JHC still online . . . .

I had posted these articles before, but the links were all broken. I am posting them again here. They present some of the Tübingen and Dutch Radical arguments for the spuriousness of the Pauline corpus:

• Hermann Detering - The Dutch Radical Approach to the Pauline Epistles
  
• Darrell J. Doughty - Pauline Paradigms and Pauline Authenticity
  
• Robert M. Price - The Evolution of the Pauline Canon
  
• G. A. van den Bergh van Eysinga - The Spuriousness of the Pauline Epistles.
  
• Thomas Whittaker - An Exposition of Van Manen's Analysis of the Epistle to the Romans
  
• W. C. Van Manen - The Pauline Writings
  
• F. C. Baur - The Epistle to the Philippians

They are really very well researched and well argued essays. I highly recommend them.

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Paul's audiences (Quixie on mythicism #3b)

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The Corinthians
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Who were they?

Corinth was a Roman colony, a place where soldiers and proud Roman citizens, drunk with the glory days of Rome, went to retire. It became quite a little bustling city. Latin culture seems to have had an elevated status there. Latin is more prominent in the inscriptions of Corinth than Greek is.

Philo mentions Corinth as one of the colonies in which Jews had established a presence¹ , but, except for a single fragmentary Hebrew inscription, a partial reference to a “synagogue of the Hebrews”,² there is no archeological evidence of a significant Jewish presence at Corinth. Correspondingly, we have little evidence of a Judean presence in the community being addressed in 1st Corinthians³ . As in Thessalonika, the Christian population is apparently gentile (at least the Christians that are involved in the issues that are troubling Paul in the "letter" are).

1st Corinthians purports to be Paul's response to a letter he received from Corinthian Christians he refers to as πνευματικοι (pneumatikoi -spiritual ones). By examining the nature of their explicit complaints to the apostle, we get a glimpse into some of the forms that their worship took. Chapters 7–15 of 1st Corinthians are basically Paul running down their concerns and responding to them. I bracket Paul’s responses, for I am more interested in glimpsing what these spiritually superior Christians ‘believed’ than I am in Paul for now.

1. They seem to eschew sexual activity. They practice abstinence as a means of becoming more spiritual. They resent the licentiousness they ascribe to their Corinthian brethren. This again calls to mind a Qumran-like or Gnostic-like asceticism.
2. They think that they “possess knowledge.” Does this refer to their educated status or is there a Gnostic influence in Corinth? Or both? Some of the Corinthian Christians feel free to indulge in food that has previously been sacrificed to idols without thinking twice, believing it to be no harm. They’re deemed as cavalier, elitist. There is an air of superiority at play there.
3. Paul has a problem with the way these Corinthians have been worshipping the Judean God. He exhorts them to come up with a better system. He describes disorder in the meetings. He then lists some common activities that frequently take place during Christian worship in Corinth. He calls them ‘spiritual gifts.’ We each have our own talents, Paul says, meaning to devalue these mannerisms, but he must be cautious in his critique because he knows how important such outward displays of ecstatic reveries are to their practitioners. He doesn’t forbid them to indulge. He instead tries to make the converts see how trivial such concerns actually are in the big picture. The Corinthian pneumatikoi are into a charismatic, showy variety of worship, one in which spirits are actively involved in making things happen during their services. No soporific cadences for them! No sir. They speak in tongues. They whoop and holler. They are on fire with the spirit. There’s nothing that Paul could do to stop it, even if he wanted to, I think. Here we get to watch syncretism in the process of happening. Paul can be shown tolerating heathen practice in exchange for fidelity to his specific kerygma.
   Speaking in tongues can be traced back to the worship of the ancient Asia Minor fertility deity Kybele. Pharisaism, resistant to all forms of syncretism, was especially repelled by these corybantic and orgiastic aspects of Kybelian displays of ecstasy. The Corinthian gentile Christian group that Paul is writing to, however, is likely composed of many of these former charismatic fertility cultists. Indeed, we find quite a few allusions to their licentiousness in this epistle (chapter 5, Ch 6:9–11, 7:1–6, 10:7–9). They have apparently transferred some of their enthusiastic Kybelene practices onto their new Yahveh context. (This is particularly ironic in light of their new-found celibacy.)
4. Finally, in Chapter 15 Paul seems to be saying that these pneumatikoi think that there’s no such thing as a bodily resurrection. We think we know Paul believes in bodily resurrection. — Don‘t they?

Kybele

All of these points of contention show that these Corinthian Christians curiously don’t seem to be too familiar with anything we can recognize as Paul’s teaching. Yet these are the very people who took the time to actually write to Paul, specifically, to see what he could do to help fix their troubles. And Paul writes back to these guys! There is a tremendous dissonance here. Why are they espousing things that are so clearly contrary to Paul’s preaching? Are they familiar with Paul’s actual preaching or merely with his reputation as an apostle? These people are fanatical freaks any way you look at it. They look sort of Gnostic to my eyes, maybe even a tad docetic. The body seems disagreeable to them, they seem to want to reject it in favor of some theomaniacal Platonic ideal. They are too radically ascetic even for the likes of Paul, but he writes to them anyway. He paints himself as a ‘ringer’ apostle that will straighten them out, but then he walks on eggshells around their ‘pentecostalistic’ tendencies. It’s weird.

It’s no wonder the Tubingen scholars found so many problems with the genuineness of the Pauline material. It is full of inconsistencies.

Where does Judaism factor in?

Corinthians reveals a mixed bag of problems of varying urgency, all of which fall fairly neatly into one general motif: division. The author of this epistle has a problem with people who think themselves socially superior to others. The wealthier Christians that host congregations in their households have been lately exploiting the shame/honor system that was part of the Mediterranean social landscape, to the detriment of group morale. They flaunt their wealth, engendering a sense of rivalry within congregations (and between them). This kind of thing was common in the Greco-Roman system of honor. You are supposed to shame your peers in order to increase your own prestige and standing in society.⁴ In Paul’s view, this is not just looking down on someone, this is to mistreat them. Chapter 6 reveals that some of the Christians have even been going to court against other followers of Jesus. These were no casual spats.

Paul indicates that there are also those who think themselves religiously (spiritually) superior to others, but Judean perspectives are not in question here. In fact, if anything, the Corinthians seem to have a bit of a Gnostic tinge to them. There's nothing particularly Judean there.

If anything, 1st Corinthians gives us insight into Paul’s familiarity with advanced Greek civil rhetoric. It is replete with a kind of deliberative rhetoric that was common in civic speeches of the day. Paul seems to be rhetorically trained in a popular Greco Roman style. This letter, an argument against discord and for concord and unity, uses a popular style of discourse from Greco-Roman literature. Dio Chrysostom in his Discourse To the Nicomedians on Concord with the Nicaeans, for example, uses similar themes and techniques to deal with this same kind of honor/shame rivalry going on between one city and the next. Against discord, for unity. The similarities are self evident. Paul is definitely showing his Greek schooling in this epistle.

As another example of Paul’s familiarity with the discursive methods popular in his day, compare Paul’s use of the body metaphor to plead for unity to the language used in Livy’s rhetoric:

“They certainly considered there was no hope left, save in the concord of the citizens: that this must be restored to the state at any price. Under these circumstances it was resolved that Agrippa Menenius, an eloquent man, and a favourite with the people, because he was sprung from them, should be sent to negotiate with them. Being admitted into the camp, he is said to have simply related to them the following story in an old-fashioned and unpolished style: ‘At the time when the parts of the human body did not, as now, all agree together, but the several members had each their own counsel, and their own language, the other parts were indignant that, while everything was provided for the gratification of the belly by their labour and service, the belly, resting calmly in their midst, did nothing but enjoy the pleasures afforded it. They accordingly entered into a conspiracy, that neither should the hands convey food to the mouth, nor the mouth receive it when presented, nor the teeth have anything to chew: while desiring, under the influence of this indignation, to starve out the belly, the individual members themselves and the entire body were reduced to the last degree of emaciation. Thence it became apparent that the office of the belly as well was no idle one, that it did not receive more nourishment than it supplied, sending, as it did, to all parts of the body that blood from which we derive life and vigour, distributed equally through the veins when perfected by the digestion of the food.’ By drawing a comparison from this, how like was the internal sedition of the body to the resentment of the people against the senators, he succeeded in persuading the minds of the multitude.⁵

The body as a unity is a good metaphor.⁶ Paul’s rhetoric was right in tune with the Greco-Roman sensibilities of the gentile proselytes under his tutelage, particularly those of more refined tastes and means.

The point is: There might be Torah citations interspersed throughout this Hellenistic epistle, but there is no particularly Jewish teaching going on there.

Relation to James? . . . .

We can infer almost nothing regarding the Jerusalem James faction from Corinthians. James is listed, to be sure, among the recipients of a postmortem apparition from Jesus, but there’s nothing there that can tell us anything pertinent to our focus. The apparition of Jesus to James in Chapter 15 is often credited as describing the moment of conversion for James by Christian apologists. This verse is often used to reconcile Mark’s (Ch. 3) depiction of Jesus’ familial circumstances as hostile on the one hand, with the importance placed on James as a key figure in the nascent movement after Jesus’ crucifixion on the other. How else can we explain the continuity? James must have been converted by this post mortem appearance of Jesus that the author of 1st Corinthians describes. This finally made James a ‘believer’ according to this view. However, harmonizing Galatians with Corinthians with Acts in this way is pretty naïve, not just because the two epistles actually contradict each other and the Acts at several key points, but also because all of those books are basically partisan orthodox didactic works from the same publisher (so to speak) meant to reinforce each other’s kerygma and are therefore almost useless historiographically.

The only other attestation of this supposed event comes from the Gospel of the Hebrews, a late second century work known to Origen and partially quoted by Jerome. It not only singles James out as the very first person that Jesus appeared to after his resurrection, it also explicitly states that James had been a believer and follower of Jesus prior to his death. He had even been there at the last supper according to this work (“had drank from the Lord’s cup”—this directly contradicts the gospel stories).

So, once again, I ask: What do we know?

We know that there were class divisions within the communities that were engendering animosity among Corinthian Christians.

We know that the leadership of these communities is minimal and ad hoc.

We know there were openly charismatic pneumatikoi there who were tongue-speaking, fire-breathing, spirit-filled and celibate (at least tryin‘ like heck).

We think we know that the notorious fifteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians preserves a primitive proto-creed of presumably apostolic origin. But a good case can be made that, if anything, what this list of apparitions reveals is a contest between those of Peter (& disciples) and those of James (& apostles).⁷ I think ths gospels will further corroborate this. But first we will look at Romans . . . .

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¹ - Legatio ad Gaium 281-2

² - A crudely inscribed lintel found near the Peirene fountain (probably 4th century in origin). "At the marble steps of the Propylaeum the excavators found a heavy stone lintel on which they were able to decipher the words "Hebrew Synagogue", clearly cut out in Greek letters. The house in which Paul proclaimed the new doctrine must have stood beyond the colonnade in the region of Lechaeum street."– W. Keller, The Bible as History, p368. It was being used as a stepping stone before the inscription was discovered.
³ - Acts 18 reports that Crispus was the leader of the synagogue. Paul mentions interacting with a Corinthian by this name.
⁴ - Andrew D. Clarke elaborates on this system of status and honor and the influence on early Christianity at Corinth in Secular and Christian Leadership in Corinth
⁵ - Ab Urbe condita II. 16, 32, 33
⁶ - The metaphor was also previously used by Xenophon in Memorabilia (2.iii.18) and by Cicero in De Officiis (III.v.22)
⁷ - Robert Price wrote a good piece enumerating all the redactional issues with this chapter. Apocryphal Apparitions: 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 as a Post-Pauline Interpolation

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Paul's audiences (Quixie on mythicism #3a)

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In the previous post, we saw that for the 'historicist' (Greg Boyd in that case) the earliest Christians were those Jews who, despite the vehement revulsion they would have felt toward the idea of a “god-man” under normal circumstances (he clearly understands that it was against their very grain and fiber to accept such sacrilege), were somehow convinced and compelled by the ‘evidence’ (reports of Jesus’ supernatural ‘extras’ —healings, raisings, self-proclamations et al.) to now choose to abandon the strictures of their former fanatical monotheism in favor of one that allowed for this “god-man.”

If we, for the sake of argument, bracket the question of their authenticity ¹ and their chronology, and place them in the sixth and seventh decades of the first century, as current consensus does, the Pauline epistles would be the earliest record that we have of the phenomenon of Christianity. Under this scenario, already just twenty years after Jesus supposedly was killed, perhaps a few dozen thriving communities of Christians were already festooning Canaan, Asia Minor, and the northern Mediterranean—even across into Egypt—all proclaiming the peculiar christologies and soteriologies and creeds of an emerging orthodoxy. Paul knew of these communities and endeavored to travel to many of them to preach his particular gospel. His tireless labor made him a valued mentor and authority to these communities, who received his correspondences with either joy and gladness or fear and trembling, depending on whether or not they had been upholding the teachings he had given them. In addition to asking what the spiritual/theological indebtedness or relation to the original Jerusalem group was (the wellspring of it all), we would like to know who these people were that Paul was exhorting to follow this new fulfilled religion that in his eyes transcended the Torah. As we survey the epistles it is very important to keep in mind who Paul’s respective audiences were.

Boyd is absolutely certain that Paul is “thoroughly Jewish. He thinks Jewish. He talks Jewish. His letters are filled with references to the Old Testament. He presupposes a Jewish framework in all of his epistles and the congregation he’s writing to.”

Questions cue up: Do Paul’s letters bear this out? Is there a way to measure the Jewishness of Paul’s proto-Christian communities?
What about Paul’s own Judaism? Is there a way to gauge it?

Commentaries that underscore Paul’s thorough Judaism usually do so by comparing the rhetoric of the epistles to some of the popular exegetical methods available and known to be in vogue in Jewish discourse at the time. These include midrash, typology, allegory and pesher. I’ll stop to remark on some of those occasions when Paul engages in these, as this might reveal not just the extent of his “Pharisaim”, but it might also tell us what his readers were prone to accept as normative from an authority of Paul’s stature.

The New Testament is a very richly variegated text so I’m limiting my focus to a few questions relevant to the topic as I survey the epistles:

1-Who were the intended readers of the epistle to each respective community? Were they Pagans? Were they Jews? The answer to this question will affect the way we judge their understanding of the material that Paul is presenting to them as Judaism.
2- How does the preaching contained in the Pauline epistles compare/contrast with the normative Judaism of the day as we understand it?
3 - What can we glean about the James faction from them?

The Thessalonians

Who were they?

The audience of the first letter to the Thessalonians consisted of gentile pagans. Of this there can be little doubt (1:9). They were working class gentile people that Paul likely preached to at their places of work and in public.

This short epistle praises the community for holding fast to the gospel that Paul had previously handed down to them. When the Jews are mentioned in it, they sort of have a “Blue Meanies” (from Yellow Submarine) feel to them, i.e. they have a malevolent aspect; they are an enemy to run and hide from, lest they inflict harm to the apostle and his entourage. (see end of Chapter 2)

A question presents itself: Who was it that persecuted Paul, as late (presumably) as 51 C.E. or so? Who chased him from Judea to Athens? If his only crime was holding to a radical Jewish messianic belief in the face of an antagonistic and muscular orthodox Jewish opposition, why wasn’t James (or Cephas for that matter) who was reportedly espousing this same messianism, also chased out of town along with Paul? It must have been some group who either didn’t know of the truce reached at the "council of Jerusalem," or otherwise were a rogue group that just didn’t care about the truce. Perhaps the James group was persecuted as well, and we just don’t know about it, or perhaps James wasn't preaching the same stuff that Paul was at all, and was therefore left in peace by Paul‘s opponents. The only pertinent near-contemporary extra-canonical textual reference that alludes to this James sect is that of Josephus in the Antiquities. It is dubious, to be sure, but it does portray James as a respected and righteous leader of the community, not as an outcast, so I seriously doubt he was preaching “Jesus the resurrected god-man” in Jerusalem.

What traces of Judaic symbolism we find in 1st Thessalonians immediately call to mind the Qumran variety of Judaism (popularly called “Essene”), but I think that the “sons of light/darkness” ² motif (5:5), for instance, could just as easily be a trace of emergent Gnosticism or of Zoroastrian dualism. One of the things that I have learned about “Paul” as I re-read these epistles is that it is hard to peg all that he says down to one individual person’s mind. Paul seems to be as much a composite talking head as Jesus is. But that’s for another essay altogether.

So: What do we know?

We know that Paul was pleased with the Thessalonian Christians for remaining loyal to the Pauline brand. We know that some people were starting to die off before the parousia and that he surviving members were beginning to worry about their salvation. We know that Paul felt persecuted by Jews.

What do we think we know?

We tend to subconsciously equate “Jew” or “Jerusalem” with “James party” which leads to a whole parade of misunderstanding. But we’ll return to that after we take a look at some meatier Pauline letters.

The Galatians

Who were they?

The author’s reason for writing to the churches of Galatia (presumably founded by him —*4:13–15) is clear: He has just received news about certain outsider preachers who have been telling his converts that they must endure circumcision first if they are to be considered followers of Jesus#. The opponents (“Some who trouble you.”) seem to be saying to Paul’s converts, who are undeniably gentile:

‘What ?!

You guys want to be Christians but you haven’t been initiated into Judaism yet?!

Are you nuts?!’

The Galatian Christians were gentiles.³ The emphasis that the author places in this epistle on the rejection of circumcision is a dead giveaway. There would have been no need for Paul to argue against circumcision to Judeans. Chap 4 verse 8 leaves little doubt that they were former Pagans who had been initiated recently into the Jesus mysteries. There may or may not have been “Jewish” Christians in these groups, but we have no way of ascertaining this. Even if there were some, we can safely say that these were not the people who were on the author’s mind when writing this epistle. In Galatians the figure of Paul is stressed out because some of his recent converts are being sold straight-up Judaism by some unknown outsiders. He doesn’t want his darlings to be exposed to this straight-up Judaism, lest they fall away from his “true gospel.” He wants them to remain gentile. At some point in the recent past, apparently, Paul had inspired these gentiles to abandon their former Pagan ways in order to adopt his particular version of the Judean god, a vision that did not require such extreme measures as circumcision from them.

What was Paul selling at Galatia?

The gentile god fearers of Galatia seem to have been in the market for a specifically Jewish type of monotheistic expression (else, what’s a god-fearer for?). Galatians suggests that they were still ambivalent about which path to commit to. What’s more, they were responsive enough to these Judaizers to make Paul freak out about it. Perhaps Paul’s audients weren’t as committed to a Pauline Judaism as we’d like to believe. Perhaps they were eager to hear any and all Jewish viewpoints which would bring them closer to this god whose mysteries they sought to enter. Unfortunately, the Pauline rhetoric is the only viewpoint that survived.

A major advantage that the author(s) of the Pauline epistles possibly had over the Judaizer sects, what set him apart was the Greek training that he seems to have had. “Paul” knew how to talk to these gentiles about the god they had recently chosen to fear in a way that the “circumcision party” could not. Whether their newly chosen god strictly resembled the Biblical Yahveh or not (one of Marcion’s focii) was of little concern to Paul’s god-fearers. Would a neophyte know the difference? An ancient mystical tradition like Judaism is intangibly sublime, virtually unfathomable without a knowledgeable guide to help one navigate it. (Enter Paul and his glass darkly.) Paulinism offered gentile aficionados a way inside the mystery of the living god of Israel, in plain Greek, that didn’t require self-mutilation. The way of entrance into the covenant through baptism was understandably more appealing to these Pagan proselytes than was the requisite knife. This was a no-brainer.

Still, these Galatian protégés of Paul apparently were laboring under the impression that their Jesus worship was still somehow a fundamentally Jewish expression. Their wish to be adopted into the Abrahamic fold was genuine. When Paul showed up around the Diaspora synagogues preaching this new paradigm of the Judaic god, the texts say that the Jews turned him away at every synagogue. (Hell, the texts say that they near darn near killed him at a few of them!) Yet Paul was somehow still able to found a smattering of churches across a good swath of territory using this much maligned and spurned theology of his. How did he manage to build an ‘alternate’ Judaism without any Jews? If the Jews threw stones at him, who was it that bought into it? The answer has never been hidden from view. It was very likely these god-fearers, whose understanding of Judaic monotheism (and/or covenant, Torah, et al) could only be an ambitious Platonic or Stoic approximation. But no matter; these spiritual gentiles found in Paul’s all-inclusive message an attractive alternative path to this Jewish god they sought. In lieu of having no traditional Hebrew credentials (i.e. the right pedigree/bloodline), Paulinism became the loophole through which the god-fearers could at last sneak past the surgeon’s gate into Abraham’s bosom. Why adopt Yahveh? We’ll explore that question in time.

The educated Greek style that Paul exhibits throughout the corpus was attractive to the gentile god-fearers. It plays a significant role in the form of the epistles. For instance, the author employs a form of judicial rhetoric in the first couple of chapters of Galatians, where he defends his message over against his opponents by first defending the legitimacy of his apostleship. It’s a defense as well as an attack, showing good form and a familiarity with contemporary Hellenistic methods of discourse.

But Paul takes a bold step. He mixes biblical midrash into his Hellenistic rhetoric. In arguing against his opponents, he uses the authority of Torah to support his arguments for why it is unnecessary to circumcise the gentiles. This is so weird and ironic that it warrants repetition, rephrased: Paul uses Torah to explain to gentile god-fearers why gentiles need not be bound to Torah to legitimately follow the Jewish god. (Mind you, his audience is gentile, so he can pretty much say what he wants, really, and they’d be none the wiser.)

He does this with a midrash, a method of biblical interpretation whereby one searches for deeper meaning by applying a kind of logical extrapolation to a given passage, projecting from the lesser case to the greater or vise versa, for example. This method allows for a fairly wide scope of interpretation of scripture. Through it, the rabbis would openly discuss the intricacies of the law and resolve any discrepancies resulting from the peculiar, sometimes difficult phrasing of biblical passages.

The specific midrash that Paul attempts in this case involves the very first covenant that the Hebrew god ever made with Abraham in the book of Genesis. Paul focuses on two different details, both referring to this covenant, to defend his position. In Genesis 15 God promises prosperity to Abraham because of the constant faith that he has displayed. Later, in chapter 17, he demands the ritual of circumcision from male members as a sign of this special covenant with the people. Paul argues that the promise was made before the ritual had been instituted by god in order that the gentiles can be endeared to god through faith alone, without relying on external signs like circumcision. The chronology of the two parts of the contract makes a world of difference for Paul, who reasons that the one must be prior to the other not just chronologically, but also in terms of their significance for human history. If the epistle to the Galatians is anything, it is a loud cry to allow the whole world into the Jewish tent.

One aspect of the midrash process was that it is an interactive method. A midrash doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not enough to unpack and to posit a possible explanation for any given passage. Torah is a living thing. It needs to be engaged and discussed among one’s peers. Something might be a valid midrash, but it might not necessarily be a compelling one. A valid interpretation is not necessarily a correct one. ⁴

I say this because I find it hard to believe that a moderately learned Pharisee could not have demolished Paul’s premise that the gentile has access to Yahveh prior to the Jew because of this particular sequence in Genesis (by pointing out the fact that there‘s no such thing as ‘half-a-contract’, for example). Was there no one nearby who could engage and challenge Paul’s midrash? I bet those opponents he’s complaining about could have, had they stuck around. These Judaizers were good enough talkers to rattle the Galatians enough to inspire Paul to call them “foolish” (“who has bewitched you?”) Paul’s letter gives the impression that these Galatian Christians were “of Paul”, but how committed to Paul they actually were is questionable. There would have been no need for Paul to scold them so severely for listening to an old hat argument for circumcision if their faith in his message had been secure.

Interestingly, to the naked eye, the offenders’ rationale seems to be simply the standard within Judaism. Nothing more. If Paul saw these guys as fellow followers of Jesus, it would seem that they had an understanding of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus that differed radically from Paul’s, an understanding which he characterizes as “another gospel” (and which he double-curses). But this “other gospel” seems to have been nothing but good old normative Judaism, as far as I can tell, with, perhaps (it‘s hard to tell from the text) an added element of importance imparted to Jesus (which can be inferred from the texts, but is not implied by them). Was he a Messiah? Was he a beloved, well-remembered Rabbi? We could venture guesses, but we ultimately don’t know because all that Paul says is that these opponents wanted his gentiles to be circumcised.

Another example of Paul’s use of biblical exegesis in Galatians (4:24) is his allegory involving Abraham’s two seeds, that of Sarah and of Hagar, respectively. Allegory is simply the figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another one. In this case, the author identifies the Judeans with Ishmael, the son of Hagar, Abraham’s slave concubine, while he equates the church with Isaac, the son of Sarah, a freewoman. These two alternatives are cast as the two covenants, of the flesh, and one of spirit. Without getting too deep into Paul’s reasoning here, it should be noted how repulsive this would have sounded to a Jew. If you think that Jesus was bold for calling the Pharisees vipers, imagine how well they would have reacted to Paul saying they were sons of a slave whore girl. Had there been any schooled Jews around to riposte, Paul would have gotten quite an earful, I’m sure! The interpretation that Paul advances in this allegory could only occur to a Christian superssesionist—certainly not to a Pharisee, who have always stressed the Abraham–Isaac–Jacob–Joseph lineage in Genesis.

Hyam Maccoby wrote a whole book⁵ in which he questions Paul’s Pharisaic credentials by pointing to many of the discrepancies in Paul’s supposedly Pharisaic thought. He concludes that the apostle’s attempts at displaying rabbinic proficiency were but an idiosyncratic affectation at best. I won’t belabor the point, but I think that Mr.Maccoby may have been right.

What is the relation to James? . . . . .

Early in the epistle, in his exasperation over having to defend the validity of his apostleship, Paul relates an earlier episode in Antioch (Chapter 2), where some of James’ party, including Cephas, apparently were not keen on sharing their meals with the gentiles. He refers to these people as the circumcision party. But in telling that anecdote, he is not referring to these new Judaizing offenders. He’s merely recollecting a recent episode in his mission. While some kind of kinship is usually assumed between these Judaizers intruders in this epistle and the James group from Chapter 2, the letter never actually explicitly equates these two groups. In fact they seem to be two distinct groups upon close inspection. In light of the author’s explicit and boastful description of his “meeting” with James and the pillars in Jerusalem, for example, I find it hard to believe that anyone from the James’ party would so openly and defiantly contradict a direct ruling from James if he was truly the man in charge. If James’ authority was as far reaching as is implied in the Pauline corpus, then surely these “troublemakers” had heard of the recent “merger” (the so-called Council of Jerusalem) between the two giants (Paul and James). It turns out that the Judaizers in Galatia, however, either don’t know about the decisions taken during the council or else they simply don’t care. They preach a Torah-first faith to these Galatians, sans any arbitration or intervention or influence from James, apparently (or from Paul for that matter).

It must be stressed that Paul is not speaking to these opponents in the epistle; he’s not trying to convince them to change their ways. He is trying to convince the Galatian Christians (who are decidedly gentile) to not listen to these outsiders who insist that following Jesus demands a parallel adherence to Torah first.

Is this group’s insistence on an imperative observance of Torah sufficient reason to pinpoint them to Jerusalem? Possibly— it at least recognizes them as the Judeans they are. But were these Judaizers specifically Christian Jews from James? I strongly doubt it.

Another possibility exists. Is it not plausible that there could have been more than one “circumcision party” in Palestine at the time? This Galatian letter inadvertently reveals that it was apparently possible to be a Torah observant Jesus follower (IF they were followers of Jesus at all! —again, the texts are unclear—so much depends upon so seemingly tiny a variable) which did not look to James for authority, who eat only kosher food and honor all other Jewish religious observances. The way I see it, it would be just one more possible way of being proto-Christian in this formative gestation period from which the new religion eventually emerged.

Before moving on from the James connection to Galatians, we should again mention the collection of money for the poor in Jerusalem as it is another central concern in this epistle. It is critical, because for Paul this collection brings with it a perception of legitimacy in the eyes of the Jerusalem church. The collection would allow him to alleviate (he hopes) some situation with Jerusalem. He seems to need a more positive relationship with that group for some reason. Why does he need this legitimacy so badly? We’ll explore that below.

So . . .: What do we know?

We know that some outsiders tried to convince some of Paul’s follower’s that circumcision was a necessary component of keeping the faith.

What do we think we know?

We think we know that these outsiders were from James specifically. We think we know that they were somehow affiliated with James’ party, with whom Paul shared an awkward meal in a story he relates. Paul does call them the ‘circumcision party’, but it’s important to note that in Chapter 2 Paul is not identifying the Jacobians with this new threat. He is merely venting his frustrations in dealing with Judaizers by sharing one anecdote from his past experiences.

At any rate, we see that neither the Thessalonians nor the Galatians are the "thorough Jews" that Boyd describes in his objections.

In the next installment, we will look at the Corinthian community that Paul addressed.

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¹ - I tend to agree with W.C. Van Manen, G. A. van den Bergh van Eysinga, and Bruno Bauer that it is unlikely that any of the pauline epistles are authentic. However, for the purpose of this essay, I presume at least Baur's Hauptebriefe. I include Thessalonians as well just because it is sometimes thought to be the earliest of them
² - Compare with the Dead Sea Scrolls “Rule of the Community” which elaborates on this theme.
³ - This was the conclusion reached by J. Munck in Paul and the Salvation of Mankind, and by many others
⁴ - This important subject is dealt with at length in Validity in Interpretation by Hirsch, E.D. Jr

⁵ - The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity

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The Boyd Objections — (quixie on mythicism #2) …

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Because scorn seems to be the most common response to mythicism from academics, I try to note those rare occasions when this idea non grata is actually engaged with some modicum of seriousness and professional respect by the scholar who seeks to refute it. My first encounter with this kind of level-headed approach to refuting mythicism was a debate between Greg Boyd and Robert Price a couple of years ago. Boyd has since co-authored two books with Paul Eddy — The Jesus Legend and Lord or Legend (the latter is a popular condensation of the longer and more-annotated former), which lay out a case against mythicism, an attempt at a rational and systematic approach to the topic.  It is clear from the onset that Boyd is a reasonable man who's willing to at least entertain the idea for long enough to construct an argument against it based on his understanding of what he perceives to be the unlikeliness of a Jesus "legend" having taken hold like it did. It is an honest attempt to project the implications of the theory onto a working model. I think his conclusions are wrong, of course, but Boyd's stance is a huge improvement from the simple-minded dismissiveness of most of the current vocal opponents of the theory. As an example of what I mean, consider the fact that during a Q&A session at the end of the debate Boyd agreed with Price that none (i.e. "zero") of the so-called "fullfilled O.T. prophecies" held by many evangelicals to foretell Jesus' coming are at all relevant or even refer to Jesus; they are all taken out of context and are useless as evidence. Boyd reasons (correctly) that such a prophetic reading of these passages would require the forcing of a context onto Hebrew stories that had not been there before these gospel authors began to scour the psalms and suchlike in search of scriptural muscle to reinforce their developing tradition. Boyd does not accept these as "prophecies" of Jesus, and this shows me that he is no unthinking lemming intent on defending an indefensible party line. He's trying to be honest when faced with evidence. His arguments, however,  in the end turn out to be as full of circular reasoning (such as when he ascribes "eyewitness" status to a gospel ), unconscious equivocation (when he misrepresents "ἀδελφὸν τοῦ Κυρίου" as though it read "ἀδελφὸν τοῦ Ιησοῦ"), special pleading (when he views the will to believe as a valid epistemological tool), that is, all the usual fallacies, as some of his less-well-mannered evangelical peers' are.

But, …

Instead of trying to catalog all of the errors in Boyd's case, I’d like to focus on just one main trajectory in it, which, if shown to be specious renders the rest moot,  I think. I single it out also because it is the one and only instance where one of his arguments gave me some significant pause for a moment. When I first heard it, this was probably the strongest argument I had heard against the Christ Myth.

Boyd: " First century Palestinian Judaism, I submit to you, is the single worst environment for a legend about a crucified god-man to evolve. […] First, the Jews of the first century, especially Palestinian Jews of the first century, since that was the most conservative area in first century Judaism. They deplored the idea that a man could be God. It was revolting to them. These were people that prayed the Shemmai Israel every day of their life (“Hear O Israel; the lord our God is one Lord”). If they believed anything, it was that God is God and that humans are humans and never the twain shall meet. They were all the more resistant to this idea because it was common for the pagans around them to believe in divine men, that a certain human or an emperor human was a god. As my former professor from Yale has shown in his doctoral dissertation—Carl Holloday has shown in his Oxford dissertation [on] the “Divine Man“—the more the […] Jews were encompassed by these divine man legends, the more resistant they became to them. So the question is this: How do you explain the evolution of a legend about a god-man in an environment that is completely hostile to it? Now, the problem is so severe that a number of the more liberal scholars in the twentieth century began to say ‘maybe the Christian faith, the Jesus story, wasn’t birthed on Jewish soil. Maybe it’s actually a pagan legend. They tried to make that case. It’s called the “history of religions” school. It has been, in my estimation, thoroughly discredited. Hardly anyone, even the most liberal scholars, hold to the history of religions school any more because of just overwhelming evidence against it. For one thing, you have to give the book of Acts and the gospels zero credibility—they have to be entire fabrications because they portray the story as originating on Palestinian soil, and very few scholars are willing to go that far."

"And the other thing is that the earliest advocate we have, first spokesperson we have, is Paul. And Paul is thoroughly Jewish. He thinks Jewish. He talks Jewish. His letters are filled with references to the Old Testament (OT). He presupposes a Jewish framework in all of his epistles and the congregation he’s writing to. In fact, a number of scholars have been arguing over the last twenty years especially, the Jesus story, abstracted out of a Jewish context—the OT context—makes absolutely no sense. And so for very good reasons, very few are advocating that now. The Christian faith was born on Jewish soil and that causes this tremendous problem: How do you explain how this, on a naturalistic basis, could evolve?"

“We're talking about monotheistic Jews here. They prayed to Jesus. Paul himself prayed to Jesus, often in the same breath as praying to God, the father. This is outstanding. You can show examples of how in some segments — fringe segments— of Judaism people venerated intermediate beings, but as Larry Hurtado and a number of others have argued, never did it cross the line into worship and invocational prayer. Jesus is seen as the judge of the world in Paul, but only God is the judge of the world. He is seen as being the creator of the world, but only God is the creator of the world. Paul says in Phillipians 2 that he is by his very nature God and equal with God. Scholars recognize this a being a traditional hymn, it's already in place in the early church —we're talking twenty–twenty-five years after Jesus lived [that] this is already in place— That's incredible! What explains that? We need to have an explanation for that. [He's] God over all and blessed forever in Romans, and if you accept Colossians and Titus, he is fullness of God in bodily form, and he's our great God and savior. And so the question is this: We need to have a historical explanation for […] What must Jesus have been like to have impacted Jews against all of their cultural and religious presuppositions that this man could be God?"

Before tackling this general reasoning, one minor point should be noted: Boyd’s claim that the History of Religions School (HRS) has been “thoroughly discredited” is a gross oversimplification. His characterization of the intents and methods of the History of Religions School is but a thumbnail caricature of what was in fact a highly influential movement. To hear him tell it, one would think that the HRS merely sought to discredit the church by making these comparisons to the mystery religions and other Pagan spiritual outlets of the day. In fact, the function of the school was primarily to promote the scientific examination of religion through a rigorous multi-discipline historiographical approach to the materials that utilized archeology, sociology, anthropology, comparative religion, and a host of other academic disciplines. It was invaluable for the advancement of our modern understanding of the development of religions generally, and of the origins of Christianity in particular. If the HRS was the dismal failure that Boyd asserts that it was, then someone forgot to tell Hans Conzelmann, Rudolf Bultmann, James Dunn, Geza Vermès, Mircea Eliades, Dom Crossan, Karen Armstrong, and countess other scholars who have since then sought to make sense of the history of Christianity by means of a systematic cross-discipline approach to their research. The legacy of the school is reflected in much of the work done on the Historical Jesus and Christian origins in the twentieth century and on into the twenti-first century. I’m afraid that Boyd is selling it way too short here.

Having said that, I think that Boyd does bring up an interesting undeniable fact in his objections. Judeans of the time would have invariably rejected the notion of such a failed god-man. Boyd contends that, had they not been compelled to a new faith by the portentous miracles described in the texts, the Palestinian Jews (and those dispersed throughout the provinces) would surely have rejected the crucified god-man doctrines espoused in the Pauline epistles outright as anathema to their culture. The very ‘fact’ that they ‘accepted them’ (so Boyd) is evidence that the historical and supernatural events described in the texts are ‘probably’ true. He further infers from this view that these first ‘Jewish’ believers were already promulgating these highly advanced christologies and soteriologies as early as the fifth decade of the first century. Alluring at first sight, all this revolves around a single common theme, namely the Jewish background of the story. For Boyd it is a given that the first Christians (in Jerusalem, presumably) were first and foremost Jews who found in Jesus their promised Messiah and elevated him to a status of mediator god-man. The Jews of Palestine, so says Boyd (and I would not disagree), would never have accepted or subscribed to a dying un-messianic Messiah. This is a major problem for the Christ-mythers as he sees it. But then, did Jews really accept this god-man in this way? I think the texts themselves show that they did not.

I had been reading John Shelby Spong's Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes at the time that I first heard this line of argument, wrestling with what seemed to me to be Spong's forced attempt to find a liturgical continuity between Judaism and christology, and so Boyd's questions were falling on pre-sensitized ears in a way. Until that moment, I had never stopped to consider why we so easily assume that James and Cephas and all their followers were Christians in the same sense that Paul was. On what grounds can one ascribe a Pauline kerygma to a Jerusalem church? We don’t have any reliable texts that can inform us at all on the fate of the reputed disciples. The idea that they were more or less in agreement with Paul theologically could be no more than a presupposition, an unexamined given. Boyd is certainly not alone in holding to this idea. It‘s almost universal— even among liberals, even among seculars who don't care about religion. Just as we saw in part #1, here we have another example of a false consensus which is really just passive adherence to an unexplored notion. It presumes a 'given' continuity between …

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• … an actual, historical Jewish peasant sage (Jesus of Nazareth) whose seemingly radical teachings inspired an …
• … esoteric messianic Jewish cult in Jerusalem with James and/or Cephas at its helm(s) which …
• … Paul at first fiercely opposed and persecuted, but eventually converted to, championed, and insisted should include gentiles. Subject to the ‘original’ Jerusalem cult, he became the earliest known expositor and witness of this new ‘fulfilled’ Judaism, writing a series of pastoral letters to churches throughout the Diaspora, some of which he had founded himself.

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This supposed continuity from normative Judaism to the Christian faith expressed in the epistles is what vouchsafes the historicity of Jesus for Boyd. His arguments depend on it. In that view Christianity is essentially a revamped form of Judaism. The earliest followers were thorough Jews who only reluctantly, eventually, allowed gentiles into their fellowship (with Paul of Tarsus as their spokesman). Later on, in the process of developing into something distinct from its “mother” religion, Christianity progressively took on a more and more Pagan flavor, until it was basically unrecognizable as any kind of Judaism anymore. This has been the traditional way to see the origing of Christianity. Our image of Paul is influenced by what we've already read in the Acts of the Apostles (the pauline corpus immediately follows Acts in the canon) whose portrayal of the Jerusalem community of devotees is not much more than an idyllic fanfare before the true hero of the story, Paul, enters the stage. But who were these people, really? What did they believe? What was the connection between Jerusalem's authority and Paul's submission to it? What was their parallel devotion to Jesus about? Simply assuming them to be equivalent based on the Acts' cursory treatment of this seminal period would be too uncritical and too simplistic a way out of the puzzle. The truth is that we just don’t know much about the so-called Jerusalem church.

I therefore challenge that presumed axiomatic continuity and find that appeals that assume a thoroughly Jewish-Christian matrix from which the Pauline variety essentially took its cue are circular, assuming that which they aim to demonstrate. I propose that if it can be shown that these presuppositions are invalidated by no more evidence than the texts themselves, then these Boyd objections, which necessarily project an advanced christology onto the Jerusalem proto-church, are rendered weightless. It is my contention that, since there are no extant contemporary records which might tell us what these original Jewish-James-Christians were all about (either liturgically or rhetorically) other than Paul's condescending (while simultaneously submissive) letters, then we have no basis for attributing any kind of christology to them, particularly in light of the existence of later traditions which can arguably be traced to this group which explicitly oppose Paul’s idiosyncratic thinking. The assumption that the “Jewish” Christianity of the Jerusalem group was akin to that which was emerging in the Diaspora in Jesus’ name (egged on by the Paulinists) although almost universally held, is invalid nonetheless.

For Boyd's objections to have any relevance, he must first demonstrate:

1. the ‘thorough Jewishness’ of the Pauline communities … and …
2. a Jacobean christology.

Lacking this, the objections are meaningless. They are incomplete, half-thought-out apologetic appeals. One must first demonstrate a continuity before one can appeal to it.

The problem is that there seems to be a hazy gap between what we know and what we think we know. We know that there were some forms of Jesus-adoration which probably preceded Paul’s missionary activity. We know that the Pauline epistles refer to one such group, that of Yacob in Jerusalem, as somehow authoritative, and that Paul desperately sought recognition and legitimatization from it. We think we know that they were ‘thoroughly Jewish’, but we just cannot escape the fact that the only textual corroboration whatsoever that we have from this proto-sect is one side of a heated (if muffled) multi-sided conversation.

I would like to stress before proceeding that it is NOT the Judean origin of the Jesus story that I doubt here. What I question is the implicit continuity that is too easily presumed between the seminal Judean messianic cult of Jerusalem and the Christianity which would later claim it as its direct ancestor. I explicitly say this in case there might be those who grasp onto some sensationalist mischaracterization of what I am actually saying here. I have no doubt that the Jesus legend started in Judea. The NT is replete with symbolism borrowed from the pages of the ancient Jewish scriptures. But it is one thing to examine the Judaic content of the texts and another to ask who the audience of this borrowed symbology within was.

These are two separate questions. In the next installment, I will try to look at the audience first..

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open question . . .

After having a brief discussion with someone earlier, I would like to ask a question to anyone who might be inclined to answer it:

What is a Christian?

The person I was talking to is of the opinion that one must believe in the essential divinity and pre-existence of Jesus in order to rightly be called a Christian.

This was kinda puzzling to me, because I think that, using this criteria, the author of the Gospel of Mark would be disqualified, as would many of the earliest Christians.

I would greatly appreciate any answers that may come.

Thanks in advance.
Peace

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quote of the day . . .

All the hair on the horse's tail has disappeared, but he must not be admitted to be tailless; the missing essence is not in the kitchen, the drawing room, or the attic, yet somewhere in the house it must be; and thus theology becomes an illogical suspense between the conclusion and the premises; the literalist relents, but the mystical spiritualist is firm, and the true "Word" in scripture remains unimpeached by literary and historical refutation. The husk is gone, but the invisible kernel maintains the position; although in the many pious platitudes passing current in the subject no real meaning be discernible except the broad inference of natural morality and providential superintendence, the general teleological purpose which we believe to be ever tending to good in its majestic passage through the ages, although ourselves far too limited in faculty to identify its action in special cases, or to make it directly responsible for particular occurrences or books.

[...] Strauss' great merit consists in the negative work contributed by him towards the reconstruction of theology; and it was the fitness of the "Leben Jesu" to accomplish the intellectual iconoclasm so often needed in the progress of science which provoked so much odium; since nothing irritates so much as to be convicted of ignorance as to matters confidently believed to be already sufficiently and fully known.

R.W. Mackay,

The Tübingen School and its Antecedents,

1863, pp. 172, 184–185

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Quixie on Mythicism #1 - Idea Non Grata

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Mythicism, the notion that the Jesus legend might be better explained as a composite hero myth than as a biographical phenomenon— that it might be a fabric more likely woven together from syncretic strands of Mediterranean and Near-Eastern esoterica rather than from historical memory— is an idea that has resurfaced in the cultural landscape following the publication of the works of a handful of scattered writers like Earl Doherty, Robert M. Price, G. A. Wells, Hermann Detering, and a few others. It is not a new notion; all of these scholars would acknowledge their debt to those now-forgotten scholars who sought to free historical New Testament scholarship from the vise grip of ecclesiastical dogmatism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries using their (then) newly acquired historico-critical muscles. Once the Enlightenment had safely established the scientific paradigm as the new, preferred standard of learning and investigation to aspire to (logic replacing faith as the ultimate arbiter of truth), it was only a matter of time before the new methodologies would start to be applied to Holy Writ itself. At the time, scripture had been that which had vouchsafed the authenticity of the traditions of the ubiquitous Christian religion for eighteen hundred years. What secrets might a new scientific examination of these ancient texts reveal?

This question prompted the birth of the “higher criticism” (a.k.a. ‘historico-critical method’). In the post-enlightenment period, as inquisitive minds (Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian Hermann Weisse, David Friedrich Strauss, etc.) began to engage these texts from a deductive, historiographical perspective, one requiring a temporary “willful suspension of belief” in the name of methodological honesty and neutrality, their resulting reconstructions were often very offensive to the scholars and to the clergy of the time, who were quick to denounce them. People tend to get a bit grouchy when their sacred cows are taken out of their glass cases and examined too closely, so despite the diligent and exhaustive work of Strauss and Schleiermacher and those who followed their lead, it could only meet with resistance from both the church and the academy … at first, at least. The stodgy piety and decorum of that bygone era served to ensure that the conclusions reached by the historiographic probings of these men into the origins of the Bible and of the Christian religion would be categorically shunned and reviled by their conservative peers, who were still mired in their devotional, superficial approach to the study of the Bible’s details. Among the shocking new revelations of these higher-critical scholars were:

• The fact that the Pentateuch could not have been the work of a single, historical Moses. At least four individual scribes, or "schools" (for lack of a better term), spanning several centuries, were responsible for its compilation.
• Similarly, the book of Isaiah, was demonstrably a conglomerate of at least three different schools.
• Mark, contradicting church tradition, was likely the earliest of the gospels in the New Testament to be written.
• At least several of the epistles attributed to Paul were very probably the late pseudonymous products of an emerging ecclesiastical structure.

These proverbial elephants in the middle of the room (and some others) were simply too big and too spooky for those who had authority over the parlors of the time to look at. They continued to denounce and mock those who strayed from the long-established axioms concerning the provenance and authorship of the texts, but one can only ignore an elephant for so long. It took a few generations for the usefulness of this new hermeneutic to slowly take hold, but it inevitably did take hold, and as time passed these scholars' ideas became progressively more and more accepted as valid, and even as the normative interpretation of the evidence. After a great deal of exposition, dialog, and debate of the details involved, academic consensuses were eventually arrived at concerning many things which had been previously believed to be otherwise. Indeed, the ideas of Strauss and later Bultmann would soon become the fundamental presuppositions that scholars now use as their starting place in their own investigation and analysis of these texts, even to this day. To be sure, consensus is not always arrived at, but in each of the cases I listed above, at least, after various kinds of higher criticism (redaction-criticism, textual-criticism, form-criticism, and source-criticism, among others) were applied to the pertinent texts, the consensus on these matters, though not universal (it never is), is fairly overwhelming.

With time, the conclusions of some scholars became more and more radical. F.C. Baur would found a school of thought in Tübingen that embodied this historiographic hermeneutic. If the religionist academic hierarchy found it difficult to accept Schleiermacher's opinion that Paul might have written neither of the Timothies, it was absolutely horrified when Baur suggested that out of the thirteen epistles traditionally ascribed to him, only four (both Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans) could be seen as possibly the authentic work of a historical Paul. The others could be shown to reflect a second-century synthesis of this Pauline core of four with a hazy Palestinian tradition which we know almost nothing about (its texts did not survive but we can at times see some vestigial traces of this sect in the texts that did survive).

F.C. Baur

If that wasn't enough, along came Bruno Bauer and the Dutch Radical school. This group saw no reason to authenticate any of the Pauline works and discredited the lot of them. Some thought he went too far, and he had indeed gone further than anyone had before him, but when Bauer argued for the spurious nature of all the epistles, he was using pretty much the very same lines of reasoning that Baur had used to discredit Philippians, Ephesians, et. al. The Dutch school would even eventually be as audacious as to bring into question the very historicity of Jesus and of the disciples. As radical as the idea may be, if it turns out that the Pauline corpus is entirely spurious, then we in fact posses no primary sources to inform historiographic speculations on any of it. This prospect is a disturbing one for those who would base their theoretical constructs on the basic reliability and historical trustworthiness of the New Testament narratives. Bauer was crossing a kind of asymptotic line that no one had ever dared to cross before, not even Baur, who, when he came to that cliff edge, was compelled to stop by his religious sensibilities. Bauer, on the other hand, dove in with aplomb.

This was shocking. There is a big difference between on the one hand boldly pointing out that the chronology of the gospels as traditionally taught was wrong, that the gospel we know as Mark's very probably came first, and on the other suggesting that we have no primary sources whatsoever or that Jesus very probably is primarily a mythic construct. One could accept the former without it affecting one's religious commitment in the least. But to accept or to even consider the latter ideas would require, at the very least, a complete re-examination of the interrelationship between the Christian scriptures and the Christian faith they purport to historically support. In fact, the resistance encountered by the ideas of the scholars of the Tübingen and of the Dutch Radical schools was directly proportional to how mythologizing they were. Marcan priority, while an audacious idea at first, was not threatening to the faith itself, and so could reluctantly be brought up for discussion and debated without the awkwardness that the more radical ideas of Bauer produced, for example, while the idea that Jesus didn't "exist" (at least not in the way we have been taught to think he did) was ignored out of hand as a ludicrous proposition, not worthy of serious consideration. Anything that suggested the basic fictive and tendentious and syncretic aspects of the narratives got the silent treatment. The matter was never engaged, never discussed in any real depth, never debated in history departments. Simply cast aside as ludicrous from the outset, no thorough critical academic evaluation of the ideas of the Tübingen and Dutch Radical schools seems to have been conducted. Is it any surprise, then, that so few 'refutations' were written?

Albert Schweitzer, who was personally acquainted with a few of the radicals, seems to be one of the only contemporaries who took these scholars seriously. He mentioned many of them in his classic The Quest of the Historical Jesus, and even devoted whole chapters to Strauss and to Baur. Curiously, while he openly disagreed with the Tubingen school and with the Dutch Radicals, he nevertheless praised their rigorous and meticulous methodologies and obviously thought very highly of them. He respected them and considered them scholars par-excellence. Unfortunately, the focus and scope of Schweitzer’s volume did not allow for a full engagement with the arguments of these radicals concerning the Pauline corpus and the historicity of Jesus. Only a cursory summary is sketched, and in the end, he considered their conclusions to be reactionary and ideologically based, and he went on to put them in what he thought were their proper respective places in the history of historical Jesus studies. At least he acknowledged them, though, which is more than any of his contemporaries had done, and which also evinces his own particular brand of iconoclasm.

The few semi-scholarly works devoted to the "refutation" of mythicism that were penned in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth were effectively polemical over-simplifications misrepresenting the arguments in a way intended to make then seem ridiculous, or else they were exercises in circularity, or were both simultaneously. (I may address some of their specific errors as they arise in future posts in this series —this is the first post, in which I focus on mythicism as idea non grata; I focus on the gag reflex that is almost invariably the scholar's first encounter the Christ Myth. Other posts will follow as time allows. Suffice it for now to say that very little unimpassioned or non-polemic scholarly discussion has been advanced to refute the Christ myth theory.)

This is doubly frustrating. On the one hand, I’m sure that many people (I, for instance) would love to read any collection of such point-by-point refutations. On the other hand (here I finally arrive at my main point), by some unfortunate lapse in logic, the long silence the hypothesis engendered has been now co-opted by apologists, who conveniently misread it as if it were evidence of some kind of tacit agreement within the academy that the hypothesis has been discredited. The silence of a stumped room of startled exegetes has over the decades become misinterpreted as the silent ruling of some imaginary consensus. To insist that this silence is a vindication of the standard position by default, however, as some do, is an invalid and premature projection. Is there such thing as an expiration date on an ignored proposition which would render it invalid after a time? Is there a statute of limitations on the discussion of theories? An eternal green room?

That a majority of New Testament (or any other kind) of scholars have never considered that the dearth of primary sources makes the biographical legend dubious at best—that they accept the historicity of Jesus a priori — is unquestionably true. But to call this unexplored assumption a "consensus " is a glaring equivocation, a clear example of a semantic fallacy (also a variant of the etymological fallacy), where the precise meaning or implication of a word or phrase is disregarded (consciously or not) in favor of its more casual, every-day usage. Another example of this fallacy is the common use of the word "myth" to express the idea of a falsity. In an academic sense, the word "myth" denotes a complex of interrelated symbols and stories which informs the self-identity and cultural inheritance of a given people. In modern lay parlance, the word simply means "fairy-tale," or worse, "lie." Similarly, the word "consensus" in an academic sense denotes a position commonly held by an authoritative body, a viewpoint arrived at and agreed upon after the examination of the pertinent facts has been undertaken.

Are most New Testament scholars Christian?

Yes, by far. I think most do self-identify as such.

Do most of them believe that Jesus was born miraculously of a virgin?

Most of them? … Hmm … Possibly.

Do they believe that Jesus miraculously rose from the dead on that first Easter morning?

Yes, almost universally.

But are these beliefs "consensus views" just because most scholars defend them? No. They are the creedally accepted foundational axioms of a religious community, for which there is no way to determine historicity (even if these miracles really did happen!). These things have not been (cannot be, not with the texts we have to work with, at any rate) empirically demonstrated; they are simply givens. It is very important to note this distinction. A consensus is not just a majority view. Consensus implies more than passive acceptance of a given, it implies reasoned agreement after the rigorous examination of evidence. To make this a bit more clear, consider that something like 90–97% of Americans believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the only shooter involved in the murder of JFK in 1963. The majority is overwhelming (frustratingly so to those who have studied the matter soberly and honestly). The consensus, that reached, for example, by the Warren Commission after careful systematic investigation of testimony and evidence, is that Oswald, acting on his own that day, shot three bullets at the presidential motorcade, two of which hit their intended victim. The distinction between these two widely divergent positions should be noted.

Yet there are those who still regrettably appeal to this kind of paper-doll “consensus.” It is often the frontline defense in a rejection of mythicism, sometimes the only one. I’m afraid that this kind of methodological leap is symptomatic of the troubling state of affairs in the field today, where arguing from an authority— in this case no more than a perceived authority—an embarrassing blunder in any scientific discipline, is given a free pass in biblical studies. Interestingly, some academics now even specialize in this sort of superficial head counting and statistical analysis in their professional work, meticulously graphing the trends in the literary output of New Testament scholars, categorizing their works individually and collectively by how they rate on a linear scale, with strict orthodoxy at one extreme and skepticism on the other. In this way they try to show that the orthodox position on any given matter is not only plausible, but normative, and therefore preferable by default.

Relying on a consensus is bad enough, to be sure, but when the consensus is just an imaginary one to begin with … well … that’s erring twice over, a puzzling phenomenon to encounter in a field that purports to be an academic enterprise. This is the sort of scholarly behavior that Hector Avalos explores in his The End of Biblical Studies, a scathing critique of the currents underlying modern New Testament scholarship (Philip Davies is another vocal critic of such practices). Then, to add insult to injury, backed by their paper-doll consensus, many "historicists" (for lack of a coined term) adopt a haughty, mocking, downright insutling attitude toward the scholars who have exhumed these long-ignored ideas of the Tübingen and Dutch Radical schools, dusting them off for public perusal once more. Whenever I encounter invective language in any academic argument, a little alarm goes off in the back of my head, something like a big yellow sign on a swervy road warning me: 'CAUTION! - PASSION AHEAD.' If cogent arguments were being offered up, instead of the over-simplifications that are, I could understand frustration turning into insult. Where there should be coherent arguments against the ideas presented, I see field of such flags, and I will maintain that there would be no need for this rancor if the theory was not seen as a personal affront somehow.

It's not just faith that is jeopardized by the Christ Myth. One could tangentially argue that this out-of-hand dismissal of the hypothesis in the academic community could also be a matter of scholars subconsciously huddling together against a gathering storm, so to protect the means of their livelihood (job security can be a powerful motivating factor). And who could blame these armies of professional exegetes, really, for bracing themselves against such an imaginable end to their tenures? Moreover (and perhaps more poignantly), who really wants to believe that all the work one has devoted so much time and passion to turns out to be a house of cards in the end?

Despite vehement opposition and prejudice, in this less-than-welcoming climate, the new mythicists have appeared on the scene, undaunted, representing the scholars of old, giving the lie to this paper doll ‘consensus,’ and reminding us that the riddles and inconsistencies in the texts, the same ones that once led the old Tübingen and Dutch radicals to advance their appalling ideas, are still glaringly there, and are still as unexplored and as glossed over as ever.

To be fair, though, in closing, let me now admit that more monographs are sorely needed (on both sides of this question). Until mythicism can be expressed more cogently than it has been until now, until detractors stop with the silent treatment, the mockery, and resident scorn, this issue will continue to be the posturing dance of egos that it currently is. Let me also now admit that I fully agree that some of the frustration and rancor felt toward a certain variety of infantile cyber-clandestine uninformed trolling on the internet is indeed very much deserved, and I truly empathize with those sentiments. I myself recently had an awkward encounter with one of these cyber-souls. Unfortunately, this is the internet, where everybody and their proverbial mother can wax authoritative without having read any substantive, truly scholarly works on this (or any other) subject. But let me stress that it would be a great mistake to not discern the wheat from the chaff in this case It would be a great mistake to throw the whole mess into the flames. To categorically consider anyone who might think that mythicism is a plausible scenario to be reprehensible, or laughable, or crazy, or anti-scholarly, or what-have-you, solely on their sober acceptance or defense of that historical possibility would be to do a great disservice and an insult to many truly honest, dutiful, able, conversant, diligent, sophisticated, nuanced, credentialed, insightful, and honorable scholars of the past and of the present, who at the very least deserve the respect of their peers.

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(*** I consider the "consensus" argument to be made essentially of nothing more that straw and bravado. In future posts in this series, I hope to engage some of the more substantive arguments against mythicist thought, particularly some points raised by Greg Boyd and by John Dominic Crossan, who i think have fairly coherent objections that rise above the scornful and/or simplistic mischaracterizations and other sundry reactionary barbs that are usually thrown at mythicism, This is not a series in which I will lay out the mythicist case myself, my intention is instead to address specific objections to it. Anyone interested in acquainting themselves with the main trajectories in mythicist thought should read the work of Earl Doherty and of Herman Detering, who are probably the most exhaustive modern exponents of the Ideas of the Tübingen and Dutch Radical schools. Their respective bibliographies should be used as a springboard for further research.
Finally, online, a four-part podcast series by Zachary Moore lays out the case fairly well.
Happy reading/listening!) :)

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