Gospel Truth
- With the release of Mel Gibson's Jesus flick,
The Passion of
the Christ many people are wondering about the historicity of not just
the arrest and trial of Jesus, but also that of all the Christian Gospel
story. (The interest generated by the so-called
James
Ossuary and the popularity of books like the
Da Vinci Code, and The Holy Blood and The
Holy Grail are indicative of such curiosity.) There are now only
four accounts of Jesus' life and teachings, four that are well known,
that is. Other
gospels, which did not fit the particular version of Christianity that
those in authority wished to propagate, were lost or suppressed
deliberately. Many are only known by critical references to them in
early writings by the
Church Fathers - which are usually, and hardly surprisingly, hostile.
Thanks to archaeology and good fortune, some lost works such as the
Gospel of Thomas
have come to light and show a Jesus very unlike the character portrayed in
the four Canonical Gospels. Even among these, the official versions, there
are discrepancies
in such things as the names of the disciples, the order and timing of
crucial events and even the theology. The gospels of Luke and Matthew, (we
have no idea who actually wrote them) are built around that of Mark, and
all three are called the Synoptic Gospels, ie taking the same point of
view, and have much common material. They also include sayings of Jesus
taken from a postulated
source document. The gospel called John is
very different,
with a very different Jesus talking with a very different voice. It has
been suggested that John may have been an authentic recollection
subsequently worked over in order put over a later writer's theology as
originating with Jesus.
Twisted Sister
- Gibson claims that his film is somehow more authentic than other
portrayals. The movie's website states that the script is based upon all
four gospels (so there must have been choices made over which version of
events is shown). But
another
work was also used for details, "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord
Jesus Christ" by
Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774 - 1824) a German nun. This is a
description of Emmerich's ecstatic visions of Jesus' death and, despite
its reported gruesomeness, it has no claim to be historically accurate
about events in 1st century Judaea. But it is notable for something else
that has dogged the film and raised many hackles - anti-semitism. (It is
worth remarking that the movie's website does not mention this book.) This
attitude is also evident in the gospel called Matthew, when the crowd is
offered a choice - to free Jesus or Barabbas, apparently a robber or
terrorist. (Incidentally, the idea that Pontius Pilate, a high Roman
adminstrator, and known from history as a cruel and violent man, would act
against his own desires at the behest of a mob is absurd.) The author of
Matthew has the Jewish crowd shout out, having chosen Jesus for death "
His blood be on us, and on our children."
(Matthew 27:25) This single sentence has been the basis for two thousand
years of persecution of Jews and yet has no basis in history whatsoever.
The inclusion of these words in Gibson's script has led to an outcry, but,
according to the reviews, he takes a weasel way out by still including
this "blood libel" but in Aramaic with no subtitles. (In passing it is
worth noting that contrary to what many Christians seem to think,
crucifixion was a
common form of execution and display of a felon, not something unique to
the Jesus story. Also it was not unknown for some tough individuals to
survive the ordeal.) The script is famously in what Gibson thinks is the
authentic language of the time. The movie website says "All
the characters in the film are heard speaking the languages they would
actually have spoken at the time. This means Aramaic for the Jewish
characters .....and "street Latin" for the Romans. Greek which was
commonly spoken by the intellectuals of the time was not quite as relevant
to the story." Here Gibson demonstrates his ignorance. The eastern
Roman Empire's prime language was a kind of Greek, the
koine, and not solely the tongue of intellectuals. It was "a
dialect of ancient Greek that was the lingua franca of the empire of
Alexander the Great and was widely spoken throughout the eastern
Mediterranean area in Roman times" Any dialog at a trial of Jesus
was likely to be in the koine. The four gospels, Gibson's claimed source
material, were
originally written in Greek.
Why Not Paul?
- Gibson's big claim for his film is that it shows events that actually
took place. He bases this on his use of the Gospels and Emmerich. The only
way Emmerich could be authentic is if one accepts the reality of visions
caused by near starvation - Emmerich apparently had been eating nothing
but communion wafers. But how historical are the Gospels themselves? There
are several points worth remembering when looking at this question. Jesus'
execution is conventionally dated to around the year 33 CE. New Testament
scholarship is in fair agreement that the earliest Gospel is
Mark.
Internal evidence dates it to around the year 70 CE. In between the
crucifixion and Mark, the Jewish revolt against the Romans occurred. Not
only were huge numbers of people killed by the Romans but the Jewish
rebels made a point of destroying any records that came into their hands
in order to make tax collection impossible. Given this, where did Mark
find his witnesses for his story and any details about Jesus' trial? Here
we have to remember Mark (and the other evangelists) were not writing
history as we understand it. They were already convinced of Jesus' role as
Messiah and were trying to spread what they viewed as this marvellous
news. If they knew little or nothing of Jesus it was not a problem, as
they knew he must have fulfilled prophecies they ransacked the books of
what Christians now call the Old Testament for suitable material.(This
practice of exegesis
was not uncommon and predates Christianity.) Around this they constructed
their stories, adding sayings that were attributed to their Messiah, which
may well have been collected together
already. The
reliability of this sort of document for historical purposes is
effectively zero, apart from telling us what the author, in a later time,
thought important. One priority seems to have been an attempt to distance
Christians, who, to the Romans, would have looked like a Jewish sect, from
the Jews proper, especially in the aftermath of the Jewish revolt. This
goes hand in hand with whitewashing the Romans, which explains the totally
unlikely behavior of Pilate in the Gospel accounts. Christians by then
were evangelising amongst
godfearers and pagans and did not wish to offend the rulers or
potential converts. But there is one New Testament figure whose
letters
predate the Gospels, Paul of Tarsus. His epistles, (epistle is merely
a name for a "literary" letter intended for publication) or at least those
reliably attributed to him, are generally accepted to date from before 65
CE, the traditional date of Paul's death. Why did Gibson not use these for
source material, as they obviously predate the other sources? The reason
is simple and rather odd. Paul seems to know nothing of the earthly life
of Jesus that the later Gospels portray. He mentions none of the well
known events, none of the sayings, and is uninterested in any "historical"
or even earthly Jesus. You would have thought quoting, say, the Sermon on
the Mount, the Lord's prayer, or Jesus' declarations on whether to follow
Jewish dietary and other laws (a source of much conflict to Paul) would
have helped in his mission. In fact the figure of Jesus in Paul's letters
bears no resemblance to a flesh and blood person, one who supposedly lived
only a few years earlier. He is the Christ, a deity seen only in visions,
that bears more resemblance to a god from one of the
pagan mystery religions rather than an itinerant preacher from
Galilee.
Faith's Fakers
- These oddities concerning Paul's
ignorance of the Gospel
Jesus are puzzling and, along with much other evidence, have led Earl
Doherty to present a convincing case that the historical Jesus did not, in
fact, exist. Many people, and not just believers, would dismiss this out
of hand. But where is the evidence? As we have seen above, the Canonical
Gospels are not historical documents and were not intended to be, and they
also follow the events they purport to describe by at least 40 years,
years of great violence and turmoil in Judaea. The only near contemporary
writer Paul, seems ignorant of a human Jesus and interested only in a
supernatural figure. What information can be gleaned from non-Christian
writers?
Philo of Alexandria wrote extensively of the Hebrew
scriptures and
philosophy, and was deeply involved with Jewish relations with the
Romans. He would have been a contemporary of Jesus but says nothing of
him. The Jewish historian Josephus was writing just after the Jewish
revolt, in which he played a part. He does
mention Jesus
but in a manner and a context that demonstrates that the passage in
question is a later Christian interpolation. This comes back to what is
termed a "pious fraud" - telling a story for which you have no evidence
but know by your faith MUST be true. To the early Christians it was no sin
to tamper with documents in this way. Obviously Josephus omission of Jesus
was an error that should, must, be rectified. The danger is in looking at
any of the New Testament material as a record of historical events - to
repeat, that was not their purpose. The evangelist we know as Luke gives
the appearance of being a historian, (even
lifting some of Josephus) but his attempts to give Jesus' birth a
historical context are unsuccessful. This lack of evidence leaves
believers, at least those that have bothered to learn something of the
history of 1st century Judaea, relying upon faith. The problem with this
position is that the central theme of Christianity is that God became
flesh, suffered and died to redeem our sins. This absolutely requires that
Jesus was a real historical personage - anything else would mean he is
little different from other dying and reborn
savior gods.
Here is a fascinating and enlightening page pointing out the many
similarities between Jesus and his rival deities,
Jesus
as a Mythical Copycat. (This is actually an excerpt from a much longer
essay, The Origins of
Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus Christ.)
Mythical Christ - Doherty's book
and website, the
Jesus Puzzle, goes over the evidence from the New Testament writings,
the early church Fathers, Josephus, and the mystery religions in
exhaustive detail and finds that, on the balance of probabilities, the
Jesus of the Gospels never had a real, human, physical existence. This is
not to say that some of the sayings attributed to him are not authentic to
the period, but they were probably in common currency in the Judaism of
these
turbulent times, which was very different from the rabbinical Judaism
that we know today. In fact such Judaism was but one strand of several,
another being the Jerusalem Temple cult. Undoubtedly there were many
itinerant preachers and holy men, originating from Galilee, as there were
also many claimants to the Messiahship. The average Christian knows little
of the Roman Empire and the lively culture of the eastern Mediterranean.
Prophets and miracleworkers were almost commonplace, and none of the
miracles attributed to Jesus are really any different from those reported
elsewhere. (Here is a fascinating article by Richard Carrier,
Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire: a look into the world of the gospels,
and here is his review of Doherty's book,
The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ?
Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus in which Carrier
makes an important point about about how Doherty's thesis differs from
that of others who also assert the ahistoricity of Jesus. "It
cannot be emphasized enough that Doherty's thesis is not "Jesus didn't
exist, therefore Christianity started as a mystical-revelatory Jewish
sect" but "Christianity started as a mystical-revelatory Jewish sect,
therefore Jesus didn't exist." Most scholars who argue that Jesus didn't
exist (who are called "ahistoricists," because they deny the "historicity"
of Jesus, or "mythicists," because they argue Jesus is mythical) have
little in the way of reasons beyond a whole complex of arguments from
silence. Doherty, in contrast, uses arguments from silence only to support
his thesis. He does not base it on such arguments, but rather on positive
evidence, especially a slew of very strange facts that his theory accounts
for very well but that traditional historicism ignores, or explains
poorly." (See more links to Carrier's work below.)
Jerusalem Syndrome
- Gibson's film is but one of a long line of efforts to promote the
historicity of Jesus, and by implication the rest of the Christian Bible.
The fundamentalist Protestant view is that the Bible is the inerrant word
of God. They show a preference for the King James version of the good book
and generally acknowledge no other. This can only be done if you are
completely ignorant of the history of how the Bible was compiled,
translated, edited over the years. (These
are just the English versions) This view can only be sustained by faith in
defiance of the facts, but for many other people faith alone is not
enough. This yearning for "proof" explains why the James Ossuary attracted
so much publicity and has, in the past and even today, led to the
Jerusalem Syndrome. This is, according to a fascinating article by
Yuval Goren, of the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern
Cultures, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, " a clinical
psychiatric diagnosis first identified in the 1930s" and involves "a
temporary state of sudden and intense religious delusions brought on while
visiting or living in Jerusalem. The patients often adopt "biblical" or
otherwise eccentric clothing, sometimes merging their identity with that
of a character from the Bible or having a strong feeling of mission. They
typically adopt a lifestyle of religious observance and attach unusual
significance to religious relics."
Pious Fraud
- Goren goes on to say the modern equivalent of this is those, who should
know better, losing their objectivity and falling for
archaeological finds that have been altered
or falsified to provide "evidence" for a Biblical personage or event. The
above mentioned
ossuary and objects like the
Jehoash tablet,
are too often uncritically accepted because people desperately want them
to be real, physical evidence of the world portrayed in the Bible. There
is even a branch of archaeology called biblical archaeology - the very
name implies some kind of prejudgement of what will be found. Goren seems
to find nothing wrong with the term itself but this does not stop his
anguished cry " Is it possible that over a century
after Sir William Mathew Flinders-Petrie established the scientific
methodology of biblical archaeology, the discipline is still controlled by
dilatants and charlatans?" It would seem that the pious frauds (and
the less than pious frauds) are as much in evidence today as at any time
in the last 2000 years. These can be in the form of doctored artifacts,
archaeological interpretations or even a motion picture. Gibson's film is
merely the 21st century's version of an old industry, and is evidence of
nothing beyond Gibson's own personal religious passions.
Reviews - 80
has seen the trailers (downloadable
here) for Gibson's movie only. This affects none of the arguments made
above. Sufficient inducement probably does not exist to ensure viewing a
full two hours of what the trailer revealed. Here is an unflattering
review from the UK Guardian. Mr Gibson takes criticism of his work
badly, saying of the New York Times film critic, "I
want to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick. I want to kill his
dog." It would seem turning the other cheek is not for him. He
would also find nothing complimentary in
this review by Geza Vermes, emeritus professor of Jewish Studies at
Oxford University and world renowned expert on the New Testament and the
Judaism of the time. Vermes begins by saying "I am
still in a state of shock having sat through two hours of almost
uninterrupted gratuitous brutality, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the
Christ. I hope I will never be obliged to see something as dreadful again."
His opinion of the film's authenticity matches his view of its
anti-semitism and violence. 80 does not know if Mr Vermes has a dog, but
if he does, he should make sure of its safety. Christopher Hitchens,
writing in Slate, finds the film a
fascist statement, and his
opinion of Gibson is about as low as it gets. Also in Slate is a
review by David Edelstein
which sums up The Passion as "a
two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie—The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre—that
thinks it's an act of faith."
Many of the links mentioned above lead to articles
by Richard Carrier - there is a lot more
archived here, courtesy of the
Internet Infidels
site which is well worth a visit. Excellent stuff.
Quotes
"Do not confine your children to your learning, for they were born in a
different time."
Anonymous Hebrew proverb
"Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest
violence."
Anonymous Hebrew proverb
"What is not in nature can never be true."
Voltaire
"It is with books as with men - a very small number play a great part,
the rest are lost in the multitude" Voltaire
"When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad."
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge
"All superstition is much the same whether it be that of astrology,
dreams, omen, retributive judgment, or the like, in all of which the
deluded believers observe events which are fulfilled, but neglect and pass
over their failure, though it be much more common."
Francis Bacon
"Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one
in himself calleth religion."
Thomas Hobbes
