Biblical Criticism

"[The non-Christian references to Jesus from the first two centuries] render highly implausible any farfetched theories that even Jesus' very existence was a Christian invention. The fact that Jesus existed, that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate (for whatever reason) and that he had a band of followers who continued to support his cause, seems to be the part of the bedrock of historical tradition. If nothing else, the non-Christian evidence can provide us with certainty on that score."

"In the academic mind, there can be no more doubt whatsoever that Jesus existed than did Augustus and Tiberius, the emperors of his lifetime. Even if we assume for a moment that the accounts of non-biblical authors who mention him - Flavius Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger and others - had not survived, the outstanding quality of the Gospels, Paul's letters and other New Testament writings is more than good enough for the historian."

"The essentials of the message Paul preaches are not coming from those who were with Jesus, whom Paul sarcastically calls the “so-called pillars of the church,” adding “what they are means nothing to me” (Galatians 2:6), but from voices, visions, and revelations that Paul is “hearing” and “seeing.” For some that is a strong foundation. For many, including most historians, such “traditions” cannot be taken as reliable historical testimony. (James Tabor, “Paul as Clairvoyant,” accessed 21/09/2012, http://jamestabor.com/2012/05/23/paul-as-clairvoyant-2)."

"I.e. if we leave out of account the Christ-myth theories, which are hardly to be reckoned as within the range of serious criticism."

"[Bruno Bauer] promoted the view that Christianity was syncretistic and mythical at its beginnings."

"Christianity and its Christ, [Bruno] Bauer argued, were born in Rome and Alexandria when adherents of Roman Stoicism, Greek Neo-Platonism and Judaism combined to form a new religion that needed a founder."

"[Bruno Bauer] denied the value of the New Testament, especially the Gospels and Paul’s letters, in establishing the existence of Jesus."

"[Per] The Jesus Myth (1999), [G. A.] Wells ...now accepts that there is some historical basis for the existence of Jesus, derived from the lost early “gospel” “Q” (the hypothetical source used by Matthew and Luke). Wells believes that it is early and reliable enough to show that Jesus probably did exist, although this Jesus was not the Christ that the later canonical Gospels portray."

"[Bruno Bauer] argued that the lack of mention of Jesus in non-Christian writings of the first century shows that Jesus did not exist. Neither do the few mentions of Jesus by Roman writers in the early second century establish his existence."

"A penultimate conclusion relates to those who still argue that Jesus never existed. Since the classical writers contain no certainly independent witnesses to Jesus, by the strictest standards of historical evidence we cannot use them to demonstrate the existence of Jesus."

"I think that there are hardly any historians today, in fact I don't know of any historians today, who doubt the existence of Jesus... So I think that question can be put to rest."

"Anyone who talks about "reasonable faith" must say what he thinks about Jesus. And that would still be so even if, with one or two cranks, he believed that He never existed."

"In the last analysis, the whole Christ-myth theorizing is a glaring example of obscurantism, if the sin of obscurantism consists in the acceptance of bare possibilities in place of actual probabilities, and of pure surmise in defiance of existing evidence. Those who have not entered far into the laborious inquiry may pretend that the historicity of Jesus is an open question. For me to adopt such a pretence would be sheer intellectual dishonesty. I know I must, as an honest man, reckon with Jesus as a factor in history... This dialectic process whereby the Christ-myth theory discredits itself rests on the simple fact that you cannot attempt to prove the theory without mishandling the evidence."

"A phone call from the BBC’s flagship Today programme: would I go on air on Good Friday morning to debate with the aurthors of a new book, The Jesus Mysteries? The book claims (or so they told me) that everything in the Gospels reflects, because it was in fact borrowed from, much older pagan myths; that Jesus never existed; that the early church knew it was propagating a new version of an old myth, and that the developed church covered this up in the interests of its own power and control. The producer was friendly, and took my point when I said that this was like asking a professional astronomer to debate with the authors of a book claiming the moon was made of green cheese."

"Belief in Christ is no more or less rational than belief in John Frum."

"[In Did Jesus Exist] I agued that Paul sincerely believed that the evidence (not restricted to the Wisdom Literature) pointed to a historical Jesus who had lived well before his own day; and I leave open the question as to whether such a person had in fact existed and lived the obscure live that Paul supposed of him. (There is no means of deciding this issue.)"

"That Jewish Wisdom ideas influenced early Christian writings is undeniable, for Jewish statements made about Wisdom are there made of Jesus. Christ is called “the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Cor. 1:24); in him are “hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Cols. 2:3). Like Wisdom, Christ assisted God in the creation of all things (1 Cor. 8:6)—an idea spelled out in the Christological hymn of Colossians 1:15-20. And like the Jewish Wisdom figure, Jesus sought acceptance on earth but was rejected and returned to heaven. Furthermore, in the Wisdom of Solomon, the righteous man, Wisdom’s ideal representative (no particular person is meant), is persecuted but vindicated post mortem. His enemies have condemned him to “a shameful death” (2:20), but he then confronts them as their judge in heaven, where he is “counted among the sons of God" (5:5)."

"Jesus is nowhere in the Talmud said to have been executed by the Romans; his death is represented as solely the work of the Jews: and nowhere is his alleged Messiahship mentioned, not even as a reason for putting him to death."

"[Per Wells on his sources] What I actually did was to draw extensively (not 'chiefly') from certain articles in Cheyne and Black's Encyclopaedia Biblica—articles written with commendable candour by theologians who believed that they were serving Christianity by clearing away what the evidence had shown to be indefensible positions. [..] [And referenced by] Professor Kenneth Grayston's good-natured quip in his generous review of JEC in The Methodist Recorder: "The Encyclopaedia Biblica rides again""

"From the mid-1990s I became persuaded that many of the gospel traditions are too specific in their references to time, place, and circumstances to have developed in such a short time from no other basis, and are better understood as traceable to the activity of a Galilean preacher of the early first century, the personage represented in Q... This is the position I have argued in my books of 1996, 1999, and 2004, although the titles of the first two of these—The Jesus Legend and The Jesus Myth—may mislead potential readers into supposing that I still denied the historicity of the gospel Jesus. These titles were chosen because I regarded (and still do regard) [the following stories;] the virgin birth, much in the Galilean ministry, the crucifixion around A.D. 30 under Pilate, and the resurrection—as legendary."

"[T]he view that there was no historical Jesus, that his earthly existence is a fiction of earliest Christianity—a fiction only later made concrete by setting his life in the first century—is today almost totally rejected."

"[Per] the gospel of Mark, the oldest surviving gospel? Attaining essentially its final form probably as late as 90 CE but containing core material dating possibly as early as 70 CE, it omits, as we have seen, almost the entire traditional biography of Jesus, beginning the story with John the Baptist giving Jesus a bath, and ending – in the oldest manuscripts – with women running frightened from the empty tomb."

"The denial that Christ was crucified is like the denial of the Holocaust. For some it's simply too horrific to affirm. For others it's an elaborate conspiracy to coerce religious sympathy. But the deniers live in a historical dreamworld."

"A hundred and fifty years ago a fairly well respected scholar named Bruno Bauer maintained that the historical person Jesus never existed. Anyone who says that today—in the academic world at least—gets grouped with the skinheads who say there was no Holocaust and the scientific holdouts who want to believe the world is flat."

"Many (including the present writer) are content to infer broadly, from the scanty reliable evidence and the religious developments of the first century, that probably some Jew named Jesus adopted the Persian belief [see Avesta] in the end of the world and, thinking that it was near, left his Essenian monastery [see Essenes] to warn his fellows, and was put to death. They feel that the question of historicity has little importance [...] the very scanty biographical details even as given in the Gospels [see Mark] do not justify the claim of a "unique personality,"..."

"This skeptical way of thinking reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth. In ancient times, this extreme view was named the heresy of docetism (seeming) because it maintained that Jesus never came into the world "in the flesh", but only seemed to; (I John 4:2) and it was given some encouragement by Paul's lack of interest in his fleshly existence. Subsequently, from the eighteenth century onwards, there have been attempts to insist that Jesus did not even "seem" to exist, and that all tales of his appearance upon the earth were pure fiction. In particular, his story was compared to the pagan mythologies inventing fictitious dying and rising gods. (paragraph break) Some of the lines of thinking employed to disprove the Christ-myth theory have been somewhat injudicious."

"Except for the references among the writings of Josephus and Tacitus, the extra-biblical sources are very late. All these sources demonstrate some element of fraud or ambiguity, and generally do not tell us any more about Jesus than what is already known from the Gospels. None of the sources stem from Jesus’ own time. None of the sources come from proven eyewitnesses. These issues allow significant justifiable doubt on what Jesus said, what he did, who he really was, and if he even existed at all. There should be no issue, then, in noting that Jesus’ ahistoricity is an epistemic possibility, and therefore expressing some reservations over his historicity is reasonable."

"There are no existing eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus. All we have are later descriptions of Jesus’ life events by non-eyewitnesses, most of whom are obviously biased."

"Only Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey have thoroughly attempted to prove Jesus’ historical existence in recent times. Their most decisive point? The Gospels can generally be trusted – after we ignore the many, many bits that are untrustworthy – because of the hypothetical (i.e. non-existent) sources behind them. [...] Given the poor state of the existing sources, and the atrocious methods used by mainstream Biblical historians, the matter will likely never be resolved. In sum, there are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus’ historical existence – if not to think it outright improbable."

"[Per the case for "Historical Jesus" agnosticism] ...the justification of agnosticism is already made obvious by consulting the people arguing for Jesus’ historical certainty. ...Simply peruse the sources for yourself. Do that, and also hear from the historicists how they 'prove' Jesus’ existence. ...If the case for Jesus is unconvincing, then agnosticism is already justified."

"The recent defences of Jesus’ historicity by Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey lack lucid and competent methodologies, rely on highly questionable documents, and further make use of sources that no longer exist, if they ever did.[...] If the consensus view that a historical Jesus certainly existed is based on such tenuous methodology, it would seem reasonable that the consensus view should be reviewed, while not necessarily immediately rejected as false. Let us end this section with a mainstream scholar’s admission that such methods — like the earlier and often mentioned appeal to imaginary sources — are idiosyncratic; that they are unique to historians who specialise in the New Testament texts"

"[Richard Carrier's hypothesis of ‘minimal mythicism’], highly influenced by the work of Earl Doherty, states that Jesus was initially believed to be a celestial figure, who came to be historicised over time."

"[R. M.] Price speculates that the sources should point historical Jesus scholars in the direction of “complete agnosticism”."

"We can be certain that Jesus really existed (despite a few highly motivated skeptics who refuse to be convinced), that he was a Jewish teacher in Galilee, and that he was crucified by the Roman government around 30 CE."

"...on the one hand, literal acceptance of everything in the New Testament as the veridical record of what happened, and, on the other, some form of Christ-myth theory which denies that there ever was a Jesus."

"There have even been learned and intelligent men who have denied that Jesus ever existed: the so-called "Christ-myth" theory."

"If this account of the matter is correct, one can also see why it is that the 'Christ-myth' theory, to the effect that there was no historical Jesus at all, has seemed so plausible to many..."

"To accept the historicity of Jesus one must have independent historical evidence, but this evidence is not forthcoming."

"[The Mythical Jesus viewpoint holds that a historical Jesus—if he did exist—] had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity."

"For a good, direct, and recent statement of the mythicist view, see George A. Wells, “Independent Confirmation." As will be clear, in one important respect Wells differs from most other mythicists: rather than tracing the invention of the historical Jesus back to the myths about the pagan gods, Wells thinks that it derived from Jewish wisdom traditions, in which God’s wisdom was thought to have been a personalized being who was with him at the creation and then came to visit humans (see, for example, Proverbs 8). [Wells, George A. “Is There Independent Confirmation of What the Gospels Say of Jesus?" Free Inquiry 31 (2011): 19-25.]"

"When all the evidence brought against Jesus' historicity is surveyed it is not found to contain any elements of strength."

"[The Christ myth] is the theory that no historical Jesus worthy of the name existed, that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure, that the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction, and that no single identifiable person lay at the root of the Galilean preaching tradition." In simpler terms, the historical Jesus did not exist. Or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity."

"[R. M.] Price thinks the evidence is so weak for the historical Jesus that we cannot know anything certain or meaningful about him. He is even willing to entertain the possibility that there never was a historical Jesus."

"Richard [Carrier] takes the extremist position that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed, that there was no such person in history. This is a position that is so extreme that to call it marginal would be an understatement; it doesn’t even appear on the map of contemporary New Testament scholarship."

"Since around 1970 an alternative explanation of the New Testament and related texts has been emerging. Researchers are recognizing precise ways in which New Testament texts are explained as depending not on oral tradition but on older literature, especially older scripture. [...] The dependence of the gospels on the Old Testament and on other extant texts is incomparably clearer and more verifiable than its dependence on any oral tradition — as seen, for instance, in the thorough dependence of Jesus’ call to disciples (Lk. 9:57-62) on Elijah’s call (1 Kgs 19). The sources supply not only a framework but a critical mass which pervades the later text."

"No serious historian of any religious or nonreligious stripe doubts that Jesus of Nazareth really lived in the first century and was executed under the authority of Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea and Samaria. Though this may be common knowledge among scholars, the public may well not be aware of this."

"The scholarly mainstream, in contrast to Bauer and company, never doubted the existence of Jesus or his relevance for the founding of the Church."

"Frankly, I know of no ancient historian or biblical historian who would have a twinge of doubt about the existence of a Jesus Christ - the documentary evidence is simply overwhelming."

"It is fair to say that most present-day theologians also accept that large parts of the Gospel stories are, if not fictional, at least not to be taken at face value as historical accounts. On the other hand, no theologian seems to be able to bring himself to admit that the question of the historicity of Jesus must be judged to be an open one. It appears to me that the theologians are not living up to their responsibility as scholars when they refuse to discuss the possibility that even the existence of the Jesus of the Gospels can be legitimately called into question."

"[Birger] Olsson devotes ...half his [commentary] space to a quite fair summary of my hypothesis [per Myten om Jesus (1992)]. (Reply by Alvar Ellegård, p. 199)"