No Historical Evidence of Jesus
SOURCE: Tom Harpur, The Toronto Star (16 May 2004)
(Copyright © 2004 Toronto Star. All Rights Reserved.)
Ever since the publication of The Pagan Christ, literalist clergy and others have been hammering away at the theme of the alleged historicity of the Gospels. Yet, Bible scholars today know that the Gospels never were historical biographies even though they may appear to be such. Listen to the genius Dr. Albert Schweitzer, in his landmark book The Quest of the Historical Jesus:"The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give it its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism and clothed by modern theology in a historical garb." Schweitzer goes on to point out that the historicity issue implodes upon itself once one truly puts the Gospels under a critical lens. To use a different image, it falls apart because of the contradictions and lack of congruent historical detail.
As the eminent Canadian literary critic and expositor of the code of the Bible, Northrop Frye said - in words that should be on the study wall of every priest and minister - "When the Bible is historically accurate, it is only accidentally so; reporting was not of the slightest interest to its writers. They had a story to tell which could only be told by myth and metaphor; what they wrote became a source of vision rather than doctrine."
Those who want to learn more can go to a rich lode of books today by other scholars who have rendered the latest quest for the elusive historical Jesus a futile pursuit. For example, Harold Leidner's The Fabrication of the Christ Myth (1999) or The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? (1999), by Earl Doherty, or The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" A Pagan God? by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy (1997). The bibliography at the end of my book gives plenty more.
The would-be historicizers are faced with a major problem. Outside the Gospels themselves - and even here there are serious difficulties - there is no evidence from the first century for any historical Jesus. This is why there was such excitement recently when it was thought that an ossuary bearing an inscription about James "the brother of the Lord" was a genuine archaeological find. Experts in Jerusalem later determined the inscription was fraudulent. True, the Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, (37-100 CE) has a couple of passages in which he seems to cite a historical Jesus but modern scholars and the more perspicacious of the early Fathers are unanimous that these are not authentic but later interpolations. Leidner notes there are 21 people with the name Jesus in the Loeb index to Josephus' two works and none of these is identified with Jesus of Nazareth.
Literalists will cite a brief mention of Christians in letters of Pliny the Younger to Emperor Trajan, a brief reference by Tacitus to Jesus being executed in the reign of Tiberius, and a possible reference to Christ (Chrestus) in Suetonius. But, these few lines are from about 120 CE and thus close to 100 years after the supposed dating of the crucifixion, and not one is free from ambiguity. For a detailed discussion, see Doherty's book or the relevant passages in Alvin Boyd Kuhn's Who Is this King of Glory?
One of the best commentaries on the extraordinary silence of this early period regarding the "historicity" of the Gospels comes from Sir Edward Gibbon, of The Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire fame. He wrote:
"But how shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan philosophical world to these evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses? During the age of Christ and his apostles...the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, demons were expelled, and the laws of nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the Church. But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and pursuing their ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral or physical government of the world. Under the reign of Tiberius the whole Earth, or at least a celebrated province of the Empire, was involved in a preternatural darkness of three hours. Even this miraculous event which ought to have excited the wonder, the curiosity and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history. It happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the elder Pliny....Each of these philosophers...has recorded all the phenomena of Nature, earthquakes, comets, eclipses, which his indefatigable curiosity could collect. But, both have omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness since the creation...."
The "historical" evidence isn't there.
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