker, J. C. O‘Neill, G. A. Wells have all argued or asserted this). Since not everyone has memorized this list, it may be useful to quote it here for reference. I Cor 15:3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. 9 For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 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. 11 Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed. Perhaps most importantly, however, you would realize that, as Burton L. Mack, Jonathan Z. Smith and their school argue, the very idea of Christianity beginning with a Big Bang of startling visions of Jesus on Easter morning is highly dubious — very likely the fruit, not the root, of Christian theological evolution, alongside other versions of early Jesus movements and Christ cults that had no need for or belief in a resurrection. You would know that there may be quite a gap between whomever and 160 JESUS IS DEAD whatever the earliest Christians may have been (if you can even draw a firm line where proto-Christianity split off from ‗Essenism‘ or the Mystery Religions) and what we mean by the term today. Like Habermas, I must be content to recommend these writings, but I am not trying to win an argument here, merely to challenge Habermas‘ contention that there is a safe consensus among today‘s scholars on these issues. There is no substitute for studying the issues oneself. The third big problem with the essay is the lamentable leap in logic whereby, like a ‗Scientific Creationist,‘ Habermas seems to assume that the (supposed) absence of viable naturalistic explanations of the first resurrection-sightings proves the objective reality of the resurrection. This is to pull the reins of scientific investigation much too quickly! And in fact one may never yank them in the name of miracle, for that is a total abdication of the scientific method itself, which never proceeds except on the assumption that a next, traceable, i.e., naturalistic, step may be found. And if it never is, then science must confess itself forever stymied. To do otherwise, as Habermas does, is to join the ranks of the credulous who leap from the seeming improbabilities of ancient Egyptians engineering the Pyramids to concluding that space aliens built them with tractor beams! But let us go back and examine some of Habermas‘ claims in detail. Habermas’ Ennead Our apologist lays out a hand of trump cards he thinks will justify him gathering up all the stakes. But does he win the game? We need to take a closer look at his cards. First, ―There is little doubt, even in critical circles, that the apostle Paul is the author of the book of 1 Corinthians. Rarely is this conclusion questioned‖ (p. 264). But there is reason to question it, and this is where the appeal to the majority is so misleading. Bruno Bauer and a whole subsequent school of New Testament critics including Samuel Adrian Naber, A. D. Loman, Allard Pierson, W. C. van Manen, G. A. van den Bergh van Eysinga, Thomas Whittaker, and L. Gordon Rylands all rejected the authenticity of 1 Corinthians as a Pauline epistle. 12. Gary R. Habermas 161 And they did so with astonishing arguments that remain unanswered to this day, the major strategy of those few ‗consensus‘ scholars who even deigned to mention them being to laugh them off as a priori outrageous. These arguments have been revived and carried further today by Hermann Detering, Darrell J. Doughty, and myself. Again, appealing to authoritative names in the manner of an exorcism is vain in scholarly matters. I mean only to indicate that there are real and open issues here, and that one must not oversimplify the debate by taking important things for granted. Second, ―Virtually all scholars agree that in this text [1 Corinthians 15:3ff] Paul recorded an ancient tradition(s) about the origins of the Christian gospel. Numerous evidences indicate that this report is much earlier than the date of the book in which it appears‖ (ibid.). This is not really a separate argument from the next two following, but let us briefly note the oddity of the whole notion of Paul, if he is indeed the author, passing down a Christian ‗tradition,‘ much less an ‗ancient‘ one (though perhaps Habermas means ancient in relation to us, but then that‘s true of the whole epistle, isn‘t it?). Habermas has set foot on one of the land mines in Van Manen‘s territory: the anachronism of the picture of Paul, a founder of Christianity, already being able to appeal to hoary traditions, much less creedal formulae! All this demands a date long after Paul. Not only that, but as Harnack showed long ago, the 1 Corinthians 15 list is clearly a composite of pieces of two competing lists, one making Cephas the prince of apostles, the other according that dignity to James the Just. The conflation of the lists (to say nothing of the addition of gross apocryphal elements like the appearance to the half-thousand!) presupposes much historical water under the bridge, way too much for Paul. Third, ―The vast majority of critical scholars concur on an extremely early origin for this report. Most frequently, it is declared that Paul received the formula between two and eight years after the crucifixion, around A.D. 32–38‖ (ibid.) because …‖ Fourth, ―Researchers usually conclude that Paul received this material shortly after his conversion during his stay in Jerusalem with Peter and James (Gal 1:18–19), who are both 162 JESUS IS DEAD included in Paul‘s list of individuals to whom Jesus appeared (1 Cor 15:5, 7)‖ (ibid.). One may ask concerning all this what it is that Paul was supposed to have been preaching prior to this visit, since 1 Corinthians 15:1 makes the list the very content of his initial preaching to the Corinthian church! The text as we read it gives no hint that Paul is supposed to be citing some older material (though I agree the material is alien to the context, not being the writer‘s own words. I just make it a later interpolation, not a Pauline citation of prior material. It‘s just that the text does not mean to let on to this). But if he does regard the list as a piece of earlier material, he leaves no interval between the beginning of his apostolic preaching and the learning of this so-crucial list. Ouch! Nor should we forget how Galatians tells us in no uncertain terms that the gospel message of Paul was in no way mediated through any human agency, which would just not be true if he was simply handing on tradition ―like a plastered cistern that loses not a drop.‖ Besides this, it is sheer surmise that Paul would have memorized this text at the behest of Peter and James when he was in their company in Jerusalem on the occasion mentioned in Galatians. In fact, to bring the list and the visit together in the same breath is already a piece of harmonization after the manner of hybridizing Mark‘s empty-tomb story with Luke‘s by saying one of Luke‘s angels was out buying a lottery ticket when Mark got there, pen in hand. It is like pegging the visionary ascent to the third heaven (2 Corinthians 12:1–10) as the same as the Damascus Road encounter of Acts. Purely gratuitous. To make things worse, there is the serious question of whether the fortnight‘s visit of Paul to Jerusalem in Galatians 1:18–24 is original to the text either. It bristles with odd vocabulary, even in so short a text!, and neither Tertullian‘s text nor Marcion‘s seems to have contained it. It looks like a Catholicizing interpolation trying to shorten the span between Paul‘s conversion and his first encounter with the Jerusalem apostles, fourteen years after (Galatians 2:1). I realize that evangelical readers will be snickering by this time. They have been led to scoff at this way of scrutinizing the text for interpolations too early for the extant manuscript 12. Gary R. Habermas 163 sources to attest them. I recommend William O. Walker‘s Interpolations in the Pauline Letters as a good introduction to this methodology and its inherent plausibility. Conservatives have elevated to a dogma the premature and groundless judgment that we can take for granted that no important interpolations crept into the text during that early period for which there is absolutely no manuscript evidence either way. Fifth, Habermas takes it as independent corroboration of Paul‘s (= the list‘s) claim that various people saw the Risen Jesus that Paul got the creed from James and Peter: ―if critical scholars are correct that Paul received the creedal material in 1 Corinthians 15:3ff from Peter and James in Jerusalem in the early 30s A.D., then we have strong evidence that the reported appearances of the risen Jesus came from the original apostles.‖ (p. 267). If they gave him the list, they must have drawn up the list to begin with, or at least informed those who did. I don‘t see how this follows. And the whole scenario reminds me too much of the old legend that the Apostles Creed was written, an article at a time, as each apostle added on his favorite tenet. Habermas points to Galatians 1:18–20, the mention of Paul heading for Jerusalem to seek Peter‘s expertise, presumably on the main features of his gospel or about the life of Jesus: if they had told him something very different concerning the resurrection than we read in Paul, wouldn‘t he have said so? But again, this is part of that harmonizing interpolation, inserted just to make things easier for apologists like Habermas himself. In general, we must recognize that references to what the apostles may or may not have said, occurring not in writings by them but rather in writings by a different author, have no independent historical value. We might as well invoke John the Baptist‘s endorsement of Jesus from the gospels as independent evidence for the historical Jesus! Sixth, Paul (= the list) includes an appearance to Paul himself. I think the interpolated list mentioned Paul in the third person, and that the redactor (inevitably) made it first person, an adaptation the interpolator of 2 Corinthians 12:1–10 could not competently carry through. In any case, if it is an interpolation, it is post-Pauline and pseudepigraphical, so this one depends on a prior decision as to authorship. 164 JESUS IS DEAD Habermas notes that the three accounts in Acts of Paul‘s encounter with the Risen One on the road to Damascus tend to corroborate the statement of the 1 Corinthians 15 list about a Pauline appearance. This is ironic, since Luke seems instead to want to ring down the curtain on the resurrection appearances with the ascension, allowing Paul and Stephen to have mere visions afterward. This he does to rebut claims for their non-twelve apostleship. And, as Detering notes, the element of Paul being blinded (borrowed ultimately from the conversion of Heliodorus in 2 Maccabees 3) surely means to deny that Paul saw the Risen Jesus in any manner analogous to the twelve, who, after all, had tea with the Risen Savior on more than one occasion. Seventh, Habermas cites Paul‘s Jerusalem visit in Galatians 2:1–10, which issued in an A-plus report card, as further evidence that Paul and the Jerusalem apostles had no serious disagreement. Suffice it to say that the text is very clear on the point at issue in these discussions: not resurrection but rather circumcision of the Gentiles. We simply do not know if the question of the resurrection came up on that occasion. There is no point in pretending we do, or we are making it up as we go along. Habermas warns: ―rather than highlight what many contemporary scholars think cannot be known about the New Testament testimony, I want to concentrate on the evidence that we do have‖ (p. 262). But this isn‘t part of it. Eighth, ―After recounting the creed and listing key witnesses to the appearances of Jesus, Paul declared that all the other apostles were currently preaching the same message concerning Jesus‘ appearances (1 Cor 15:11– 15). In other words, we have it on Paul‘s authority that these resurrection appearances were also being proclaimed by the original apostles‖ (p. 267). But we cannot say we know they were preaching the same list or the same listed appearances until we read some other document by one of them that has the list in common with 1 Corinthians 15. And we have no such text. You can‘t blithely quote Paul as evidence for what others were saying. The 1 Corinthians text does not take us out of the range of what Paul is saying — unless we recognize that the material is interpolated! And then the point is that it is a Catholicizing gloss, rewriting history to make it look like Paul agreed with the Jerusalem apostles when in fact he hadn‘t. 12. Gary R. Habermas 165 Ninth, ―Another indicator of the appearances to the original apostles is the Gospel accounts … Even from a critical viewpoint, it can be shown that several of the appearance narratives report early tradition [an apologetical euphemism for ‗early rumor‘] as Dodd argues after a careful analytical study. He contends that the appearance narratives in Matthew 28:8–10, 16–20 and John 20:19–21, and, to a lesser extent, Luke 24:36–49, are based on early material [again: apologetical euphemism — ―material‖!]. The remaining Gospel accounts of Jesus‘ resurrection appearances are lacking in typical mythical tendencies and likewise merit careful consideration‖ (p. 268). Now isn‘t that special? It is hard to stop cringing and to know where to begin after this fusillade of fustian. Matthew 28:8–10 — based on early tradition? Matt 28:8 So they [Mary Magdalene and „the other Mary‟] departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9 And behold, Jesus met them and said, ―Hail!‖ And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him. 10 Then Jesus said to them, ―Do not be afraid; go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.‖ This is simply part of Matthew‘s fictive add-on to Mark‘s empty tomb narrative which itself does not manage to make Dodd‘s list! Not only that, it represents editorial rewriting and contradiction of the Markan original! Likewise, 16–20 are a mere pastiche-summary of a resurrectioncommission narrative, as if the evangelist knew more or less what this kind of story sounded like but couldn‘t quite pull it off, much like the inept paraphrase of earlier materials in the Longer Ending of Mark. The disciples meet Jesus on the mountain he had specified — where? And when did he tell them? This is a reference back to something he forgot to include in his story, like somebody getting ahead of himself and spoiling the ending of a joke. Verse 17 means to have the epiphany of Christ quell all doubt, but instead the narrator rushes through it with the incoherent ―they worshipped him though they doubted‖ (masked by translations because it wouldn‘t sound good in Easter sermons). Some of the language is Matthean (―unto the consummation of the age;‖ ―to disciple‖); the rest is derived from 166 JESUS IS DEAD both the Septuagint and Theodotion‘s translation of Daniel 7, as Randel Helms (Gospel Fictions, 1988) has shown. And then what is left? Habermas says Dodd valued John 20:19–21 above the parallel Luke 24:36–49, though I think the evidence points to John‘s version being a redaction of Luke‘s (and not just of the ‗underlying tradition‘ as apologists would prefer, trying to maintain some semblance of the old notion of the gospels being independent reports). John has omitted Luke‘s redactional material in Luke 24:44–49, retaining only a paraphrase of the Great Commission (―As the Father has sent me, so I send you.‖). And let‘s get it straight: vv. 44–49 are not ―independent L tradition,‖ which is to appropriate source criticism as apologetics. No, Luke just made it up, as one can see from the material‘s similarity to the speech in 24:25–27 as well as to many of the speeches in Acts — also Lukan compositions (see Earl Richard, Acts 6:1–8:4. The Author‟s Method of Composition, 1978; Marion L. Soards, The Speeches in Acts: Their Content, Context, and Concerns, 1994). But beyond this, John has edited Luke so that Jesus no longer offers just his (corporeal) hands and feet, but now his wounded (only in John) hands and side. This fits with John‘s having added the piercing of Jesus‘ side and anticipates Doubting Thomas with the mention of nail holes and a chasm in the side. All this uniquely Johannine redaction rewrites the story in order to suppress a current reading of Luke‘s story in which Jesus is understood to have survived crucifixion, evaded death, and means to show the disciples that, like Mark Twain‘s, the reports of his death are premature. In fact, this way of reading Luke‘s story makes it remarkably similar to the episode in Philostratus‘ Life of Apollonius of Tyana (also supposedly based on local oral tradition as well as eyewitness memoirs!) in which the sage vanished from the court of Domitian, where he was up on capital charges, to reappear across the Mediterranean among his astonished disciples, who naturally take him for the ghost of their presumably late master. He stretches forth his hands and invites them to examine his corporeal flesh! Subsequently he ascends into heaven alive, as also in Luke. Or so some read Luke in John‘s day, and that is why the latter sought to reinforce the real death of Jesus with spear-thrusts and nail wounds. 12. Gary R. Habermas 167 See for yourself! Let‘s take stock: John‘s version, far from being straightforward reporting, is a redacted version of Luke‘s — which is already redacted and embodies a common Hellenistic epiphany theme attested also in Philostratus. You can hold your breath and keep quoting the fantasy novelist C. S. Lewis about how none of this smacks of mythology, or you can stop citing authorities and examine the matter for yourself. Are the remaining gospel resurrection accounts free of mythological traits, as Habermas suggests Dodd contended? Hardly! In the Emmaus Road story, we have another epiphany mytheme, closely matched in an Asclepius story predating Luke by centuries. In that one, frustrated seekers of a miracle in Asclepius‘ temple return home and are met on the way by a concerned stranger who hears their sad tale, performs the desired healing, reveals himself, and vanishes. The empty tomb tale itself is clearly cut from the same cloth as the numerous apotheosis stories discussed by Charles H. Talbert (What Is a Gospel? The Genre of the Canonical Gospels, 1977), in which a famous sage or hero mysteriously vanishes, companions search for the body, can find no trace, and are assured by an angel or heavenly voice that he has been raptured by the gods, henceforth to be worshipped. The Doubting Thomas story closely parallels one from Philostratus in which a stubborn young disciple is the sole hold-out against belief in immortality. His brethren are startled to witness the fellow having a vision in which Apollonius manifests himself from heaven for the sake of the doubter who henceforth doubts no more. The farewell to Mary Magdalene in John 20 is highly reminiscent of the last words of the departing angel Raphael to Tobias and Sarah in Tobit chapter 12, as Helms has noted. The miraculous catch of fish in the Johannine Appendix, like its preresurrection cousin in Luke 5, stems directly from a Pythagoras story in which the vegetarian sage wins the forfeit lives of a shoal of fish by preternaturally ‗guessing‘ the number of them caught in the nets. 168 JESUS IS DEAD The idea that these stories do not smack of mythology is just palpably absurd. Rather than functioning as an argument on behalf of faith, the claim has by now itself become an article of faith, so drastically does it contradict all manner of evidence. Is there a worse example of the fallacy of special pleading, the double standard, than to dismiss all these mythical stories from other ancient religions and to claim that in the sole case of the gospels they are all suddenly true? Laughable in the one case, convincing in the other? Truth or Method Let us not miss Habermas‘ gambit here. First he recommends Dodd‘s judgment that at least 2.0 or maybe 2.5 of the gospel resurrection stories are, if not factually true, at least based on early story-telling. That is what one might call damning with faint praise on Dodd‘s part. But it is good enough for Habermas. And then Habermas says those stories not taken seriously by Dodd are to be taken seriously anyhow. His agenda is clear. Because he is a spin-doctor on behalf of inerrantism (the real presupposition underlying all this blather), he has never met a resurrection story he doesn‘t like. And if you (or Dodd) don‘t like this one, maybe you‘ll buy that one. Habermas himself obviously cares nothing for the judgment of the critical scholars he cites except that he may use them cosmetically in a warmed-over piece of fundamentalist apologetics. Habermas will take what he can get from mainstream scholars, at least those of yesteryear who are nearer orthodoxy anyway. This is clearest in his nose-count of scholars lining up in favor of the ‗heavenly telegram‘ or ‗objective vision‘ theory of the supposed Easter experiences. Taken on its own, this version of resurrection belief is abhorrent to Habermas because it amounts to an ‗Easter docetism,‘ a non-fleshly resurrection. That isn‘t good enough for Habermas, and he finally takes refuge with the pious equivocation of John A. T. Robinson: ―a body identical yet changed, transcending the limitations of the flesh yet capable of manifesting itself within the order of the flesh. We may describe this as a ‗spiritual‘ (1 Cor. 15:44) or ‗glorified‘ (cf. 1 Cor. 15:43; Phil. 3:21) body … so long as we do 12. Gary R. Habermas 169 not import into these phrases any opposition to the physical as such‖ (cited on p. 273). What specious clucking! We may say half-fish, half-fowl, or anything else we may fancy, as long as we stonewall and insist that the result is not a matter of docetism — the claim that Christ merely appeared to have a human body. As if Robinson has not just given a good working definition of docetism: the doctrine of only apparent fleshly reality, the polymorphousness of a divine being who can change forms precisely because he has no true physical form! It all comes down to saying the proper shibboleth when you get to the river bank. Coherent meaning is strictly secondary, if even that. How pathetic. The poor apologist is forever engaged in a bruising game of dodge-ball, imagining he has vindicated the Bible just because he has contrived a way of never having to admit he was wrong. Less Real than a Hallucination Gary Habermas thinks to convince us that the earliest disciples did see something, something that walked like the Risen Jesus, talked like the Risen Jesus, and therefore must have been the Risen Jesus. He thinks those theologians who posit ―objective hallucinations,‖ i.e., true but intrapsychic visions sent by God, are headed in the right direction, but he wants finally to quell all talk of hallucinations. Slippery ground, you know. So he rehearses the standard arguments against the resurrection appearances of the gospels being hallucinations. This formula argument, unvarying no matter which apologist dusts it off, is the kind of instrument apologists like Habermas think Paul was using and bequeathing in 1 Corinthians 15:3–11. They are making Paul over in their own image. Hallucinations are not shared by groups. Then I guess Habermas accepts the historicity of the dancing of the sun in the sky at Fatima. Plenty of people saw that, too. The disciples could not have been hallucinating, since such visions come at the behest of the longing of mourners, who thus have their dreams fulfilled. But the disciples are shown as skeptical of the reality of the Risen Jesus. Come on: by now Habermas must have learned from those ―critical scholars‖ whose opinions he 170 JESUS IS DEAD professes to respect so much that the skepticism element is simply a common plot-prop in any miracle story. It in no way marks the story as eyewitness testimony. To even argue that way reveals that Habermas and his colleagues are mired in the eighteenth century when these arguments were first framed: they were arguments against Rationalistic Protestants who denied supernatural causation but believed in the accuracy of the gospels! Only against such convenient opponents does it make any sense to take for granted that the gospel scenes are historically accurate and so the implied causation must be miraculous! Hallucinations are the stock in trade of weirdoes, and there is no reason to think the disciples were all weirdoes. Oh no? People who abandoned their jobs to follow an exorcist so they could get a piece of the action when the Millennium dawned? Fanatics eager to call down the lightning bolts of Jehovah upon inhospitable Samaritans? Not exactly your average Kiwanis Clubber or Methodist, I‘d say. People would not die as martyrs for mere hallucinations. Well, sure, as long as they didn‘t realize that‘s what they were! People are not changed from cringing cowards to men who turn the world upside down by mere hallucinations. How do we know? And besides, the New Testament itself attributes the evangelistic zeal of the apostles not to the resurrection appearances but to the infilling of the Spirit at Pentecost, seven weeks later! But the salient point is this: Habermas is still locking horns (in the mirror) with the eighteenth-century Protestant Rationalists when he simply assumes we know that the earliest Christians were the named people in the gospels and Acts who did the deeds and said the words depicted in those texts. But as Burton Mack says, these stories are themselves the final products of a myth-making tendency in some quarters, and not all, of early Christianity. They represent the end result of one kind of Christian faith, not the root and foundation of all Christian faith. There is not only no particular reason to think the gospel Easter narratives or the 1 Corinthians 15 list preserve accurate data on the Easter morning experiences. There is no particularly compelling evidence to suggest that the stories even go back to anyone‘s experiences. They are one and all mythic and literary in nature. Or they sure look like it, and there‘s nothing much on the other side of the scale. N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) f you have seen any of a number of ABC or PBS documentaries on the historical Jesus question, you have certainly seen N. T. Wright. He is one of the ‗usual suspects‘ rounded up by Peter Jennings and his producers, along with John Dominic Crossan, Paula Fredricksen, Ben Witherington, and others, all of whose views are comfortingly homogenized by the pleasant host (along with the pronouncements of Pentecostal choir directors and Middle Eastern tour guides) to reinforce the comfy prejudices of the audience. Wright always adopts the stance as of a career historian in the field of ancient history, as if approaching the gospel texts as an admiring outsider. In fact, he is a bishop of the Church of England celebrated there for his reactionary theological opinions. He has expressed these opinions in a number of books that seek to rehabilitate pre-critical views of the Bible by a sophistical appeal to recent scholarly research. Wright‘s massive book on the resurrection is, even for the garrulous bishop, an exercise in prolixity. It is several times longer than it needs to be, as if designed to bludgeon us into belief. One might save a lot of time and money by finding a copy of George Eldon Ladd‘s I Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus (Eerdmans, 1975), which used most of the same arguments at a fraction of the length — and without skimping. The arguments have not gotten any better. They are the same old, stale, fundamentalist apologetics we got in Ladd — essentially the same old stuff we used to read in Josh McDowell and John Warwick Montgomery. It is the same hash reslung — only now it is getting pretty smelly. Perhaps that is why Wright seeks to perfume it, reminiscent of Joseph and Nicodemus attempting to fumigate the decaying corpse of Jesus by encasing it in an extravagant hundred-pounds weight of spices (John 19:39). Wright backs I 172 JESUS IS DEAD up much too far to make a running start at the resurrection, regaling us with unoriginal, superfluous, and tedious exposition of Old Testament and Intertestamental Jewish ideas of afterlife and resurrection, resurrection belief in every known Christian writer up into the early third century, etc., etc. The mountain thus laboring is doomed to bring forth a messianic mouse, alas. All this erudition is perhaps intended to intimidate the reader into accepting Wright‘s evangelistic pitch. But it is just a lot of fast talking. In the end, Wright, now Bishop of Durham, is just Josh McDowell in a better suit. His smirking smugness is everywhere evident, especially in his condescension toward the great critics and critical methods of the last two centuries, all of which he strives to counteract. He would lead the hapless seminary student (whom one fears will be assigned this doorstop) backwards into the pre-critical era with empty pretenses of post-modern sophistication, shrugging off the Enlightenment by patently insincere attempts to wrap himself in the flag of post-colonialism. Genuine criticism of the gospels he dismisses as the less advanced, muddled thinking of a previous generation, as if ‗cutting-edge‘ scholarship like his were not actually pathetic nostalgia for the sparkling Toyland of fundamentalist supernaturalism. It is a familiar bag of tricks, and that is all it is. The tragedy is that many today are falling for it. Witness Wright‘s own prominence in the Society of Biblical Literature, to say nothing of his ecclesiastical clout. The weight of this book‘s argument for orthodox traditionalism is to be found, of all places, in the acknowledgements section, where Wright thanks the hosts of the prestigious venues where he first presented bits of this material: Yale Divinity School, South-Western Theological Seminary, Duke Divinity School, Pontifical Gregorian University, St. Michael‘s Seminary, etc., etc. Wright is the mouthpiece for institutional orthodoxy, a grinning spin-doctor for the Grand Inquisitor. What credibility his book appears to have is due to the imposing wealth, power, tradition, even architecture, of the social-ecclesiastical world that he serves as chaplain and apologist. It is sickening to read his phony affirmations of the allegedly political and radical import of a literal resurrection (if you can even tell what Wright means by this last). 13. N. T. Wright 173 Does Bishop Wright espouse some form of Liberation Theology? No — for just as he emptily says that Jesus redefined messiahship, Wright redefines politics. When he says the early Christians were anti-imperialistic, all he has in mind is the fact that Christians withstood Roman persecution, valiant enough in its way, but hardly the same thing. Like a pathetic Civil War reenactment geek, he is sparring at an enemy safely dead for centuries. In attempting to co-opt and parody the rhetoric of his ideological foes, Wright reminds me of Francis Schaeffer, a hidebound fundamentalist who began as a children‘s evangelist working for Carl MacIntyre. Schaeffer, posing as an intellectual and a philosopher, used to stamp the floor speaking at fundamentalist colleges, shouting ―We are the true Bolsheviks!‖ Right. Part of Wright‘s agenda of harmonizing and de-fusing the evidence is to smother individual New Testament texts beneath a mass of theological synthesis derived from the Old Testament and from the outlines of Pauline theology in general. He is a victim of what James Barr long ago called the ―Kittel mentality,‖ referring to the approach of Kittel‘s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT), in which articles on individual New Testament terms and words are synthesized from all uses of the term, creating an artificial and systematic semantic structure that leads the reader to suppose that every individual usage of the word was an iceberg tip carrying with it implied reference to all other references. In other words, each article in the TDNT composed a ‗New Testament theology,‘ topic by topic. In just this manner, Wright first composes a streamlined Old Testament theology of historical and eschatological redemption. Then he synthesizes a Pauline Theology, then a New Testament theology, and then an early Christian theology. Finally, he insists that the synthetic resurrection concept he has distilled must control our reading of all individual gospel and Pauline texts dealing with the resurrection. In short, it is an elaborate exercise in harmonizing disparate data. The implications of 1 Corinthians 15, for example, with its talk of spiritual resurrection, are silenced as the text is muzzled, forbidden to say anything outside the party line Wright has constructed as ‗the biblical‘ teaching on the 174 JESUS IS DEAD subject. Another example is his insistence on translating the Greek Christos as ‗the Messiah‘ in Pauline passages, lending them a falsely Jewish coloring belied by their content. Wright even admits that the Pauline writings are already pretty much using ‗Christ‘ as simply another name for Jesus, yet he wants to tie Paul‘s theology in with the grand arc of Old Testament theology, ‗redemptive history,‘ or whatever. Similarly, he sees everything in the context of second-temple Judaism. Again, we detect here a phony ecumenism, as if he thought Jews were not all going to hell for rejecting Jesus as the Son of God. The same is true with his cosmetic use of politically correct inclusive language and ecumenical mistranslations of Jews as ‗Judeans,‘ etc. It is all to butter up the reader, like a used-gospel salesman closing in for the sale. Wright is a better-educated Anglican Zig Zigler. In reality, the only value he sees in Judaism is the safe haven it gives him from taking into account the patent influence on early Christianity of Hellenistic Mystery religions, which are really all we need to account for the empty tomb legend and the resurrection myth. For Wright ‗Judaism‘ really denotes Old Testament and rabbinic interpretation of it. Here we spot the reason for — and the character of — the unholy alliance between mainstream Judaism and Evangelical Protestantism in the pages of the Journal of Biblical Literature and Bible Review. They are closing ranks against radical critics in both traditions: Old Testament minimalists and Jesus Seminar-type scholars alike. It is rather like the Moral Majority, uneasy allies with certain goals in common. There are three fundamental, vitiating errors running like fault lines through the unstable continent of this book. Fault-line I The first is a complete unwillingness to engage a number of specific questions or bodies of evidence that threaten to shatter Wright‘s overoptimistically orthodox assessment of the evidence. The most striking of these blustering evasions has to do with the dying-and-rising redeemer cults that permeated the environment of early Christianity and had for many, many 13. N. T. Wright 175 centuries. Ezekiel 8:14 bemoans the ancient Jerusalemite women‘s lamentation for Tammuz, derived from the Dumuzi cult of ancient Mesopotamia. Ugaritic texts make it plain that Baal‘s death and resurrection and subsequent enthronement at the side of his Father El went back centuries before Christianity and were widespread in Israel. Pyramid texts tell us that Osiris‘ devotees expected to share in his resurrection. Marduk, too, rose from the dead. And then there is the Phrygian Attis, the Syrian Adonis. The harmonistic efforts of Bruce Metzger, Edwin Yamauchi, Ron Sider, Jonathan Z. Smith and others have been completely futile, either failing utterly to deconstruct the dying-and-rising god mytheme (as Smith vainly tries to do) or trying to claim that the Mysteries borrowed their resurrected savior myths and rituals from Christianity. If that were so, why on earth did early apologists admit that the pagan versions were earlier, invented as counterfeits before the fact by Satan? Such myths and rites were well known to Jews and Galileans, not to mention Ephesians, Corinthians, etc., for many centuries. But all this Wright merely brushes off, as if it has long been discredited. He merely refers us to other books. It is all part of his bluff: ―Oh, no one takes that seriously anymore! Really, it‘s so passé!‖ Wright comes near to resting the whole weight of his case on the mistaken contention that the notion of a single individual rising from the dead in advance of the general resurrection at the end of the age was unheard of, and that therefore it must have arisen as the result of the stubborn fact of it having occurred one day — Easter Day. This is basically absurd for reasons we will attend to in a moment, but the premise is false. Even leaving out the resurrections of the savior gods, Wright mentions that the resurrection of Alcestis by Hercules is an exception to the rule, but he seems to think it unimportant. Worse, though, is his utter failure to take seriously the astonishing comment of Herod in Mark 6:14–16 to the effect that Jesus was thought to be John the Baptist already raised from the dead! Can Wright really be oblivious of how this one text torpedoes the hull of his argument? His evasions are so pathetic as to suggest he is being disingenuous, hoping the reader will not 176 JESUS IS DEAD notice. The disciples of Jesus, who was slain by a tyrant, may simply have borrowed the resurrection faith of the Baptist‘s disciples who posited such a vindication for their own master who had met the same fate. Wright should really be arguing for the resurrection of John the Baptist, if its being unprecedented means anything! Equally outrageous is Wright‘s contrived and harmonistic treatment of the statements about a spiritual resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, where we read that ―flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God‖ (v. 50) and that the resurrected Jesus, the precedent for believers, accordingly possessed a ―spiritual body‖ (v. 44). Wright labors mightily and futilely to persuade us that all Paul meant by ―flesh and blood‖ was ‗mortal and corruptible,‘ not ‗made of flesh and blood.‘ Who but a fellow apologist (like William Lane Craig who sells the same merchandise) will agree to this? What does Wright suppose led the writer to use a phrase like ―flesh and blood‖ for ‗mortal corruptibility‘ in the first place if it is not physical fleshiness that issues inevitably in mortal corruption? How can the Corinthians writer have used such a phrase if he meanwhile believed the risen Jesus still had flesh and blood? It is no use to protest that none of the ―second temple Jewish‖ writers we know of had such a notion of resurrection. This supposed fact (and Ladd knew better: he cited apocalypses that have the dead rise in angelic form, or in the flesh which is then transformed into angelic stuff) cannot prevent us from noticing that 1 Corinthians 15:45 has the risen Christ ―become a lifegiving spirit.‖ Likewise, when he gets to Luke, Wright laughs off the screaming contradiction between Luke 24:40 (―Touch me and see: no spirit has flesh as you can see I have.‖) and 1 Corinthians 15:50 and 45 (―Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.‖ ―The last Adam became a lifegiving spirit.‖). The contexts of both passages make it quite clear that the terms are being used in the same senses, only that one makes the risen Jesus fleshly, while the other says the opposite. Wright‘s laughable hairsplitting is a prime example of the lengths he will go to get out of a tight spot. Similarly, when he gets to 1 Peter 3:18 (Jesus was ―put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and made proclamation to the 13. N. T. Wright 177 spirits in prison,‖ etc.), Wright rewrites the text to make it say what he wants: ―he was put to death by the flesh, and brought to life by the Spirit.‖ This is just ridiculous. It is the exegesis of that faith that calls things that are not as though they were. Fault-line II Wright‘s second mortal sin is his desire to have his Eucharistic wafer and eat it too. He takes refuge on either side of an ambiguity when it suits him, hopping back and forth from one foot to the other, and hoping the reader will not notice. For instance, Wright is desperate to break down the ‗flesh/spirit‘ dichotomy in Paul and Luke (not to mention that between Paul and Luke!), but he builds the same wall higher outside the texts. That is, he wants to say resurrection always meant bodily, not merely spiritual, resurrection. The latter would mean just ‗going to heaven,‘ and that will not do. But Wright confesses he has no clear idea of what sort of physical presence the risen Jesus might have had. He calls it ―transphysical‖ and admits he cannot define it. What then is he arguing? He just knows he wants a bodily resurrection, but it has to be a body capable of passing through locked doors and teleporting, appearing and disappearing at will. Yet he despises the notion that the risen Jesus was docetic — a spiritual entity that could take on the false semblance of physicality. Wright doesn‘t want any early Christians to have believed this. He doesn‘t want it even to have existed as an heretical option that the evangelists were trying to refute — because that would mean that a spiritual resurrection was one form of early Christian belief, which Wright is trying to rule out. Most scholars rightly see the business about the risen Jesus requesting a fish sandwich (Luke 24:42–43) as demonstrating, against Gnostic Docetists, that Jesus had a fleshly body. But Wright will have none of this. He is right to point out, as A. J. M. Wedderburn does in Beyond Resurrection (1999), that anti-docetism is inconsistent with the same narratives‘ depicting Jesus walking through locked doors like Jacob Marley. But why cannot Wright see this simply attests the inconsistent 178 JESUS IS DEAD piecemeal nature of the redactional attempts to ‘anti-docetize‘ the very same narratives? But Wright is stuck with both contradictory features as ―eyewitness testimony‖ or ―early tradition‖ which he seems to think mean the same thing. So his ―transphysical‖ Jesus must be the equivalent to a comic book superhero like the Vision or the Martian Manhunter — possessing a physical body but able to vary physical density at will. But wait a minute — if this is not Docetism, what does Docetism mean? Fault-line III The third strike against Wright is by far the most important. He loathes Enlightenment modernity because it will not let him believe in miracles. So he must change the rules of the game. Like all apologist swindlers, Wright makes a fundamental confusion. He thinks it an arbitrary philosophical bias that historiography should be ―methodologically atheistic.‖ Why not admit that miracles might have occurred? It may be that a miracle turns out to be the most simple and economical explanation of the data. If we are unalterably opposed to that possibility, Wright says, we are bigots and arbitrary dogmatists. But if Wright should ever make a serious study of the ‗miracles‘ of the pagan religions, would he not himself adopt a ‗methodologically atheistic‘ approach, even as Benjamin B. Warfield did in his skeptical Counterfeit Miracles (1917)? Would he too then be a bigot and an arbitrary dogmatist? Freud would readily peg Wright as a victim of ‗reaction formation‘ Long ago, the Ionian philosopher Thales understood that it explains nothing if we piously say that it rains because Zeus turned the faucet on. No, even if there is a god, it is to short-circuit the process of scientific explanation to invoke divine fiat. The same point is made in the cartoon where a lab-coated scientist is expounding his theory with a chalkboard full of figures. He points his pencil to a gap in the long equation and says, ―Right here a miracle occurs.‖ It is funny for a reason Wright apparently does not understand. To say that the rise of Christian resurrection faith requires a divine intervention is tantamount to saying we just do not know how it arose. One resorts to such tactics of desperation 13. N. T. Wright 179 when all else fails, as Wright thinks mundane explanations have failed. But in that moment one has not found an alternate explanation at all. It is like the fundamentalists who say their god must have ignited the Big Bang since scientists cannot yet account for what chain of causation led to it. How is a god an explanation, even if there is a god? ‗God‘ is a mystery, unless one is an idolater. And to claim one has explained a problem by invoking a mystery is no advance at all. You are trying to invoke a bigger enigma to explain a smaller one. ―I have the answer to X! The answer is XX!‖ Erudite Bishop Wright reveals himself to be on the same level with evangelical cartoonist Jack Chick who ‘explains‘ that the unknown Strong Nuclear Force is really Jesus Christ because scripture says ―in him all things hold together‖ (Col. 1:17). What‘s the difference? The instant one invokes the wildcard of divine miracles, the game of science and scientific history comes to a sudden halt. But then that is just what Wright, unsuccessfully disguising himself as a humble historian, wants to do. The good bishop would reassure the faithful that superstition is really science, harmonization is criticism, fideism is evidence. And why does Wright think a miracle is necessary? Only a real spacetime resurrection, he insists, can account for the birth and spread of resurrection faith. Of course there are many viable explanations, not least Festinger‘s theory of cognitive dissonance reduction, whereby more than one disappointed sect has turned defeat into zeal by means of face-saving denial. Wright suicidally mentions this theory, only to dismiss it, as usual, with no serious attempt at refutation. So totally does his predisposition to orthodox faith blind him that he cannot see how lame a gesture he makes. No argument against his faith can penetrate his will to believe. Every argument against his evangelical orthodoxy seems ipso facto futile simply because he cannot bring himself to take it seriously. But suppose a miracle were required. What sort of a miracle might it be? Wright maintains that the earliest evangelists must have been galvanized, electrified, by something mighty convincing! Set aside the fact that all manner of supposed eyewitness enthusiasts — not least UFO abductees — have equal and equally sincere zeal. This is not nearly enough. Wright 180 JESUS IS DEAD needs to account for the spread of this improbable-seeming belief among those who had not themselves seen the risen Christ, if he thinks the spread of the faith requires a miracle. Wright himself is at pains to show how resurrection seemed absurd and distasteful to nearly everyone. If that were so, and I am not convinced it was, what Wright needs to posit is something like the Calvinist notion of the effectual call, a supernatural mesmerism whereby God makes the gospel attractive to sinners. The miracle is needed at a later stage if it is necessary at all — not that I think it is. Wright’s wrongs Wright (though by this time one is tempted to start calling him Wrong) uses sneer quotes, dismissing with no argument at all Crossan‘s claim (which I deem undoubtedly and even obviously correct) that the empty tomb traditions stem from women‘s lament traditions like those mentioned in Ezekiel 8 and attested for the Osiris cult and others. Having ignored rather than refuted this contention, Wright insists that the empty tomb narratives are eyewitness evidence, evidence that is all the stronger for the supposed fact that ancient Jews did not admit legal testimony from women. How‘s that? Wright‘s early evangelical Anglican Christians in togas just felt they had no choice but to include this vital eyewitness testimony even though it would surely invite ridicule by Celsus and his ilk. They were stuck with it. But why? Wright himself imagines that the framers of the 1 Corinthians 15 list of resurrection appearances knew the empty tomb tale but omitted it so as not to invite ridicule. It was thinkable to do so. But the unwitting logic of Wright‘s whole argument presses ineluctably toward saying that the empty tomb story is not even supposed to be evidence and is not offered as such. It must be there for an entirely different reason. Crossan had it right. He made sense of it. Wright doesn‘t, because he does not want anything to link the Easter story to the Mystery Religions. Wright‘s insistence on limiting himself to the canonical Judeo-Christian continuity blinds him to other crucial parallels to the Easter stories. The Emmaus story (Luke 24:13ff), where 13. N. T. Wright 181 two apostles meet the Risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus but do not recognize him, is cut from the same cloth as numerous ancient ‗angels unawares‘ myths, but it bears a striking resemblance to a demonstrably earlier Asclepius story where a couple returns home dejectedly after failing to receive the desired healing miracle at Epidaurus. They are intercepted by a curious and concerned stranger, the divine savior incognito, who ferrets out the reason for their sadness, reveals himself, performs the hoped-for healing after all, then vanishes. The miraculous catch of fish in John 21 is patently based on an earlier Pythagoras story in which the no-longer relevant detail of the number of the fish made some sense. As Charles L. Talbert pointed out years ago (What Is a Gospel?, 1977), the abrupt ending of Mark (as it seems to readers familiar with the other gospels) fits quite naturally as a typical apotheosis story, where the absence of the body combined with a heavenly voice is sufficient to attest the hero‘s exaltation to heaven. Talbert showed how an empty tomb story made sense by itself, and how the gospel tomb scene may have originated as window-dressing for an apotheosis narrative. We are not stuck with the empty tomb as a stubborn historical fact as Wright would like us to think. These Hellenistic parallels tell us that we hardly require eyewitness testimony of miracles to explain the origin of the gospel Easter stories. Occam‘s Razor makes that altogether unnecessary. But they also explain something else Wright thinks explicable only by miracles: the absence of scriptural allusions in these stories. Wright throws down the gauntlet to Crossan, who says that the gospel Passion Narratives are historicized prophecies from the Old Testament, rewritten as New Testament stories. Why, then, is there so little scripture reflected in the burial and Easter stories? Well, there is a good bit. Matthew has supplemented Mark with Daniel, as Randel Helms shows in Gospel Fictions (1988) — and as Wright himself eventually admits! But Crossan has also shown how similar Mark‘s burial and resurrection stories are to the entombment alive and subsequent crucifixion of the enemy kings in Joshua 10:16–27. Helms also shows how John 20:17 is based on Tobit 12:16–21. But there is a good bit of the gospel story that is not derived 182 JESUS IS DEAD from scripture — and that is because it comes from pagan mythology and novels where prematurely entombed heroines are inadvertently rescued by tomb robbers and heroes survive crucifixion (another body of highly relevant textual evidence that Wright haughtily laughs off). Wright piously tells us that, faced with the resurrection narratives, we ought to bow in awe and wonder. That may or may not be so, but we must blink in astonishment at Wright‘s comments upon them! In another case of his both/and harmonizations (one found frequently with Evangelical scholars, i.e., apologists), Wright both claims that the resurrection narratives lack artifice (hence must be authentic ―raw footage‖) and that they have been thoroughly worked over by each evangelist so as to function as consistent extensions of themes and even narrative structures running through each gospel. This sort of analysis, demonstrating the thorough permeation of Mark‘s Passion story by themes ubiquitous throughout the previous chapters led the contributors to Werner H. Kelber‘s symposium The Passion in Mark (1976) to conclude that Mark had no preexistent passion tradition but composed the whole thing. Such an obvious conclusion never occurs to Wright. For him, each narrative is both early, unadorned tradition and thoroughly modified. It is either one as he needs it to be. The bishop throws source criticism out the window when he needs to, claiming, astonishingly, that there is so little apparent interdependence between the tomb tales of Mark, Matthew, and Luke that we cannot be sure they are not independent tellings of the same story, learned by each evangelist via different channels. This is a way of discounting the great degree to which Luke and Mathew have rewritten Mark, maintaining they are all separate collectors of ‗early traditions,‘ a slippery repristination of the old Sunday School notion that the four evangelists are independent witnesses, as if to the same auto accident. Again, there is no stale crust of apologetical sleight-ofhand that Wright will not claim as a critical advance upon Enlightenment scholarship. For Wright, Matthew‘s accuracy is demonstrated by the fact that he seems to have added no new stories to the resurrection plot-line. What about the repeated earthquakes, the descent of the angel, the guards at the tomb, the embassy of the Sanhedrin 13. N. T. Wright 183 to Pilate, the rising of the dead saints on Good Friday? Without a word as to the improbability of other evangelists omitting it if it had happened, Wright confesses himself ready to swallow the historical accuracy of the guards. Wright thinks it makes sound sense that the guards are to tell that the disciples stole the body while the guards were asleep? How did they know what happened while they were snoozing? Wright seems not to recognize comedy if there is no laugh track. Wright insists that the gospel writers must have believed in a literal resurrection (whatever that would be: Jesus becoming the Martian Manhunter again?). But can we be so sure of that, given certain elements of their narratives? Luke‘s Emmaus scene is transparently symbolic of the invisible presence of Christ among his followers every Sunday at the breaking of the bread. (Wright finally admits this, but he insists that it also really happened, more of his both/and-ism.) Matthew ends not with an ascension to get Jesus off the stage of history (as in Acts), but with Jesus assuring the readers (at whom the Great Commission must be aimed) that he will continue with them until the end of the age. Does this not imply that the resurrection was after all the inauguration of the metaphorical/spiritual sense in which Matthew‘s readers, like modern Christians, sense Jesus intangibly with them? John‘s story of Doubting Thomas concludes with Jesus making an overt aside to the reader: ―Blessed are those who have not seen yet have believed.‖ Can this writer have seriously intended his readers to think they were reading history? Such asides to the audience are a blatant and overt sign of the fictive character of the whole enterprise. As Barr pointed out long ago (Fundamentalism, 1977), the fact that Luke has the ascension occur on Easter evening in Luke 24 but forty days later in Acts chapter 1 (something Wright thinks utterly insignificant!) shows about as clearly as one could ask that Luke was not even trying to relate ‗the facts‘ and didn‘t expect the reader to think so. One could easily go on and on and on, even as Wright does — and because Wright does. What we have in this book is not a contribution to New Testament scholarship, any more than Creationist ‗Intelligent Design‘ screeds are contributions to 184 JESUS IS DEAD biological science. Both alike are pseudoscholarly attempts to pull the wool over the eyes of readers, most of whom will be happy enough for the sedation. A. J. M. Wedderburn’s Beyond Resurrection (Hendrikson Publishers, 1999) Back of Beyond . J. M. Wedderburn has nothing but credibility among mainstream biblical scholars. He serves on the Protestant Faculty of the University of Munich, and his well-received books including Reasons for Romans and Theology of the Later Pauline Letters were not particularly liable to ruffle anyone‘s feathers. The same, fortunately or unfortunately, cannot be said of his Beyond Resurrection. This one is sure to have pious heads shaking and praying for the author. In a sense, though, the newly radical character of Wedderburn‘s take on the gospel narratives of the resurrection should not be surprising. The issues in the study of the gospels are rather different from those at stake in the epistles. It‘s a commonplace that evangelical scholars sometimes go into ‗safe‘ fields of biblical study such as textual criticism (‗Lower Criticism‘) because there they are liable to find little that will upset their own faith or that of their public. Truly scholarly, truly important, but not very controversial. The same is true of Pauline studies. There one may play the theologian more than the critic. I always wondered how the brilliant evangelical theologian Clark H. Pinnock could say the things he said against New Testament critics and in favor of biblical infallibility since he himself had earned a PhD degree in New Testament. The answer, as I later discovered, was that he had studied the Pauline epistles under F. F. Bruce at Manchester University. Thus, for example, he never had occasion to read D. F. Strauss. If he had, I suspect he would have seen matters much differently, for Strauss had thoroughly refuted virtually every apologetics argument for the gospels and the resurrection still in use today, and he did it long before any of today‘s apologists were born. Well, A. J. M. Wedderburn here emerges from the safety zone of Pauline literature into the battlefield of gospel studies. A 186 JESUS IS DEAD Doubters will be as delighted as believers will be shocked to read Wedderburn‘s views on the gospel Easter materials, for they are anything but conservative. In this book we are witnessing a milepost along the way that has led so many of us, as thoughtful Bible readers, from uncritical fideism to a critical standpoint that becomes inevitable as soon as one begins engaging the text on a technical level. This book has a title that might be taken two ways: does he mean to take the resurrection of Jesus as an established point of departure and then ascend to ever-higher realms? Or does he mean the resurrection somehow fails to pass muster and must be discarded in favor of something else? The latter, perhaps surprisingly, is closer to the truth, and as he anticipates, some colleagues will not much relish what they read here. Wedderburn writes as a scholar who has quietly taken seriously the professed zeal of his fellow New Testament historians and found himself passing beyond the rest, in the process charting the sandbars and rocks where each of his fellows has run aground. For instance, he writes knowingly and well of intellectual stratagems nearly ubiquitous in the world of ‗maximal conservative‘ evangelical scholarship, including the idea that any viable reconstruction of Christian origins must be theologically adequate and must meet the needs of preaching. This bizarre and arbitrary axiom is precisely why anyone refers to ―evangelical scholarship‖ at all; what makes the scholarship ―evangelical‖? It is tweedy rationalization at the service of teary-eyed revivalism. But Wedderburn will have none of it. Not that he is unsympathetic to the concerns of the pious pew-potatoes; he has simply come to the realization that the scholar‘s role cannot be that of the Grand Inquisitor, shielding people from the uncomfortable truths they fear. (And in the last few chapters he strives manfully to reconstruct some sort of theological stance that will fake neither the biblical evidence nor that of the senses. The result is inevitably pretty modest.) In the same way, Wedderburn commendably repudiates the controlling axiom of all evangelical scholarship: if there remains any open space for doubting that the traditional view (of Petrine authorship, gospel accuracy, literal resurrection) has been refuted, then the believer need not yield to the critic. 14. A. J. M. Wedderburn 187 Now if one were honest about it and admitted one‘s convictions were held by simple will power (C. S. Lewis‘ old friend ―obstinacy in belief‖), this might fly. But to shut one‘s eyes and chant ―innocent until proven guilty,‖ while pretending to be a historian is the very height of hypocritical posturing. And to his great credit, Wedderburn has had enough of it. One of the surprising cases he discusses of such will-to-believe masquerading as historical judgment is Wolfhart Pannenberg (Jesus: God and Man, 1968), Professor of Theology at the University of Munich until 1994. Pannenberg was a student of Karl Barth. Dismayed at the existentialist element in Barth, he sought to restore revelatory value to history and argued for a historical resurrection of Jesus. He once enumerated a list of criteria that would serve to debunk the resurrection as history: (a) if the Easter traditions were demonstrable as literarily secondary constructions in analogy to common comparative religious models not only in details, but also in their kernel, (b) the Easter appearances were to correspond completely to the model of self-produced hallucinations …. (c) the tradition of the empty tomb of Jesus were to be evaluated as a late (Hellenistic) legend (Wedderburn, p. 18). Pannenberg seems to think he has erected a strong fortress around his faith, like Warfield‘s series of hurdles the denier of inerrancy must leap. But in fact he was crouching within a melting igloo and trying not to get wet. What was he waiting for? Have not all the criteria been long ago met? Pannenberg‘s inability to see the obvious can only be compared to the supernatural blindness of the Emmaus disciples. Swatting the Plague of Flies In a number of specific cases Wedderburn has seen how the Risen Lord is wearing no clothes. He is quick to point out the unfalsifiable game of ―heads I win, tales you lose‖ as applied to the gospel resurrection accounts. Which is it? Are these stories more credible because their contradictions show there was no collusion between their authors? (Of course there was, in the 188 JESUS IS DEAD sense that one may easily demonstrate how one has embellished and rewritten the other.) Or are the stories powerful evidence because they do not contradict one another? (The latter is a barely disguised instance of the absurd claim that an ‗apparent contradiction‘ may be treated as no contradiction at all so long as one can devise some contrived harmonization. In fact, the need to harmonize must itself count, and would in any other field, as a disqualification of the texts as evidence.) One cannot have it both ways (And I am saying one cannot have it either way!) Wedderburn offers several other helpful refutations of the bombast of conservative apologists. Contra today‘s leading evangelical apologist William Lane Craig and others, he shows that the Acts 13:29 tradition of Jesus‘ burial by his enemies is more widely attested, occurring also in Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 97:1 and the Gospel of Peter 6:21. Again, he explodes the claim of apologists that Paul knew of the empty tomb tradition because he says Jesus ―was buried‖ in 1 Corinthians 15:4. Surely, Wedderburn points out, the ―was buried‖ is intended to cap what precedes it, ―Christ died,‖ i.e., ‗dead and buried,‘ not what comes after — ―he rose.‖ Indeed the situation is precisely parallel to the futile Protestant argument against the perpetual virginity of Mary (itself, of course, a legend). Protestants think that the fact that Joseph ―knew her not until she had borne a son‖ (Matthew 1:25) implies they went at it afterward — when the point is not what followed Jesus‘ birth but what preceded it: nothing! So the baby cannot have been Joseph‘s. Does Luke 2:7 (―She gave birth to her first-born son‖) imply anything afterward, i.e., more children? No, surely the point is to underline her previous virginity. James D. G. Dunn (who once seemingly strove for critical scholarship, but has seemed sorrier and sorrier to have hewn himself from the fundamentalist rock), Craig, and a multitude of others maintain that the lack of a known veneration of a tomb for Jesus attests the resurrection. The point seems to be that if there had ever been a time when a Jesus movement had not believed in the resurrection of Jesus (e.g., the Q community as envisioned by Burton Mack), we would hear of a pilgrimage site to where Jesus was buried. 14. A. J. M. Wedderburn 189 But I wonder: once the resurrection creed became ascendant, any such site might have been expunged with the ferocity of a King Josiah closing down the high places. That is, if anyone had regarded tomb-veneration as incompatible with belief in the resurrection in the first place. Wedderburn astutely observes that no one would have seen any incompatibility. They never have since Constantine ‗discovered‘ the tourist-trap tomb site in the fourth century. Surely the best commemoration of the resurrection would be to visit the empty tomb! And yet, as Dunn and Craig and their fellows contend, there is no early tomb-veneration! Might this lack be construed as evidence that there was no dominant early belief in an empty one? Texts Not Facts Wedderburn shows how the Easter tales of Matthew and Luke stem from their rewriting of Mark — and to show this is to show the purely literary character of at least Matthew and Luke. The problem with the contradictions between the gospel Easter stories is not that they are goofs casting doubt on the details of stories we might otherwise be inclined to take seriously. No, the point is that the contradictions are keys enabling us to trace the purely literary history of the narratives. (Think of the case Bart Ehrman makes in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: textual variants can often be shown not to be mere slips of the pen but rather to possess a redactional Tendenz). And Wedderburn pursues the point. It is not only glitches between gospels but also within them that betray a literary rather than historical origin. For example, it is simply by crude authorial fiat that Luke 24:16, John 20:14, and the longer ending of Mark (16:12) make the resurrected Jesus unrecognizable to the mourning disciples. Try to picture the scene (as Strauss, in his The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, 1835, bade us try to envision Jesus multiplying loaves of bread by stretching them out like sponges!) and you wind up with absurdities. Was Jesus heavily robed? Was he flogged and bruised into hamburger meat and thus unrecognizable? (Never mind that Jesus should have been recognized precisely by means of his wounds, as in John 20:25, 27.) In one sense the literary gimmick here is an excellent one: the element of uncertainty preserves the supernatural chill of the scene without resolving it into pat certainty, a technique 190 JESUS IS DEAD Tzvetan Todorov (1975) explains in his The Fantastic. But on the other hand, it is done artlessly: no narrative explanation is given for the uncertainty. The evangelists just baldly tell us the disciples did not recognize him, something as abrupt and arbitrary as their incredible failure to grasp what the passion prediction meant (Mark 9:32). There, Mark was just trying to account for why the passion and resurrection predictions did not prepare the disciples, as they are supposed to do for the reader, for the subsequent events. But all this, both the stories‘ skill and their lack of it, is a matter of literary composition, not of historical reporting. Similarly, the question in John and Luke is whether the Risen One is solid flesh or can pass through locked doors like Jacob Marley. If what Jesus wanted was to demonstrate was the physical reality of his body, that he was not a ghost, he certainly had a funny way of showing it! But the incoherence arises from the literary character of the story: the evangelists wanted to show two things: that Jesus was corporeal, and that, as a resurrected being, he could make a heck of a surprise entrance! The two contradict one another, but that does not occur to the storyteller as long as both individual goals are met. It is just like the Transfiguration story in Mark: did Elijah appear personally in the time of Jesus? Yes he did: you just saw him with Moses. And no, he didn‘t: he appeared only in a manner of speaking, as John the Baptist. Mark inherited both apologetical arguments and decided he might as well include both. Never mind that they are incompatible; he couldn‘t bring himself to choose between them. Nor here; hence a fleshly Jesus who can nonetheless walk through walls! The only explanation is that we are dealing with fiction, whether well told or badly — or both. Blindness and Insight It is perhaps surprising to see the limits of Wedderburn‘s critical vision, for he still seems trapped in the clinging Lazarus-bands of conservatism — more individual assumptions than modes of argument. For instance, he imagines that ―It is an indubitable historical datum that sometime, somehow the disciples came to believe that they had seen the risen Jesus‖ 14. A. J. M. Wedderburn 191 (p. 13). I should say not! Any more than that we know about any ‗changed lives‘ of these disciples from before to after the resurrection. As Pannenberg feared and Wedderburn seems to realize, the gospel resurrection accounts are secondhand — or worse, completely fictive. And what other evidence do we have about what the first disciples may or may not have experienced? 1 Corinthians 15:5 and 7 are hardly firsthand evidence. It is after all, a pair of formulas, standardized, official credential lists that even seem to undercut one another, one presupposing James as the leader of the apostles, the other Peter (as Harnack knew and Wedderburn seems aware). We have this set of formulas from a third party, even if we regard the text in which it appears as genuinely Pauline. As for Paul‘s own vision, Wedderburn recognizes the difficulties in knowing what Paul may have experienced and how similar or different it may have been to the experience (if any!) of the ‗original disciples.‘ Burton Mack is right: the empty tomb and appearance stories can simply no longer be taken as either univocal or equivocal (―it might have been hallucinations‖) evidence of a Big Bang that started Christianity. No, these stories are themselves growths from one of the several kinds of early Christianity, whose origins are unknown. The stories of the apostles and the dawn of their faith are a product of one particular ‗apostolic‘ Christianity and betray an agenda that makes sense best in the second century where well-defined sects (including ‗catholic‘ ‗orthodoxy‘) vied with one another and made parallel boasts of apostolic succession. In the gospel Easter stories we are seeing not the root of the plant but the tip of the iceberg. Wedderburn still lingers in the pleasant shade of the historicizing bias when he arbitrarily retains individual elements of the resurrection narratives seriously as history. He thinks the women looked for the body, probably without much luck. Isn‘t it obvious by now that the whole scenario parallels and is derived from ubiquitous Mystery Religion myths where goddesses (Isis and Nephthys, Ishtar, Anath, Cybele) seek for the slain god (Osiris, Tammuz/Dumuzi, Baal, Attis) and anoint him to raise him from the dead? Let Occam‘s razor rip! Granted, women‘s testimony may not have been worth much in the 192 JESUS IS DEAD ancient world, so the empty tomb stories wouldn‘t have begun as apologetics — Celsus showed the futility of using them for that. But surely they began instead not as factual reports but rather as mythic scripts for women‘s mourning rituals such as those long familiar in Israel for Tammuz (Ezekiel 8:14) and Haddad-Rimmon (Zechariah 12:11). Wedderburn thinks there may be some reliable tradition underlying the Sea of Tiberias story in John 21, but the whole thing must be based on the famous tale of Pythagoras, a vegetarian, who came upon a group of fishermen unloading a huge catch, whereupon he made them an offer. If he could guess the right number of fish, would the fishermen free them? He was right, and back they went. The miracle wasn‘t the size of the haul, but rather the Rain Man-like acuity of the sage‘s calculations. The point has been shifted in the Johannine version, but that it stems from the Pythagorean legend is still apparent from the fact that the number of fish — one hundred fifty-three — not only presupposes someone counting them (pointless in the Johannine version we now read) but happens to be one of the holy Pythagorean ‗triangular‘ numbers. Wedderburn wrestles with the origin of the ‗third-day‘ motif and wonders if something did not after all happen that day. Hosea 6:1–2 (―on the third day he will raise us up‖) seems insufficient to have fixed the day if there had not also been some event that day, even if that should prove to have been the failure of the women to find the body! [The] earliest Christians were convinced, thanks to their experiences at Easter and afterwards, that Jesus‘ fate was according to God‘s will. Because they also believed that God had revealed that will in the Old Testament scriptures, they … searched in those scriptures for the proof that the anointed one of Jewish expectations had indeed to suffer and die and be raised again, that his fate was therefore according to the scriptures (plural). As a result of this basic enquiry which convinced them that Jesus‘ fate did correspond to what the scriptures had foretold, they … sought for the confirmation of their basic search in as many details of the passion story and its sequel as they could … Even when only one passage could support, rather precariously, a detail like the third day, it confirmed the general character of the story as scriptural. But this analysis leads to the conclusion that the [Hosea] 14. A. J. M. Wedderburn 193 passage did not originate the date, as some have claimed; on the contrary, the date led to the discovery of the text that showed its basis in scripture‖ (p. 52). But this seems superfluous and unnatural. What would have been the point if the event of the resurrection, the experience of the risen Jesus, had first convinced them? Would these Easter morning believers and their immediate heirs have been dissuaded if they had not been able, like the Pharisees of John 7:52, to document every detail from scripture? No, the whole scenario bespeaks a scribal atmosphere like that of the rabbis or of Qumran, where new secrets are coaxed out of the sacred page by means of esoteric combinations and out-of-context exegetical atomism. Surely a more natural picture is the one hypothesized by Earl Doherty (The Jesus Puzzle, 1999) whereby early Christians sought to historicize their spiritual messiah by filling in details from scripture peshers. When they said Christ died for sins, was buried, rose, etc., according to the scriptures, they probably, like Matthew with the 30 pieces of silver, the two donkeys, etc., derived the supposed events from reading texts out of context for their secret predictive value. Thus most likely either Hosea 6 was the origin of the third-day motif, or it was invoked to supply a Jewish, biblical pedigree for a mytheme derived from a Mystery Religion (Attis, too, rose on the third day). Has Wedderburn abandoned his one-time evangelical compatriots? Or, as I deem more likely, have they abandoned him? That is, someone here has taken seriously and consistently the exhortation all evangelicals hear to love the truth above all, but not everyone has seen that the truth cannot be identified with a given dogmatic-exegetical party line. I should say Wedderburn has chosen the better part. William Lane Craig’s “Contemporary Scholarship and the Historical Evidence For the Resurrection of Jesus Christ” illiam Lane Craig is a meticulous researcher and a smooth platform speaker. Those attending one of his debates will readily come to see they have chanced upon an evangelistic rally in academic clothing. His goal is not so much to win debates as to win souls. But he makes a good showing at the lectern, or the pulpit, whichever it is. He is a kind of ‗Mister Science‘ purporting to convey the increasingly conservative results of contemporary scholarship in order to convince sophomoric skeptics and doubting believers alike. The most remarkable thing is the degree of respectability Craig (like his twin N. T. Wright) has managed to obtain in the ranks of mainstream scholarship. There is no denying Craig‘s brilliance, and yet his arguments strike me as being pretty much gussied-up versions of hackneyed old platitudes. How is, then, that they show up now and again in the pages of the super-elite New Testament Studies and similar venues? I believe the welcoming of views like Craig‘s and Wright‘s attests a demographic shift that is easy to explain. The 1970s resurgence of emotiondriven, revivalistic religion has resulted in the mushrooming of evangelical seminaries and Bible colleges. These institutions are able to employ large numbers of graduate-schooled Bible professors — all trained, like Creationist biology teachers, in the trappings of mainstream scholarship, though most of them only endured courses in criticism with gritted teeth long enough to get the requisite sheepskins. Thus was created, too, a wider scholarly market for textbooks of a neo-conservative slant, eager to stultify the results of generations of the Higher Criticism of scripture. Then the Society of Biblical Literature flung wide its once closely guarded doors, admitting anyone who applied. W 196 JESUS IS DEAD The result of all these trends was a demographic shift in the ―plausibility structure‖ (as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Structure of Reality, call it). In short, the reactionary backwater of one generation succeeded in becoming the mainstream of the next. Genuine critics have been forced back to the defensive ramparts we once occupied in the early days of critical scholarship, distracted from positive, pioneering work by the need to try to undo some small part of the damage. Hence the need for essays like this one, to try to indicate the vacuity of the regnant neo-fundamentalist scholarship. My acquaintance with Dr. Craig goes back to 1985 when I was privileged to be invited to represent a critical viewpoint in a Christiansponsored confab on apologetics in Texas. Dr. Craig was one of the organizers. Once we got there, we were all told that our presentations, already pared to the bone to fit 30-minute time slots, had to be reduced by half. One exception to this rule was Dr. Craig, who gave the keynote speech. I can only wish that he had been subject to the same strictures, and that he had allowed me to take the editing knife to his remarks. I was astonished at their wrongheadedness then, and I have only grown more astonished in the years since, years in which I have read his essays on the resurrection and debated him in person. Here I will restrict myself to a rejoinder to one particular exercise in apologetics, Dr. Craig‘s article ―Contemporary Scholarship and the Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ‖ (available at ). Philosophical Presuppositions Dr. Craig begins by stacking the deck, driving home to the reader (almost certainly already a fellow believer looking for some salve for his chafing doubts) the dismal alternative to faith in an afterlife and a creator God. We are left bereft of hope, he says, if we are but the chance products of evolution, doomed to be set adrift in the vacuum of eternity, our atoms commingling randomly with those of the forgotten pterodactyl and the unremembered community college administrator. A sobering prospect, to be sure, but not for that reason a bad www.leaderu.com/truth/1truth22.html 15. William Lane Craig 197 one. As Bertrand Russell (―A Free Man‘s Worship‖) showed so splendidly, such a nihilistic vision may instead yield a noble Stoicism of purpose and duty. As Nietzsche proclaimed, such a gospel of the Death of God may be received, as Epicurus‘ was, as decidedly good news! It implies that Man is born from the forehead of precisely nothing, a clay Adam awaiting his selfcreation as he himself wields the tools of will and intelligence. He need not mutely await orders from some higher being, for whose puppet-show he has been carved as a marionette. It does no good to say that this is what Hitler thought (though he didn‘t — he was a Roman Catholic); any creed may be abused by the wicked, as the sorry history of knaves and demagogues who have manipulated Christianity for their own ends shows too well. Craig reassures the reader that he need not look into the Nietzschean void, because there is the hope of eternal life with God, and that hope is founded upon the resurrection of Jesus. We will shortly see whether that hope is well founded. But for the present, let us ask ourselves: if this life has no discernible purpose, how would lengthening it unto eternity suddenly make it meaningful? Add an infinite number of zeroes to zero and what have you got? Endless quantity does not create quality, as if one should watch millions of episodes of Laverne and Shirley or Charles in Charge. Would that make them good viewing? Craig believes life would be pointless without an eternal extension of it. I don‘t see why. We would first have to settle the question of what would make it meaningful here and now. And if we can answer it, then the question of how long it may last is a completely different issue. For example, if we decided that loving and serving a god gives meaning to life, that conclusion alone tells us nothing about possible life after death. Ancient Israel apparently believed in a loving god to whom one bade farewell on one‘s deathbed. It was just part of the humility of the human condition. Still not a bad way to look at it. But in all this, Craig is rushing to embrace the very danger Kierkegaard warned awaited the interested partisan in any intellectual problem: if one has a vested interest in a certain conclusion being reached, one‘s hand rests too heavily upon the saw, and the needful fine consideration of factors becomes 198 JESUS IS DEAD clumsy and violent. Craig should have heeded that warning. Failing that, he is a raging bull stampeding through the china shop of delicate evidence. Resurrection of the Resurrection Craig next laments the abandonment of the belief in the historical resurrection of Jesus by nineteenth-century liberal Protestant theologians, under the influence of Rationalistic Deism, which denied the possibility of miracles. Schleiermacher would be a case in point. Like the Deists, he disdained miracles as clumsy mid-course corrections by a god who surely was wise enough to get it right the first time, when he planned the universe and set in place its natural laws. As a result, Schleiermacher justified the resurrection appearance narratives as factual (something the Rationalists were eager to do!) by positing (as many of them did) that Jesus had not died but been taken down alive from the cross, then revived in the tomb, whence he emerged for a brief period, which Schleiermacher called ―the second life of Jesus‖ before he finally succumbed. We will see, however, that it is Craig and his fellow apologists who are mired in eighteenth-century Rationalism, for like them and their contemporary Orthodox opponents, Craig believes that the terms of the debate over the resurrection include a prior acknowledgment by both sides that the gospel narratives are historically accurate even down to the details. The debate must concern the lines employed to connect those details, like dots in a puzzle. Can we connect them without resort to miracles and the supernatural? The Rationalists said Yes; their Orthodox opponents said No. Craig and the apologists are still trying to play that game. There is no other team; there are only tackling dummies — for the other team has long since moved on, not only to a different stadium, but to a different game altogether. Already in the eighteenth century, the Empiricist David Hume [1711–1776], the scourge of philosophical Rationalism, mounted an argument that apologists seem perversely to refuse to understand. In their writings, one continuously reads as if in a recurrent nightmare the erroneous refutation by C. S. Lewis 15. William Lane Craig 199 in Miracles: A Preliminary Study, that Hume‘s argument is circular. It is not. Hume did not argue, as Rationalists had done, that we know natural laws are inflexible and do not allow for the barest possibility of miracles ever having occurred. For Hume, we know no such thing! The most radical of Empiricists, Hume simply pointed out that, faced with a report of a miracle, the responsible person would have to reject it, not because he has a time machine in the garage and can go prove it didn‘t happen, but because he knows the propensity of people to exaggerate, to prevaricate, to misunderstand, to be tricked, etc. Balance against the possible truth of this report of a miracle all the evidence of contemporary experience against violations, suspensions, whatever, of the regular occurrence of events, and where will you come out? You do not know for a fact that the miracle report is mistaken, because you can never absolutely know the past. But you have to make your call whether the thing is plausible or not. Let‘s let Hume himself tell us what he thought about miracles: No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish. … When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider … whether it be more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact which he relates should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other … and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates — then, and not until then, can he pretend to commend my belief or opinion. [Hume, ―On Miracles‖] What Hume argued was essentially the same as what Ernst Troeltsch in the next century would dub the principle of analogy: claims of past events must be judged by today‘s standards of what does and does not happen. Otherwise there simply is no standard. We are stuck believing every fairytale and political promise. And if we say one must be equally open to things having gone differently in the past, we are begging the question, since what basis do we have to think they did? And besides, the apologists‘ own case, though it turns out to be 200 JESUS IS DEAD futile, depends no less on the scarcity and astonishing nature of miracles in whatever age they may occur. In other words, they are imagined as always violating the analogy of the experience of every age, or no one would take notice of them and say, ―Surely God is among you!‖ Hume would agree that by a leap of faith, i.e., sheer will power, one may insist on believing the improbable, but then all talk of the supposed importance of ‗evidence‘ must end — has ended except as window dressing. Craig is equally disgusted with the successors to classical liberal theology, Neo-Orthodoxy and Bultmannian existentialism. They didn‘t have a taste for the historical resurrection either. But the clouds parted starting with Käsemann and the New Quest for the Historical Jesus — or did they? Käsemann certainly did not believe in the empty tomb of Jesus. He and neoBultmannians simply sought to find evidence, in what fragments of Jesus‘ authentic teaching they had left after critical scrutiny, of any continuity between Jesus‘ own ‗authentic existence‘ and that made possible for Christians in the wake of the Christ-event. Craig has found something more like an ally in Wolfhart Pannenberg [1928– ], whose belief in a physical resurrection is based on one of the weakest of old-time apologetics: what changed the disciples from craven cowards to lion-hearted preachers? The whole thing depends upon a naïve reading of the gospels, where the disciples‘ flight at Gethsemane is dramatically requisite so the hero may face, and triumph over, danger alone. And it entails a selective reading of Acts, according to which it is not the resurrection appearances at all which have emboldened the disciples, but rather the advent of the Holy Spirit seven weeks later, until which time they are pictured as still huddling together in private. At any rate, Craig is delighted to be able to point to a movement among scholars backwards towards belief in an empty tomb and a historical resurrection. There are various ways to explain such shifts in the scholarly plausibility structure, and each has its own strength in the eye of the beholder. To me and my colleagues, for example, the trend toward such beliefs is the product of a failure of nerve beginning already with Rudolf Bultmann [1884–1976], a fearful backing away from the radical insights of F. C. Baur [1792–1860]. Higher Criticism of the old 15. William Lane Craig 201 school was gradually abandoned because of a move toward retrenchment in an age that sought the comfort of the familiar, that rejoiced to return, as Freud would say, to the oceanic bliss of the womb that bore them. Craig is wrong to disdain Neo-Orthodoxy. It, and Karl Barth [1886–1968], charted the course back to churchliness that pulled biblical studies exactly where Craig thinks it belongs, as the handmaid of Christian dogma. Holy Hearsay One can chart the tidal movements of currents of opinion, but that really counts for nothing. One must look instead at the evidence. Craig announces that the scholarly shift rightward is due to scholars considering ―the resurrection appearances, the empty tomb, and the origin of the Christian faith.‖ As to the first of these, Craig credits Joachim Jeremias [1900–1979] with restoring credibility to the list of appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 by inferring that it was a piece of tradition, practically a creed, memorized by Paul on a visit to Jerusalem where he met earlier apostles, who must have composed the list. This, Craig and many other apologists tell us, takes the list of appearances back to within five years of the events. True, the witnesses cited there might have been hallucinating, but what reason is there to think so? To which one must respond, Oral Roberts might have been hallucinating or lying or what-not when he saw, as he said, a Jesus the size of Godzilla standing next to his hospital building, telling him to raise the money to pay for it. Ditto for the numerous claims of UFO abductees, witnesses of the Virgin Mary, etc. As Hume said, why should anyone take any of these claims seriously? What are the chances these people have not misunderstood, hallucinated, been deceived, etc., given the dismal record of the human race in this regard? But I do not grant the point of the tradition even being old. Craig and I have tangled on this, and I cannot take the time to repeat it all here. One may read my case (―Apocryphal Apparitions: 1 Corinthians 15:3–11 as a Post-Pauline Interpolation‖) together with Craig‘s reply and my reply to him at infidels.org. Suffice it to note that if this text, this list, were as 202 JESUS IS DEAD old as apologists make it — if it even fell within the first century! — we should certainly see the business about the appearance to more than five hundred brethren reflected in the gospels, which instead give us nothing but disappointing scenes of Jesus appearing to small groups behind locked doors! The notion of the eyewitness apostles composing this list is no different from the identically bogus claim that the twelve of them got together and composed the Apostles Creed! As an inerrantist, a conviction that controls his every move though he keeps it tactfully tacit during these machinations, Craig cannot leave it at 1 Corinthians 15. He cannot throw the gospel appearance stories to the wolves. So he takes the circuitous path to nowhere and starts with deductive arguments about how quickly legends can and cannot form, how long it takes for remembered public events to become distorted, and then says that the gospel Easter stories just don‘t have the time to be anything but newspapertype reporting. He buttresses his case with the sweet assurances of A. N. Sherwin-White (Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament) who agrees that much more time would be needed for such distortions to creep into the record. Craig is proud to appeal to Sherwin-White as an objective witness, not a biblical scholar but an impartial historian of secular matters! Yes, about as impartial as William Foxwell Albright, a Presbyterian apologist for biblical historicity who misled a whole generation of biblical archaeologists (who wanted desperately to be misled — part of that Neo-Orthodox retrenchment). Scarcely the disinterested drop-in from an alien field, Sherwin-White wrote as a Christian apologist, proof-texting Roman studies to vindicate the gospels. But whoever he was or whatever the reason he wrote, he is just wrong. Studies of actual cases of myth-mongering in far less than a generation (such as I give in my book Beyond Born Again) show these deductive pontifications about ―what would have happened‖ are absolutely worthless, as arbitrary a presupposition as that naturalism which Craig delights in ascribing to biblical critics. In the final analysis, all this hair-splitting is really quite superfluous and unnecessary. Craig asserts the 1 Corinthians 15 list of Jesus‘ alleged appearances takes us back to within five years of the events. Really? How on earth could he know 15. William Lane Craig 203 that? How does he know when Jesus died? How does he know that Jesus ever lived at all, let along died in a particular year? How does he know when, where, and by whom the text of 1 Corinthians 15 was committed to writing? How long had the ‗tradition‘ therein been circulating at the time of writing, and how could he prove it? What proof does he have that someone named Paul wrote it? How does he know the text is unitary and has never been altered by a later hand? How does he know that any particular appearance ever occurred? How can he know the whole thing is not a total fiction concocted for theopolitical purposes in a historical milieu unrecognizably different from the primitive Christianity of Orthodox tradition? Confederacy of Dunces Craig says ―a significant new movement of biblical scholarship argues persuasively that some of the gospels were written by the AD 50‘s.‖ I will not assume Craig is hallucinating here. Let‘s suppose he has actually read something to this effect: he can only be referring to other evangelical pietists grinding out fatuous apologetical arguments like the ones we are dealing with here. To dignify this nonsense with a term like ―a new movement of biblical scholarship‖ is like calling Henry Morris and the Creationists ―a new movement in paleontology.‖ Oh — I forgot: Craig is a Creationist, too, isn‘t he? I refer the reader to my book The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, chapter one, ―The Sources,‖ for a discussion of gospel dating. It is too much to reproduce here. Similarly, Craig fantasizes that ―All NT scholars agree that the gospels were written down and circulated within the first generation, during the lifetime of the eyewitnesses.‖ With this, Craig has begun to do with contemporary history what he has been doing all along with ancient history: recasting it according to his fond desires. This is not even a good generalization! Does Craig now read nothing but fundamentalist apologists? Unless the reader has so restricted himself, he will know at once how wide of the mark Craig‘s assertion is. ―It is instructive to note that no apocryphal gospel appeared during the first century. These did not arise until the generation 204 JESUS IS DEAD of eyewitnesses had died off.‖ What does that have to do with it? First, we aren‘t close to knowing that any of the canonical gospels occur within the first century. Second, the distinction hints at Craig‘s theological bias: inside the canon is good; outside the canon is bad. Anything we have to say to make the canonical look good, we will say. If what he means is that the familiar four gospels are blessedly free of exaggeration such as we find in things like the Gospel of Nicodemus and the Gospel of Peter, he still fails. Comparing Matthew with Mark shows how Matthew added to Mark‘s crucifixion account the ‗details‘ of the mass resurrection of dead saints and their eerie return to Jerusalem, as well as earthquakes that shattered stones. If these are not prime examples of ‗apocryphal‘ embellishment, nothing is. True, Nicodemus‘ gospel goes even farther, but so what? Matthew must be measured as much against Mark as against Nicodemus. And if Craig snickers at the giant angels accompanying Christ out of the tomb in Peter‘s Gospel, I hope he gets a belly laugh out of the giant angel within the canon at Revelation 10:1–2, or those seen by Elchasai and Muhammad. Of course his face straightens right up if you flip over to Revelation 10, because the issue, as it always is with Craig, is theological apologetics, not the scholarly study of ancient documents. Veritas versus Verisimilitude ―If the burial account is accurate, then the site of Jesus‘ grave was known to Jew and Christian alike. In that case, it is a very short inference to [the] historicity of the empty tomb.‖ Right off the bat, one is tempted to say, ―Yes, but then if the raft account is accurate, then the direction of Huck and Jim‘s flight would have been known to Tom and Aunt Polly alike. In that case it is a very short inference to the historicity of Huck Finn.‖ But on to details. Craig says the first disciples could never have sustained their own belief in Jesus‘ resurrection had they known Jesus was still in the grave, since there is no known form of Jewish resurrection belief compatible with a rotting body. He quotes fellow evangelical apologist E. Earl Ellis to this effect. (I am reminded of the laundrymen who stayed in business by taking 15. William Lane Craig 205 in each other‘s wash.) But this is just not so. Even the scene in John in which Jesus is recognized by his wounds is reminiscent of Hellenistic (including Jewish) post-mortem appearance scenes by ghosts! The ectoplasmic body would have looked like the physical one, so pointing to a wound sustained while being put to death would not have to mean physical resurrection. One would have ―returned from the dead‖ in any event. Besides, as Burton L. Mack and many others (if one wants to name drop and nose-count as Craig likes to do) have shown, there is no way of knowing that the earliest Christians even believed in the resurrection of Jesus! Whoever compiled the Q document gave no hint of it, that‘s for sure. (Craig rejects Q, by the way, but he‘s going to be waiting a long time for New Testament scholarship to catch up to him on that point!). Others seem to have believed Jesus was initially assumed into heaven, where he served as an intercessor in the manner that Jews believed Jeremiah and Onias III did, from whence he would one day return via the resurrection, a belief with which an occupied tomb would not be at all incompatible. This is exactly what Lubavitcher Hasidim believe about the late Menachem Schneerson today. Craig assets that ―Even the most skeptical scholars admit that the earliest disciples at least believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Indeed, they pinned nearly everything on it.‖ Such assurances are gratuitous. All we do know is that it served the interests of some segments of early Christianity to tell stories in which Jesus returned from the dead and appeared to his disciples. We have no way to know whether such stories came from the original disciples, especially since Craig knows good and well that the similar resurrection appearance scenes of the apocryphal gospels are by no means historical. But then how can we be sure the scenes in the canonical four are? It is begging the question, in precisely the same way the old Rationalists used to do, to take for granted all sides in the dispute must assume the substantial accuracy of the gospels and Acts going in! ―The Jewish authorities would have exposed the whole affair. The quickest and surest answer to the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus would have been simply to point to his grave on the hillside.‖ I love the buttoned-vest peremptory 206 JESUS IS DEAD tone of these dismissals, carrying with them the English club atmosphere of the older generation of apologists (e.g., J. N. D. Anderson) whom Craig and his pals are emulating. But this is surely the lamest of arguments. Remember, the only evidence we have one way or the other as to when anyone began preaching the resurrection is Acts 2, where it began fully seven weeks after the death. If the Sanhedrin had produced the body, it would have by then been a lump of liquescent putrefaction, unidentifiable as anyone in particular. Remember, the mourners held their noses when Jesus ordered Lazarus‘ grave stone to be taken away: ―Lord, by this time he stinketh!‖ And that was only the fourth day! Plenitude of Emptiness Craig offers a Pentateuch of pleadings to get us to accept the historicity of the story of Jesus‘ burial. Firstly, ―the burial is mentioned in the third line of the old Christian formula quoted by Paul in 1 Cor. 15:4.‖ But, again, it may not be an early list. Even if it is, so what? It may be history, or it may be verisimilitude if someone is building up to a resurrection fiction. Secondly, ―It is part of the ancient pre-Marcan passion story which Mark used as a source for his gospel.‖ But are we so sure there ever was such a source? I for one do not think so. To posit one is itself, I think, another sleight-of-hand scheme to narrow the gap between Jesus and the earliest gospel. That is why Craig assumes without question the existence of a pregospel source here, but denies it in the case of Q, the implications of which he dislikes. As for me, I am only saying we can‘t rely on a merely hypothetical source if we are, like Craig, trying to narrow down the possibilities, not trying to open them up as I am seeking to do. And the more possibilities there are, the less the case seems to ―demand a verdict.‖ Thirdly, ―The story itself lacks any traces of legendary development.‖ Oh does it, now? The fretting of the women — ―Who shall roll aside the stone for us?‖ — is an obviously literary anticipation of the supernatural opening of the tomb. John‘s account, which only he has, and involving a character unique 15. William Lane Craig 207 to his gospel, Nicodemus, smacks of legend, especially the extravagant hundred pounds‘ worth of spices! The burial in a garden recalls the relevant fertility-god mythemes (which also include the searching for the savior‘s body by the divine sisters, e.g., Isis and Nephthys looking for Osiris, Cybele looking for Attis, Anath seeking Baal). The element of Jesus‘ burial in a rich man‘s tomb (implicit in all versions, explicit in Matthew) sounds like the typical lead-in of the Hellenistic novels to the discovery by grave robbers of the person prematurely interred, awakening from a coma. In fact, if we were not, in the gospels, reading a piece of fiction, there would be no burial story at all! In a historical account the burial would be implicit, not rising above the threshold of the noteworthy. Whereas a historian never bothers telling us how a character was dressed, a fiction writer will tell us how the character is dressed if it is going to prove relevant in what comes after. Even so, here we are told that Jesus was buried in a particular tomb simply to pave the way for the narration to return there and see what happens next. Fourthly, ―The story comports with archaeological evidence concerning the types and locations of tombs extant in Jesus‘ day.‖ But even if that were true, that need be no more than verisimilitude in fiction. If the story were guilty of gross errors of geography (as the gospels do seem to be elsewhere, not least on the question of there having been synagogues in Galilean villages), this might militate against its historical accuracy, but the absence of them means nothing. One might as well argue that War and Peace is a record of real events since, where it does use historical coloring, it gets it right. Fifthly, ―no other competing burial traditions exist.‖ Not so, mon ami. As Craig knows, Acts 13:29 has the executioners of Jesus see to his burial. Craig, as I recall, wishes to subsume this as mere summarizing of the fact that Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Sanhedrin. But that is a very strange way of putting it! If you were generalizing from the gospels‘ Joseph story, would you subsume Jesus‘ benefactor amid the mob howling for his blood? It is a strange bit of synecdoche! Besides, Justin Martyr and the Gospel of Peter, not to mention the Toledoth Jeschu, give alternate burial stories. What they hold in common may be very old, and that‘s all we have to show in order to show Craig has not eliminated all the variables. 208 JESUS IS DEAD Paul-Bearers Craig next tries to find the body of an assertion of the empty tomb inside the vacant cavity of 1 Corinthians 15:4. In that verse the author says ―he was buried,‖ then passes on to ―he was raised.‖ It is begging the question to assume that ―no Jew‖ could have understood a resurrection to be compatible with a decaying body. And yet what does 1 Corinthians 15 itself go on to say? The discussion compares the dead body to the seed husk from which the newborn plant emerges (verses 37–38). It requires no great stretch to see how one who wrote in this manner could have easily envisioned the husk lying there to decay. The impact of this point is not lost even if, with me, one deems 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 an interpolation. My point is simply that here we have what Craig says cannot exist: an apparent understanding of the resurrection body compatible with the sloughing off of a mortal body of flesh. The fact that 1 Corinthians 15:4 has Jesus raised ―on the third day‖ seems to Craig (and others) to require some historical peg to hang from. If there had not been some historical event, even a hallucination, on that day, why choose ―the third day‖ for the resurrection? But the passage itself gives us a broad hint when it says he rose on the third day ―in accordance with the scriptures.‖ I join many who read this as meaning that the early Christians derived ―the third day‖ midrashically from Hosea 6:2, ―On the third day he will raise us up.‖ That is certainly the simplest alternative. How else did Matthew ‗know‘ Judas had been paid thirty pieces of silver? He surmised it, and a great many other details of his story, from Zechariah. Craig appeals to Rudolf Pesch for two arguments for the antiquity of the burial tradition. First, the account of the Last Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:23–25 seems to reflect Mark‘s and to be based on it. This implies that the pre-Markan passion narrative (if there was one) would have been older than Paul, already available to him. But this ignores the strong possibility that 1 Corinthians 11:23–25 is itself an interpolation, as has been argued by William O. Walker, Jr. But let us assume it is genuine. In that case, as Hyam Maccoby says, we have a passage in which Paul seems to claim knowledge of the proceedings of 15. William Lane Craig 209 the Last Supper by means of direct revelation, not by historical tradition: he received it ―from the Lord‖ and passed it down to the Corinthians. But I think it is an interpolation based on canonical Mark and thus very late. Furthermore, Mark (or his source) never refers to the officiating high priest by name, which Pesch absurdly takes to mean that the narrator was writing for contemporaries who naturally knew the identity of the priest. But might it not just as easily mean that the narrator did not himself know who the priest was, because he was writing too much later? I don‘t see why not, or how we could decide between the two options. For how many fairy tales do you know the names of the kings and queens? Shall We Join the Ladies? In lock-step with the legions of yesterday‘s apologists Craig next asks why women are credited with discovering the empty tomb if the story was made up? Women‘s testimony was suspect in the eyes of many (though the degree to which that is true is newly debated these days). So if someone were making it all up, he should never have had the empty tomb discovered by women. So it must be true. Really, now? There is another approach. We might conclude that since it would have been altogether pointless to adduce the testimony of women, then testimony is not what we are reading. What would make sense in an ancient context? The presence of the women at the tomb is exactly what we should expect if the whole story hails from the cognate resurrection myths of Osiris, Baal, Attis, and Dionysus, whose major devotees were inspired women who sought out the body of the slain savior, then raised it from the dead. It is virtually an article of faith among apologists to disclaim and despise such myth-pattern cross-references, as if to suggest such parallels were tantamount to denying the Holocaust. Apologists like to scorn this observation, one suspects, because it is so deadly to their case. If there were well-known myths of dying and rising gods similar at many points to the passion and Easter stories of the gospels, then anyone could see, à la Hume, that these gospel stories are much more likely to be whatever the others are: beautiful and profound myths. 210 JESUS IS DEAD Despite the repeated assurances of Bruce Metzger, Edwin Yamauchi, Ronald Sider, and Jonathan Z. Smith that no pre-Christian evidence for such pagan resurrections exists, the claim is absurd. Pyramidal evidence for the risen Osiris, textual evidence for the resurrections of Tammuz and Baal, iconographic evidence for the risen Attis all predate the New Testament. Besides, why on earth would early Christian apologists resort to the argument that Satan counterfeited the true resurrection in advance if they thought no such myths predated theirs? In short, then, the stories of the women at the tomb are not intended as evidence for anything. Rather, they are remnants of the rubrics for the Easter vigil of the holy women. That makes the most sense to me. If I‘m wrong, I‘d like to know why. It sure fits the pattern of ancient religion. Craig defies the critic to explain where Christianity came from in the first place if there were no ‗Big Bang‘ (if I may borrow Burton Mack‘s term) to give it the initial momentum. Well, if the resurrection of Jesus as a historical fact is the only answer, then I guess we‘re stuck believing in the historical victory of Mithras over the cosmic Bull, the historical resurrection of Attis, Osiris, Tammuz, etc. Craig has no difficulty believing these fine religions began amid the hoary mists of antique myth. Why should this one be any different? Of course, what makes it different in Craig‘s estimation is that this one started relatively recently, which is why he is so concerned to pin down everything to within a few years of the alleged events. But that is, again, begging the question, since precisely what is at issue is whether it makes more sense to trace Christianity to a sudden mutation of the resurrection myths that thickly foliated the region. Craig is myopic when he says Christian faith in the resurrection could only have come from Jewish influences, since there weren‘t any ―Christian influences‖ before Christianity began. But Mack is right: there may well have been non-resurrection Christianities that eventually created the belief in the resurrection at a certain stage of their evolution. Anyway, Craig discounts the possibility of Christianity emerging from Jewish resurrection belief since in all our evidence for such belief there is never any reference to the possibility of someone rising from the dead before the eschatological denouement 15. William Lane Craig 211 when everyone rises together. Does Mark 6:14 mean nothing? ―King Herod heard of it; for Jesus‘ name had become known. Some said, ‗John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; that is why these powers are at work in him‘.‖ It sure seems to mean that Jewish contemporaries (mis)understood public appearances of Jesus as resurrection appearances of John the Baptist! I‘d say that‘s a pretty good possible source for the idea! Craig protests that this-worldly resurrections, e.g., that of Lazarus, are no real parallel, because these people, like Jairus‘ daughter, must have died again one day. How does Craig know this? In view of the faith of early Christians that the world would end in their own generations, I would have to assume they were believed to ―tarry till I come again‖! But notice Craig does not even mention the possibility of Christian resurrection faith arising from contact with the cults of Baal, Osiris, Attis, Tammuz, etc., all of which were still going strong. He wants to explain Christian origins as a case of creation ex nihilo, by a miracle of God, the historical resurrection. Does the slander attributed to the Jewish elders in Matthew 27:62–66; 28:4, 11–15 at least imply Jews admitted the tomb of Jesus was empty? Would one resort to claiming Jesus‘ body had been stolen if one did not have to reckon with an empty tomb and come up with some other explanation for it? No, not at all. Here we have an exact analogy to the Jewish slur that Jesus was a misbegotten bastard. It does not require that Jews had to admit that Joseph was not Jesus‘ father and had to resort to gossip to avoid admitting the virginal conception! No, the whole point is that they were just sneering at, spoofing Christian preaching. ―Empty tomb? Sure! have it your way! Now what could account for that, eh?‖ When Craig quotes D. H. van Daalen, ―It is extremely difficult to object to the empty tomb on historical grounds; those who deny it do so on the basis of theological or philosophical assumptions,‖ this is sheer libel. Empty Tombs and Shell Games In classic style, Craig finishes up with the argument from the process of elimination: none of the alternative explanations 212 JESUS IS DEAD serves to explain the Easter morning events, not the Wrong Tomb Theory, the Swoon Theory, the Hallucination Theory, the Theft Theory, etc. I have dealt with all these tired arguments, as full of holes as a pair of moth-eaten socks, in my book Beyond Born Again. Please look it up at infidels.org. Let me just point out that it is just here where Craig shows himself completely mired in the apologetics of the eighteenth century, to which he seeks to turn back the scholarly clock. What he has shown is that, à la the Rationalists and Orthodox, is that these theories cannot be wedged in around the edges of a literalist reading of the gospels that takes their stories all at face value. These arguments only ever sounded good to Rationalist inerrantists who (freakishly, to our ears) denied the miraculous! They were in the bizarre position of upholding the entire accuracy of the texts as they stand, yet explaining them without miracles! You could disqualify this or that alternative theory by pointing out how it was inconsistent with this or that feature of the story, e.g., the guards at the tomb. This is why apologists, who are after all writing to reassure worried insiders, love these arguments. They allow them to keep their big gun: an inerrant scripture. With this taken for granted, any opponent who falls for their strategy is trapped, having to suggest far-fetched ways of reading the texts against the grain, twisting texts written pretty much out of whole cloth to proclaim the resurrection, as if to make them look like they were saying something else, say, that it was all a case of mistaken identity. (That is pretty much what Hugh J. Schonfield does in The Passover Plot, another late growth of the old Rationalism.) What critics see, ever since David Friedrich Strauss, is that we are not dealing with historical writing here, but with legend and scriptural pastiche. We can easily trace the growth of the Easter stories from gospel to gospel as one evangelist tried to improve or correct his predecessor. To suggest that the variations between the gospels are like street reports of a car accident seen from different angles is just laughable, given the patent interrelationships between the texts and their rooting in Old Testament sources and mystery religion mythemes. If contemporary New Testament scholarship is going Craig‘s way, it is devolving back into Protestant scholasticism. It reminds me of the time that Reinhold Niebuhr decried Billy 15. William Lane Craig 213 Graham‘s evangelistic efforts — over-simple and crass as they seemed to him: ―Billy Graham has set Christianity back a hundred years!‖ Graham‘s response: ―That‘s too bad! I‘d like to set it back two thousand years!‖ James Patrick Holding’s “How Not to Start an Ancient Religion” nternet apologist James Patrick Holding (as he chooses to be known) has thus far seen fit to by-pass the pages of published books, though one can only imagine that numerous evangelical publishers would love to have him. He maintains a Web-site containing a whole raft of apologetical essays, most of them aiming to refute unbelievers and biblical critics — all of whom he considers to be enemies of the faith. He is amazingly prolific and erudite as well, though he seems to me sometimes perversely to misread his opponents‘ arguments and to reduce them to straw man status. In the essay to be addressed here, Holding sets forth a wide-ranging version of an old argument one hears more and more these days from fundamentalist apologists: that the initial success of Christianity defies sociological common sense and demands a miraculous explanation. The sheer scope of the argument, as well as its increasingly common use in debate, make a critical review of it advisable. Holding here attempts ―to put together a comprehensive list of issues that we assert that critics must deal with in explaining why Christianity succeeded where it should have clearly failed or died out‖ like many another messianic cult. For example, that of Sabbatai Sevi in the seventeenth century? Holding deems it unlikely, first of all, that Christianity could have begun with the hoodwinking of a sufficient number of gullible dupes. Imposture is no basis for a successful religion, a notion asserted as if self-evident by many apologists past and present. And yet it is easy to show how Mormonism started with a hoax, though, given the paradoxes of human psychology, we cannot for that reason dismiss Joseph Smith as not also being a sincere religious founder. But a hoax it was, and here today, look at it: it is a thriving world religion in its own right. So such things can happen. On the other hand, I believe the parallels to Sabbatai Sevi are important and show how I 216 JESUS IS DEAD some of the greatest challenges facing early Christianity may have been overcome, especially the crushing defeat in the wake of its Messiah‘s death. It also illustrates the thinking that led to retrospective claims of ‗passion predictions‘ and scriptural prophecies, as well as the framing of atonement theories as after-the-fact rationales of an embarrassing death — plus resurrection appearance (and miracle) rumors. Most devastating of all, as I show in Beyond Born Again, the rapid, contemporary formation of legends — and that against the attempts of an Apostle such as Nathan of Gaza to prevent miracle-mongering — utterly destroys the apologist‘s claim that such legendary embellishment could not have taken place in the case of the Jesus tradition. Holding argues that ―Christianity ‗did the wrong thing‘ in order to be a successful religion‖ and that thus ―the only way Christianity did succeed is because it was a truly revealed faith … and because it had the irrefutable witness of the resurrection.‖ Here he serves notice that we will be asked to ‗admit‘ that miracles are the only way to account for the rise and success of Christianity. In any other field of inquiry this would be laughed off stage. I am thinking of a cartoon in which a lab-coated scientist is standing at the chalkboard, which is full of symbols, and he is pointing to a hollow circle in the midst of it all, saying, ―Right here a miracle occurs.‖ Appealing to miracles as a needful causal link is tantamount to confessing bafflement. But in fact, there will be no need for this. Cross Examination Citing 1 Corinthians 1:18 (―For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.‖), Holding asks rhetorically, ―Who on earth would believe a religion centered on a crucified man?‖ He contends that crucifixion was so repulsive and degrading a punishment that no one could have taken a crucified man seriously as a religious founder. On top of that, no one could have envisioned the notion of a god stooping to undergo such treatment. 16. James Patrick Holding 217 This being the case, we may fairly ask … why Christianity succeeded at all. The ignominy of a crucified savior was as much a deterrent to Christian belief as it is today — indeed, it was far, far more so! Why, then, were there any Christians at all? At best this should have been a movement that had only a few strange followers, then died out within decades as a footnote, if it was mentioned at all. The historical reality of the crucifixion could not of course be denied. To survive, Christianity should have either turned Gnostic (as indeed happened in some offshoots), or else not bothered with Jesus at all, and merely made him into the movement‘s first martyr for a higher moral ideal within Judaism. It would have been absurd to suggest, to either Jew or Gentile, that a crucified being was worthy of worship or died for our sins. There can be only one good explanation: Christianity succeeded because from the cross came victory, and after death came resurrection! The shame of the cross turns out to be one of Christianity‘s most incontrovertible proofs! This is completely futile and does not begin to take into account the religious appetite (in many people) for the grotesque and the sanguine. Just look at the eagerly morbid piety of Roman Catholics and fundamentalist advocates of ―the Blood‖ who wallow in every gruesome detail of the crucifixion, real or imagined. Consider the box office receipts of Mel Gibson‘s pious gore-fest The Passion of the Christ. In ancient times, think of the Attis cult that centered upon the suicide of its savior who castrated himself and bled to death. Street corner celebrations of such rites invariably attracted bystanders, even initially hostile ones, swept up in the music and chanting, to castrate themselves and join the sect on the spot! Even if one stops short of the Christ Myth theory, one must still reckon with the possibility, as advocated by Bultmann and others, that the crucifixion of Jesus would still have been readily embraceable as a means of salvation because of the familiarity of the dying and rising god mytheme. It was a familiar religious conception, and no less so because of Hellenistic Judaism‘s martyrdom doctrine as glimpsed in 2 and 4 Maccabees, where the hideous deaths (much more fulsomely dwelt upon than the crucifixion is in the gospels) are set forth as expiations for the sins of Israel. See Sam K. Williams, The Death of Jesus as Saving Event. 218 JESUS IS DEAD Finally, crucifixion was not a taboo subject — as witnessed by the frequent occurrence of crucifixion in dream interpretation manuals, where dreaming of being crucified was typically taken as a good omen of impending success. Good Jews, Bad News? Holding thinks that ―Jesus‘ Jewishness … was also a major impediment to spreading the Gospel beyond the Jews themselves. Judaism was regarded by the Romans and Gentiles as a superstition. Roman writers like Tacitus willingly reported … all manner of calumnies against Jews as a whole, regarding them as a spiteful and hateful race. Bringing a Jewish savior to the door of the average Roman would have been only less successful [than] bringing one to the door of a Nazi.‖ This is ludicrous. There were Roman anti-Semites aplenty, though this seems to have prevailed mainly during periods of Jewish revolt against Rome. But in fact, Judaism was quite attractive to Gentiles in general, Romans in particular, as witnessed by the number of conversions and the unofficial adherence of Gentile ‗God-fearers‘ (like Cornelius in Acts 10 and the Lukan Centurion who bankrolled the synagogue). It had the appeal of an ‗Oriental religion‘ as well as the sterling teaching of Ethical Monotheism to recommend it. The Romans … believed that superstitions (such as Judaism and Christianity) undermined the social system established by their religion — and … anyone who followed or adopted one of their foreign superstitions would be looked on not only as a religious rebel, but as a social rebel as well. No, Judaism was considered a legitimate religion and for that reason Jews were exempt from military service. The Roman attitude seems to have been that an ancient religion was okay, even if silly by the standards of Romans like Juvenal, who felt the same way about the religion of Isis and Osiris, Cybele and Attis, etc. But these, too, were legal and quite popular. It was only new religions, like Christianity or the Bacchanalia (new to Rome), that aroused suspicion. (Holding will acknowledge this fact later, when it seems to prove useful to him.) 16. James Patrick Holding 219 This Accursed Multitude Furthermore, says Holding, ―Christianity had a serious handicap [in] the stigma of a savior who undeniably hailed from Galilee — for the Romans and Gentiles, not only a Jewish land, but a hotbed of political sedition; for the Jews, not as bad as Samaria of course, but a land of yokels and farmers without much respect for the Torah, and worst of all, a savior from a puny village of no account. Not even a birth in Bethlehem, or Matthew‘s suggestion that an origin in Galilee was prophetically ordained, would have [de]tached such a stigma: Indeed, Jews would not be convinced of this, even as today, unless something else first convinced them that Jesus was divine or the Messiah.‖ I cannot imagine anybody would have been this snobbish. Romans and other non-Palestinians could hardly have drawn much of a distinction between Galilee and Timbuktu. But even if they had been so choosy, does Holding seriously imagine that any such blue-nosed scoffer would have been convinced only by the miracle of the resurrection, as opposed to the assertion of the resurrection? They would no longer have been in a position to be convinced by the real thing, though they might have found the preaching of the resurrection emotionally or spiritually compelling, as many still do. It is foolish to argue in effect that ―They were convinced by it, so it must have been convincing. So you, too, should be convinced.‖ Again, ―Assigning Jesus the work of a carpenter was the wrong thing to do; Cicero noted that such occupations were ‗vulgar‘ and compared the work to slavery.‖ Must early Christian preaching have won over the worst sort of snobs? No one, not even the special-pleading Crossan, argues that Jesus was one of the Untouchables or Outcasts. Don‘t tell me there weren‘t plenty of people then as now who would not have relished the notion of a faith started by a rustic carpenter. But I think the identification of Jesus as a carpenter, à la Geza Vermes, was an early error, a Gentile misunderstanding of the Jewish acclamation that he was an erudite rabbi, skilled in scripture exposition. At any rate, it did not seem to hinder the fantastic success of Stoicism that one its most beloved sages, Epictetus, 220 JESUS IS DEAD had been a slave, even less classy, one might suppose, than a carpenter. Placing Jesus‘ birth story in a suspicious context where a charge of illegitimacy would be all too obvious to make would compound the problems as well. If the Gospels were making up these things, how hard would it have been … to take an ‗adoptionist‘ Christology and give Jesus an indisputably honorable birth (rather than claiming honor by the dubious, on the surface, claim that God was Jesus‘ Father)? Tell that to all the myth-mongers who ascribed divine paternity to their saviors and heroes! Must these miraculous nativities be factual, too? Let’s Get Physical Holding ventures that a fabricated religion such as he supposes critics imagine Christianity to have been, would never have chosen a version of exaltation for its hero that entailed a physical resurrection since many ancients are on record as finding the whole notion repugnant, preferring Platonic soul-survival. Indeed, many rejected the idea: Sadducees, some philosophers, even pagan Arabs in Muhammad‘s day. Does that mean no one else liked it? We never find denunciations of a belief that no one holds. I find fundamentalism grossly repugnant, but that doesn‘t mean everyone else does. Holding knows that many Jews did share the Christian belief in a physical resurrection, but he says this would not have facilitated their belief in Jesus‘ resurrection, since Jews supposedly restricted resurrection to the end of the age (John 11: 23-24, ―Jesus said to her, ‗Your brother will rise again.‘ Martha said to him, ‗I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.‘ ‖) Holding, like all evangelical apologists, claims that belief in a man rising from the grave before the time, in the midst of ―this age,‖ would have been unthinkable. Hence on the one hand, it cannot even have occurred to Christians as a possibility unless they knew Jesus had actually arisen. And on the other, it would have struck the ears of other Jews as the rankest heresy. 16. James Patrick Holding 221 But think of John the Baptist, transformed into a miracle-working entity by virtue of resurrection, according to the belief of many (Mark 6:14). Of course Mark makes it a false opinion, but the point is that such a belief, closely paralleling the preaching of Jesus‘ own resurrection, was readily available in the immediate environment of early Christianity according to the gospels themselves. As for the venue of the Gentile Mission, ―what makes this especially telling is that a physical resurrection was completely unnecessary for merely starting a religion. It would have been enough to say that Jesus‘ body had been taken up to heaven like Moses‘ or like Elijah‘s. Indeed this would have fit … what was expected, and would have been much easier to ‗sell‘ to the Greeks and Romans.‖ But this only means the early Christians didn‘t concoct Christianity like a bunch of network execs fashioning a sitcom according to focus group surveys. The question is: where did they get the belief in resurrection that they were shortly saddled with? It might have been because of a real resurrection, sure, but they might simply have inherited it from an environment more friendly to the idea. Too New To Be True Holding first argued that Judaism was repulsive to Romans, but now he has to switch hats. He says, correctly, that Romans paid grudging respect to Judaism because it had an ancient pedigree. ―Old was good. Innovation was bad.‖ Thus a new faith like Christianity should have failed. Should we then conclude that no new religions ever started or were accepted on their appearance in the West? You just can‘t take the opinions of the intellectual caste as definitive for what everyone would have thought. Especially since the very expression of such opinions presupposes a regrettable (to these snobs) prevalence of precisely such ‗superstitions‘ as the snobs were condemning. Such faiths famously could and did succeed — even to the extent of becoming the official religion of Rome: Mithraism and even Baalism, for example. Holding argues as if the success of Christianity couldn‘t happen and so it must have taken a miracle for it to have happened. The scientific approach, taken 222 JESUS IS DEAD by Rodney Stark (The Rise of Christianity) and others, is to take as established that it did happen and then explain it — not piously refuse to explain it and claim, ―It‘s a miracle!‖ With that utter abdication of the scientific method, we would still be in the Dark Ages. Of course, no one denies there were persecutions of the Christian faith and, before that, the Isis and the Dionysus cults. They were occasioned by the fact that many, many people did like these religions and practiced them. That is why Juvenal has occasion in the first place to ridicule them, why Plutarch warns young matrons against them — because they were so prevalent, even among the aristocracy. Their husbands didn‘t like it, but they couldn‘t ultimately stop it. Novelty was in large measure responsible for official distaste for the new faith. But as always, many people are looking for something new, however much the establishment hates and forbids it. And even they may eventually succumb: they yielded to Mithraism as the official state religion, and similarly later to Christianity. Hurdles are meant to be jumped, and hardy religions have jumped them. Christianity had much going for it, many noble features, just as Judaism did, and they won out. Raising the Bar Where, Holding wonders, would potential converts have derived the wherewithal to repent of their nice, cozy sins to swallow the bitter pill of early Christian abstinence, if the whole thing were simply a matter of joining one more man-made religion? Can he ignore the fact that all the (very popular) Mystery Religions called their recruits to an initial stage of repentance and purification, too? Neither must we suppose that all Christians were heroic cross-bearers. The whole crisis of a second repentance seen in the Shepherd of Hermas and witnessed in Constantine‘s deferral of baptism to his deathbed attests to the general mediocrity of Christian lay behavior as the rule. They were all no doubt good folks, just not heroic like Jesus or the martyrs. As Stark (The Rise of Christianity) shows, the growth rate of Christianity seems to have matched that of analogous modern 16. James Patrick Holding 223 ‗new religions‘ like Mormonism and the Unification Church. One reason it expanded was its narrowness. Unlike other faiths, it insisted that theirs was the only way, so if you joined Christianity you left your other affiliations behind, whereas others could and did belong to several movements at once, with naturally watered down devotion to any one of them. Another way it grew was that Christianity provided a constant safety zone for assimilating Hellenistic Jews who wanted to slough off parochial Jewish ethnic markers like circumcision (already Paul is telling the Corinthian men not to undertake the epispasm operation to ―undo‖ circumcision — ouch!) yet without abandoning the biblical tradition. Yet another growth factor was Christianity‘s opposition to abortion and infanticide, both quite common among pagans. This meant there were many more Christian women surviving to adulthood, perforce marrying pagan men and converting them. And of course the sterling conduct of Christians, ministering to the sick and destitute in times of plague and famine while pagan priests headed for their countryside villas, like Prince Prospero in Poe‘s Masque of the Red Death, must have attracted many of those helped — and justifiably so! Christianity has much to be proud of in all this. But we don‘t need any overt miracle to explain it. As for the unlikelihood that a great number should have welcomed a new faith that offered moral guidance and discipline, I don‘t see a problem — unless one already takes for granted a doctrine of total depravity. Intolerance of Intolerance Christianity began in the Hellenistic age of cosmopolitan tolerance. It was common for members of various religions to regard all the gods as the same, just wearing different names from nation to nation. Even some Jews, like the writer of the Epistle of Aristaeus, regarded Jehovah and Zeus as the same. One result was that anyone might join several different religions or cults simultaneously. So mustn‘t Christianity have disgusted Roman society because of the new faith‘s exclusivism? 224 JESUS IS DEAD Mustn‘t the preaching of Jesus as the only way to heaven have appeared a piece of tasteless bigotry? Surely no one would have found such a faith attractive, would they? Actually, it was a mixed bag. As I have just said, à la E. R. Dodds (Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety) and Rodney Stark, exclusivism was also a factor accounting for Christian expansion, not necessarily making it unlikely. The same thing is evident in the modern day in Dean M. Kelly‘s famous book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: people feel they are getting the red meat of authentic Christianity with evangelicalism, not the vapid tofu of liberalism, so they flock to the clear notes of the fundamentalist/orthodox trumpet. On the other hand, what Holding notes about the guardians of the social order being enraged by this, or even some of the people, is true too: there were plenty of lynch mobs before Diocletian and Decius declared open season on Christians. But not everybody reacted the same way. And much of the reaction was conducive to Christian growth — even the persecutions! For, as Tertullian said, the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church. And then what if significant elements of the establishment embrace the new faith? Things change rapidly. ―Jews, too, would be intolerant to the new faith. Jewish families would feel social pressure to cut off converts and avoid the shame of their conversion. Without something to overcome Roman and even Jewish intolerance, Christianity was doomed.‖ But Christianity appealed to Hellenistic Jews and to Gentile God-fearers precisely because it offered Jewish morality, added to something like Mystery Religion salvationism (and this independent of the question of whether its symbolism and soteriology were borrowed from these faiths. Let‘s assume for the sake of argument that they weren‘t), and freedom from what Gentiles and assimilating Jews regarded as the burden of the Law. As Stark (chapter 3) shows, Hellenistic Jews found Christianity a bonanza! No doubt Ebionite Jewish Christianity did eventually dry up on the vine for the reasons Holding gives: Non-Christian Jews came to associate the name Jesus with what appeared to them a new Gentile cult and wanted nothing to do with Torah-Christianity, either. The plaintive pleas of the latter, ―But we‘re not like them! We‘re like you!‖ fell on deaf ears. Meanwhile, 16. James Patrick Holding 225 Gentiles faced with the choice of Law-free Christianity or Torah Christianity would surely choose the former, not so much because they were lazy, but because it seemed less inauthentic for them. Why should you have to adopt alien cultural markers to become a Christian? An Omniscient Public Holding next cites Acts 26:26, ―For the king knoweth of these things, before whom also I speak freely: for I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from him; for this thing was not done in a corner.‖ Here Paul is making his defense before King Herod Agrippa II. The NT is filled with claims of connections to and reports of incidents involving ‗famous people.‘ [For instance,] Herod Agrippa [I] … ―was eaten of worms‖ as Luke reported in Acts 12:20-23. Copies of Acts circulated in the area and were accessible to the public. Had Luke reported falsely, Christianity would have been dismissed as a fraud and would not have ‗caught on‘ as a religion. If Luke lied in his reports, Luke probably would have been jailed and/or executed by Agrippa‘s son, Herod Agrippa II … because that was the fellow Paul testified to in Acts 25-26 … And Agrippa II was alive and in power after Luke wrote and circulated Acts. No, sorry. For one thing, Luke‘s account of the first Agrippa‘s death sounds remarkably like that in Josephus (Antiquities 19:8:2) as well as the tale of the worm-devouring death of Antiochus Epiphanes in 2 Maccabees 9:9. For another, there are many reasons to think that Acts stems from the second century, and many scholars think so. Merely mentioning that opinion does not make it true. It does mean, however, that the reader is not entitled to take Holding‘s assertion of Luke‘s contemporaneity with Herod Agrippa II for granted either. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, Agrippa ―was dead and couldn‘t blow the gaff.‖ It is typical of the Hellenistic novels to have fictional heroes interact with famous historical figures, just as in such novels today. Does Holding imagine that the spurious letters between Paul and Seneca must be authentic because otherwise 226 JESUS IS DEAD somebody would have definitively put the hoax to rest? Look how hard it is to lay the ghost of Nicholas Notovitch‘s bogus Unknown Life of Jesus Christ which keeps getting revived after the public has forgotten both it and the refutations it garnered in earlier generations. ―People outside the area of Lystra may not have known enough about what happened in Lystra, or wanted to check it, but Christianity was making claims at varied points across the Empire, and there were also built in ‗fact checkers‘ stationed around the Empire who could say something about all the claims central to Jerusalem and Judaea — the Diaspora Jews.‖ Thus Acts‘ stories must be true. But this is unrealistic and anachronistic — fact checkers? No doubt there were local skeptics who, as in the case of Sabbatai Sevi‘s miracle reports, denied anything was really going on, but who listens to them? Not the true believers. Like Holding himself, they will mount any argument so as not to have to take threatening factors seriously. Rastafarians refuse to believe Haillie Selassie died. Premies refuse to believe their Satguru‘s mom fired him. Also, does Holding expect us to accept that the temple of Diana in Ephesus collapsed at the preaching of John because it says so in the Acts of John? The NT claims countless touch-points that could go under this list. An earthquake, a darkness at midday, the temple curtain torn in two, an execution, all at Passover (with the attendant crowds numbering in the millions), people falling out of a house speaking in tongues at Pentecost … — all in a small city and culture where word would spread fast. Word spreads fast — word of what? Events and non-events. Rumors spread as fast as facts, faster even. And besides, a little event called the fall of Jerusalem supervened between the time described and the writing of the gospels and Acts. Any witnesses pro or con were long dead and unavailable. ―In short, Christianity was highly vulnerable to inspection and disproof on innumerable points — any one of which, had it failed to prove out, would have snowballed into further doubt, especially given the previous factors above which would have been motive enough for any Jew or Gentile to say or do something.‖ Oh please! If such claims were even made in the 16. James Patrick Holding 227 time of apostolic contemporaries, we have no way of knowing they were not as thoroughly and adequately refuted as the claims of Joseph Smith were. Christian tradition and documents would hardly inform us of the fact. And once Jerusalem fell, as it had before the New Testament was written, all hope of corroboration is sheer fantasy. Sticks, Stones, and Names Holding mounts a version of the argument from martyrdom that is slightly more nuanced than the usual one, and for that we may give him credit. He admits that we have no reliable information as to the possible martyrdom of any specific early Christians. Most of the supposed data come from apocryphal, legendary sources like the fanciful Acts of Paul. But, following Robin Lane Fox, Holding widens the scope of social ostracism to which early Christians were subjected: ―rejection by family and society, relegation to outcast status. It didn‘t need to be martyrdom — it was enough that you would suffer socially and otherwise.‖ But this sword cuts both ways, if you are trying to determine its likely effect on the growth and consolidation of membership in a new religion. Such ostracism, when not spontaneously forthcoming at the hands of outsiders, is famously cultivated (even simulated) by cults that seek to cement the loyalty of new members by isolating them from natural family and old friends so they will bond more strongly with ―brothers and sisters in the faith.‖ This is why cult deprogramming was such a waste of time — it only drove the victim into the arms of the cult more deeply than ever. As for outright persecution, e.g., lynchings, seizure of property, just observe how the censured and persecuted Mormons reacted to such hardships — by succeeding fabulously! ―It is quite unlikely that anyone would have gone the distance for the Christian faith at any time — unless it had something tangible behind it.‖ Or, unless they believed it did, which no one doubts, and which is all Holding can ever show. 228 JESUS IS DEAD Monolithic Monotheism? Holding has already expressed his reluctance to credit any ancient believing in a crucified god. But what about the general belief that Jesus was God incarnate? Would that notion have proven so repugnant to ancient Jews and Gentiles that none of them could have seriously entertained it — unless either irrefutable evidence for the resurrection (how is this a proof for the Incarnation?) forced one to accept it? Holding, like C. S. Lewis and so many others who use the same argument, is stuck on the discredited notion that something like secondcentury rabbinic orthodoxy prevailed or even existed in the first centuries BCE and CE. A lot of weird stuff was going on in the Holy Land and elsewhere that would later be forced out under the post-70 hegemony of the rabbis. One might as well ignore the diversity of theologies in Islam and conclude that the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim was Allah incarnate, as the Druze maintain, or that Ali already was God in the flesh, as many Shi‗ite sects believe today. How could such beliefs have arisen in the context of absolutely and fiercely monotheistic Islam? Well, it turns out it wasn‘t so monolithic, and neither was first-century Judaism. ―And it would be no better in the Gentile world. The idea of a god condescending to material form, for more than a temporary visit, of sweating, stinking, going to the bathroom, and especially suffering and dying here on earth — this would be too much to swallow!‖ But exactly such was believed of the various demigods, like Asclepius, Pythagoras, and Apollonius. Besides, many early Christians did not believe in a genuine incarnation, but were Docetists, and it is far from certain that Paul was a real incarnationist, with his talk of Christ taking on the likeness of human flesh, the form of a servant, etc. I for one do not take for granted that orthodox definitions of incarnation can be assumed for the earliest Christians. Armchair Radicalism ―‗Neither male nor female, neither slave nor free.‘ You might be so used to applauding this sort of concept that you don‘t realize what a radical message it was for the ancient 16. James Patrick Holding 229 world. And this is another reason why Christianity should have petered out in the cradle if it were a fake.‖ It is a notorious matter of debate even among ‗literalist‘ evangelicals whether statements like the one Holding quotes meant any more than that all the listed categories had equal access to salvation, or whether they also denoted the abolition of traditional social distinctions among Christians. We don‘t know how progressive a face early Christians presented to their contemporaries. Besides, some of the pre-Socratic Sophists had already preached male-female equality, as did the Pythagoreans and Stoics. Moreover, Christians were by no means, except for Marcionites and Gnostics, quick to implement texts like the one just quoted from Galatians 3:28, as the Pastoral Epistles show. ―Note that this is not just to those in power or rich; it is an anachronism of Western individualism to suppose that a slave or the poor would have found Christianity‘s message appealing on this basis.‖ On the contrary, part of the appeal of such ‗cults‘ is that they offer esteem and honor to someone in the eyes of his brethren that he cannot achieve in the secular world. A slave could be a Christian leader. ―Christianity turned the norms upside down and said that birth, ethnicity, gender, and wealth — that which determined a person‘s honor and worth in this setting — meant zipola.‖ This is characteristic of all sectarian movements in their infancy. It is partly Know-Nothingism — because education is disparaged — and partly true egalitarianism, of course. But hardly unusual for a new religious movement. Buddhism, too, repudiated caste and succeeded. Is it the only true religion, too? The group-identity factor makes for another proof of Christianity‘s authenticity. In a group-oriented society, you took your identity from your group leader, and people needed the support and endorsement of others to support their identity … Moreover, a person like Jesus could not have kept a ministry going unless those around him supported him. A merely human Jesus could not have met this demand and must have provided convincing proofs of his power and authority to maintain a following, and for a movement to have started and survived well beyond him. A merely human Jesus would have had to live up to the expectations of others and would have been abandoned, or at least had to change horses, at the first sign of failure. 230 JESUS IS DEAD This is outrageous special pleading. What about the Buddha, John the Baptist, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and many others who were let down temporarily or permanently by their followers? And if there were anything special about such persistence, you needn‘t posit an incarnation. It would be adequate to say Jesus was strengthened by God. Were the indefatigable Paul and Peter God incarnate, too? ―If Christianity wanted to succeed, it should never have admitted that women were the first to discover the empty tomb or the first to see the Risen Jesus. It also never should have admitted that women were main supporters (Luke 8:3) or lead converts (Acts 16).‖ Similar traditions stem from the ritual mourning of women devotees of Tammuz (Ezekiel 8:14), Attis, Baal (Zechariah 12:11), etc. They are not supposed to be ―evidence for the resurrection‖ any more than the Oberammergau Passion Play is. And plenty of Mystery cults gave leadership roles to women. That‘s part and parcel of sectarianism and its first-generation rejection of mainstream norms. Holding appeals to the bumpkin status of Jesus, John, and Peter (Acts 4:13), and even of the early Christians generally, as another factor militating against the success of the new faith. On the contrary, the supposed illiteracy of prophets and founders is part of apologetic rhetoric, used of Jesus, Peter and John, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith so as to argue they must have been incapable of making this stuff up — ―Flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my father in heaven.‖ It is a common, predictable, and fictive topos, much like the common rhetorical trope that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 2:1–2, the claim to have renounced or to be inept at clever rhetoric, to throw readers off the track and set them up to fall for it. Besides, how would Christianity‘s being ‗real‘ or ‗fake‘ as to miracle claims have anything to do with the success or failure of its progress in society decades later? Wouldn‘t we have to look to the strengths of the movement at the time? Or are we to picture the Holy Ghost hypnotizing people as they heard the gospel? If instead Holding means they found ancient Christian apologetics so compelling, then he must reproduce them for us to be convinced by. He can‘t adopt the approach of the Catholic Church, a call for ―implicit faith,‖ second-hand faith in the faith of the early Christians. 16. James Patrick Holding 231 Standing Up for Jesus ―[Bruce] Malina and [Jerome] Neyrey note that in the ancient world, people took their major identity from the various groups to which they belonged. Whatever group(s) they were embedded in determined their identity. Changes in persons (such as Paul‘s conversion) were abnormal. Each person had certain role expectations they were expected to fulfill. The erasure or blurring of these various distinctions … would have made Christianity seem radical and offensive.‖ Right! Of course! That‘s what happens when people join new or different religions. Not everyone has the guts to do it (though many have long felt alienated, and have silently waited for some new option to present itself). Holding seems to be arguing that no one converts to new religions except by a miracle of God. Holding, then, insists that ancient people, much more part of a groupmentality than we are, would not have been likely to break with family and convention to join a new sect. I doubt this, in view of the cosmopolitan character of the Hellenistic Roman Empire when it would have been scarcely less difficult than it is today to run into members of other religions. There was already beginning to be what Peter Berger calls a ―heretical imperative‖ to choose for oneself. But this was probably less true for Palestinian Jews. And yet some did break with their ancestral creeds to joining Christianity. Or did they? Remember, Christianity would have begun among Jews. ―Faith in Jesus‖ may not even have amounted to a sect allegiance any more than did Rabbi Johannon ben-Zakkai‘s controversial belief in the messianic claims of Simon bar-Kochbah. But let us admit that the earliest Christians, as well as other venturesome souls who went out on a limb and joined a new sectarian group, had a lot of guts. All honor to them! But is this miraculous? I know Holding is ultimately trying to say that the evidence for the resurrection must have been pretty darn compelling to prompt such wrenching changes. But it isn‘t in our day, nor is it even the reason most people give for such conversions. And even supposing there were a few eyewitnesses of the resurrection, assuming it happened, how many of the early conversions can they have accounted for? And then, once you look at the next generation of second- and third- 232 JESUS IS DEAD hand converts, the air is out of the tire. ―Hey Crispus! I heard this really convincing guy talk about a vision he had!‖ That is lame. ―I guess you had to be there.‖ I see early conversions as motivated by something else than clincher apologetics. ―Have you believed because you have seen? Blessed are those who have not seen yet believe‖ (John 20:29). ―Without having seen him you love him; though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy‖ (1 Peter 1:8). Every Idle Word In the ancient world, we are told, everybody kept an eye on everybody else. Little escaped a neighbor‘s scrutiny. Surveillance and gossip were rife — much like today! ―So now the skeptic has another conundrum. In a society where nothing escaped notice, there was indeed every reason to suppose that people hearing the Gospel message would check against the facts — especially where a movement with a radical message like Christianity was concerned.‖ All salvationist sects required repentance and new birth. Jews required righteousness. What was so radical about it? ―The empty tomb would be checked.‖ Maybe it was, and maybe it was found occupied, and maybe Christians with their will to believe found it as easy to ignore it as Creationists do the fossil record. Many people, after all, did not come to faith. Maybe this is why. We, at any rate, are in no position to check it out. And Holding begs the question by supposing that the earliest Christians even told such a story. I agree with Burton L. Mack (A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins; The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins; and Who Wrote the New Testament?) and others who suggest that the empty tomb story is a late addition to the preaching. ―Matthew‘s story of resurrected saints would be checked out.‖ Two generations later? Not likely. Besides who would be reading/hearing this story but the members of Matthew‘s church in Antioch? ―Lazarus would be sought out for questioning.‖ What, sixty or seventy years after event? He would be dead again by that time, supposing he was ever a historical character at all, and not just borrowed from the Lazarus of the Luke 16 16. James Patrick Holding 233 parable. ―Excessive honor claims, such as that Jesus had been vindicated, or his claims to be divine, would have been given close scrutiny.‖ By whom? It is a safe bet Malina and his Social Science colleagues do not mean to depict the ancients as mirror-image apologists as Holding does. ―And later, converts to the new faith would have to answer to their neighbors.‖ How many hearers of the resurrection preaching, which may not at first have included the empty tomb anyway, would have been in any position at all to ―check it out‖? ―Master, I‘d like several months off so I can travel over to Palestine and see if I can verify a story I heard from some street corner preacher, that a man rose from the dead over there fifty years ago. I‘m hoping I can find his tomb, or maybe somebody who saw it a few days after the execution.‖ And if we are thinking of hypothetical hearers of empty tomb claims in CE 34 or so, what makes Holding think they would be any more inclined to ―check it out‖ than anybody in our day who heard Oral Roberts claiming he had witnessed a King Kong-sized apparition of Jesus in Tulsa one night? Besides, Holding‘s whole argument is misguided — as if one could adjudicate historical questions of what did happen by appealing to general tendencies of ancient temperaments and what would have happened. You can‘t just squeeze history out of peasant sociology, as Crossan does. He and Malina and the crew all tend to reduce Jesus to a mere instantiation of current trends, mores, etc. “I Believe Because It Is Absurd” ―Scholars of all persuasions have long recognized the ‗criteria [sic] of embarrassment‘ as a marker for authentic words of Jesus. Places where Jesus claims to be ignorant (not knowing the day or hour of his return; not knowing who touched him in the crowd) or shows weakness are taken as honest recollections and authentic (even where miracles stories often are not!).‖ Surely, Holding reasons, the framers of a merely concocted religion would take more care to make their imaginary savior deity look good! Hence no one would take the gospel Jesus seriously — unless they had to. 234 JESUS IS DEAD As usual, Holding grossly oversimplifies the historical situation. As John Warwick Montgomery observed, every gospel saying must have been offensive to somebody here or there in the early church. What offended Matthew (Jesus declining to be called ‗good,‘ for example) did not offend Mark, and we may be able to suggest reasons Mark would have created it. At least no criterion of embarrassment will shield it. Other embarrassing sayings may yet be damage control, fending off something yet more embarrassing. Certainly Schmiedel [1851-1935] was naïve in thinking no Christian would ever have fabricated Mark 13:32, where Jesus says he does not know the time of the end. Obviously the point is to correct the impression of the immediate context that he did claim to know and that he was wrong — as C. S. Lewis (―The World‘s Last Night‖) admitted. For Jesus to disclaim knowledge was better than having him mistaken. Junior Detectives Encouraging people to verify claims and seek proof (and hence discouraging their gullibility) is a guaranteed way to get slammed if you are preaching lies. Let us suppose for a minute that you are trying to start a false religion. In order to support your false religion, you decide to make up a number of historical (i.e., testable) claims, and then hope that nobody would check up on them. What is the most important thing to do, if you have made up claims that are provably false? Well, of course, you don‘t go around encouraging people to check up on your claims, knowing that if they do so you will be found out! Once a student in a class of mine insisted that the CEO of Proctor and Gamble had admitted on the Donahue TV show that he was a Satanist and that the corporate logo was Satanic symbolism as well. I told my student that this was an urban legend. Next time he brought in the crudely copied hand-bill he had read. It offered a New York City phone number and urged the reader to call and ask for the transcript of the show for such-and-such date. I called it. There was no connection at all with Donahue. The hoaxer had evidently assumed that the 16. James Patrick Holding 235 mere provision of this (fake) information would be so convincing as to deceive the reader into thinking just as my student did and just as Holding does. When the reader of 1 Corinthians 15 reads that Paul challenged him to go and ask the 500 brethren about their resurrection sightings, something Paul knew well the Corinthians would never have the leisure to do, he may be impressed, but Paul was taking no risks. The mere challenge in such a case functions as sufficient proof. Note that he provides no clue as to the names or locations of these supposed witnesses. In the late Syriac hagiography, The Life of John Son of Zebedee, the apostle similarly invites his hearers to check out the story of Jairus‘ daughter, resurrected by Jesus. The idea is that the reader will understand that once upon a time the facts could have been checked out, even though it is too late for him personally to do so. This all proves nothing and indeed invites suspicion of imposture where it might not have arisen otherwise. Holding imagines, with the eye of faith that calls thing which are not as though they were, that ―Throughout the NT, the apostles encouraged people to check seek proof and verify facts: 1 Thessalonians 5:21 [says to] ‗Prove all things; hold fast that which is good‘.‖ But this text refers, in context, to prophetic utterances which should not be dismissed out of hand but scrutinized, as in 1 Corinthians 14:29. ―And when fledgling converts heeded this advice, not only did they remain converts (suggesting that the evidence held up under scrutiny), but the apostles described them as ‗noble‘ for doing so: Acts 17:11 [says] ‗These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so‘.‖ But this is only a much later description of a dubiously historical scene and in any case means only ―See? The smart people agree with us!‖ And if Luke means us to take as representative the fanciful scripture ‗proofs‘ he has the apostles offer elsewhere in the book, we can hang it up right now. 236 JESUS IS DEAD Stigma and Dogma ―Christianity, as we can see, had every possible disadvantage as a faith … I propose that there is only one, broad explanation for Christianity overcoming these intolerable disadvantages, and that is that it had the ultimate rebuttal — a certain, trustworthy, and undeniable witness to the resurrection of Jesus, the only event which, in the eyes of the ancients, would have vindicated Jesus‘ honor and overcome the innumerable stigmata of his life and death. It had certainty that could not be denied; in other words, enough early witnesses [as in, the 500!] with solid and indisputable testimony (no ‗vision of Jesus in the sky‘ but a tangible certainly of a physically resurrected body).‖ Finally we are reduced to this: It was plenty convincing to those in a position to know the inside story, so you ought to be convinced, too! Sorry, but I can only look at the meager fragments of evidence that survive, and they do not look promising. If Holding deems the evidence for the resurrection to be so strong, then what is the point of all this business of ―disadvantages‖ and so forth? Why beat around the bush rather than getting to the real business at hand? It is not as if he is shy to discuss the evidence in its own right, but the argument considered here is not only fallacious; it is wholly superfluous even if he could be shown to be right in his other arguments for the resurrection. Glenn Miller’s “Were the Gospel Miracles Invented by the New Testament Authors?” Strike Up the Band hen I was cutting my teeth on the polemical literature of evangelical apologetics, the leading authors in the field (at least of historical apologetics) included F. F. Bruce, John Warwick Montgomery, and Josh McDowell. They formed a diverse group: Bruce a member of the Plymouth Brethren and a sophisticated New Testament scholar, Montgomery a Lutheran Theology professor, and McDowell a Campus Crusade for Christ evangelist largely derivative of others like Bruce, Montgomery, and still earlier apologists like Wilbur Smith and Paul Little. My study of apologetics eventually pointed my way out of evangelical Christianity altogether, and I documented my case in a book, Beyond Born Again. I entered the lists of debates on biblical accuracy and the historical Jesus only some years later, in the late 1990s, and by then a new generation of apologists (I suppose, the generation I had once planned on being a part of!) had taken the stage, including William Lane Craig, Ravi Zacharias, Craig Blomberg, Glenn Miller, Gary Habermas, and Greg Boyd. As I began to delve into their pages, I wondered if any of them had come up with anything new. I hoped I should be open-minded enough to be convinced if they proved to be convincing. To tell the truth, I can only say I was amazed that their case had not advanced by an inch. As one, these new defenders of the faith alike hauled out the same old arguments, just as lame as they ever seemed to me. One supposes they were trotting out the same shelf-worn wares to young audiences unfamiliar with them. I think of the NBC W 238 JESUS IS DEAD slogan to promote their summer reruns: ―If you haven‘t seen it, it‘s new to you!‖ Glenn Miller is typical of these very bright writers and debaters in that his work is a galling waste of time and talents that, freed from the blinders of dogma, might be better applied to genuine biblical criticism. But then again, many of today‘s critics began as would-be apologists, and, like me, decided ―if you can‘t beat ‘em, you might as well join ‘em.‖ Maybe Glenn Miller will eventually see it our way, too. Miller has certainly done his homework in his essay ―Were the Gospel Miracles Invented by the New Testament Authors?‖ (http://www.christianthinktank.com/mqx.html). And yet I find myself thinking that, like his less sophisticated brethren, he still tends to dismiss critical approaches to the gospel material by amassing a priori arguments, as if to disqualify critics‘ arguments in advance instead of having to deal with them head-on. This is not at first evident, nor am I suggesting he means to do this, for Miller does try to dissect and to address critical theories in great detail. But, for instance, with regard to the claim that the gospels are myth, he lets formal categories get in the way of analyzing the gospels, asking if the gospels meet this and that possible definition of ―myths,‖ and demonstrating that they do not. When he is finished, I am left with the distinct impression that the issues are a bit more subtle than that. To wit … Myth Perceptions I am delighted to see Glenn Miller bring into the discussion the fascinating book by Classicist Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe their Myths? (1988). Veyne (pp. 17–18, 88) says they did not believe them in the same sense that they believed in the factual reality of recent, datable historical events. Instead, they vaguely pictured the ‗events‘ of myth as having happened somewhere in the distant past, something like the notion of Heilsgeschichte as used by Rudolf Bultmann (Jesus Christ and Mythology) and Gerhard von Rad (Old Testament Theology). No one would have thought to ask when in history this or that exploit of Apollo occurred. It happened ‗once upon a time,‘ in an altogether different mental category. Miller rightly points out that the gospels do not fall under this category of myth for the 17. Glenn Miller 239 simple reason that the foundational saga of Christianity is set in the era of Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate. True enough. But that is not the whole point. We still have to reckon with the relationship and the difference between myths and legends. As Jaan Puhvel (Comparative Mythology, 1989, p. 2) sums it up, there are two stages of evolution in the transmission of fantastic tales in antiquity. The earlier stage is that of myth proper, raw myth as I like to call it. The protagonists are the gods themselves. The stories happen ‗once upon a time‘ or at the dawn of time. There may be Trickster animals who, it is taken for granted, may speak with human beings. The Yahwist‘s Eden story would be such a myth. The subsequent stage is when myth becomes legend through a transformative retelling: the old stories are set into historical time. Gods and Tricksters become mortals, albeit supernaturally endowed mortals, epic heroes, culture heroes. The Hercules stories would fit in here. Hercules was originally simply the sun. But he has gone a good way toward historicization. His rays have become his poison arrows and the mane of the Nemean Lion, which he strips off and wears. The houses of the Zodiac have become his twelve labors, etc. Later still, as Veyne notes (p. 32), Herodotus tries to establish when in history Hercules would have, or must have, lived. Plutarch does the same with the grain and desert deities Osiris and Set, making them royalty in ancient Egypt. The whole trend toward ‗Euhemerism‘ as far back as the Sophist Prodicus partakes of the same process, albeit at a more reflective stage. (Euhemerus assumed that behind all mythic characters lay historical figures, a general behind a war god, a doctor behind a healing god, etc.) Though Euhemerists imagined historical individuals had been mythicized, the truth was that they themselves were historicizing mythic and legendary characters. Much of the Old Testament appears to me to represent this historicized stage. Jubal, elsewhere attested as the Canaanite god of music, has become the culture hero who invented the lyre and pipe. Gad, known as the Near Eastern god of luck, has become a tribal patriarch. Baal has become Abel. Joshua the son of Oannes/Dagon has become Moses‘ successor. Several sun gods have become patriarchs, ethnic stereotypes, and heroes: 240 JESUS IS DEAD Samson, whose name simply means ‗the sun,‘ Nimrod, Elijah, Moses, Isaac, Esau, and Enoch. Abraham, Elisha, and Jacob were at first moon gods (Ignaz Goldziher, Mythology among the Hebrews and Its Historical Development, 1877, reprinted 1967, pp. 32, 104-161ff). Ishtar Shalmith becomes ‗the Shulammite‘ (Song of Songs 6:13). Eve/Hebe, like her Greek sister Pandora, begins as the Great Mother, but she is demoted to a primordial Lucy Ricardo. And so on. Sometimes attempts to fix a historical period, à la Herodotus, were not stable; there was more than one attempt. For instance, Cain is set in various historical periods, which is why one episode, where he marries a wife (Genesis 4:17), presupposes a populated earth, while another (Genesis 4:1) makes him the first son of Adam and Eve. Ezekiel, who lived during the Babylonian Exile, thinks of Daniel as a figure of great wisdom sharing the remote antiquity of Noah (Ezekiel 14:14, 20), while the later Book of Daniel places Daniel himself in the Exile, contemporary with Ezekiel. This is the distinction we must draw when we approach the gospels as deposits of myth. They appear now in a historical setting, but the issue is whether they are perhaps historicized myths. For instance, George A. Wells (The Jesus of the Early Christians and others) and Earl Doherty (The Jesus Puzzle), the great Mythicists of our time, argue that the earliest Christians, whose beliefs are on display in the early Epistles, worshipped a savior who had either (à la Wells) lived in the mythic long ago, or (as per Doherty) had never lived on earth at all, but died and rose in a heavenly world, that of the Gnostic Archons. Similarly, Barbara G. Walker (The Women‟s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, articles ―Jesus Christ‖ and ―Mary Magdalene‖) reads the gospels as historicizations of very ancient nature-religion myths, the kind we read of in James Fraser‘s The Golden Bough. It would have been a subsequent development for Christians to attempt to fix a historical period for Jesus, for church-political reasons well explained by Arthur Drews (The Christ Myth, 1910, reprinted 1998, pp. 271–272; cf. Elaine Pagels, who makes the same point in connection with the objectification of the resurrection in The Gnostic Gospels, 1979, pp. 3–27). This would account for the varying attempts to do so. 17. Glenn Miller 241 The Talmud and various Jewish-Christians place Jesus 100 years BC (G. R. S. Mead, Did Jesus Live 100 BC?). Irenaeus (Against Heresies 2:22:6) thinks Jesus was crucified in Claudius‘ reign, which he harmonizes with the gospels by making Jesus nearly fifty years old at his death. The Gospel of Peter (1:2) holds Herod Antipas responsible for his death, while Mark blames it on Pilate. If Jesus were a person of recent historical memory, how can we explain such uncertainty? It would fit better with a trend toward historicizing a mythic figure. Alan Dundes (―The Hero Myth and the Life of Jesus,‖ in Robert A. Segal, ed., In Quest of the Hero) similarly shows how extensively the gospel life of Jesus parallels the standard mythic hero structure, implying that myths have been historicized (or that a historical character has been mythicized, the facts getting lost in the haze of hero-worship). And this is where we ought to see the relevance of mythemes from the sacred kingship ideology (see Sigmund Mowinkel‘s The Psalms in Israel‟s Worship and He That Cometh, as well as Aubrey R. Johnson, Sacral Kingship in Ancient Israel; Ivan Engnell, Studies in Divine Kingship in the Ancient Near East, and the many works of Geo Widengren.). Miller mentions this, then discounts it. He says that this ancient myth of civic and cosmic renewal may have fit ancient Babylonian and Canaanite monarchies (actually, Hellenistic ones, too) but it does not fit with a figure like Jesus. To apply it to Jesus is to rip it out of the only historical context in which it made sense. Again, I don‘t agree, because we need only remind ourselves that the messiah was the sacred king, albeit demystified to some extent by the rabbis once Judaism had embraced monotheism some time after the prophets introduced it. Originally the king of Judah was a god on earth (Psalm 45:6; Isaiah 9:6), or the son of one (Psalm 2:7), or of Yahweh and Shahar (Psalm 110:3, ―from Dawn‘s womb‖). Such a king ritually reenacted the mythic victory of the god whose vicar he was, the victory and resurrection of Baal, Marduk, Dumuzi, etc. This was how the god had, in primordial times, secured his kingship (Psalm 74:12–17; 89:5–14), and how in historical times, the king renewed his own heavenly mandate. Once the tree of Jesse was chopped down by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC, these myths were officially set aide, waiting, along with kingship itself, to be 242 JESUS IS DEAD renewed. When Jesus was understood as King of the Jews, no wonder it all came flooding back in. (This, whether Jesus was a historical or originally a mythic figure: the messiah association would have placed him within this conceptual world.) Near Myth A related issue: Miller notes that genuine Christian myths, which he says do not exist in the gospels, might be expected to portray Jesus wrestling with Zeus, chatting with Marduk, etc. But are we not on pretty much the same unstable ground when Jesus is shown trading scripture quotes with the very Devil and the latter miraculously teleports him all over Palestine (Matthew 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13) — or when demons (not just demoniacs) threaten to blow his cover (Mark 1:34)? Miller may object that the miraculous and the mythic are not the same thing. But here we begin to see why they are. Myth, as Bultmann said so well, is the representation of the transcendent in objectifying terms (Bultmann, ―New Testament and Mythology,‖ in Hans Werner Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth, pp. 10–11, 35, 44; Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology, 1958, pp. 19-20). Miller resorts to the old apologists‘ contention (maintained by his present-day colleagues, and given new impetus recently from the unlikely quarters of G. W. Bowersock, Fiction As History: Nero to Julian (Sather Classical Lectures, Vol 58) and Jonathan Z. Smith [see his article ―Dying and Rising Gods‖ in Mircea Eliade, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion]) that relevant myths like that of the dying and rising gods and later novelistic reflections of them in the Hellenistic Romances (see B. P. Reardon, ed., Collected Ancient Greek Novels; Reardon, The Form of Greek Romance; Tomas Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity; Niklas Holtzberg, The Ancient Novel: An Introduction; J.R. Morgan and Richard Stoneman, eds., Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context) were borrowed from the Christian gospel by pagan imitators, that the direction of influence was opposite that usually claimed by critics. But, as I have argued in detail elsewhere (Deconstructing Jesus, 2000, chapter 3), this is ruled out at once both by specific pre-Christian evidence of beliefs in the resurrection of Osiris, 17. Glenn Miller 243 Baal, Tammuz, and Attis and by the simple fact that the second-century Apologists admitted that the pagan versions were the older — the result, as they desperately reasoned, of Satanic counterfeiting in advance. No one would mount such an argument if there had been any reason to think the pagans had borrowed them from Christians. Bowersock‘s derivation of the ‗apparent death‘ element of the novels from the Christian gospels seems to me even more outrageous — nothing but special pleading. The religious roots of the novels and their tales of the providence of the gods are plain; so plain, in fact, that some scholars regard the novels as popular religious propaganda for the cults mentioned in them. That may or may not be, but I find no hint of Christian influence. What I think we can see, as I have argued elsewhere (―Implied Reader Response and the Evolution of Genres: Transitional Stages Between the Ancient Novels and the Apocryphal Acts,‖ Hervormde Teologiese Studies, 53/4, 1997), is just which pagan elements in the novels were seized upon by Christian readers and lifted for reinterpreted use in their own version of the genre, the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. Did pagans never charge Christians with concocting a purely mythic Jesus, as Miller asserts? Of course they did, as the Apologists of the early church themselves attest, as they replied to skeptics who rejoiced, as today, to list all the parallels between Jesus, Hermes, Apollo, etc. Miller points to skeptics like Celsus and the rabbis who were willing to grant a historical Jesus who performed miracles. On this basis, Miller claims, early opponents of Christianity viewed it not as myth but as magic — charlatanry. But clearly both criticisms were in the air. Nor can one read 2 Peter 1:16 as anything but a rebuttal to some who were charging precisely that the gospel episodes were ―mythoi‖ in some sense recognized by the ancients, though the intention here is apparently ‗myth‘ as ‗hoax and imposture,‘ a different issue, treated elsewhere by Miller. But then again, the pagans who made such charges probably viewed the traditional Greek myths as humbug and priestcraft à la Bel and the Dragon. Miller does not seem to want, despite some comments, to deny that ancient pagans considered gospel events to be myths. His point is that Christians in rejecting such criticism 244 JESUS IS DEAD showed they did not take the same stories as fictive. But this later Christian reading doesn‘t tell us one way or the other how the gospel tradents and writers intended their work. Why may they not have understood the gospels as Origen did? As filled with ―thousands‖ of historical impossibilities, all planted there to lead the reader deeper, into the real allegorical meaning? It seems to me that Miller‘s verdict on mythology in the gospels would come out a bit different if he compared them with the form-critical categories of Herman Gunkel in his great Genesis commentary. Though, as we now read them, the gospel stories are legends, i.e., historicized myths, we can still see what Miller denies, namely didactic intent, as when Peter walks on water, founders, and is rescued by Jesus, surely a comment on the Christian duty to keep one‘s eyes fixed on Jesus in the midst of life‘s storms. Ceremonial etiologies abound, as in the feeding stories and the Emmaus epiphany, which have long been read (correctly, I think) as Eucharistic stories. The ‗Suffer the little children‘ pericope is, à la Oscar Cullmann (Baptism in the New Testament, Studies in Biblical Theology # 1, pp. 76–79), a piece of infant-baptismal liturgy. The various stories in which this or that apostle or kinsman of Jesus come in for a drubbing are surely to be seen as analogous to the ethnological myths of the Old Testament, memorializing and accounting for national and tribal rivalries in the story-teller‘s day by using the ancient personages as political cartoon symbols for the latter-day factions. Miller says that historians seem agreed these days that the gospels are intended as something on the order of ancient hero biographies. Indeed so. But this says nothing about the historicity of their contents. Do the miracles of Pythagoras in his various biographies, much less those of Apollonius of Tyana, guarantee their accuracy? Maybe all Miller means is that the episodes in them would not have been intended by the biographers as fiction. But again we cannot read their minds. After all, Mason L. Weems, the first biographer of George Washington, admitted he concocted incidents like boy George throwing the silver dollar across the Potomac and admitting to having chopped the cherry tree because he thought they epitomized the character of his subject more than any actual 17. Glenn Miller 245 facts. These tall tales appeared in his Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington, published in 1800, a single year after Washington‘s death. Fear of Fiction I believe that conservative/evangelical/apologetical approaches to the historicity of the gospels (or lack of it) are severely hampered, if not altogether thrown off course, by an unexamined presupposition, namely that if a gospel narrative, with the exception of Jesus‘ parables, were to be judged fictional, that would make it a hoax and a scam. Indeed, I once had a student who did not make an exception of the parables. When I ventured as a commonplace observation that Jesus was making up stories to get his point across, this lady, eyes flashing, informed me that I was calling Jesus a liar and would face his ire on the Day of Judgment! I do not mean to caricature the mainstream conservative position, but my anecdote does seem to me to put a finger on the unsuspected arbitrariness of the conservative position. Why should one insist that any narrative, even one about Jesus if not told by Jesus, must be historical, or else it is a lie? I argue in an essay of some length (―New Testament Narrative as Old Testament Midrash‖ in Jacob Neusner, ed., The Midrashim: An Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation in Judaism, Brill, 2004) that virtually every single gospel narrative can be shown with real plausibility to have been rewritten, with no factual basis, from (in most cases) the Septuagint and (in a few cases) from Homer. Acts adds Euripides‘ Bacchae and Josephus. Though I will shortly consider Glenn Miller‘s arguments that the early gospel tradents and evangelists could not or would not have created fictive Jesus material, let me first register my vote that it seems like they did. I am reminded of a favorite hadith about the great evangelistic preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Once an admirer asked Spurgeon, a Baptist, if he believed in infant baptism. His reply: ―Believe in it? Why, man, I‘ve seen it!‖ I see a number of features in the gospel texts implying that their writers were not trying to write factual histories. Most obvious is the simple fact of their creative redaction of each 246 JESUS IS DEAD other‘s previous texts. No one can compare Matthew or Luke, much less John, with Mark and come away thinking that the evangelists did not feel utter freedom in retelling the story, rewriting the supposedly sacrosanct teaching of Jesus, the events of the Passion, etc. They wrote, rewrote, and edited in such a way as to suggest that they understood themselves to be amending sacred texts, not ―falsifying historical records.‖ They were doing what the liberal revisers of the New RSV or the Revised English Bible or the Inclusive Language New Testament did when they added ―and sisters‖ to Pauline salutations, changed male singulars to inclusive plurals, etc. They did not mean to tell naïve readers that the ancient writers actually wrote this. They were instead approaching an instrument of liturgy and instruction and trying to sharpen or update it. So were the evangelists. This is why Luke changed Mark‘s thatched roof (implicit in Mark 2:4) to a tiled roof (Luke 5:19), for the ease of his readers. This is why scribes added ―and fasting‖ onto Mark 9:29. Sad experience showed that deaf-mute epileptics did not necessarily respond to the treatment of simple prayer after all, so the text had to be updated. They were interested in the text of a sacred book, not the question of exactly what Jesus had said one day. And the same would be true in the New Testament rewriting of the Old Testament narratives. They were not trying to fake or fabricate a spurious history of Jesus in order to deceive people. No, they were trying to create a Christian version of the Jewish Scripture. It would have Christian versions of familiar Bible stories. We simply do not face the alternative of ―hoax or history,‖ which is a blatant example of the bifurcation fallacy. How do the evangelists deal with the resurrection? In such a manner as to suggest that it is some sort of spiritual reality rather than a concrete piece of history. For example, when the Lukan Jesus reveals himself to the disciples in the breaking of the bread — and vanishes into invisibility (Luke 24:30-31) — surely we are to learn the lesson that we meet the Risen One invisibly present at the communion table. The ‗literal‘ point is a figurative resurrection. In John‘s ‗Doubting Thomas‘ story (John 20:24–29), Jesus speaks to Thomas, who obviously stands for the reader, not lucky enough to have been on the scene, and he speaks an aside 17. Glenn Miller 247 to the audience: ―Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.‖ This is a stage whisper, as when a character in a movie, e.g., Ralphie in A Christmas Story, turns to the audience and winks. We know we are watching fiction. The same is true of Matthew‘s farewell of Jesus to the disciples after the resurrection (Matthew 28:20). The missionaries who will carry the gospel to the nations are not the twelve, long dead in any case, but the eager missionaries from the evangelist‘s own community, probably in Antioch. And when he promises them his invigorating presence until the close of the age, instead of an ascension, we ought to recognize a seamless transition between the literary character of Jesus and the experience of the reader. It is well portrayed at the end of the movie version of Godspell, when the disciples carry the body of the slain Jesus around the corner, and then from around all city corners streams a flood of new Christians. That is how Jesus rose, and Matthew knew it. How could Luke think nothing amiss when he has the ascension of Jesus take place on Easter evening in his gospel (24:1, 13, 33, 36, 44, 50–51), but forty days later in Acts 1:3 —unless he was not even trying to record ―the way things happened‖? The same is true for his three versions of Paul‘s conversion (Acts 9:1–19; 22:4–21; 26:9–20). They contradict themselves intentionally, for sound literary reasons, in order to defamiliarize the story so that it sounds fresh each time. Mad Rush to Midrash Glenn Miller, in another admirably erudite discussion — this time of Jewish midrashic and haggadic techniques — seeks to rebut the claim made by some New Testament scholars that in freely amplifying Jesus stories, the evangelists/tradents were simply following in the footsteps of the rabbis. Miller‘s first objection to this claim is that midrashic exposition is a later development, after the first century. Hence it would have been unavailable as a precedent or guideline for Christian creation of edifying fiction. Second, midrashim were expositions only of specific scriptural texts, and those only from the Pentateuch. Other ancient Jewish expansions of scripture, he tells us, 248 JESUS IS DEAD rarely involved ascribing miracles to biblical heroes and even downplayed such motifs. First, let me say that in every case of a gospel tale seeming to be a rewrite of a tale of Elijah/Elisha, Moses, David, etc., we can easily determine what specific text of the Septuagint the Christian writer was using as a springboard (see Randel Helms, Gospel Fictions; Thomas Louis Brodie, Luke the Literary Interpreter: Luke-Acts as a Systematic Rewriting and Updating of the Elijah-Elisha Narrative in 1 and 2 Kings, Ph.D. dissertation, 1981). I do not think the Jesus stories are cut from whole cloth. Just as Miller says the rabbis employed traditional material to expand on a biblical passage, so I am saying the Christian gospel scribes used the Old Testament (and Homer, Euripides, etc.). Sometimes they were expanding on earlier gospel material, as Heinz Joachim Held (―Matthew as Interpreter of the Markan Miracle Stories,‖ in Günther Bornkamm, Gerhard Barth, and Hans Joachim Held, Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew, 1963, p. 165–300) shows Matthew retooled Markan miracle stories to make them into churchly lessons of faith and prayer. Similarly, Matthew (27:19) posits Mrs. Pilate‘s nightmare to account for the otherwise puzzling urgency of Pilate in Mark‘s gospel to get Jesus off the hook. To satisfy reader curiosity over the amount of money Mark said Judas received, Matthew (26:15; 27:3–10) went to Zechariah 11:12–13, and so on. Miller will deny that any of this is technically midrash, since Elijah and Elisha are not the Pentateuch and the Septuagint is not the Massoretic Text. But so what? To use the term ‗midrash‘ for what the gospel creators were doing is to borrow a term that sheds light, at least because of close similarities with what the familiar term denotes. Miller likes to point out how the gospel stories do not fit the precise conventions of Greek myth or Hebrew midrash, as if that meant the categories are not appropriate or helpful. In this he resembles, I think, those literary critics blasted by Wayne Booth who condemn genre transgressions as the mark of a bad example of a would-be member of the genre in question (The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed., 1983, p. 31). Booth, along with Tzvetan Todorov (―The Typology of Detective Fiction,‖ in his The Poetics of Prose, pp, 42-52), notes that genres evolve precisely by means of 17. Glenn Miller 249 ‗transgression‘ of genre conventions. What we are seeing in the Christian rewriting of Septuagint stories as Jesus stories is something like a mutant strain of what was happening over in the cousin religion of Rabbinic Judaism. An apple is not an orange. Neither is a tangerine, but it is helpful to compare a tangerine to an orange if you are trying to describe a tangerine. It is more helpful than comparing it to an apple or to saying that, since it is like nothing else exactly, it does not exist. Again I say that Glenn Miller appears content to wield a priori considerations as clubs to bludgeon critical analyses of the gospels. In order to establish and define the Jewish practice of expositional Bible expansion, he is happy to marshal numerous fine analyses of Josephus, the Book of Jubilees, the Pseudo-Philonic Biblical Antiquities, and so forth. How does he know what they did with the Bible? It is because of (someone‘s) inductive study of their treatment of the underlying biblical texts. He does not start with what they must have or should have done. But when we get to the gospels, we are warned that their authors cannot have been doing this or that because no rabbis were doing it. I realize he seems at first merely to be saying ―Whatever they were doing, it wasn‘t, e.g., midrash.‖ But his larger project is the process of elimination. He will eventually get around to telling us that the gospel creators cannot have been doing anything but telling us the police report. ―The facts, ma‘am, just the facts.‖ I would rather begin with a close scrutiny of the gospels to see what they seem to be doing with their sources. I would like to begin with my own comparisons between the gospels and their possible underlying sources. But Miller seeks to head that off at the pass. For instance, in the case of Dennis R. MacDonald‘s claim that Mark is dependant upon Homer (The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark) Miller laughs him off with the note that, if the gospels really made any use of Homer, surely Celsus would have noticed it and mentioned it. That proves just exactly nothing. It is a strange kind of appeal to authority. MacDonald‘s work is full of references to ancient reader responses to Homer that make it look ever more likely that Mark‘s work embodies his own ancient readings of Homer. Maybe Celsus just didn‘t get it. Whether he did or didn‘t doesn‘t save us the trouble of 250 JESUS IS DEAD seeing for ourselves if maybe the evidence tends that way. It‘s always possible that we are only getting MacDonald‘s readings of Homer this way, but that‘s what we would have to show on a reading-by-reading basis. We can‘t just obviate the argument by appealing to Celsus. Silly Rabbi! Magic Tricks are for God’s Kids! Next Glenn Miller explores the proposal of Geza Vermes (Jesus the Jew), and glancingly that of Morton Smith (Jesus the Magician). He has the acuity to see that the two books are related, as some seem not to. Vermes sees the historical Jesus as resembling certain charismatic Jewish holy men of the immediate pre- and post-Christian centuries, including Honi the CircleDrawer and Hanina ben-Dosa, famous legendary rain-makers. Smith shows how the gospel Jesus fits the pattern of Hellenistic magicians at many points. But Miller is, I think, asking a slightly different question from the one Vermes and Smith want to raise. Miller wonders whether the gospel writers or story-tellers fabricated miracles and ascribed them to Jesus in order to conform him to the desirable stereotype of such a wonder-worker, whereas Vermes and Smith are talking about a possible historical Jesus who, as Bultmann said, must have done deeds he and his contemporaries understood as miracles (Jesus and the Word, 1958, p. 173). Miller rightly notes the disdain and suspicion of the early rabbis regarding claims of contemporary miracles. Even when, as in the case of the famous heretic Eliezar ben Hyrkanus, the miracle-worker was acknowledged to be a righteous man, and even when some of his halakhic rulings were considered valuable, such figures were marginalized, as Jacob Neusner shows (Why No Gospels in Rabbinic Judaism?) because they had become centers of religious attention in their own right. Venerated sages with unexceptionable opinions tended to be merged almost anonymously into the mass of ‗our rabbis‘ on the assumption that the Truth of the Torah is no one‘s pet theory or doctrine. Miracles would function as credentials for innovations (or heresies as the mainstream would view them). The notion of there being no new prophets or new miracle workers was 17. Glenn Miller 251 a doctrine aimed at protecting the conventional orthodoxy, preventing the boat from getting rocked and capsized. Such a doctrine does not tell us that in fact there were no prophets or miracle-workers, but rather the opposite: the establishment wanted nothing to do with them. The situation is precisely parallel to that of Dispensationalists and Calvinists vis-à-vis the Pentecostal/Charismatic movements in our own day. This is relevant in a way I am not sure Miller grasps. As Neusner sees, there are no gospels in Rabbinic Judaism for the reasons already mentioned, and he explains the existence of Christian gospels about Jesus by the fact of Christian devotion to Jesus, in principle like that of their followers to Eliezar ben Hyrkanus and others, bringing the new movement to a crossroads in which Jesus assumed the centrality hitherto assigned to the Torah. The lack of Rabbinic ‗gospels‘ about charismatic sages Miller seems to take to denote a purely historical conservatism, and he infers that the gospels with all their miracles of Jesus must represent, instead, simple historical reporting by people who must have had a similar conservative historiographical (not theological) disdain for bogus miracles. The difference was, they found to their surprise that there were loads of miracles to record. I think that is the whole trend of all Miller‘s individual analyses gathered here. But Neusner shows us how miracle stories garnishing the lives of sages marked them off as loose cannons outside the canon. Figures like Jesus were spinning off the Jewish axis on a tangent. Miracle-ascription is a theologicalsymbolic function of this dynamic. Even the cases he cites, Vermes‘s cases as well, represent a degree of ‗rabbinization‘ (as William Scott Green calls it, ―Palestinian Holy Men: Charismatic Leadership and the Rabbinic Tradition,‖ Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt 2.19.619–647) — a later attempt to draw some of these figures back into the mainstream, and undoubtedly the key feature (rightly spotlighted by Miller) of their asking God for the miracle instead of being the immediate authors of it themselves, is meant to subordinate them to God, and to orthodoxy. Originally they would have been more on the order of shamans, working miracles by their own power. Interestingly, in Islamic tradition, where Jesus has again become a mediator 252 JESUS IS DEAD of God instead of a God in his own right, there is a rainmaking story in which Jesus has someone else call upon the Father to be heard for his righteousness. Just the kind of distancing we miss in the gospels. As for Morton Smith, I am a loss to understand how Miller can dismiss so casually the parallels in technique that Smith and others (see John M. Hull, Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition) adduce, e.g., the use of spit and clay to heal (Mark 7:32–35; 8:22–26; John 9:6–7) as gestures of imitative magic. The biggest surprise to me in this section of Glenn Miller‘s essay is this statement: ―The mass of later [rabbinical] miracle stories are generally considered to be deliberate fabula, designed for teaching, preaching, and illustration (like a colorful parable might be).‖ Bingo! This, applied to the gospels, is form criticism in a nutshell. Why is it so hard to imagine that the gospel miracle tales may belong to the same species? Because they are somewhat earlier? What does that have to do with it? We may not be able to show that the gospel writers would have gotten the idea from hearing such rabbinical fabulae, but is that really important? I should think the relevant point is whether rabbinical literature offers us helpful historical parallels and literary analogies, not whether they enable us to trace out genealogical trees. True Romance I must say I reject almost completely what Miller says in his section about the Hellenistic Romances and their possible relation to gospel origins. With Bowersock, Miller (for obvious reasons) wants desperately to date the novels as late as he can and make them dependent upon the gospels or Christian preaching. But as he himself admits, three of the five major Greek novels may date from the mid-first century CE to the middle of the second. While we need not assume any gospel writer read and copied scenes from any of these novels, the closeness in time is easily enough to posit the likelihood of shared fictive themes. Just compare the empty tomb scenes in John‘s Gospel and Chariton‘s Chaereas and Callirhoe and 17. Glenn Miller 253 tell me if they are not astonishingly similar. I don‘t care who borrowed what from whom. The point is that such narrative features are shown not to require a historical origin or to represent historical reporting. When you keep in mind the recurrence in the novels of premature burial in a rich man‘s tomb, escape from the tomb thanks to the appearance of tombrobbers, the crucifixion of the hero (not just endangerment, mind you, but actual crucifixion!) and his escape, and the reunion of the hero and heroine in a scene where each first assumes the other must be a ghost — well, I just don‘t see how you can dismiss the novels as irrelevant to the gospels. The types of plots are different, granted, but Philostratus‘ Life of Apollonius of Tyana is another case of a novel sharing the gospel plot outline, with an annunciation, miraculous conception, itinerant wandering, healings and exorcisms, confrontation with a tyrant, miraculous deliverance, ascension into heaven, reappearance to assure the faithful, etc. It will not do to dismiss Philostratus as a gospel imitator, since the resemblances, though many and striking (which is my whole point, of course) are not similar enough to imply borrowing, unlike, e.g., the fish miracle of John 21 which must be directly based on a similar Pythagoras story. Philostratus‘ work is third-century, but Apollonius lived in the first, and some of his legends presumably stem from that period, too. Besides, as I argue in two chapters of my The Widow Traditions in LukeActs, we can find traces in one of Luke‘s sources of a Joanna story very similar to the conversion stories of celibate women in the Apocryphal Acts, which all scholars admit are derived from the Romance genre. Miller refuses to recognize any reflection in the gospels of the important contemporary trend of Homeric rewrites. I just can‘t see how one can sweep away the books of Dennis MacDonald on this subject. I am not convinced by all of the cases of Homeric borrowing he finds in Mark, but to dismiss them all is like a Creationist saying that God didn‘t actually cause one species to evolve from another: he just created them to look as if they did! Does Miller not feel the need to respond to the powerful case Richard I. Pervo makes (in his wonderful Profit With Delight: 254 JESUS IS DEAD The Literary Genre of the Acts of the Apostles) that the canonical Acts have much more in common with both the Apocryphal Acts and the Romances than scholars have been willing (for reasons of canon-apologetics) to admit? I think he has carried the day. I can only say that in the deliberations of the Acts Seminar of the Westar Institute, we find no paradigm for the study of Acts so illuminating as that it is historical fiction. By saying so, I do not mean to invoke authority. No, I mean that it is only close scrutiny of the text itself that will enable us to form judgments, not a priori assertions about what would or would not have been possible for ancient writers. Neither the Acts Seminar nor Glenn Miller can save the interested individual that trouble. Crucial to this section and the next, on Divine Men, is a strategic error, the failure to grasp the nature of an ideal type, a textbook definition or category that groups recurrent features of various phenomena, setting aside their differences. One may dispute the aptness of such an ideal type and propose a better one. But to do so would require one to show not that the differences between the specific cases are greater than the similarities (that will almost always be true), but that the most important features of the phenomena match those of the members of some other class, some other type, and have thus been misclassified. Because the gospels and Acts are different at several points from the novels does not mean they do not at least overlap them as cousin genres, close enough to share themes or to have influenced one another. Simply Divine Because some ‗divine men‘ (a category of ancient wonder-workers into which Jesus is often placed) specialize in this rather than that type of miracle, some do more miracles than others, or because divinity is predicated of Moses and Pythagoras in somewhat different senses hardly means these figures, as portrayed in Hellenistic literature, do not all qualify as divine men. You can‘t tell me that such differences — which surprise no one — outweigh the recurrence of numerous themes such as those compiled by Charles H. Talbert in his What Is a Gospel? Does it mean nothing for Pythagoras, Apollonius, Alexander, 17. Glenn Miller 255 Plato, Jesus and others to share miraculous nativities and so many other features such as Talbert surveys? We might as well join apologist Leon Morris (Apocalyptic, 1972) in denying that the Revelation of John belongs with other apocalypses like 4 Ezra because they are not exactly alike at every point. Sorry, Leon, there is a larger genre of apocalypses. And sorry Glenn, there is a larger category of aretalogies. The ancients did not seem to have any trouble lumping such figures together, as when Celsus recalls the divine men he saw in action in his Near Eastern travels: ―I am God or God‘s Son or a divine spirit! I have come, for the destruction of the world is at hand! And because of your misdeeds, O mankind, you are about to perish! But I will save you! Soon you will see me ascend with heavenly power. Blessed is he who now worships me! Upon all others I will cast eternal fire, on all cities and countries … But those who believe in me I will protect forever.‖ (quoted in Origen, Contra Celsum 7:9). This sounds very much like Jesus as portrayed in the gospels. And Celsus‘ statement raises the possibility that the divine man category might be not only a literary type but a social-religious type, a mystagogue, cult leader, Bodhisattva, what have you. Jesus may well have been one of them. Marcus Borg (Jesus: A New Vision) certainly thinks so. On the other hand, D. F. Strauss (The Life of Jesus for the People, 1879, vol. 1, pp. 359–360) pointed out what is implicit in the comparison with the Celsus passage: if the historical Jesus really went about making such bombastic boasts (as in the Gospel of John), we would be hard put not to dismiss him as a self-important megalomaniac, a deluded kook. Such extravagances would, however, make sense as the poetry of worship and exaltation placed upon the lips of Jesus as the literary incarnation of Christian devotion. Is there really so little, as Miller thinks, in common between Jesus and Asclepius, or as they used to call him, the Savior? Asclepius was a son of a god and a mortal woman and had walked the earth as a mortal, albeit a demigod. He healed many and finally raised the dead. One may say he healed using conventional means, but then so did Jesus when he employed spit, clay, gestures, etc. Zeus struck him dead for blasphemy when Asclepius raised the dead, but then he raised Asclepius himself up on high to become one of the Immortals. 256 JESUS IS DEAD From heaven he would frequently appear to his suppliants on earth. The healing shrines dedicated to him are brimming with testimonial plaques, many quite fanciful, allegedly placed there as votive offerings by satisfied customers. And many of the stories have the same component features as the gospel miracle stories, including the case history, skepticism of the suppliant or of the bystanders, inability of the disciples, etc. There is no reason to say that the gospel writers or tradents borrowed from Asclepius; it is just the same kind of thing. Even the fact of the Asclepius healings occurring in the shrines after the ascension of the god coincide with the form-critical theory that the gospel miracles stem from the practice of the early church. It just happens that, like medieval Elijah stories set in the prophet‘s time but used in ritual exorcism (see Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 1978, pp. 188-190), the gospel stories depict Jesus in his natural habitat, though, like Asclepius, it is really the Risen Savior who is doing the healing — among early Christians. Ideal types are not Procrustean boxes into which phenomena must fit or be forced to fit. Rather they are yardsticks distilled from common features, yardsticks employed in turn to measure and make sense of the features the phenomena do not have in common. The differences are just as important as the similarities, which is why it is needful to study the various phenomena (in this case, ancient miracle-workers and inspired sages) each in its own right. Each is unique, but what they have in common with the other recognizable members of the same class will help us understand where they differ and why. Thus it is not helpful in studying the gospels to cross ‗divine men‘ off the list for gospel study either because the proposed members of the class are not all alike (as Jack Dean Kingsbury wants to do in The Christology of Mark‟s Gospel) or because there are also other elements besides that of the divine man in the gospels. Theodore J. Weeden (Mark: Traditions in Conflict) shows how Mark both presupposes and critiques the Christology of Jesus as a theios aner — a divine man. Here and in other sections, Glenn Miller‘s way of putting his questions seems to presuppose that early Christian preachers were some sort of marketing agents: ―How can we make Jesus salable to our contemporaries? They like charismatic rabbis? 17. Glenn Miller 257 Let‘s roll out Rabbi Jesus! They like sacred kings? Let‘s give ‘em what they want! And miracles — you‘ve been doing some work on this, haven‘t you, Harvey?‖ It is easy to dismiss such a picture of the disciples. I sense lurking here a version of the old hoax-or-history bifurcation. It‘s not as simple as the first Christian story tellers either cynically faking things — like Bill Clinton‘s policies based on focus groups — or else being Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters. As with modern urban legends, we usually cannot tell or even guess where rumors and miracle legends originate. It is no easier than discovering who was the first to use a particular cliché or to tell a particular joke. Herder and the early form critics tried to take this into account when they spoke of the ―creative community‖ standing behind the gospels and other popular traditions. Harald Riesenfeld (The Gospel Tradition) and Birger Gerhardsson (Memory and Manuscript) tried to vindicate gospel accuracy by (gratuitously) positing that the gospel traditions all go back to rabbinical-type disciples memorizing the maxims of Jesus and handing them on. But this is to beg the question, since we just do not know who originated any single gospel pericope, or whether they stemmed from memory or imagination. Sure, if the gospel traditions stemmed from a circle of eager memorizers, we would be entitled to regard them as accurate, but that is just the point at issue. Dead Prophets Society Did early Christians customize Jesus to make him another Elijah, Elisha, or Moses? Glenn Miller says no. I am not so sure. Paul Achtemaier‘s article ―Miracle Catenae in Mark‖ (Journal of Biblical Literature 91, 1972, pp. 198– 221) shows us a collection of Northern Israelite, non-Davidic (hence nonmessianic) miracle stories where Jesus is modeled upon Elijah, Elisha, and Moses. Mark (8:28) probably has the disciples say ―Some say you are Elijah‖ because it is a current opinion among Jesus-believers in his day, presumably in Caesarea Philippi (Mark 8:27), and it is a belief that Mark rejects. At any rate, it seems very hard to deny that the Elijah/Elisha miracles were the sources of many Jesus miracle stories. 258 JESUS IS DEAD To point out minor differences does not change this. No one is saying the gospel writers Xeroxed them. Again, I refer readers to my article ―New Testament Narrative as Old Testament Midrash.‖ Similarly, it seems hard to deny that Luke has based his Jesus nativity story on, among other things, Pseudo-Philo‘s version of Moses‘ nativity, while Matthew has based his on Josephus‘ Moses nativity. See my The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, pp. 59, 63. But did early Christians perhaps fabricate miracles so as to make Jesus look like other recent ‗sign prophets‘ (Theudas the Magician, etc.)? With Miller, I see no particular reason to think so. I have nothing to dispute at this point. Similarly, as to whether early Christians clothed Jesus in the robes of a miracle-worker so as to make him fit messianic expectations, I doubt it. The data are unclear (to me, anyway) whether anyone expected a messianic miracle-worker. If you expected a new Elijah or a new Moses, you weren‘t expecting a messiah, which is Davidic. I do, however, think that Mark‘s artificial Messianic Secret motif presupposes that, given the delay of the Parousia, some Christians had retrojected Jesus‘ messiahship (at first a role he should play only as of his second advent) into his earthly career and retroactively took his miracles to be proof of his messiahship. But this has nothing to do with Jewish expectations. Archetype Casting? In my view, Miller‘s attempts to dismiss the very existence of preChristian myths of sacred kings and dying and rising gods are just ludicrous. This is an old apologetical tactic, and a desperate one. Still, they will not give it up for obvious reasons. Again, I have dealt with this at some length in Deconstructing Jesus. Suffice it to say here that we have not only a misrepresentation of the evidence but also the attempt to discount Ideal Types by misunderstanding them as collections of exactly identical phenomena. This error is only compounded when Miller seeks to evade the force of the claim that the gospel life of Jesus fits the outlines of the Mythic Hero Archetype. Miller thinks to debunk the whole idea because there are 17. Glenn Miller 259 somewhat different scholarly versions and descriptions of it, as if that meant anything; and because warrior hero myths don‘t fit it, as if that were somehow relevant; and because not all hero stories contain every single feature of the Ideal Type. Again, he does not want to know what an Ideal Type is. And Jesus certainly does fit this one, as well as the sacred king mytheme and the dying and rising god myth. Here we are dealing with special pleading, the stock in trade of the apologist. I will agree, however, that performing miracles has little to do with any of these archetypes or categories. That is not their relevance. I will also readily agree that there is no reason at all to suggest that early Christians unwittingly fabricated miracles stories as a way of dealing with their own feelings of grief and guilt at Jesus‘ passing. I will not grant that there ever were such experiences. I believe the stories, and even the 1 Corinthians 15:3–11 list, are the product of dogmatic belief and mythic assimilation, not of historical memory. Again, I agree with Miller that it is unfruitful to suggest that early Christians might have unconsciously exaggerated and turned into miracles various mundane events, à la the more ridiculous theories of the eighteenthcentury Rationalists, and the preposterous theory of the pathetic Jerome Murphy-O‘Connor about the Transfiguration stemming from Jesus‘ beaming smile of relief! That‘s all a blind alley. Historie versus Bullgeschichte We finally come, as we knew we must, to the same old stuff, how there was not sufficient time for legends to form between Jesus and the writing of the gospels, about how the business of the apostles of Jesus was to make things easier for future evangelical apologists by keeping a close eye on the Jesus tradition with the same zeal as modern fundamentalists who club any new piece of theology to death the moment it rears its ugly head. That some New Testament writers claim to be guarding tradition, e.g., in the Pastorals which are late and post-Pauline anyway, means nothing, since on the one hand they were probably (if the absence of Jesus sayings and the 260 JESUS IS DEAD presence of ‗faithful sayings‘ are any guides) talking about creedal summaries such as we find in Tertullian, Irenaeus, and the Apostles Creed. Even if they weren‘t, the apologist begs the question of ancient standards of accuracy. Josephus, as Miller knows too well, freely rewrites and adds material to the Old Testament in his Antiquities even though he says he will add or subtract nothing. He no doubt thought he was keeping his promise. I will consider in just a moment the interesting business in Miller about tendencies within and beyond the canonical gospels. He argues that we do not find further embellishment of gospel miracles beyond the canon, so we have no reason to posit it having occurred within the canon either. First, though, let me note the implication of his argument for the kindred topic of the sayings of Jesus. In non-canonical works we find a great profusion of dialogues, aphorisms, parables, revelation discourses, etc., falsely attributed to Jesus. Shouldn‘t Miller be ready to admit that we may follow this trajectory back into the New Testament texts precisely as critical scholars do, bracketing numerous ‗Jesus sayings‘ in the canon as redactional compositions, prophetic coinages, etc.? Now what about the lack of further miracle embellishment between the canonical and the apocryphal gospels? Miller mentions the miracle in the Gospel of Philip where in the dye-works of Levi Jesus pours in various dyes and the clothes all come out white. This ought to count, and it has probably been inspired by the reference in the Transfiguration story about Jesus‘ garments becoming white like no mortal fuller could dye them. In the Gospel According to the Hebrews Jesus relates how he was grasped by the hair by his Mother the Holy Spirit and whisked away to Mt. Tabor. In the Gospel According to the Ebionites, when Jesus is baptized, the visionary and anointing scene receives the addition of a fire kindled on the water. In John‟s Preaching of the Gospel, a section of the Acts of John, we read that Jesus appeared in constantly shifting forms to James and John when he called them to be fishers of men. The point is apparently to account for their readiness to drop everything and follow him. The same source has Jesus change consistency from the insubstantiality of mist to the hardness of iron. (Miller 17. Glenn Miller 261 seems to feel he is entitled to discount material from Gnostic sources, which this might be, unless it is simply popular hyper-spirituality, informal Docetism. I‘m not sure why this material would be less relevant.) The Toledoth Jeschu is probably based on a Jewish gospel (Hugh J. Schonfield, According to the Hebrews), seeing that it seems to show way too much serious Jewish-Christian character for a mere polemical hack-job. And this gospel has Jesus sit upon a millstone in the sea without sinking. (Possibly this miracle has grown from a dim-witted reading of Mark 4:1, ―he got into a boat and sat in the sea.‖) Syrian monastic traditions of Jesus, preserved by Sufi writer al-Ghazzali (Revival of the Religious Sciences) has Jesus awaken the dead to account for their fate. He brokers a rain-making miracle by finding a sinless man and asking him to pray for it. The resurrection of Jesus is elaborated in a spectacular manner in the Gospel According to Peter, where the Risen Christ emerges from the tomb having grown to gigantic stature, ―overtopping the heavens.‖ And in the Gospel of Nicodemus/Acts of Pilate the Risen One appears to half a thousand Roman soldiers. The Gospel According to the Hebrews adds a resurrection appearance to the high priest‘s servant and supplies one to James the Just (barely mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15), elaborating the story, since it retroactively places James at the Last Supper, a disciple already. I‘m not sure why Miller sees such a gap between stories of the mature Jesus and the adventures of Jesus in the Infancy Gospels. These, as a category, would have been later than stories of the mature Jesus for the simple reason that the belief in his miracle birth, which invited speculation about how his divine nature would have manifested itself in the early years, was also secondary. Stories of the young god Jesus saving the day when doltish adults had failed already become evident in Luke 2:41–51 (the visit to the temple at age 12) and in John 2:1–11 (the Cana story which, as Raymond E. Brown [The Birth of the Messiah, 1977, pp. 487-488] noted, must have begun life as a tale of Jesus the miracle-working lad). They blossom in the later Infancy Gospels. Why this does not count as an ongoing heightening of the miraculous in the Jesus story, I don‘t know. 262 JESUS IS DEAD Can we indeed not discern any cases within and among the canonical gospels where miracles have been added or made more spectacular? How about these? Mark knows of no miracle birth. Matthew and Luke must alter Mark to add such a miracle (though they have different stories of it). Mark has no resurrection appearances, but Matthew, Luke, and John add some. Mark 15:33 has darkness at the crucifixion, but Matthew 27:51–53 adds an earthquake, exploding boulders, and the resurrection of many local dead saints. In Mark 16:5, there is only a young man at the empty tomb, possibly an angel. But Matthew 28:2–5 makes him definitely an angel and has him swoop down and move the stone in plain sight of the women. He has added tomb guards (27:66) to witness the feat and to faint in astonishment (28:4). Matthew also adds a cameo appearance of Jesus himself on the scene (28:9– 10), contra Mark and Luke. Luke and John have two men (Luke 24:4) or angels (John 20:12). At the arrest, John 18:5–7 has Jesus flatten the arresting party with a word, though they get up, brush themselves off, and proceed as before! Luke has misunderstood an underlying ―Let it be restored to its place,‖ which Matthew and John thought meant the disciple‘s sword (Matthew 26:52; John 18:11), but which Luke thought must refer to the severed ear! So Jesus now glues it back on (22:51). In Mark 6:48 and John 6:19 only Jesus treads the waves, but Matthew 14:28–29 adds Peter. Likewise, Matthew 20:29–34 doubles Bar-Timaeus (from Mark 10:46–52) as well as the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:1–20 vs. Matthew 8:28–34). The cursing of the fig tree in Matthew 21:18–19 and Mark 11:12–14, 20 may have grown from the parable of the barren fig tree in Luke 13:6–9; 17:5–6. The raising of Lazarus in John chapter 11 probably comes from the parable in Luke 16:19–31, where Dives asks Abraham to send Lazarus back among the living. Mark 5:22–24a, 35–43//Matthew 9:18–26 (Jairus‘ daughter) and Luke 7:11–17 (son of the Widow of Nain) have stories which are like other ancient tales where a miracle-worker, a doctor, etc., awakens someone from a seeming death and saves the person from premature burial. John‘s gospel removes any ambiguity about Lazarus‘ resurrection by having him dead four days by the time Jesus arrives (John 11:17). In Jesus‘ own case, 17. Glenn Miller 263 John (20:20, 25, 27) changes Jesus‘ display of corporeal feet and hands (as in Luke 24:39) to that of wounded side and hands, so as to prove Jesus had really died and risen, not merely escaped death, as in the novels. Mark juxtaposes two explanations of why Elijah had not publicly appeared, preceding Jesus, which ostensibly he should have if Jesus was the Messiah. One (Mark 9:13) says John the Baptist figuratively fulfilled this prophecy. The other (Mark 9:4) had Elijah himself appear after all, just in private, on the Mount of Transfiguration. No one would have concocted the John the Baptist version if he already knew of the Transfiguration version, which must imply the Transfiguration, a supernatural event, is the later invention. And in Mark 9:3, it is only Jesus‘ clothes that shine, whereas in Matthew 17:2, his face does, too. Mark 1:16-20 has the disciples just drop everything to follow Jesus, but Luke 5:1–11 adds the miraculous catch of fish to provide adequate motivation. There is no ascension in Mark and Matthew, but there is one in LukeActs. Rising bodily into the sky! I should think all of this constitutes a heightening of the miraculous. I‘m sure Miller has harmonizations at the ready for all them, like a cocked gun. But harmonizations are by their very nature a way to discount the apparent sense of troublesome data. Prima facie, I think these passages point in the direction I have indicated. Authenticity and Autonomy Plausibility has worn paper-thin once we reach the section in which Miller tries to turn the authenticity criteria framed by critical scholars against them. One fundamental problem is that he employs the criteria of multiple attestation, dissimilarity, coherence, etc., to miracle stories, whereas they are designed to apply instead to sayings, as, e.g., Norman Perrin states explicitly in one of the quotes from him Miller includes. Let‘s see why this does not work. Yes, Miller quotes others, like Craig Evans and John Maier, who apply the criterion to miracle stories, but the trouble is: these men are axe-grinding apologists, too. 264 JESUS IS DEAD Miller plays a shell game (whether intentionally or not) in that he takes the supposedly important feature of the autonomy of Jesus‘ miracles (i.e., he doesn‘t need to call upon God to get him to perform them) as the litmus test by which to see if the gospel miracles are dissimilar (not like other miracle stories from the culture), and, guess what, they are! Jesus doesn‘t invoke Solomon as Josephus‘ exorcist Eleazer does (Antiquities 8:2:5). But Apollonius does not invoke powers or names. He just does the trick, like Jesus does. So does the ascended demigod Asclepius. And Pythagoras. Besides, I suspect the godlike ―unbrokered‖ (to use John Dominic Crossan‘s favorite piece of pet vocabulary) quality of Jesus‘ miracles is a product of the Christologizing of the original stories which would have featured him using standard exorcistic technique. The adjuration element — which is where the authority would have been invoked — is now frequently placed in the mouth of the demon instead, because the exorcisms have been readjusted to Christology. We see precisely the same thing going on in Matthew‘s and Luke‘s omission of Jesus‘ spit-and-polish healing techniques from Mark. John saves the use of clay for healing the blind man in chapter 9 because he wants to use it as a symbol equivalent to Acts 9:18‘s ―something like scales‖ which fell from the newly converted Paul‘s eyes. Again, if we bracket both Q‘s and Mark‘s deflective questions or conditions from the Beelzebul pericope (Mark 3:23: ―How can Satan cast out Satan?‖ Matthew 12:27–28//Luke 11:19–20: ―If I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your protégés cast them out? Ask them what they think of your reasoning! But if I cast them out by the Spirit/finger of God, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you‖), we are left with an original in which Jesus defends his magical practice of binding the strong man Beelzebul in order to force him to part with his goods, his possessed victims. But Q and Mark, like Philostratus, were disinclined to let their hero any longer be seen as a magician. As Käsemann said (―The Problem of the Historical Jesus‖ in Käsemann, Essays on New Testament Themes. Studies in Biblical Theology # 41, 1964, p. 28), the evangelists have probably altered the exorcism stories as a bit of retrospective ―realized eschatology,‖ putting already into the time of the ministry the envisioned day of 17. Glenn Miller 265 Philippians 2:10–11, when all infernal powers should swear grudging fealty to the Lord Jesus. Miller does eventually go the whole way and tell us that Jesus‘ miracles are not, even in broad outline, much like any others claimed for other figures in the Hellenistic world. Well, this is just patently absurd. I invite you to read, among many collections of such ancient tales, the miracles chapter of my The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man. How about multiple attestation? Miller is pulling a fast one here, too. It is scarcely enough to show that all types of miracles are attested in every gospel source (Q, Mark, special Matthean, special Lukan, John), distributed evenly among them. If we could say of sayings only that their various forms are evenly distributed among the gospels, that would bring us no closer to a solution of the authenticity question as it pertains to any particular saying. This is not what critics do: they want to know if any particular saying is preserved in more than one place. If we apply this test to miracles, then, on Miller‘s own showing, there is one single miracle that might meet the criterion, namely the Beelzebul controversy and the presupposed exorcism. Mark and Q appear to have preserved different versions of it, as per my discussion, just above. But even that vanishes if we accept the judgment of H. T. Fleddermann (Mark and Q) that Mark used Q. In all the other cases, any miracle appears in more than one gospel simply because Matthew, Luke, and John all used Mark, and Matthew and Luke also used Q. So much for multiple attestation. The criterion of embarrassment is, unfortunately, useless, whether by critics or by apologists. As John Warwick Montgomery once said (in The Altizer-Montgomery Dialogue: A Chapter in the God Is Dead Controversy, 1967, p. 64), everything Jesus said must have been offensive to someone in the early church, just as (I would add) everything attributed to him must have been useful for some faction of early Christians or it would not have been preserved in the first place. So can we take the ‗unseemly‘ attempt of Jesus to heal the Markan blind man on a second try (Mark 8:23–25) as authentic because later Christology would have omitted it? Well, Matthew and Luke did find it embarrassing, but obviously Mark did not. Changing fashions make the criterion useless. 266 JESUS IS DEAD But the hugest problem here is that the principle of analogy discounts the nature miracles of Jesus, everything but psychosomatic healings and psychodramatic exorcisms. When an ancient claim of some event paralleled only in legend and myth occurs in our sources, the only probable judgment we as historians can render is that this one, too, is most likely a myth or a legend (or a misunderstanding). Hume (―Of Miracles‖) was right, despite C. S. Lewis‘s misrepresentation of his argument (Miracles: A Preliminary Study). Knowing the ease and frequency with which people misperceive, misunderstand, etc., and keeping in mind the massive regularity of our perceived experience, how can we ever deem a miracle report as probable? We can never make such a judgment. We were not there and cannot claim to know miracles have never happened, but what are the chances? Not very great. The bare philosophical possibility (which, admittedly, no one can rule out) of a miracle doesn‘t make any particular report of one probable. On the other hand, we know very well that one can find today scenes analogous to those in the gospels where people have the demons cast out of them, or think they do. We know there are meetings where people are healed (or believe they are). And we have no reason at all to rule those out for Jesus. At least not a priori. The Devil In the Details Miller holds that it is a sign of historical authenticity when we find vivid narrative detail, though he admits it is theoretically possible this could be the result of literary polish. For example, the details of John‘s empty tomb story can easily be matched in Chariton‘s novel Chaireas and Callirhoe. But Miller doubts this is possible for the gospels since we can be sure the early Christians were a bunch of uneducated morons who couldn‘t have composed such texts. That, he senses at once, is a gratuitous assumption, so he allows that there might have been gifted writers among the early Christians. But they cannot have contributed to gospel production because the gospel traditions were firmly under the control of apostles and 17. Glenn Miller 267 their close associates. How on earth does he know this? What is he: Rudolf Steiner? By the way, this attempt to run down the education of the early Christians is an old piece of apologetics. Jesus, Peter, John, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith must have been inspired recipients of true revelation since they could never have come up with this stuff on their own. Flesh and blood hath not revealed it to them!. Sure, and Shakespeare wasn‘t smart enough to have written all those plays. Odd details must, Miller assures us, be vestiges of what reporters just happened to remember, preserved because those who heard them would never have left out a single sacred syllable. It might be. But it may just as easily be a sign of incomplete editing. The evangelist may have taken something from another source and left in something that made sense in the original context but no longer does. For instance, why are other boats said to have launched off along with the one Jesus and the disciples were in at the start of the stilling of the storm story in Mark 4:36? There is no follow-up. Dennis MacDonald argues quite plausibly that the other ships are a vestige of the Odyssey, where Odysseus and his men had more than one ship as they headed into their ill-fated adventure with the bag of winds given them by Aeolus. Similarly, the mention of the exact number of fish in John 21:11, irrelevant in context, must be a vestige of the underlying Pythagorean story, where the miracle was the sage‘s supernatural knowledge of how many fish had been caught. Miller pooh-poohs the suggestion that little details and changes in details have sprung up between one gospel and the next as a result of redactional rewriting, to wink to the reader and make a new point. Why didn‘t the evangelists just add whole new characters and/or speeches? Well, sometimes they did. Stylistically and thematically, much of the material unique to Matthew, Luke, and John appears to be wholesale invention by the evangelists. But the fact remains that when you do what Hans Conzelmann (The Theology of St. Luke) and the other redaction critics did, compare very carefully the little differences between one gospel and another based on it, you do begin to discern what look for all the world to be coherent and meaningful patterns of alteration. Are they just accidental? 268 JESUS IS DEAD There is no reason to think so. This willful blindness is a prime example of how apologetics cheats its practitioners out of an appreciation for the riches of critical exegesis. Miller admits the advocate of gospel authenticity would have trouble if he were to spot anachronisms in the stories or the teachings of Jesus. To my surprise, he simply denies there are any! I refer the reader to my The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man where I repeat Strauss vis-à-vis anachronisms in the nativities, then go on and show how many teachings ascribed to Jesus presuppose a later period of the church. Miller is dreaming. He is taking massive harmonization for granted. Magic Mirror Glenn Miller feels sure that the miracle-working powers and deeds of Jesus are amply and convincingly attested in extra-biblical sources. We must endure the old Josephus routine again. I can only say here that it seems most likely to me that the Testimonium Flavianum originated with Eusebius (see Ken Olson, ―Eusebius and the Testimonium Flavianum,‖ The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61.2 (April 1999): pp. 305–22). Origen had never seen it. As for the Talmud, Celsus, and others who dismissed Jesus as a sorcerer, they do not prove Jesus did supernatural feats. No one has ever shown why such claims need mean more than that the critics of Christianity were replying to the Christian story as it was being preached, not to supposed prior facts to which they still somehow had access. Celsus was in no position to know what Jesus may have done or not done. He could only reply to the claims of miracles made by Christians. And if he believed in magic, there was certainly no problem granting that Jesus performed magic. We should not picture Celsus and the rabbis as members of today‘s Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, stubborn skeptics re supernaturalism. No, these ancient people were themselves believers in supernaturalism of various sorts. So it was nothing for them to take for granted that Jesus had been involved with the supernatural in some form. Celsus was no James Randi. Miller thinks that the mention in the Sibylline Oracles of Jesus (if it is Jesus who is intended; no name is given) 17. Glenn Miller 269 of multiplying loaves and fish and walking on the water constitutes an independent reference to these two miracles, not derived from the New Testament. Maybe so. But his is not the only way to read it. Margaret Morris argues (in her Jesus-Augustus) that the passages in question are not, as usually supposed, Christian fabrications about Jesus, but in fact pagan eulogies of Caesar Augustus, and that the gospel stories have been borrowed from the propaganda of the divine Caesar. I don‘t claim to know either way. Similarly, Miller says the version of the Last Supper in the Koran, where Jesus causes a fully laden table to descend for the disciples, represents yet another historically independent version of the miraculous feeding. But surely this story is a garbled mix of the Last Supper and the ―bread from heaven‖ discourse. I Have a Bridge Over Troubled Water I’d Like to Sell You Miller takes on Evan Fales and Richard Carrier, who claim that, given the gullibility of people in the ancient world, we would not be entitled to trust the claims even of eyewitnesses to gospel miracles, if we had reason to believe any of these tales stemmed from eyewitnesses. Miller will have none of this. Instead, he assures us, the ancient world was all Bertrand Russell. And if they believed in miracles, then, by golly, they must have passed muster, and we ought to believe in them, too. No one is saying there were no sophisticated thinkers and observers in the ancient world, only that their presence does nothing to obviate the prevalence in any generation of the Weekly World News readership. Isn‘t it interesting how the early Christians were too stupid to write detailed fictions but too smart to accept a wooden nickel when it came to miracle reports? They turn out to be as illusory and polymorphous as the Jesus of the Gnostics was. In the end, for all his genuine and manifest erudition, Glenn Miller strikes me as one more religious spin-doctor, wasting a fine mind to defend the indefensible — like an O. J. Simpson attorney. Christ A Fiction remember a particular Superboy comic book in which the Boy of Steel somehow discovers that in the future, he is thought to be as mythical as Peter Pan and Santa Claus. Indignant at this turn of events, he flies at faster than light speed and enters the future to set the record straight. He does a few super-deeds and vindicates himself, then comes home. So Superboy winds up having the last laugh — or does he? Of course, it is only fiction! The people in the future were quite right! Superboy is just as mythical as Santa Claus and Peter Pan. This seems to me a close parallel to the efforts of Christian apologists to vindicate as sober history the story of a supernatural savior who was born of a virgin, healed the sick, raised the dead, changed water into wine, walked on water, rose from the grave and ascended bodily into the sky. I used to think, when I myself was a Christian apologist, a defender of the evangelical faith, that I had done a pretty respectable job of vindicating that story as history. I brought to bear a variety of arguments I now recognize to be fallacious, such as the supposed closeness of the gospels to the events they record, their ostensible use of eyewitness testimony, etc. Now, in retrospect, I judge that my efforts were about as effective in the end as Superboy‘s! When all is said and done, he remains a fiction. One caveat: I intend to set forth, briefly, some reasons for the views I now hold. I do not expect that the mere fact that I was once an evangelical apologist and now see things differently should itself count as evidence that I must be right. That would be the genetic fallacy. It would be just as erroneous to think that John Rankin must be right in having embraced evangelical Christianity since he had once been an agnostic Unitarian and repudiated it for the Christian faith. In both cases, what matters are the reasons for the change of mind, not merely the fact of it. Having got that straight, let me say that I think there are four senses in which Jesus Christ may be said to be a fiction. First (and, I warn you, this one takes by far the most I 272 JESUS IS DEAD explaining): It is quite likely, though certainly by no means definitively provable, that the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual. Put simply, not only is the theological ‗Christ of faith‘ a synthetic construct of theologians — a symbolic Uncle Sam figure — if you could travel through time, like Superboy, and you went back to First-Century Nazareth, you would not find a Jesus living there. Why conclude this? There are three reasons, which I must oversimplify for time‘s sake. (1) In broad outline and in detail, the life of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels corresponds to the worldwide Mythic Hero Archetype in which a divine hero‘s birth is supernaturally predicted and conceived, the infant hero escapes attempts to kill him, demonstrates his precocious wisdom already as a child, receives a divine commission, defeats demons, wins acclaim, is hailed as king, then betrayed, losing popular favor, executed, often on a hilltop, and is vindicated and taken up to heaven. These features are found worldwide in heroic myths and epics. The more closely a supposed biography, say that of Hercules, Apollonius of Tyana, Padma Sambhava, or of Gautama Buddha, corresponds to this plot formula, the more likely the historian is to conclude that a historical figure has been transfigured by myth. And in the case of Jesus Christ, where virtually every detail of the story fits the mythic hero archetype with nothing left over — no ‗secular‘ biographical data, so to speak — it becomes arbitrary to assert that there must have been a historical figure lying back of the myth. There may have been, but it can no longer be considered particularly probable, and that‘s all the historian can deal with: probabilities. There may have been an original King Arthur, but there is no particular reason to think so. There may have been a historical Jesus of Nazareth, too, but, unlike most of my colleagues in the Jesus Seminar, I don‘t think we can simply assume there was. (2) Specifically, the passion stories of the gospels strike me as altogether too close to contemporary myths of dying and rising savior gods including Osiris, Tammuz, Baal, Attis, Adonis, Hercules, and Asclepius. Like Jesus, these figures were believed to have once lived a life upon the earth, been killed, and risen shortly thereafter. Their deaths and resurrections were in most cases ritually celebrated each spring to herald the 18. Christ A Fiction 273 return of the life to vegetation. In many myths, the savior‘s body is anointed for burial, searched out by holy women and then reappears alive a few days later. (3) Similarly, the details of the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection accounts are astonishingly similar to the events of several surviving popular novels from the same period in which two lovers are separated when one seems to have died and is unwittingly entombed alive. Grave robbers discover her reviving and kidnap her. Her lover finds the tomb empty — grave clothes still in place — and first concludes she has been raised up from death and taken to heaven. Then, realizing what must have happened, he goes in search of her. During his adventures, he is sooner or later condemned to the cross or is actually crucified, but manages to escape. When at length the couple is reunited, neither, having long imagined the other dead, can quite believe the lover is alive and not a ghost come to say farewell. There have been two responses to such evidence by apologists. First, they have contended that all these myths are plagiarized from the gospels by pagan imitators, pointing out that some of the evidence is postChristian. But much is in fact pre-Christian. And it is significant that the early Christian apologists argued that these parallels to the gospels were counterfeits in advance, by Satan, who knew the real thing would be coming along later and wanted to throw people off the track. This is like the desperate Nineteenth-Century attempts of fundamentalists to claim that Satan had created fake dinosaur bones to tempt the faithful not to believe in Genesis! At any rate — and this is my point — no one would have argued this way had the pagan myths of dead and resurrected gods been more recent than the Christian. Second, in a variation on the theme, C. S. Lewis suggested that in Jesus‘ case ―myth became fact.‖ He admitted the whole business about the Mythic Hero archetype and the similarity to the pagan saviors, only he made them a kind of prophetic charade, creations of the yearning human heart, dim adumbrations of the incarnation of Christ before it actually happened. The others were myths, but this one actually happened. In answer to this, I think of an anecdote told by my 274 JESUS IS DEAD colleague Bruce Chilton. Staying the weekend at the home of a friend, he was surprised to see that the guest bathroom was festooned with a variety of towels filched from the Hilton, the Ramada Inn, the Holiday Inn, etc. Which was more likely, he asked: that representatives from all these hotels had sneaked into his friend‘s bathroom and each copied one of the towel designs? Or that his friend had swiped them from their hotels? Lewis‘s is an argument of desperation which no one would think of making unless he was hell-bent on believing that, though all the other superheroes (Batman, Captain Marvel, the Flash) were fictions, Superboy was in fact genuine. (4) The New Testament epistles can be read quite naturally as presupposing a period in which Christians did not yet believe their savior god had been a figure living on earth in the recent historical past. Paul, for instance, never even mentions Jesus performing healings or even as having been a teacher. Twice he cites what he calls ―words of the Lord,‖ but even conservative New Testament scholars admit he may as easily mean prophetic revelations from the heavenly Christ. Paul attributes the death of Jesus not to Roman or Jewish governments, but rather to the designs of evil ―archons,‖ angels who rule this fallen world. Romans and 1 Peter both warn Christians to watch their step, reminding them that the Roman authorities never punish the righteous, but only the wicked. How could they have said this if they knew of the Pontius Pilate story? The two exceptions, 1 Thessalonians and 2 Timothy, epistles that do blame Pilate or Jews for the death of Jesus, only serve to prove the rule. Both can easily be shown on other grounds to be non-Pauline and later than the gospels. Jesus was eventually historicized, redrawn as a human being of the past (much as Samson, Enoch, Jabal, Gad, Joshua the son of Nun, and various other ancient Israelite gods had already been). As a part of this process, there were various independent attempts to locate Jesus in recent history by laying the blame for his death on this or that likely candidate, well known tyrants including Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate, and even Alexander Jannaeus in the first century BC! Now, if the death of Jesus were an actual historical event well known to eyewitnesses of it, there is simply no way such a variety of versions, differing on so fundamental a point, could ever have arisen! 18. Christ A Fiction 275 If early Christians had actually remembered the passion as a series of recent events, why does the earliest gospel crucifixion account spin out the whole terse narrative from quotes cribbed without acknowledgement from Psalm 22? Why does 1 Peter have nothing more detailed than Isaiah 53 to flesh out his account of the sufferings of Jesus? Why does Matthew supplement Mark‘s version, not with historical tradition or eyewitness memory, but with more quotes, this time from Zechariah and the Wisdom of Solomon? Thus I find myself more and more attracted to the theory, once vigorously debated by scholars, now smothered by tacit consent, that there was no historical Jesus lying behind the stained glass of the gospel mythology. Instead, he is a fiction. Some of you, well-versed in the writings of apologists like Josh McDowell, may already be posing objections. Let me try to anticipate a few. First, am I not arguing in a circle, considering gospel miracles as myths because of ―naturalistic presuppositions‖? Actually, no. We deem them myths not because of a prior bias that there can be no miracles, but because of the Principle of Analogy, the only alternative to which is believing everything in The National Inquirer. If we do not use the standard of current-day experience to evaluate claims from the past, what other standard is there? And why should we believe that God or Nature used to be in the business of doing things that do not happen now? Isn‘t God supposed to be the same yesterday, today, and forever? Secondly, the apologists‘ claim that there was ―too little time between the death of Jesus and the writing of the gospels for legends to develop‖ is circular — presupposing a historical Jesus living at a particular time. Forty years is easily enough time for legendary expansion anyway, but the ChristMyth Theory does not require that the Christ figure was created in Pontius Pilate‘s time, only that later on, Pilate‘s time was retrospectively chosen as a location for Jesus. See Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History on the tendency in oral tradition to keep updating mythic foundational events, keeping them always at a short distance, a couple of generations before one‘s own time. 276 JESUS IS DEAD Even if there were a historical Jesus and we knew we had eyewitness reports, the apologists fail to take into account recent studies which show that eyewitness testimony, especially of unusual events, is the most unreliable of all, that people tend to rewrite what they saw in light of their accustomed categories and expectations. Thus Strauss was right on target suggesting that the early Christians simply imagined Jesus fulfilling the expected deeds of messiahs and prophets. Thirdly, it is special pleading to dismiss all similar stories as myths and to insist that this case must be different. If you do this, admit it, you are a fideist, no longer an apologist at all — if there is any difference! But I had better get on with the matter of the various senses in which it might be proper to say that Christ is a fiction. The second one is that the ‗historical Jesus‘ reconstructed by New Testament scholars is always a reflection of the individual scholars who reconstruct him. Albert Schweitzer was perhaps the single exception, and he made it painfully clear that previous questers for the historical Jesus had merely drawn self-portraits. All unconsciously used the historical Jesus as a ventriloquist dummy. Jesus must have taught the truth, and their own beliefs must have been true, so Jesus must have taught those beliefs. (Of course, every Biblicist does the same! ―I said it! God believes it! That settles it!‖). Today‘s Politically Correct ‗historical Jesuses‘ are no different, being mere clones of the scholars who design them. C. S. Lewis was right about this in The Screwtape Letters: ―Each ‗historical Jesus‘ is unhistorical. The documents say what they say and cannot be added to.‖ But, as apologists so often do, he takes fideism as the natural implication when agnosticism would seem called for. What he imagines the gospels so clearly to ‗say‘ is the mythic hero! When, in his essay, ―Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,‖ Lewis pulls rank as a self-declared expert and denies that the gospels are anything like ancient myths, one can only wonder what it was he must have been smoking in that ever-present pipe of his! My point here is simply that, even if there was a historical Jesus lying back of the gospel Christ, he can never be recovered. If there ever was a historical Jesus, there isn‘t one any more. All attempts to recover him turn out to be just modern 18. Christ A Fiction 277 remythologizings of Jesus. Every ‗historical Jesus‘ is a Christ of faith — of somebody‟s faith. So the historical Jesus of modern scholarship is no less a fiction. A third sense in which Jesus is a fiction: Jesus as the personal savior, with whom people claim, as I used to, to have a ―personal relationship‖ is in the nature of the case a fiction — essentially a psychological projection, an imaginary playmate. It is no different at all from pop-psychological visualization exercises, or John Bradshaw‘s gimmick of imagining a healing encounter with loved ones of the past, or Jean Houston leading Hillary Clinton in an admittedly imaginary dialogue with Eleanor Roosevelt. I suppose there is nothing wrong with any of this, but one ought to recognize it, as Hillary Clinton and Jean Houston, and John Bradshaw do, as imaginative fiction. And so with the personal savior. The alternative is something like channeling. You have tuned in to the spirit of an ancient guru, named Jesus, and you are receiving revelations from him, usually pretty trivial stuff, minor conscience proddings and the like — some sort of imaginary telepathy. In fact, I suspect that for most evangelical pietists, ―having a personal relationship with Christ‖ is nothing more than a fancy, overblown name for reading the Bible and saying their prayers. But if they did really refer to some kind of a personal relationship, it would in effect be a case of channeling. I suspect this is why fundamentalists who condemn New Age channelers do not dismiss it as a fraud pure and simple (though obviously it is), but instead think that Ramtha and the others are channeling demons. If they said it was sheer delusion, they know where the other four fingers would wind up pointing! In view of the fact that the piety of ―having a personal relationship with Christ‖ and ―inviting him into your heart‖ is alien to the New Testament and is never intimated there as far as I can see, it is especially amazing to me that evangelicals elevate it to the shibboleth of salvation! Unless you have a personal relationship with Jesus, buster, one day you will be boiling in Hell. Sheesh! Talk about the fury of a personal savior scorned! No one ever heard of this stuff till the German Pietist movement of the Eighteenth Century. To make a maudlin type of devotionalism the password to heaven is like the fringe Pentecostal who tells you you can‘t get into heaven unless you 278 JESUS IS DEAD speak in tongues. ―You ask me how I know he lives?‖ asks the revival chorus. ―He lives within my heart.‖ Exactly! A figment. A fourth sense: Christ is a fiction in that Christ functions, in an unnoticed and equivocal way, as shorthand for a vast system of beliefs and institutions on whose behalf he is invoked. Put simply, this means that when evangelists or apologists invite you to have faith ―in Christ,‖ they are in fact smuggling in a great number of other issues — for example, Chalcedonian Christology, the doctrine of the Trinity, the Protestant idea of faith and grace, a particular theory of biblical inspiration and literalism, habits of church attendance, etc. These are all distinct and open questions. Theologians have debated them for many centuries and still debate them. Rank and file believers still debate them, as you know if you have ever spent time talking with one of Jehovah‘s Witnesses or a Seventh Day Adventist. If you hear me say that and your first thought is ―Oh no, those folks aren‘t real Christians,‖ you‘re just proving my point! Who gave Protestant fundamentalists the copyright on the word Christian? No evangelist ever invites people to accept Christ by faith and then to start examining all these other associated issues for themselves. Not one! The Trinity, biblical inerrancy, for some even anti-Darwinism, are non-negotiable. You cannot be genuinely saved if you don‘t tow the party line on these points. Thus, for them, ―to accept Christ‖ means to accept Trinitarianism, biblicism, creationism, etc. And this in turn means that „Christ‟ is shorthand for this whole raft of doctrines and opinions — all of which one is to accept by faith on someone else‘s say-so. When Christ becomes a fiction in this sense he is an umbrella for an unquestioning acceptance of what some preacher or institution tells us to believe. And this is nothing new, no mutant distortion of Christianity. Paul already requires ―the taking of every thought captive to Christ,‖ already insists on ―the obedience of faith.‖ Here Christ has already become what he was to Dostoyevsky‘s Grand Inquisitor, a euphemism for the dogmatic party line of an institution. Dostoyevsky‘s point, of course, was that the ‗real‘ Jesus stands opposed to this use of his name to sanction religious oppression. But remember, 18. Christ A Fiction 279 though it is a noble one, Dostoyevsky‘s Jesus is also a piece of fiction! It is, after all, ―The Parable of the Grand Inquisitor.‖ So, then, Christ may be said to be a fiction in the four senses that (1) it is quite possible that there was no historical Jesus. (2) Even if there was, he is lost to us, the result being that there is no historical Jesus available to us. Moreover, (3) the Jesus who ―walks with me and talks with me and tells me I am his own‖ is an imaginative visualization and in the nature of the case can be nothing more than a fiction. And finally, (4) ‗Christ‘ as a corporate logo for this and that religious institution is a euphemistic fiction, not unlike Ronald McDonald, Mickey Mouse, or Joe Camel, the purpose of which is to get you to swallow a whole raft of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors by an act of simple faith, short-circuiting the dangerous process of thinking the issues out to your own conclusions.