TEACHING COURSES ON THE New Testament in the Bible Belt is a real honor and pleasure. For one thing, one never needs to worry about getting enough enrollment. My classes are always bursting at the seams, with dozens of students who cannot get into the course desperately begging to be let in. And it’s not because of me. It’s because of the subject. I’ve known some truly awful teachers in my time at universities in the South, professors of biblical studies who still had full classes every term. Students in this part of the world are eager to study the New Testament—both Christians who want to learn about it from a different perspective than what they absorbed in church and Sunday school and non-Christians who realize just how important the Bible is for their society and culture.
Because of where I teach, almost all my students come from conservative Christian backgrounds and already have both a vested interest in and a firm set of opinions about the subject matter. That makes biblical studies unlike almost any other academic discipline in the university, and it is why courses in the field are perfect for a liberal arts education. Students who take courses in other areas of the humanities—classics, philosophy, history, English, you name it—do not usually hold fixed ideas about the subject. As a result, they simply are not shocked by what they learn, for example, about the lives of Plato, Charlemagne, or Kaiser Wilhelm, and they do not come to class with deeply held opinions about other classics, King Lear, Bleak House, or The Brothers Karamazov. But they do have set opinions about the Bible—what it is and how it should be understood. These opinions can be challenged in class, and when they are, students are forced to think. Since one of the goals of a liberal arts education is to teach students how to think, courses in biblical studies are perfect for a liberal arts education, especially in a region such as the South, where the vast majority of students think they already know what the Bible is about.
At a reputable university, of course, professors cannot teach simply anything. They need to be academically responsible and reflect the views of scholarship. That is probably why there are no mythicists—at least to my knowledge—teaching religious studies at accredited universities or colleges in North America or Europe. It is not that mythicists are lacking in hard-fought views and opinions or that they fail to mount arguments to back them up. It is that their views are not widely seen as academically respectable by members of the academy. That in itself does not make the mythicists wrong. It simply makes them marginal.
As we saw in the previous chapter, some of the arguments that mythicists typically offer in support of their view that Jesus never existed are in fact irrelevant to the question. Other arguments are completely relevant but not persuasive. Those are the views that the present chapter will address, each of them involving ways mythicists have imagined, or rather invented, their mythical Christ. I will try to present these views fairly and then show why scholars in the relevant fields of academic inquiry simply do not accept them. I begin with the most commonly advocated view of them all.
Did the Earliest Christians Invent Jesus as a Dying-Rising God, Based on Pagan Myths?
ONE OF THE MOST widely asserted claims found in the mythicist literature is that Jesus was an invention of the early Christians who had been deeply influenced by the prevalent notion of a dying-rising god, as found throughout the pagan religions of antiquity. The theory behind this claim is that people in many ancient religions worshipped gods who died and rose again: Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, Heracles, Melqart, Eshmun, Baal, and so on. Originally, the theory goes, these gods were connected with vegetation and were worshipped in fertility cults. Just as every year the crops die in winter but then come back to life in the spring, so too with the gods who are associated with the crops. They die (when the crops do) and go to the underworld, but then they revive (with the crops) and reappear on earth, raised from the dead. They are worshipped then as dying-rising deities.
Jesus, in this view, was the Jewish version of the pagan fertility deity, invented by Jews as a dying and rising god. Only later did some of the devotees of this Jewish deity historicize his existence and begin to claim that he was in fact a divine human who had once lived on earth, who had died and then rose again. Once the historicizing process began, it continued rapidly until stories were told about this God-man, and eventually a whole set of narratives were invented by authors like Mark, the author of our first Gospel. These narratives were not based on real history, however; they were based on myths that have been historicized.
This view of the invention of Jesus is nearly ubiquitous among mythicists (one who takes a different line, as we will see below, is G. A. Wells). We have already seen it set forth in the book of Kersey Graves of 1875. More recently, Robert Price claims in his just published book that he himself, once a former evangelical preacher, became a mythicist precisely when he realized that there were significant parallels between the traditions of Jesus and the stories of other dying and gods.1
Problems with the View
There are two major problems with this view that Jesus was originally invented as a dying-rising god modeled on the dying and rising gods of the pagan world. First, there are serious doubts about whether there were in fact dying-rising gods in the pagan world, and if there were, whether they were anything like the dying-rising Jesus. Second, there is the even more serious problem that Jesus could not have been invented as a dying-rising god because his earliest followers did not think he was God.
Dying and Rising Gods in Pagan Antiquity
Even though most mythicists do not appear to know it, the onetime commonly held view that dying-rising gods were widespread in pagan antiquity has fallen on hard times among scholars.
No one was more instrumental in popularizing the notion of the dying-rising god than Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). Frazer did in his day what Joseph Campbell did in the second half of the twentieth century: he convinced thousands of people that at heart many (or most) religions are the same. Whereas Campbell was principally revered by popular audiences, especially for such books as The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth, Frazer’s studies made their greatest impact upon scholars. Particularly influential was his view of dying and rising gods.
Frazer’s important book was called The Golden Bough, which went through a number of editions, each time growing larger and larger. Already in the first edition of 1890 Frazer had set out his view of pagan deities who died and then rose again; by the third edition of 1911–15 Frazer devoted all of part 4 to the topic. In it Frazer claimed that Eastern Mediterranean divinities such as Osiris, Dumuzi (or Tammuz), Attis, and Adonis were all dying and rising gods. In each case we are dealing, Frazer averred, with vegetative gods whose cycle of life, death, and resurrection replicates and explains the earth’s fertility. Frazer himself did not draw explicit connections between these divinities and Jesus, but it is perfectly clear from his less-than-subtle ways of discussing these other gods what he had in mind. He thought that the Christians picked up this widespread characterization of the pagans and applied it to their myths about Jesus.2
Although such views about pagan gods were widely held in some circles for years, they met with devastating critique near the end of the twentieth century. There are, to be sure, scholars here or there who continue to think that there is some evidence of dying and rising gods. But even these scholars, who appear to be in the minority, do not think that the category is of any relevance for understanding the traditions about Jesus.
This is true of the most outspoken advocate for the onetime existence of such gods, Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, whose book The Riddle of the Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East tries to revive the major thesis of Frazer. On the basis of a highly detailed and nuanced study of evidence, Mettinger claims that “the world of ancient Near Eastern religions actually knew a number of deities that may be properly described as dying and rising gods.”3 He does go on to stress, however, that the vocabulary of resurrection (that is, of a dead person being revived to live again) is used in only one known case: Melqart (or Heracles). As examples of such pagan deities in pre-Christian times, Mettinger names, in addition to Melqart, Dumuzi and Baal. Like Frazer before him, he argues that the dying and rising of these gods have “close ties to the seasonal cycle of plant life.”4
Having read Mettinger’s book carefully, I do not think that it will provide much support for the mythicist view of pagan dying and rising gods. For one thing, even though Mettinger claims that such views were known in Palestine around the time of the New Testament, he does not provide a shred of evidence. He instead quotes passages from the Old Testament (his field of expertise): Ezekiel 8:14; Zechariah 12:11; and Daniel 11:37. But you can look at these passages yourself. None of them mentions the dying and rising of a god. So how do they prove that such a god was known in Palestine? What is more, none of them dates from anywhere near the time of the New Testament but are from hundreds of years earlier. Can anyone cite a single source of any kind that clearly indicates that people in rural Palestine, say, in the days of Peter and James, worshipped a pagan god who died and rose again? You can trust me, if there was a source like that, it would be talked about by everyone interested in early Christianity. It doesn’t exist.
What is particularly striking about Mettinger’s study of older deities (not in the time of the New Testament but centuries earlier) is just how ambiguous the evidence is, even in cases that he argues for most strenuously. He has to offer an exceedingly nuanced and philologically detailed argument to make the point that any of these deities was thought by anyone at all as dying and rising. So how strong and prevalent a category was it if in fact there are few unambiguous sources, even if we restrict ourselves to centuries before the matter becomes relevant to us?
It is worth emphasizing that even Mettinger himself does not think that his sparse findings are pertinent to the early Christian claims about Jesus as one who died and rose again. The ancient Near Eastern figures he talks about were closely connected with the seasonal cycle and occurred year in and year out. Jesus’s death and resurrection, by contrast, were considered a onetime event. More-over—this is a key point for him—Jesus’s death was seen as being a vicarious atonement for sins. Nothing like that occurs in the case of the ancient Near Eastern deities.
But there is an even larger problem. Even if—a very big if—there was an idea among some pre-Christian peoples of a god who died and arose, there is nothing like the Christian belief in Jesus’s resurrection. If the ambiguous evidence is interpreted in a certain way (Mettinger’s), the pagan gods who died did come back to life. But that is not really what the early teachings about Jesus were all about. It was not simply that his corpse was restored to the living. It is that he experienced a resurrection. That’s not the same thing.
The Jewish notion of resurrection is closely tied to a worldview that scholars have labeled Jewish apocalypticism. In the next chapter I will explain more about what that worldview entailed. For now it is enough to note that many Jews in the days of Jesus believed that the world we live in is controlled by powers of evil. That is why there is so much pain and misery here on earth: drought, famine, epidemics, earthquakes, wars, suffering, and death. Jews who held to this view, however, believed that at some future point God would intervene to overthrow the forces of evil in control of this world and set up his good kingdom on earth. In that future kingdom there would be no more pain, misery, suffering, or death. God would destroy everything and everyone opposed to him and would reward those who had been faithful to him. These rewards would not only come to those who happened to be living at the time, however. Faithful Jews who had suffered and died would be raised from the dead and given a reward. In fact, death itself would be destroyed, as one of the enemies of God and his people. At the future resurrection, the faithful would be given eternal life, never to die again.
Many Jews who believed in a future resurrection thought it would come very soon, possibly within their own lifetimes. God would crash into history to judge this world, overthrow all his enemies, including sin and death, and raise his people from the dead. And it would happen very soon.
When the earliest Christians claimed that Jesus had been raised from the dead, it was in the context of this Jewish notion of the soon-to-come resurrection. The earliest Christians—as seen from the writings of our first Christian author, Paul—thought that Jesus’s resurrection was important, in no small part, because it signaled that the resurrection had begun. That is to say, they thought they were living at the end of this wicked age, on the doorstep of the coming kingdom. That is why Paul talked about Jesus as the “firstfruits” of the resurrection. Just as farmers gathered in the firstfruits of their crop on the first day of harvest and then went out and harvested the rest of the crop the next day (not centuries later), so too Jesus is the firstfruits of what is now imminent: the resurrection of all the dead, to face judgment if they sided with evil or to be rewarded if they sided with God.
The idea of Jesus’s resurrection did not derive from pagan notions of a god simply being reanimated. It derived from Jewish notions of resurrection as an eschatological event in which God would reassert his control over this world. Jesus had conquered the evil power of death, and soon his victory would become visible in the resurrection of all the faithful.
As I already suggested, Mettinger himself does not think that the idea of pagan dying and rising gods led to the invention of Jesus. As he states, “There is, as far as I am aware, no prima facie evidence that the death and resurrection of Jesus is a mythological construct, drawing on the myths and rites of the dying and rising gods of the surrounding world.”5
More common among scholars, however, is the view that there is scarcely any—or in fact virtually no—evidence that such gods were worshipped at all. No one was more instrumental in the demise of the views so elegantly set forth by Frazer in The Golden Bough than Jonathan Z. Smith, an eminent historian of religion at the University of Chicago. Most significant was an article that Smith produced for the influential Encyclopedia of Religion, originally edited by Mircea Eliade.6 After thoroughly reexamining Frazer’s claims about pagan dying and rising gods, Smith states categorically:
The category of dying and rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts….
All the deities that have been identified as belonging to the class of dying and rising deities can be subsumed under the two larger classes of disappearing deities or dying deities. In the first case the deities return but have not died; in the second case the gods die but do not return. There is no unambiguous instance in the history of religions of a dying and rising deity.7
Smith backs up these claims by looking at the evidence for such gods as Adonis, Baal, Attis, Marduk, Osiris, and Tammuz or Dumuzi. With respect to ancient reports of the Greek Adonis, for example, there were in antiquity two forms of myth, which only later were combined into a kind of megamyth. In the first form two goddesses, Aphrodite and Persephone, compete for the affections of the human infant Adonis. Zeus (or in some of the myths Calliope) decides in Solomon-like fashion that Adonis will spend part of each year with each divinity, half the year with Aphrodite in the realms above, with the other gods, and the other half with Persephone, the goddess of the underworld. There is nothing here to suggest either death or resurrection for Adonis. Part of the year he is in one place (the realm of the living) and part in the other (the realm of the dead).
The other more familiar form of the myth comes from the Roman author Ovid. In this account the young man Adonis is killed by a boar and is then mourned and commemorated by the goddess Aphrodite in the form of a flower. In this version, then, Adonis definitely dies. But there is nothing to suggest that he was raised from the dead. It is only in later texts, long after Ovid and after the rise of Christianity, that one finds any suggestion that Adonis came back to life after his death. Smith argues that this later form of the tradition may in fact have been influenced by Christianity and its claim that a human had been raised from the dead. In other words, the Adonis myth did not influence Christian views of Jesus but rather the other way around. Yet even here, Smith points out, there is no evidence anywhere of some kind of mystery cult where Adonis was worshipped as a dying-rising god or in which worshippers were identified with him and his fate of death and resurrection, as happens, of course, in Christian religions built on Jesus.
Or take the instance of Osiris, commonly cited by mythicists as a pagan parallel to Jesus. Osiris was an Egyptian god about whom a good deal was written in the ancient world. We have texts discussing Osiris that span a thousand years. None was as influential or as well known as the account of the famous philosopher and religion scholar of the second Christian century, Plutarch, in his work Isis and Osiris. According to the myths, Osiris was murdered and his body was dismembered and scattered. But his wife, Isis, went on a search to recover and reassemble them, leading to Osiris’s rejuvenation. The key point to stress, however, is that Osiris does not—decidedly does not—return to life. Instead he becomes the powerful ruler of the dead in the underworld. And so for Osiris there is no rising from the dead.
Smith maintains that the entire tradition about Osiris may derive from the processes of mummification in Egypt, where bodies were prepared for ongoing life in the realm of the dead (not as resuscitated corpses here on earth). And so Smith draws the conclusion, “In no sense can the dramatic myth of his death and reanimation be harmonized to the pattern of dying and rising gods.”8 The same can be said, in Smith’s view, of all the other divine beings often pointed to as pagan forerunners of Jesus. Some die but don’t return; some disappear without dying and do return; but none of them die and return.
Jonathan Z. Smith’s well-documented views have made a large impact on scholarship. A second article, by Mark S. Smith, has been equally informative. Mark Smith is a scholar of the ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible who also opposes any notion of dying and rising gods in the ancient world.9 Mark Smith makes the compelling argument that when Frazer devised his theory about dying and rising gods, he was heavily influenced by his understanding of Christianity and Christian claims about Christ. But when one looks at the actual data about the pagan deities, without the lenses provided by later Christian views, there is nothing to make one consider them as gods who die and rise again. Smith shows why such views are deeply problematic for Osiris, Dumuzi, Melqart, Heracles, Adonis, and Baal.
According to Smith, the methodological problem that afflicted Frazer was that he took data about various divine beings, spanning more than a millennium, from a wide range of cultures, and smashed the data all together into a synthesis that never existed. This would be like taking views of Jesus from a French monk of the twelfth century, a Calvinist of the seventeenth century, a Mormon of the late nineteenth century, and a Pentecostal preacher of today, combining them all together into one overall picture and saying, “That’s who Jesus was understood to be.” We would never do that with Jesus. Why should we do it with Osiris, Heracles, or Baal? Moreover, Smith emphasizes, a good deal of our information about these other gods comes from sources that date from a period after the rise of Christianity, writers who were themselves influenced by Christian views of Jesus and “who often received their information second-hand.”10 In other words, they probably do not tell us what pagans themselves, before Christianity, were saying about the gods they worshipped.
The majority of scholars agree with the views of Smith and Smith: there is no unambiguous evidence that any pagans prior to Christianity believed in dying and rising gods, let alone that it was a widespread view held by lots of pagans in lots of times and places. But as we have seen, scholars such as Mettinger beg to differ. What can we conclude from this scholarly disagreement for the purposes at hand, the question of whether Jesus was invented as a dying and rising god? There are several key points to emphasize. First, it is important to realize that the reason there are disagreements among scholars (at least with someone like Mettinger) is that the evidence for such gods is at best sparse, scattered, and ambiguous, not abundant, ubiquitous, and clear. If there were any such beliefs about dying and rising gods, they were clearly not widespread and available for all to see. Such gods were definitely not widely known and widely discussed among religious people of antiquity, as is obvious from the fact that they are not clearly discussed in any of our sources. On this everyone should be able to agree. Even more important, there is no evidence that such gods were known or worshipped in rural Palestine, or even in Jerusalem, in the 20s CE. Anyone who thinks that Jesus was modeled on such deities needs to cite some evidence—any evidence at all—that Jews in Palestine at the alleged time of Jesus’s life were influenced by anyone who held such views. One reason that scholars do not think that Jesus was invented as one of these deities is precisely that we have no evidence that any of his followers knew of such deities in the time and place where Jesus was allegedly invented. Moreover, as Mettinger himself acknowledges, the differences between the dying and rising gods (which he has reconstructed on slim evidence) and Jesus show that Jesus was not modeled on them, even if such gods were talked about during Jesus’s time.
But there is an even more important reason for thinking that Jesus was not invented as a Jewish version of a dying and rising god. The earliest Christians did not think that Jesus was God.
Jesus as God
That the earliest Christians did not consider Jesus God is not a controversial point among scholars. Apart from fundamentalists and very conservative evangelicals, scholars are unified in thinking that the view that Jesus was God was a later development within Christian circles. Fundamentalists disagree, of course, because for them Jesus really is God, and since he is God, he must have known he was God, and he must have told his followers, and so they knew from the beginning that he was God. This view is rooted in the fundamentalist doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture, where everything that Jesus is said to have said, for example in the Gospel of John, is historically accurate and beyond question. But that is not the view of critical scholarship. Whether or not Jesus really was God (a theological, not a historical, question), the earliest followers did not think so. As I indicated at the very beginning of this book, the questions of how, when, and why Christians came to regard Jesus as God will be the subject of my next book, not this one. But I do need to stress the point here: this was a later development in Christian thinking.
It is striking that none of our first three Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—declares that Jesus is God or indicates that Jesus ever called himself God. Jesus’s teaching in the earliest Gospel traditions is not about his personal divinity but about the coming kingdom of God and the need to prepare for it. This should give readers pause. If the earliest followers of Jesus thought Jesus was God, why don’t the earliest Gospels say so? It seems like it would have been a rather important aspect of Christ’s identity to point out. It is true that the Gospels consistently portray Jesus as the Son of God. But that is not the same thing as saying that he was God. We may think it is since for us the son of a dog is a dog, the son of a cat is a cat, and the son of a god, therefore, is a god. But the Gospels were not written by people living in the twenty-first century with modern understandings (or even in the fourth century with fourth-century understandings). The Gospels were written in a first-century context and were ultimately guided by Jewish understandings, especially as these were mediated through the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament. The Old Testament speaks of many individuals and groups who were considered to be son(s) of God. In no instance were these persons God.
And so, for example, the king of Israel was explicitly said to be “the son of God” (for example, Solomon, in 2 Samuel 7:11–14). This certainly did not make the king (especially Solomon) God. He was instead a human who stood in a close relationship with God, like a child to a parent, and was used by God to mediate his will on earth. So too the nation of Israel was sometimes called “the son of God” (for example, Hosea 11:1). This did not make the nation divine; Israel was instead the people through whom God mediated his will on earth. When the future messiah was thought of as the son of God, it was not because he would be God incarnate but because he would be a human particularly close to God through whom God worked his purposes. Jesus, for the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, is that human.
This is the view, of course, that the Gospel writers inherited from the oral and written traditions on which they based their accounts. Jesus is not called God in Q, M, L, or any of the oral accounts that we can trace from the synoptic Gospels. But we can go yet earlier than this. As I pointed out, we have very primitive views of Jesus expressed in such pre-Pauline traditions as the one he cites in Romans 1:3–4, where Jesus is said to have become the son of God (not God) at his resurrection. That is, at Jesus’s resurrection God adopted him into sonship. So too with the speeches of Acts, which we examined earlier (see Acts 2:36; 13:32–33). God exalted Jesus and made him his son, the Christ, at the resurrection.
This is in all probability the earliest understanding of Jesus among his followers. While he was living they thought that perhaps he would be the future messiah (who also, as we have seen, was not God). But this view was radically disconfirmed when he was arrested by the authorities, put on trial, and then tortured and crucified. This was just the opposite fate from the one that the messiah was supposed to enjoy. For some reason, however, the followers of Jesus (or at least some of them) came to think that he had been raised from the dead. This reconfirmed in a major way what they had thought of Jesus—that he was someone special before God. But it also forced his followers to rethink who he was. Some began to think of him as the messiah who had to suffer for sins, who had gone obediently to his death knowing that God wanted him to do so, but who was raised by God from the dead to show that he really was the one who enjoyed God’s special favor. And so God exalted him to heaven, where he is now waiting to return in order to bring in God’s kingdom as the coming messiah.
One passage that mythicists often appeal to, however, may on the surface seem to suggest that Paul, writing before the Gospels, understood Jesus as God who died and rose again (comparable to dying and rising pagan deities). This is the much-debated “hymn”—as it is called—found in Philippians 2:6–11. There is probably no other passage in the entire New Testament, and certainly none in the writings of Paul, that has had as much interpretive ink spilled over it. Scholars have written large books just on these six verses alone.11 Even though mythicists typically treat it as unambiguous evidence of their views, the reality is that there is almost nothing unambiguous in the passage. Every word and phrase has been pored over and debated by scholars using the most sophisticated tools of analysis that are available. And still there is no consensus on what the passage means. But one thing is clear: it does not mean what mythicists typically claim it means. It does not portray Jesus in the guise of a pagan dying and rising god, even if that is what, on a superficial reading, it may appear to be about.
First I need to quote the passage in full. (It is important to recognize that scholars have heated and prolonged debates about even how to translate many of the key terms.)
Have this mind in yourselves which is also in Christ Jesus,
who although he was in the form of God,
did not regard being equal with God something to be seized.
But he emptied himself,
taking on the form of a slave,
and coming in the likeness of humans.
And being found in the appearance as a human
he humbled himself
and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
Therefore also God highly exalted him [literally: hyperexalted him],
and gave to him the name
that is above every name.
That at the name of Jesus,
every knee should bow
of things in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth.
And every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord
to the glory of God the Father.
Here then is one of the most intriguing accounts of Christ in the New Testament. I cannot even begin to give a full interpretation of the passage here. But I can say something about the passage, broadly, before making a couple of key interpretive points.
There is wide agreement that the passage appears to be poetic—possibly some kind of hymn (this is what everyone used to think) or a creed (this is more plausible)—and that Paul appears to be quoting it rather than composing it. But even this is debated, as scholars dispute whether it was written by someone else before Paul drafted this letter to the Christians in Philippi or whether Paul himself was its author.12 It is debated how to divide the passage. In my translation I have divided it in half, with the first half consisting of three stanzas of three lines, each talking about the descent or humbling of Christ, and the second half consisting of three stanzas of three lines, each talking about the ascent or exaltation of Christ. That is one possibility. Many, many others have been proposed by fine scholars, many of whom have studied this passage far more than I have, even though I have studied, thought about, ruminated on, and read about this passage for well over thirty years.13
For the purposes of my discussion here I simply want to make a couple of very basic points. One interpretation of the passage—the one that will strike many first-time readers as the only obvious one—is that it portrays Christ as a preexistent divine being who came to earth, was crucified, and was then exalted back to heaven. That may be the right way to read the passage, but as I’ve said, it is hotly debated. Even if that is the best way to read the passage, however, it does not support the idea that originally Christ was seen as a dying-rising god, for several reasons.
First, even though it says that before humbling himself Christ was in the “form of God,” that does not mean that he was God. Divinity was his “form,” just as later in the passage he took on the “form” of a “slave.” That does not mean that he was permanently and always a slave; it was simply the outward form he assumed. Moreover, when it says that he “did not regard equality with God something to be seized,” it is hotly debated whether that means that he did not want to “retain” what he already had or to “grab” something that he did not have. In favor of the latter interpretation is the fact that after he humbled himself, Christ is said to have been hyperexalted, that is, exalted even higher than he was before. That must mean that before he humbled himself he was not already equal with God. Otherwise, how could he later be exalted even higher? What would be “higher” than God? That would suggest that even though he was originally in God’s form, he was not fully God at the beginning; being fully God was something that he refused to grasp.
But if Christ was in the form of God without being equal with God, what was he? Here scholars have had a field day. One of the most popular interpretations of the passage may not have occurred to you at all. A large number of scholars think that the passage does not imagine Christ existing as a divine being with God in heaven, coming to earth to die, and then being exalted even higher afterward. They think instead that the passage is talking about Christ as the “second Adam,” one who was like the first man, Adam, as described in the book of Genesis, but who acted in just the opposite way, leading to just the opposite result.14
In the book of Genesis, when God creates “man,” Adam is said to have been made in the “image” of God (Genesis 1:26). The terms image and form are sometimes used synonymously in the Old Testament. Is Christ in the “form” of God the same way that Adam was? If so, what did Adam do? He wanted to be “equal with God,” and so he grabbed for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Christ, by contrast, did not think that equality with God “was something to be grabbed.” His actions were just the opposite of Adam’s. Because of sin, Adam was destined to die—as were all of his descendants. Christ, by contrast, explicitly chose to die for the sake of those who had to die because of Adam. And because he did not grab for equality with God but died out of obedience, God did just the opposite for Christ that he did for Adam. Adam and his descendants were cursed. Christ was highly exalted above all else. So high was he exalted that it is at the name of Jesus that every knee shall bow and every tongue will confess.
This final part of the passage is actually a quotation from Isaiah 45:23, which says that it is to God alone that every knee shall bow and tongue confess. However you interpret the rest of the passage, this conclusion is stunning. Christ will receive the adoration that is by rights God’s alone. That is how highly God exalted him in reward for his act of obedience.
If this interpretation is correct, then the beginning of the passage is describing Christ not as a preexistent divine being but as very much as a human being. But even if it is not correct, the passage begins by describing Christ, not as God, but as a being in the form of God. Another option is that this is describing Christ as a preexistent angelic being. Angels in the Old Testament are God’s messengers who can appear like God, as in passages in the Old Testament where an “angel of the Lord” appears and is actually called God (as in Exodus 3—the passage about Moses and the Burning Bush). In these cases, though, the angels may appear like God (in the “form” of God), but they are not actually God. They are God’s messengers, his angels. It is striking that a number of Jewish traditions speak of an angel being exalted to the level of God, sitting on a throne next to that of the Almighty.15
However one interprets the beginning of this passage in Philippians, one thing is clear. It does not describe a dying and rising god. Thinking that it does so requires the reader to ignore what the text actually says in the second stanza. What is most significant is that Christ—whether a preexistent divine being, Adam, or an angel (I prefer the final interpretation myself)—“emptied himself” before dying on the cross. That is to say, he deprived himself of whatever status he had when he was in the “form of god,” and he took on a completely different form, that of a “slave.” It is not as a god that he dies, but as a slave. And he is not raised as God. He is exalted to a position worthy of equal worship with God only after he is raised. That is when he is awarded divine attributes and given divine worship. This passage is thus not talking about a god who dies and then is raised, it is talking about the death of a humbled slave and his exaltation to a position of divine authority and grandeur.
The most important point I want to make, however, is this. Even those scholars who think that Paul inherited this hymn (or creed) do not think that it was the oldest form of belief about Jesus. Even if it predates Paul, it does not represent the earliest Christian understanding of Christ. However we interpret this passage, the earliest Christian traditions point in a completely different direction, emphasizing Jesus’s full humanness and saying nothing at all about his being God. The divinity of Christ is a relative latecomer to the scene of Christian theological reflections.
The broad views about Jesus in the early Christian traditions are otherwise clear. As I indicated, the earliest view was almost certainly that God exalted Jesus and made him his son when he raised him from the dead (this is roughly the view of the Philippians hymn as well, of course). And so the speeches of Acts, which must date well before any of our Gospels, and almost certainly predate the writings of Paul himself, indicate that it was at the resurrection that Jesus was made the Lord, the Christ, the Son of God (Acts 2:36; 13:32–33).16 That is the view of the creed that Paul quotes in Romans 1:3–4 as well.
Some Christians were not content with the idea that Jesus was the Son of God only at his resurrection, however, and came to think that he must have been the Son of God for his entire public ministry. And so we have traditions that arose indicating that Jesus became the Son of God at his baptism. That may be the view still found in our earliest Gospel, Mark, who begins his narrative with Jesus being baptized and hearing the voice of God from heaven declaring him his son. In Mark Jesus is certainly not God. In fact, in one passage he clearly indicates that he is not to be thought of as God (Mark 10:17–18; a man calls Jesus “good,” and Jesus objects because “no one is good but God alone”).
Eventually some Christians came to think that Jesus must have been the Son of God not only during his public ministry but for his entire life. And so they began telling stories about how he was born as the Son of God. We find this view in Matthew and Luke, where Jesus’s mother is in fact a virgin so that he is in a more literal sense the Son of God because the Spirit of God is responsible for making Mary pregnant (see Luke 1:35).
As time went on, even this view failed to satisfy some Christians, who thought that Jesus was not simply a being who came into the world as the Son of God but someone who had existed even before being born. This is a view not suggested by either Matthew or Luke (they appear to think that when he came into existence at conception). And so we come to our final canonical Gospel, the Gospel of John, which indicates that Jesus is the Word of God who existed with God from eternity past, through whom God created the world, who has now become a human (John 1:1–18). But I need to stress: this is a view found only in our last Gospel.17 It eventually became the standard view among Christians and was written into Christian statements of faith: Christ is himself God. But it was not the earliest Christian view, not by a long shot. Christians, then, did not invent Jesus as a dying and rising god. In the oldest form of the faith they did not consider him to be God. That belief developed only later.
Instead, as we have seen, the earliest Christians considered Jesus to be the crucified messiah. Even though Jesus is never explicitly called God in any of our early Gospels—or in the traditions they were based on or even in Paul—he was almost everywhere called something else. He was called the Christ. Even the Philippians hymn, Paul tells us, is about “Christ Jesus.” So frequently was Jesus called Christ in the oldest Christian traditions that already by the time of Paul, “Christ” had become Jesus’s name (Jesus Christ, not Jesus God). Jesus is called Christ in Paul, Mark, M, L, John, Josephus, Pliny, Tacitus, and so on. It is important to remember what this term meant in ancient Judaism. It referred—however it was interpreted—to a future powerful deliverer of God’s people from their enemies.
And so the key question to ask of the early traditions is not why the earliest Christians called Jesus God (since they didn’t), but why they called him the Christ. He was, after all, known by everyone to have been crucified, and the messiah—whatever else you might say about him—was not supposed to be crucified. Just the opposite. The early Christians did not ask why God had been crucified. They asked why Christ had been crucified. They did not derive the ideas of Jesus’s death from pagan myth. They knew he had died, and they believed, in Jewish apocalyptic fashion, that he had been raised. But the fact that they called him the Christ shows they did not derive the ideas of his death from Jewish legend and myth either since Jews had no conception of a crucified messiah. Thus the conclusion that has been reached by historians far and wide appears to be the right one: Jesus must have really existed and must have really been crucified. Those who believed in him thought that he was the messiah anyway. And they redefined what the term messiah meant in order to make sense of it. They did not invent the idea of Jesus, however. Had they done that, they never would have invented him as a crucified messiah. They were forced to come up with the idea of the crucified messiah because they knew there really was a man Jesus who was crucified, yet they wanted to maintain that he was the messiah.
And so Jesus was not invented as a Jewish version of the pagan dying and rising god. There are very serious doubts over whether any pagans believed in such gods. Few scholars wonder if Jews believed in them, however. There is no evidence to locate such beliefs among Palestinian Jews of the first century. But even more important, Christians did not see Jesus as a dying and rising god because they at first did not even see him as God. The divinity of Christ was a later theological development. The earliest Christians saw him as a dying and rising messiah.
Was Jesus Invented as a Personification of Jewish Wisdom?
NO ONE HAS BEEN a more enduring spokesperson for a mythicist view of Christ than G. A. Wells. For over thirty-five years Wells has insisted that the Christ of Christian tradition did not exist but was invented. He does not think, however, that the majority of mythicists are right that Christ was invented as a Jewish version of some pagan dying-rising gods. In his opinion the myths used to generate Christ were Jewish. Specifically, Christ was created as a personification of the mythical figure known in Jewish texts as “Wisdom.”
As we will see in greater detail later, Wells also disagrees with most other mythicists because he thinks that there really was a man Jesus. But for Wells, Jesus had very little, or nothing, to do with the myth about Christ. He was not the Galilean preacher and healer of the first century. That figure is the creation of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus was a completely unknown and obscure Jewish figure who lived over a hundred years earlier. Christ, by contrast, was an invention of a Jewish sect of the first century.18
In rough outline this view is similar to that earlier held by Archibald Robertson, who suggested the following: “May not a solution of the dispute [between those who insist that Jesus did not exist and those who claim he did] lie in recognition of the fact that the two parties are arguing on different subjects—that there are indeed, two different Jesuses, a mythical and an historical, having nothing in common but the name, and that the two have been fused into one?”19 In Robertson’s view, Paul was “a Gnostic missionary who, even if he knew anything of a Messiah executed in Palestine, cared nothing for him or his followers.” For Robertson, it is Mark who effected the fusion of the two Jesuses. And so the historical Jesus did exist. But “we know next to nothing about this Jesus.”
Wells takes this ball and runs with it, a considerable distance. Wells thinks that the early Christians who invented Christ were particularly influenced by Jewish traditions that spoke of God’s Wisdom as if it existed as an actual divine entity, distinct from but obviously closely related to, God himself. Wisdom preexisted with God and was used by God to create the world. Wells is right that this is indeed a known figure from Jewish traditions, appearing as far back as the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament. The most famous passage occurs in Proverbs 8, where Wisdom itself is speaking:
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth….
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth….
When he established the heavens I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep….
Then I was beside him, like a master worker;
And I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always.
In a book of Jewish tradition not found in the canon of the Hebrew Bible (but included in the Apocrypha), called the Wisdom of Solomon, we learn the following about Wisdom:
She is a breath of the power of God
and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty….
For she is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness….
She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other,
and she orders all things well….
For she is an initiate in the knowledge of God,
and an associate in his works. (Wisdom of Solomon 7–8)
Here we have a figure who was preexistent with God, who perfectly reflects God, who was used by God to create the world. This, for Wells, sounds a good deal like what we find in a passage celebrating Christ in one of the letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament:
For he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for all things were created in him—things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things and all things subsist in him. And he is the head of the body, the church, he who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that he might be preeminent in all things. Because in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell and, through him, to reconcile all things to himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross, whether things on earth or in the heavens. (Colossians 1:15–20)
This passage, which Wells points out is very similar to the Philippians hymn, which we just considered (Philippians 2:6–11), portrays Christ as the Wisdom of God, the image of God himself who created all things, who comes to earth and dies for the sake of reconciling all things back to God. In Wells’s view, the idea that Christ was crucified came to Paul as he reflected on the traditions of Wisdom that he inherited through the Jewish traditions. Before Paul, “some Christians…did not share his view that Jesus was crucified.” But in the Wisdom of Solomon we hear of the wise man who suffered a “shameful death” (see Wisdom of Solomon 2:12–20). “It may well have been musing on such a passage that led Paul (or a precursor) to the idea, so characteristic of his theology, that Christ suffered the most shameful death of all.”20
The key point for Wells, however, is that Paul explicitly calls Christ the “Wisdom of God” in 1 Corinthians 1:23–24: “We preach Christ crucified, which is a scandal to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles; but to those who are called, both Jews and Gentiles, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.” And later in the same book Paul says, “We speak wisdom to those who are mature, but it is a wisdom not of this age nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away. But we speak a wisdom of God that has been revealed in a mystery, which God foreknew before the ages unto our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew. For if they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:6–8).
According to Wells, then, Paul held to the view that Wisdom had become incarnate in Christ. The myth of Christ as Wisdom made incarnate was eventually historicized—that is, made into a real, historical, human being—when the Gospels were written toward the end of the first century.
Despite the inherent intrigue of this proposal, it is, I am afraid, riddled with problems, which may be why most other mythicists have not latched on to it. For one thing, while it is true that Paul calls Jesus the Wisdom of God in 1 Corinthians, this is not the normal way that he refers to him and is certainly not the way he first thought of him. There is no reason to privilege this conception over the many others that can be found in Paul. Within this passage alone, for example, Paul calls Jesus both the “Christ” and the “power of God.” Why should we think that Paul (or his predecessor) first imagined Christ to be incarnate Wisdom—especially since he does not call Jesus this anywhere else in his writings? And what does he call him? Typically, he calls him Christ. This, not Wisdom, was Paul’s earliest understanding of Jesus upon his conversion.
Paul calls Christ the wisdom of God in the Corinthians passage because he is trying to make a specific point, that the crucifixion of the messiah is a stumbling block for Jews and foolish for Gentiles. We have already seen the reason Jews stumbled over the claim that the messiah was crucified: this was not at all what was supposed to happen to the messiah. But for Paul, rather than showing that Christ was “weak” when he was crucified, the cross shows forth God’s true “power.” So too Gentiles thought that the idea of an executed criminal as the revealer of God was ridiculous. But for Paul it was, by contrast, a sign of God’s “wisdom.” That is why Jesus is the wisdom of God, not because he is an embodiment of the Jewish traditions about the Wisdom figure.
Moreover, it is important to note how Paul phrases this entire passage: his emphasis throughout is precisely on “Christ” and his crucifixion. This is an important point because Wells himself admits that the Jewish traditions about Wisdom include no reference to Wisdom ever being or becoming the messiah. There is no way to move, then, from the idea that God’s Wisdom became incarnate to the notion that this one was specifically the messiah. It is quite easy, however, to move in the other direction. If Christ was crucified—the main point Paul makes about him—it may seem to be “foolish,” but God’s ways are not ours, and for God this evident foolishness is in fact “wisdom.” Paul, in other words, did not start out as a Christian thinking that Wisdom had become incarnate; he started out thinking that Christ had been crucified.
It should not be objected—as Wells does—that the poetic passage in Colossians that I quoted at length shows that Paul understood Christ as Wisdom incarnate. There is a fatal objection to this view. Paul almost certainly did not write the letter to the Colossians. It is one of the forgeries in Paul’s name, written after his death, as critical scholars have recognized for a very long time.21 And to argue that the passage derives from a pre-Pauline tradition is problematic. Colossians is post-Pauline, so on what grounds can we say that a passage in it is pre-Pauline?
In short, the idea that Jesus is in some sense God’s Wisdom stands on the margins of Paul’s thinking. It is certainly not the first thing that popped into his mind when he became a follower of Jesus. It was a later theological reflection. The first and primary thing that Paul came to think of Jesus was that he was the messiah, and a crucified messiah at that. This is the tradition about Jesus that we can trace back to the time even before Paul converted to be a follower of Jesus sometime around the year 32 or 33. The Christians who proclaimed this view did not originally think of Christ as incarnate Wisdom based on the books of Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon. They thought of Christ as the one who had been crucified.
And this was not based on the reflection that a wise man was said to have died a “shameful death” in a passage of the Wisdom of Solomon, a book that did not become part of the Jewish scriptures. It was based on the fact that everyone knew that Jesus had been crucified. Those who believed he was the messiah therefore concluded that the messiah had been crucified. And as a result they redefined what it meant to be the messiah. It meant one who suffered for the sins of others. This view seemed ridiculous to most hearers. But the followers of Jesus argued that it was one of those paradoxical truths that showed that God’s ways are not human ways and that what seems foolish to humans is wisdom for God. Once they began to make that claim, years after Paul had been converted, they began to press it even more and (possibly) came to think of Jesus as God’s Wisdom itself, the one through whom God made the world. But this was not the earliest belief of the Christians or of Paul.
Was Jesus an Unknown Jew Who Lived in Obscurity More Than a Century Before Paul?
G. A. WELLS HAS argued that Paul did not understand Jesus to be a real flesh-and-blood Jew who recently lived as a teacher in Palestine and was crucified by the Roman authorities in the recent past. Instead, Wells contends, Paul understood Jesus to have been a supernatural being who lived in utter obscurity some 150 years or so earlier, who was crucified not by the Romans but by the demonic forces in the world.22 In part Wells derives this view from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where, as we have just seen, he refers to God’s wisdom: “We speak a wisdom of God that is hidden in a mystery, which God foreordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew. For if they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7–8).
The fact that the “rulers” did not grasp the hidden mystery of who Christ was shows that he lived in utter obscurity. He was not a well-known teacher. Moreover, for Wells, Paul gives no indication that Jesus lived in the recent past. Paul simply indicates, says Wells, that Jesus started to “appear” to people in the recent past, after his resurrection (appearing to Paul himself, for example). But that does not mean he had recently lived. On the contrary, even though Jesus was a descendant of King David, Paul gives “no indication in which of the many centuries between David and Paul” that Jesus lived.23 Wells argues that 1 Thessalonians 2:15 cannot be used to establish Paul’s views of a recent Jesus, when the text speaks of the Judeans “who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and are displeasing to both God and all humans.” In Wells’s view, this passage is an insertion into Paul’s letter, not something Paul himself wrote—a view that I discussed (and dismissed) earlier.
In short, for Paul, Jesus lived a completely unknown and obscure life over a century earlier. He was executed during the reign of the ruthless Jewish king Jannaeus (ruled 103–76 BCE), who was known to have crucified some eight hundred of his Jewish opponents. Paul knew nothing of Jesus’s life and did not care to know anything of his life. All he knew was that Jesus had now, in recent times, begun to appear to people, showing that he was alive again. Those who believed in him could be united with him by mystical baptism in light of the approaching end. It was twenty-five to thirty years after Paul that the story of Jesus began to be historicized into Gospel traditions, as eventually written down first by the Gospel of Mark.
For Wells, if Paul had thought Jesus had died recently, he surely would have mentioned something about a crucifixion in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate. Indications that Paul did not think that Jesus had lived recently can be found in such passages as Colossians 1:15, which speaks of Christ as “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” For Wells, “such passages do not read like allusions to a near-contemporary being.”24
There are numerous problems with this view. To begin with, as we have seen, Paul did not write the letter to the Colossians. It can scarcely be used to establish Paul’s views. But even if we thought that Paul wrote it, the passage in question says nothing at all about when Christ existed as a human, whether in the recent or the distant past. This is the kind of weak assertion that Wells typically makes. He provides no solid ground for thinking that Paul imagined Jesus to have lived in the remote past—certainly nothing to suggest that his life ended during the reign of King Jannaeus. The fact that Paul does not mention that Jesus died in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate is not in the least odd. What occasion did Paul have to mention something that everyone knew? That this was common knowledge should be clear from our Gospel sources, which did not begin to historicize Jesus two or three decades after Paul but spoke of the historical Jesus already by the early 30s, within at least a year of the traditional date of his death, before Paul was even converted, as we have seen.
There are solid reasons for thinking that Paul understood Jesus to have died recently. I can start with that basic confession of faith that Paul lays out in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5, a confession that was passed along to him by those who came before, as he himself states: “For I delivered over to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried; and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve.”
Several points are worth emphasizing here. This ancient creed is a neatly balanced, poetical statement, with two halves. In both halves it makes a claim about Christ (he died; he was raised), indicates that the claim is “in accordance with the scriptures,” and then offers an empirical proof: that he died is proved by the fact that he was buried; that he was raised is proved by the fact that he appeared to Cephas (Peter) and then to the twelve (apostles).
The reason the passage is highly relevant to our discussion here is that Paul gives no indication at all that a hundred years or more passed between Jesus’s resurrection and his appearance to the apostles. Quite the contrary; to insert a century-long hiatus into the formulation seems to be a bizarre interpretive move. What in the statement could possibly make one inclined to do so? No, Paul is expressing a straight chronological sequence of events: Jesus died; he was buried; three days later he was raised; and he then appeared to the apostles.
In Wells’s view Jesus died over a century earlier and presumably was raised then, since Paul does say that the resurrection took place three days (not a century) after the death. But quite apart from this view being completely ungrounded and counterintuitive, it works precisely against the logic involved in Paul’s view of the resurrection of Jesus. For Wells, the fact that Jesus has started to appear to people now, a century later, shows to Paul that the end of the age is drawing to a close. But what is the logic in that? Why would the sudden appearance of a long-dead man show Paul anything other than that he was seeing things? By contrast, if the death and burial and resurrection and appearances were all recent, then Paul’s theological understanding of the resurrection makes perfect sense.
Paul’s theology in fact was very much based on the fact (for him it was a fact) that Jesus was raised, and raised quite recently (not that he simply started appearing recently). If you were to ask Christians today what the significance of the resurrection of Jesus was, you might get a wide range of answers, from the rather uninformed “you can’t keep a good man down” to the more sophisticated “it shows that he really was the Son of God.” If you were to ask the apostle Paul the question, he would give a response that almost no one today would give. For Paul, the fact that Jesus was (recently) raised from the dead shows clearly that the end of the age is imminent.
The logic is tied to the apocalyptic understanding of the resurrection that I described earlier in this chapter. Paul was a Jewish apocalypticist even before he became a follower of Jesus. As such, Paul believed that God would soon intervene in history, overthrow the forces of evil, and bring in a good kingdom on earth. In thinking this, Paul was much like all the other apocalypticists from the time that we know about, for example, the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of the various Jewish apocalypses. At this soon-to-arrive cataclysmic end of the age, a judgment would be rendered on all people, leading to judgment of some and condemnation of others. This would apply to both the living and the dead, at the future resurrection. The idea of the “resurrection of the dead” was an apocalyptic idea shared by a wide range of Jews, like Paul, even before he was converted. The key point is this: the resurrection was to happen at the end of this age.
For Paul, Jesus’s resurrection—this end-of-the-age event—showed that the end had already begun. That, as we saw, is why Paul calls Jesus the “firstfruits of the resurrection” in 1 Corinthians 15:20. After the farmer gathers the firstfruits on the first day of harvest, when does he gather the rest? Does he wait a hundred years? No, he goes out the next day. If Jesus is called the firstfruits of the resurrection it is because all the others who are dead will soon—very soon—be raised as well. We are living at the end of time.
The fact that Paul thinks of Jesus as the firstfruits shows beyond reasonable doubt that he thought the resurrection was a recent event. It is not that Jesus—killed a hundred or more years earlier—had started to appear to people (including “apostles” who never knew him) here at the end. It is that he has been raised here at the end. The culmination of the end is therefore imminent. That is why Paul intimates that he will be alive when Jesus returns (see 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18). The recent resurrection of God’s messiah is a clear indication that the end of all things is virtually here.
And so both the literary character of 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 and the logic of Paul’s understanding of the resurrection show that he thought that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were recent events. I should stress that this is the view of all of our sources that deal with the matter at all. It is hard to believe that Paul would have such a radically different view from every other Christian of his day, as Wells suggests. That Jesus lived recently is affirmed not only in all four of our canonical Gospels (where, for example, he is associated with John the Baptist and is said to have been born during the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus, under the rulership of the Jewish king Herod, and so on); it is also the view of all of the Gospel sources—Q (which associates Jesus with John the Baptist), M, L—and of the non-Christian sources such as Josephus and Tacitus (who both mention Pilate). These sources, I should stress, are all independent of one another; some of them go back to Palestinian traditions that can readily be dated to 31 or 32 CE, just a year or so after the traditional date of Jesus’s death.
Was Jesus Crucified in the Spiritual Realm Rather Than on Earth?
ONE OF THE STAUNCHEST defenders of a mythicist view of Christ, Earl Doherty, maintains that the apostle Paul thinks that Jesus was crucified, not here on earth by the Romans, but in the spiritual realm by demonic powers. In advancing this thesis, Doherty places himself in an ironic position that characterizes many of his mythicist colleagues. He quotes professional scholars at length when their views prove useful for developing aspects of his argument, but he fails to point out that not a single one of these scholars agrees with his overarching thesis. The idea that Jesus was crucified in the spiritual realm is not a view set forth by Paul. It is a view invented by Doherty.
It is rather difficult to respond to a book like Doherty’s recent massive tome, Jesus: Neither God nor Man. It is an 800-page book that is filled with so many unguarded and undocumented statements and claims, and so many misstatements of fact, that it would take a 2,400-page book to deal with all the problems. His major theses are set forth in a brief preface that lists “The Twelve Pieces of the Jesus Puzzle.” Many of the claims are problematic, and I have dealt with a number of them already. One particular piece is especially unconvincing: in Doherty’s view, Paul (and other early Christians) believed that the “Son of God had undergone a redeeming ‘blood’ sacrifice” not in this world but in a spiritual realm above it.25
Doherty’s reason for this remarkable statement involves what he calls “the ancients’ view of the universe” (was there one such view?). According to Doherty, authors who were influenced by Plato’s way of thinking and by the mythology of the ancient Near East believed that there was a heavenly realm that had its counterpart here on earth. “Genuine” reality existed, not here in this world, but in that other realm. This view of things was especially true, Doherty avers, in the mystery cults, which Doherty claims provided “the predominant form of popular religion in this period.”26 (This latter claim, by the way, is simply not true. Most religious pagans were not devotees of mystery cults.)
In the first edition of Doherty’s book, he claimed that it was in this higher realm that the key divine events of the mysteries transpired; it was there, for example, that Attis had been castrated, that Osiris had been dismembered, and that Mithras had slain the bull.27 In his second edition he admits that in fact we do not know if that is true and that we do not have any reflections on such things by any of the cult devotees themselves since we don’t have a single writing from any of the adherents of the ancient mystery cults. Yet he still insists that philosophers under the influence of Plato—such as Plutarch, whom we have met—certainly interpreted things this way.
In any event, in both editions of his book Doherty claims that the myths of the mystery cults and of Christianity took place in this upper, spiritual realm. In particular, Christ was crucified up there, by the demons, not down here, by humans. As he states, “The essential element of The Jesus Puzzle interpretation of early cultic Christ belief, and the one which has proven the most difficult for the modern mind to comprehend and accept, is that Paul’s Christ Jesus was an entirely supernatural figure, crucified in the lower heavens at the hands of the demons spirits.”28 Like Wells before him, Doherty refuses to allow that 1 Thessalonians—which explicitly says that the Jews (or the Judeans) were the ones responsible for the death of Jesus—can be used as evidence of Paul’s view: it is, he insists, an insertion into Paul’s writings, not from the apostle himself. (Here we find, again, textual studies driven by convenience: if a passage contradicts your views, simply claim that it was not actually written by the author.) More telling for him is the passage I already quoted above from 1 Corinthians 2:6–8, which indicates that the “rulers of this age” were the ones who “crucified the Lord of glory.” For Doherty these are obviously not human rulers but demonic forces. Thus for Paul and other early Christians, Christ was not a human crucified on earth but a divine being crucified in the divine realm.
But is this really what Paul thought—the Paul who knew Jesus’s own brother and his closest disciple Peter, who learned of traditions of Jesus just a year or two after Jesus’s death? Is this why Paul persecuted the Christians—not for saying the (earthly) messiah was crucified by the Romans but for saying that some kind of spiritual being was killed in heaven by demons? And why exactly was that so offensive to Paul? Why would it drive him to destroy the new faith, as he himself says in Galatians 1 that he did?
There are a host of reasons for calling Doherty’s view into serious question. To begin with, how can he claim to have uncovered “the” view of the world held by “the” ancients, a view that involved an upper world where the true reality resides and this lower world, which is a mere reflection of it? How, in fact, can we talk about “the” view of the world in antiquity? Ancient views of the world were extremely complex and varied, just as today’s views are. Would anyone claim that Appalachian snake handlers and postmodernist literary critics all have the same view of the world? Or that Primitive Baptists, high-church Episcopalians, Mormons, atheists, and pagans do? Or Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists? Or Marxists and capitalists? That all of these groups have “the” modern view of the world? To talk about “the” view of the world in any century is far too simplistic and naive.
It is true that Plato and his followers had a certain view of reality where, roughly speaking, this material world is but a reflection of the world of “forms.” But Platonism was simply one of the ancient philosophies popular at the time of Christianity. Also popular was Stoicism, with a completely different, nondualistic sense of the world; Stoicism lacked the notion that this realm is an imitation of the higher realm. So too did Epicureanism, which thought in fairly modern fashion that the material world is all there is. Why should we assume that the mystery cults were influenced by just one of these philosophies? Or for that matter by any of them? What evidence does Doherty cite to show that mystery religions were at heart Platonic? Precisely none.
When, in his second edition, Doherty admits that we do not know what the followers of the mystery cults thought, he is absolutely correct. We do not know. But he then asserts that they thought like the later Platonist Plutarch. How can he have it both ways? Either we know how they thought or we do not. And it is highly unlikely that adherents of the mystery cults (even if we could lump them all together) thought like one of the greatest intellectuals of their day (Plutarch). Very rarely do common people think about the world the way upper-class, highly educated, elite philosophers do. Would you say that your understanding of how language works matches the views of Wittgenstein? Or that your understanding of political power is that of Foucault?
In the case of someone like Plutarch there is, in fact, convincing counterevidence. Philosophers like Plutarch commonly took on the task of explaining away popular beliefs by allegorizing them, to show that despite what average people naively believed, for example, about the gods and the myths told about them, these tales held deeper philosophical truths. The entire enterprise of philosophical reflection on ancient mythology was rooted precisely in the widely accepted fact that common people did not look at the world, or its myths, in the same way the philosophers did. Elite philosophers tried to show that the myths accepted by others were emblematic of deeper spiritual truths.
I hardly need to emphasize again that the early followers of Jesus were not elite philosophers. They were by and large common people. Not even Paul was philosophically trained. To be sure, as a literate person he was far better educated than most Christians of his day. But he was no Plutarch. His worldview was not principally dependent on Plato. It was dependent on the Jewish traditions, as these were mediated through the Hebrew scriptures. And the Hebrew scriptures certainly did not discount the events that transpire here on earth among very real humans. For the writers of the Hebrew Bible, the acts of God did not transpire in some kind of ethereal realm above us all. They happened here on earth and were deeply rooted in daily, historical, real human experience. In the same way, the early Christians, including Paul, thought of Jesus crucified the way they thought of other prophets who had suffered. He was crucified here on earth, by humans.
In short, since we know almost nothing about what adherents of the mystery cults believed, we simply cannot assume that they thought of the world like Plutarch and other upper-crust elite philosophers. One thing that we do know about them, however, is where they were located and thus, to some extent, where they exerted significant influence. We know this from the archaeological record they have left behind. Among all our archaeological findings, there is none that suggests that pagan mystery cults exerted any influence on Aramaic-speaking rural Palestinian Judaism in the 20s and 30s of the first century. And this is the milieu out of which faith in Jesus the crucified messiah, as persecuted and then embraced by Paul, emerged.
There are no grounds for assuming that Paul, whose views of Jesus were taken over from the Palestinian Jewish Christians who preceded him, held a radically different view of Jesus from his predecessors. Paul tells us about his background. He was raised a highly religious Jew, and he was a Pharisee. Were Pharisaic Jews influenced by the mystery cults? Did they spend their days plumbing the depths of the myths about Attis and Osiris? Did they look deeply into the mysteries of Isis and Mithras? It is an easy question to answer. These mystery cults are never mentioned by Paul or by any other Christian author of the first hundred years of the church. There is not a stitch of evidence to suggest that mystery cults played any role whatever in the views of the Pharisees or, for that matter, in the views of any Jewish group of the first century: the Sadducees, the Essenes (who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls), the revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow the Romans, the apocalyptic prophets like John the Baptist (and their followers), or the common people. So not only do we not know whether mystery cults were influenced by “the” (alleged) ancient view of the world—whatever that might be—there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that these cults played the least role in the development of early views of Jesus. Rather, we have plenty of reasons, based on our early Jewish sources, that just the opposite was the case.
That in no small part is why not a single early Christian source supports Doherty’s claim that Paul and those before him thought of Jesus as a spiritual, not a human, being who was executed in the spiritual, not the human, sphere. That is not the view of Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John. It is not the view of any of the written sources of any of these Gospels, for example, M and L. It is not the view of any of the oral traditions that later made their way into these Gospels. And it is not the view of the epistles of the New Testament, including Hebrews—the one book of the New Testament that may well reflect some Platonic influence—which unabashedly stresses that Christ “came into the world” (10:5), declares that he made a bloody sacrifice in this world (10:12), and says that “in the days of his flesh he offered up prayers and petitions to the one who was able to save him from death, with strong cries and tears” (5:7). This is not heavenly but earthly suffering. Or consider the book of 1 John, which is quite emphatic not only that Jesus shed his blood (1:7) as an “expiation for sins” (2:2) but also that he was a real, fleshly human being who could be heard, seen, felt, and handled when he was “manifested” here on earth (1:1–3).
So too with Paul. Paul indicates that Jesus was born (in this world) of a woman and as a Jew (Galatians 4:4); he repeatedly stresses that Jesus experienced a real bloody death (for example, Romans 3) and that he was bodily raised from the dead (1 Corinthians 15). This resurrection was not in the heavenly realm for Paul. It was here on earth. That is why Jesus appeared, not to heavenly beings in the upper realm, but to human beings in this one (1 Corinthians 15:5–8). If his resurrection took place here on earth, where was his crucifixion? Paul leaves little doubt about that. Jesus had a last meal with his disciples on the “night” in which he was handed over to his fate. Do they have nights in the spiritual realm? This is a description of something that happened on earth. But even more, Paul stresses that Jesus was buried between his death and his (earthly) resurrection. Surely he means he was buried in a tomb, and that would be here on earth.
The early Christians, Paul included, had a thoroughly apocalyptic understanding of the world, inherited from a Jewish worldview attested long before them, in which this created order would be transformed by the power of God when he brought his kingdom here, to this earth. The kingdom was not an ethereal place in some spiritual realm. For apocalypticists—from the Jewish author of the famous “War Scroll” discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Christian author of the book of Revelation—the future kingdom would be earthly, through and through (Revelation 20–21). Paul and others expected Jesus to return from heaven, into this very realm where we dwell now (1 Thessalonians 4–5), leading to the transformation of both us and the world (1 Corinthians 15). Paul thought Christ was to “return” here because he had “left” here. This is where he was born, lived, died, and was raised. It all happened here on earth, not in some other celestial realm. Jesus was killed by humans. The forces of evil may have ultimately engineered this death (although, actually, Paul says God did); the demons (whom Paul never mentions) may have inspired the authorities to do the dirty deed, but it was they who did it.
In sum, there is no evidence to support Doherty’s contention that for Paul and the Christians before him Jesus’s death took place in the spiritual rather than the earthly world, effected by demons instead of humans. But there are many other reasons to reject this view.
Did Mark, Our First Gospel, Invent the Idea of a Historical Person, Jesus?
WE HAVE SEEN THAT most mythicists maintain that the early Christians believed in a divine Christ modeled on pagan dying-rising gods or, in the case of G. A. Wells, in a Christ who was Wisdom made incarnate. It is widely thought among those who hold such views that the Jesus of the Gospel tradition—the Jewish teacher and prophet of Galilee who did miracles and then was crucified by the Romans—is an invention of our first Gospel, Mark. The later Gospels then derived their views, and many of their stories, from him. This view is suggested in several places by Wells29 and is stated quite definitively by Doherty: “All the Gospels derive their basic story of Jesus of Nazareth from one source: the Gospel of Mark, the first one composed. Subsequent evangelists reworked Mark in their own interests and added new material.”30 Throughout this study I have addressed this issue piecemeal in the context of other discussions. Here I would like to tackle it head-on to show that it is almost certainly not correct.
To begin with, there are solid reasons for doubting that the Gospel of John is based on Mark or on either of the other two earlier Gospels, even though the matter is debated among scholars.31 But the reality is that most of the stories told about Jesus in the synoptic Gospels are missing from John, just as most of John’s stories, including his accounts of Jesus’s teachings, are missing from the synoptics. When they do tell the same stories (for example, the cleansing of the Temple, the betrayal of Judas, the trial before Pilate, the crucifixion and resurrection narratives) they do so in different language (without verbatim overlaps) and with radically different conceptions.32 It is simplest to assume that John had his own sources for his accounts. And I should stress yet again that even if John did know the earlier Gospels, they did not provide him with most of his stories about Jesus as these, generally, are not found in those other books.
I should stress as well that some of these sources lying behind John stem from the early years of the Jesus movement, as is evident in the fact that some of them still betray their roots in Aramaic-speaking circles of Palestine. This puts them (some of them) in the early days of the movement, decades before Mark was written.33
Whatever one decides about the Gospel of John, it is clear that Matthew and Luke used narratives of Jesus’s life and death that were independent of Mark. The sources I have called M and L contain accounts, not only of Jesus’s words and deeds but also of his Passion, that differ from those in Mark. Even more telling, Luke explicitly informs us that “many” authors before him had produced accounts of the things Jesus said, did, and experienced. Mark by itself is not “many.” Other Gospels, in addition to Mark, were produced. It is regrettable that some of Luke’s other predecessors did not survive, but there is no reason to think he is lying when he says that he knows about them. And when he summarizes his Gospel at the beginning of his second volume, the book of Acts, it is clear that in his mind a full narrative of “the things accomplished among us” (as he describes the accounts of his predecessors in Luke 1:1) include not only what Jesus said and did but also the accounts of his Passion, up to the narrative of the ascension (Acts 1:1–4). Mark did not make up this kind of narrative. There were others. Luke writes his simply because he thinks he can do a better job.
In addition, Luke indicates that these kinds of narratives were based on what was being told by “eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” (1:2). In other words, Luke admits that even before there were written accounts of Jesus’s life and death, these stories were being passed along orally, from the very beginning. The apostle Paul knew several of the people who passed along such stories, as we have seen, as he mentions traditions that he inherited from believers before him (1 Corinthians 11:22–24; 15:3–5) and names several of Jesus’s close intimates as personal acquaintances: the disciples Cephas and John, along with Jesus’s brother James.
The idea that Christians were telling stories of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection before Luke, before Mark, and before Paul is held by virtually all scholars of the New Testament, and for compelling reasons. As I earlier pointed out, the only way the early Christians—starting in the months after Jesus’s death—could have propagated their beliefs, converting first Jews and then Gentiles to believe in Jesus, was by telling stories about him. Before he converted, Paul had heard some of these stories, at least those about Jesus’s crucifixion but almost certainly other stories as well. If he was offended that this Jew in particular was the one being called the messiah, it means he must have known something about Jesus in particular (it is possible of course that all Paul knew was that followers of Jesus were calling him a crucified messiah and that he knew absolutely nothing else, but that does require a bit of a stretch of the imagination). In any event, Paul certainly knew other stories about Jesus soon after he converted in 32–33 CE, as he provides information about Jesus’s birth, teachings, family, ministry, Last Supper, and crucifixion in his later writings, long before Mark wrote.
In addition, we have remnants of some of the early traditions of Jesus that were circulating orally, outside the Gospels, and only later written down. We have looked already at the speeches in the book of Acts. These speeches show clear signs of having derived from the earliest Christian communities since their Christological views are so “primitive” in relation to the views of Paul and the later Gospels. In several of these speeches it is clear that the storytellers believed that Jesus had become the Son of God and messiah at the time of the resurrection (not, say, at his baptism or his birth). These speeches must come from exceedingly early times. And in them we find summaries of Jesus’s life and death, where it is clear that he was a Jewish teacher and miracle worker who was crucified by the Romans at the instigation of the Jews (see, for example, Acts 2:22–28; 3:11–26; 13:26–41). This is not a story invented by Mark; it was in circulation from the earliest period of Christian storytelling.
That traditions of Jesus’s life and death were circulating in the early years of the Christian community independently of Mark can also be shown, somewhat ironically, from sources that are even later than Mark. We have already seen that writings unconnected to Mark, such as the letter to the Hebrews and the book of 1 John, stress both the earthly life of Jesus and the fact that he experienced a bloody death, which for these authors functioned as an atonement for sins. Whether or not Jesus’s death was an atonement is a theological question, but the historical fact remains that these authors believed that Jesus both lived and died. Thus they based their exhortations and theological reflections on these historical data and on the stories that conveyed them, all independent of Mark.
Even in the Gospel of Mark there is evidence of traditions that long predate Mark and involve both Jesus’s life and death. This we have seen from the fact that even though Mark was a Greek-speaking Christian, a number of his stories show clear signs of being originally told in Aramaic. And so we have seen that some of the sayings found in Mark make sense only when translated back into Aramaic (for example, “Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, therefore the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath”). Even more clearly, it is shown by the fact that some stories were passed down to Mark with their key Aramaic words left untranslated so that Mark, or more likely a predecessor, had to provide Greek speakers with a translation. Notably, this occurs in stories that involve both Jesus’s public ministry (Mark 5:41) and his Passion (Mark 15:34).
There is no reason to think that Mark was the one who first imagined putting a ministry of Jesus together with an account of his death and that all other accounts of Jesus’s life and death are dependent on his. The writings of Paul, speeches of Acts, the Gospel of John, the sources M and L, the comments of Luke, and other pieces of evidence all suggest quite the contrary, that even though Mark is our earliest surviving Gospel, his was not the first such narrative to be propagated. Luke is no doubt right that there were “numerous” such accounts before him, and there were certainly others after him. They are not all dependent, in all their stories, on Mark.
Conclusion
WE HAVE CONSIDERED SUBSTANTIAL and powerful arguments showing that Jesus really existed (chapters 2–5 above). Many of the arguments made by the mythicists, by contrast, are irrelevant to the question (chapter 6); many of the others are relevant but insubstantial or, quite frankly, wrong (this chapter). There was a historical Jesus, a Jewish teacher of first-century Palestine who was crucified by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate.
But knowing this is only part of the story. Historians also want to know more about Jesus, about what he stood for, what he said, what he did, what he experienced, and why he was executed. Once we move from the fact of Jesus’s existence to the question of who he really was, we move from the remarkably firm ground of virtual historical certainty to greater depths of uncertainty. Scholars debate these latter issues roundly. It will not be my purpose in the chapters that follow to solve the problems once and for all to the satisfaction of everyone who has ever thought about them. My goal instead is simply to explain why the majority of scholars who have dealt with these matters over the past century or so have concluded that the Jesus who existed is not the Jesus of the stained-glass window or the second-grade Sunday school class. The Jesus of popular imagination (there are actually a large number of Jesuses in various popular imaginations) is a “myth” in the sense that mythicists use the term: he is not the Jesus of history.
But there was a Jesus of history, and there is good evidence to suggest what he was like. In very broad terms Albert Schweitzer, with whom I started this story, was probably right. Jesus appears to have been a Jewish apocalypticist who expected God to intervene in the course of history to overthrow the forces of evil and to bring in his good kingdom. And in Jesus’s view this would happen very soon, within his own generation. We will see in the following two chapters why this view of Jesus is persuasive.