Introduction:
What They Didn’t Teach You in Sunday School
by
Robert Oerter
©2009
One day some years ago a book showed up on my doorstep. It had been left by a friend, together with a note that said, “You might find this interesting – don’t bother to return it.” Its thesis was so convoluted that I will make no attempt to summarize it, except to mention its claim that the Bible is a “steal” from pagan sources. The author claimed in particular that Jesus was not someone who had actually lived; he was a mythical character like Hercules, Bacchus, and Mithras.
I had been raised as a Christian, but I no longer accepted the creed I had grown up with, so I was not shocked by these claims. But I was surprised that I had never heard them before. As far as I was aware, nearly everyone, Christian or non-Christian, accepted the historical existence of Jesus. Yet the author was able to cite scholars who considered Jesus’s life story pure myth. Too, I had been taught in Sunday school that Christianity was an outgrowth of Judaism. I had never heard the claim that Christian beliefs derived from pagan, rather than Jewish, beliefs.
I was intrigued. What did I know of the evidence for a historical Jesus? In Sunday school we never attempted any sort of objective evaluation of the evidence. The truth of the New Testament accounts was simply assumed. Obviously, the church had a vested interest a historical Jesus. A skeptic by nature and by training (I am a theoretical physicist), I couldn’t simply take the church’s word for it. What of the secular world’s acceptance of Jesus? Were there good reasons for it, or was it a result of laziness and ignorance, like my own uncritical acceptance? The church, too, had reason to deny the influence of pagan religion on Christian beliefs. Theologically speaking, Christianity was the completion of Judaism: Jesus’s life and death were the fulfillment of ancient Jewish prophecies. All religions apart from Judaism and Christianity were said to be errors inspired by Satan to mislead people. If there was evidence linking Christian beliefs to these very pagan sources, my Sunday school teachers would hardly have brought it up, even if they knew about it. I decided I needed to look into the matter myself.
My friend’s book was clearly the wrong place for a skeptic to begin such an investigation. Poorly reasoned, poorly referenced, and founded in a convoluted theory of mythology and metaphysics, I had no more confidence in these claims than in those of my old Sunday school teachers. I wanted to find solid, unbiased scholarship.
Was unbiased scholarship available, was it even possible, in our religiously polarized society? Most New Testament scholarship, I soon discovered, was carried out by scholars who were themselves Christian. These scholars might be biased in favor of more traditional, Sunday school views of early Christianity. Non-Christian scholars, on the other hand, might harbor their own philosophical or anti-religious predispositions.
I began my investigation, therefore, skeptical of all sides: of traditional religious views, of radical revisionism, and of academic scholarship. I fully expected – I am embarrassed to admit it now – to find New Testament scholarship full of biased and muddy thinking. I had a large dose of the scientist’s all-too-typical arrogance towards non-scientific fields of study. Only scientists, I tacitly assumed, were really trained in rigorous thinking. Surely, in a “soft” subject like religion, scholars wouldn’t measure up. I was wrong. In my reading I encountered many books that were masterpieces of careful reasoning. Gradually, my skepticism of academic scholarship diminished and was replaced by enthusiastic respect and admiration. Setting aside their own prejudices and preconceptions, these scholars forged careful analyses of the texts – those in the Bible and others not found there – that revealed a detailed picture of early Christianity unlike any I had ever heard or read before. Far from being biased, these scholars were acutely aware of the danger of projecting their own theological preferences onto the data, of “discovering” a view of Jesus and of early Christianity that was more a reflection of their own desires than of the evidence. And indeed, while their research does not for the most part support the claims of the radical revisionists, neither does it jibe with the church’s traditional view of Christian origins. Fundamental Christian beliefs, even to the nature of the Bible and of God himself, are called into question.
The more I read, the more the questions proliferated. Scholars don’t believe that everything in the New Testament came directly from Jesus. Fine, but then where did Christian beliefs come from? Why were some beliefs so different from Jewish beliefs? Most crucially, when and how did Jesus come to be seen as God?
There is an “obvious” answer to these questions: new converts of pagan backgrounds imported pagan myths that were then Christianized by turning them into myths about Jesus. That, in a nutshell, is the argument given in several recent books, including the book my friend gave me. The “obvious” answer, it turns out, is almost completely wrong. The true story is much more complicated, and much more interesting.
To begin with, how do scholars view the Bible? Traditionally speaking, the Old Testament consists of the sacred writings of the Jews, and the New Testament consists of those recognized as authoritative by Christians. However, it is a fact that the earliest known complete list of the 27 books now called the New Testament was written in 367 AD. Christians of the first three centuries produced a remarkable variety of writings, many of them forgeries written in the name of one apostle or another. How were these documents winnowed down to the current 27? Are the New Testament books authentic or are some of them forgeries, too? These issues are the subject of Questioning the Canon.
It didn’t take me long to discover that New Testament scholars, even conservative ones who held to a very traditional view of Jesus, accept that not everything in the New Testament is historically accurate. Claims of “Biblical contradictions” have been around for a long time, and these claims have been answered many times by traditionalist Christians who assert that all purported contradictions can be resolved. Why, then, were these Christian scholars persuaded that the Bible contains inaccuracies? A direct discussion of Biblical inerrancy by these scholars was not to be found, but the literature was full of discussions of how the gospels relate to each other. From these discussions I could see the outline of a response to the inerrancy claim. But those scholarly discussions were fascinating in their own right and raised many new questions. Why do scholars think Mark was the first gospel written? Why do they think Matthew and Luke both copied parts of their gospels from Mark? What is the mysterious Q document, and how can scholars be so confident of its contents if no copy of it has ever been found? All these issues will be illuminated in Gospel Truth.
Once we accept that not all of the New Testament is historically accurate, though, why should we accept any of it as historical? Couldn’t the whole Jesus story be an invention? That, after all, was the claim of the book mentioned at the beginning of this Introduction. Yet scholars, almost without exception – and including even those who present a radically non-traditional portrait of Jesus – accept that such a man actually lived on earth and died under Pontius Pilate. It was easy to suspect that those scholars who were Christian wanted to believe that Jesus was not fictional. But as I read these scholars I became more and more impressed with the care with which they peeled away the layers of theology and legend that had accrued around Jesus to uncover the core of the tradition. Jesus: Man or Myth? confronts the radical skepticism about the historical nature of Jesus that crops up from time to time by calling on the arguments of scholars, Christian and otherwise, who accept that Jesus was a historical person.
Accepting that Jesus was historical is not the same as accepting everything about the traditional view of Christian history. Traditionally, Christianity derives directly from Judaism. Yet many Christian beliefs are quite different from their Jewish counterparts. The Old Testament depiction of the afterlife is far from the heaven and hell of Christianity. Satan’s role changes, too, from a servant of God in the Old Testament to God’s arch-enemy in the New. The Curious Career of Satan investigates how these changes came about, and the pagan religious ideas that may have influenced the changes.
A historical approach to the New Testament requires a radical revision of our picture of Jesus, as well. Jesus’s startling claim of unity with God (John 10:30) is not mentioned in any of the other, chronologically earlier, gospels, nor in the letters of Paul, making it highly unlikely that this claim actually originated with Jesus himself. In fact, no doctrine of the Trinity is given anywhere in the New Testament. What views of Jesus does the New Testament contain? How did the man, Jesus, come to be considered a god, and part of a Trinity? These issues are the subject of Promoted to God.
The Nature of Historical Study
In retrospect, it makes sense that scholars of early Christianity (or historians generally) need to be masters of careful thinking. Scientists who wish to test a hypothesis can design an experiment that will generate new data. Historians don’t have that luxury. Their data – the ancient texts that have been preserved to the present day – are mostly unchanging. Significant new finds, like the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag Hammadi texts, are rare indeed, and completely unpredictable. With such a limited amount of data, every scrap is precious and must be treated with care. Sloppy thinking in science will eventually be corrected by Nature herself, revealed through experiments. Sloppy thinking in a historical study will only be corrected by more careful thinking.
The limited nature of the data in historical investigations entails an important difference in the nature of the conclusions reached. Scientific theories, once they have been tested sufficiently by experiment or observation, can be considered “proven.” As a simple example, take the idea that gravity is an attractive force. Every time you stand up from a chair or take a step, you are performing an experiment that tests if gravity is still attractive. No sane person goes to bed at night worrying that gravity will reverse itself during the night, causing them to fly out of their bed and hit the ceiling. The attractive nature of gravity is so well tested that it is considered a fact. Historical investigations cannot be tested to the same degree, so their conclusions are necessarily more tentative. We can say that the Q document probably existed. This hypothesis can be tested by considering how well it explains the relationships between the gospels. But, barring the unlikely event that an actual copy of Q is someday unearthed from the sands of the Middle East, we cannot say its existence is proven.
It should not be surprising, then, that there is a much wider range of opinions among scholars of early Christianity than there is, say, among physicists about the nature of gravity – not as a result of muddy thinking or unspoken biases (though one does occasionally run into such), but because of the very nature of historical inquiry. Differences of opinion among historians are driven, to a large extent, by differences in starting assumptions. Some assumptions do amount to biases: an investigation that begins with the assumption that Jesus is completely mythical will never conclude that Jesus existed, and one that assumes the Bible is inerrant will never uncover a contradiction. But not all assumptions are of this type, and, indeed, some set of assumptions is necessary before any investigation can begin. We must, for example, assume the validity of the work of those scholars who have examined and translated the ancient manuscripts – unless, of course, we are prepared to re-examine and re-translate them ourselves. The question then becomes, which scholarly conclusions are established firmly enough to take as starting assumptions for further investigation? How much evidence is required for a claim to go from “possibly true” to “probably true”? Reasonable people might reasonably differ in their evaluation of earlier conclusions. Thus, it is hard to find unanimity on much of anything in the study of early Christianity, including, of course, the arguments presented in these essays. Even the most basic claims – that a man named Jesus lived and was crucified in the first century, for example – do not have unanimous assent among scholars. I have tried to choose issues and verdicts on which there is considerable agreement among scholars from a wide range of religious backgrounds. I know of no polling data to back this up, but I am confident that the main conclusions of these essays represent, if not a majority view, then at least the view of a solid minority.
The choice of topics obviously reflects my own opinion about which arguments are the most compelling. I am not a New Testament scholar, but the arguments in these essays are drawn from the works of the experts. There are abundant references for anyone who wants to check me on this – which you should! Whenever possible, the arguments given are supported with quotations from the primary sources – the actual ancient texts – rather than quoting from the scholars. That way, you can make up your own mind whether a particular argument is at all convincing. A continual stream of “likely,” “almost certainly,” “probably,” and so forth, is tedious for reader and author alike. In the essays, claims are stated with more certainty than this author feels. Let me just state at the outset my stance on everything that follows: I think the conclusions reached are true – probably.
Scholarly articles are full of detailed discussions of Greek grammar and the meanings of particular words. Fortunately, for the topics discussed here, this sort of discussion can largely be avoided. I have also chosen to avoid the thorny issues of what is known as “historical Jesus research”: the search for what Jesus actually said and did, as opposed to what other people claimed he said and did. These attempts to discern the Jesus of history go back at least to Thomas Jefferson, who famously cut out of his Bible the parts he deemed inauthentic. Scholars today seem little closer to agreement on this issue than they were in Jefferson’s day. Readers who are interested in learning about these discussions, or who want to learn more details of the arguments presented here and the objections and alternative points of view can consult the Further Reading for each essay and the references in the footnotes.
The scholarship presented here has uncovered a fascinating and detailed picture of the development of Christian beliefs and practices in the first centuries AD. Some of the details in this picture have been discovered only recently, but much of it has been known for fifty years or more. Sadly, these historical discoveries have not been widely appreciated among the general public. There seems, in fact, to be a conspiracy of silence among pastors, preachers, and priests. Anyone who has been through seminary training knows these facts and theories. Yet they are rarely heard from the pulpit or in religious education classes. This curious gap has been remarked on by New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman in his recent book, Jesus Interrupted.
One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture,…, they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous,… that in fact we don’t have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary. [1]
Ehrman’s conclusion speculates on the reasons for this reluctance: Christian history is not a high priority among all the concerns of a congregation, or pastors just don’t know where to begin, or they haven’t been taught how to present these ideas. Finally, almost reluctantly, Ehrman suggests pastors might be afraid these ideas will lead to a crisis, or a loss, of faith.[2]
This last seems the most likely explanation to me. If a Christian learns that Jesus did not declare himself to be God, that his followers did not believe he was part of a holy Trinity, how can that not have an enormous impact on his or her faith?
At any rate, you have been warned. I try in these essays to present not just the scholarly conclusions, but the reasons for those conclusions. That way you can decide for yourself how much weight to give them. My goal is not to shock religious sensibilities, nor to pander to them. It is only to learn the truth about Christian origins, to whatever extent it can be known.
A Note On Terminology
One obstacle in the way of anyone who tries to read New Testament scholarship is the ubiquitous use of technical terminology. In any scholarly field a kind of scholarly shorthand arises: certain terms, which may be normal English words or words unknown to the general public, acquire very specific, specialized meanings. This is unfortunate for the outsider but it is really inevitable; scholars need to communicate with other scholars, and lengthy definitions or discussions of points every scholar already knows are unnecessary and get in the way of communication. In these essays I try both to avoid specialized scholarly language and to define those terms I can’t avoid. However, there are a few points I need to clarify here at the outset.
Bible Analysis: In scholarly circles the various disciplines of Biblical analysis are called “criticism.” Thus, there is “form criticism” (the study of the literary forms used by Biblical authors), “textual criticism” (the study of the ancient manuscripts of the Bible and the differences between them), “narrative criticism” (the study of the books of the Bible as literary narratives), and so forth. In normal English, “criticism” has a very negative connotation. “Biblical criticism” brings to mind the image of some bearded eggheads sitting around criticizing the Bible. Actually, the term “criticism” in this context means something like “analysis.” So as not to give an incorrect impression to those readers unfamiliar with the term “criticism,” I will use “analysis” instead.
Gospel Authors: As we will learn in the essay Gospel Truth, none of the gospels were written by disciples of Jesus. They may not even have been written by persons named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. However, out of convenience, scholars continue to refer to the authors by those names, because it is easier than saying “the gospel written by an unknown person that now is known as the Gospel according to Matthew.” I will do the same in these essays; see the more complete discussion in Questioning the Canon.
Orthodoxy and Heresy: In discussing the early church it used to be common to refer to the strand of early Christian tradition that led to the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches by the term “orthodox” and to all the other divergent strands of Christianity as “heretical.” Scholars today tend to avoid these two terms, for several reasons. “Orthodox” literally means “correct doctrine” and so is heavily value-laden. It implies that these Christians were right and all the others, those “heretics,” were wrong. The heretics, naturally, thought they were the ones keeping the true doctrine and thought that “orthodox” Christians were the ones distorting Jesus’s message. Distinguishing between correct and incorrect doctrine is a job for the theologian, not for the historian. History should be about getting the facts right, not about passing judgment on theological matters.
Also, the term “heresy” implies a movement away from the original beliefs of the first followers of Jesus. However, as we will see in the essay Promoted to God, in some cases the “heretics” might have been closer to those original beliefs than the later “orthodox” Christians. Finally, because of the development of Christian theology over time, the meaning of “orthodox” changed. Some beliefs that were considered acceptable in the second or third century were declared heretical in the fourth century.
Unfortunately there is no good alternative terminology to use. Some scholars use the terms “catholic” or “proto-orthodox” to refer to those Christians in the stream of development that led to modern Christianity. To my mind, “catholic” is too suggestive of Roman Catholicism, and “proto-orthodox” seems nearly as value-laden as “orthodox.” In the absence of a better alternative I have chosen to use the term “mainstream Christians.” This term should not be taken to mean that these Christians were in the majority at all times and in all places. Certainly they were not: in some places, “heretical” Christianity (Marcionite Christianity, for instance) would have been the majority form, and “orthodox” or mainstream Christians would have been in the minority.[3] Rather, “mainstream Christians” should be taken to mean “those Christians who were in the main stream of tradition that led to modern Christianity.”
No comments:
Post a Comment