Slide 1
opening
Slide 2
Up here we have a combination of letters that represents a question. Does anyone know
what that question is? (wwjd) Well our subject here today has to do with an increasingly
popular answer to this question posed by critics of Christianity. And that answer is --Slide 3
JDNE! Say what? What does that stand for? It stands for:
Slide 4
JDNE – these days, some critics of Christianity have found an easy way, so they think, of
avoiding questions about whether Jesus was God, or whether he rose from the dead, or
whether he can save you from your sins. As they see it, just argue that Jesus did not even
exist as a human being walking the earth, and you have the ideal shortcut that allows you
to avoid all those questions. You don’t even have to ask, “What would Jesus do?”
because the obvious answer would be, “Nothing! He wasn’t even there to do anything!”
This theory is popularly known as the Christ myth thesis.
You may be thinking, “JP, this is a really crazy idea.” And you’re right, it is. But we live
in a world now in which people accept as true some of the wildest ideas you can think of
as true. Scholars and historians think the Christ myth thesis is a crazy one. But we now
have many popular writers promoting this idea, and they are succeeding in changing
minds. If you think not, let me read from just a few statements from reviews of a book
titled The Jesus Puzzle, by readers who were convinced by its message that Jesus did not
even exist:
One said: “As a non-believer, I found this theory to be quite reassuring, as there is no
longer any need to account for the unnatural events in the life and death of Jesus.”
Another said: “I was raised as a Christian, and have always felt an emptiness in all the
teachings and rituals that I was initiated into. It is a relief that there are others who seek
the TRUTH and are willing to share it.”
Another said: “After reading "The Jesus Puzzle", there is no way I can ever again
imagine Jesus as a literal historical person or think of Christian origins as anything but a
wild west like schizophrenic disarray of competing sectarian cults.”
And finally, there is this tragic commentary: “For most of my 49 years, I have been a
pretty serious Christian. I have lately allowed myself to open my mind and read literature
that may not necessarily agree with what I've always believed. The Jesus Puzzle is a very
well researched book that allows the author's arguments to be quite convincing.”
If a Christian of 49 years can find this sort of argument convincing – we have a serious
problem on our hands. I will tell you from this point, however, that the problem is not the
evidence, because it is all on our side. The problem we have is that the evidence is not
known.
In these teachings that follow, I am not expecting that anyone here will necessarily retain
all that I present here. What I want to happen here is for you to come away from these
teachings with a basic awareness of what is being claimed by the enemies of the faith,
and the knowledge that you can easily find answers to these claims. What follows in
these lessons is merely highlights – at the end of these lessons, I will provide lists of
resources for further reading, should you ever have the need for them. At any time, any
one of us or our children could become on of these “lifelong Christians” who finds
ourselves confronted by these deceitful theories. My message is: Be prepared. It is better
to know and never use this knowledge than to never know it and need it when you least
expect it.
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The evidence for Jesus can be presented in two aspects. The first aspect has to do with
background information. The basic question that can be asked is, what evidence is
required to prove that a person existed in ancient history? What kind of record should we
expect to have been left behind by someone like Jesus in history?
In discussing these questions, I want to frame the issues in terms of several
”myths” that are spread around about what is required to prove that Jesus existed. What
we find is that many critics of Christianity arbitrarily set the standards as high as they can
– far beyond what any scholar or historian would require. So we’ll begin by discussing
some “Myths in the Christ Myth” that we’ll need to be bust.
So here we have a couple of myth busters….and our first myth: “If Jesus really existed,
then there would be records of him all over the place.” To put it another way: The
argument is that if Jesus really did all the things that the NT says he did, like raising the
dead and multiplying fish and loaves, then he ought to have been mentioned in dozens of
histories of the first century because of it. He isn’t, as the argument goes, so it seems to
the Christ-myth theorists that this is evidence that Jesus did not actually exist.
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Well, an argument like this is so full of mistakes that it becomes kind of hard to untangle
quickly. But here are some summary points for consideration.
The first is that this myth assumes that literacy, the ability to read and write, was as
widespread as it is in America today. It wasn’t. The literacy rate of the ancient Roman
Empire was somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the population. So the first and
most damaging point against this myth is that there wouldn’t be “records all over the
place” to report what Jesus did in the first place.
The second point adds on to the first. Not only would there not have been that much
written to begin with, but there’s also very little that has survived to come down to us to
this day. One scholar said that you could fit all the preserved works of the first century on
a single bookshelf. That doesn’t give much of a chance to mention Jesus.
You know, one of the funniest arguments I’ve ever heard which illustrates the problem
with this argument is one that says, “There’s no record of Jesus’ trial in the records of
Pilate.” Hearing that you’d think we have Pilate’s records from the right time, and the
trial of Jesus is missing from where it should be, right between the trials of Matthias the
murderer and Simon the shoplifter in 30 AD. No, no. The truth is that we have NONE of
Pilate’s records – nor the records of trials held by ANY governor of any Roman province.
People who argue for the Christ myth tend to leave a lot of stuff out when they argue.
The third and final point is the most important, though. The myth works under the
assumption that historians and writers of the first century, if they had heard about
someone like Jesus working miracles, the first thing they’d do is whip out their pens and
start writing all this amazing stuff down. But the myth assumes too much, because it
assumes that if you walked up to the average Roman of the day, they’d immediately
believe what you told them about Jesus. What the myth fails to understand is what the
average Roman would actually think when they heard the story of Jesus.
Slide 7
A scholar named John Meier has written an excellent book titled The Marginal Jew in
which he laid out several reasons why Jesus would not have gotten much press outside of
the NT.
To begin, Jesus was crucified. Well, we know that. But what we may not know is that
being crucified was the most shameful and humiliating way that a person could die in the
Roman Empire. To an average person of that day, the crucifixion of Jesus would have
been a sign that he was cursed by God, that he was a criminal, that he did not have the
power to release himself from death. Sure, you can claim he was raised from the dead,
but the average joe will think you’re just making excuses when you say that.
Then there was who and what Jesus was. As far as the average person of the day was
concerned, Jesus had three strikes against him: He was Jewish; he was a traveling
preacher, or to put it as they would see it, a bum; and he came from Galilee, which at that
time was considered a hotbed of rebellion, like saying “Afghanistan” today.
Finally, Jesus hung out with the wrong crowd. He associated with hated people like tax
collectors, with sinners, with prostitutes.
Now put all this together, and let’s say you’re a Roman guy writing a history. You’re in
Rome in 40 AD, and someone comes to you with news of this guy named Jesus who
allegedly did all this wonderful stuff. But he also had all this bad stuff about him. How
many pages are you going to write about this Jesus guy? (“zero”) The fact is that what
we do have of Jesus is as we would expect. His followers, the Christians, produced nearly
all we have about him. Other historians mention him only in passing, and mainly because
they are explaining about the origins of Christianity. The historians of the day are not
going to believe that Jesus really raised people from the dead. They’d dismiss that as
made up, end of discussion.
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Now this leads into a second myth, and that is, that there were a lot of writers who should
have mentioned Jesus if he existed, but didn’t. I’ve already said that very little has
survived from Jesus’ day to ours, but what you’ll see sometimes is that Christ-mythers
will produce a long list of writers that they claim should have mentioned Jesus. This list
comes from an atheist of the 19th century named John Remsberg.
Slide 9
It has dozens of names on it, and if you put this in front of someone, they might think,
“Whoa! This is a lot of people who didn’t mention Jesus!” Well, in a few cases, the
writers on this list did mention Jesus, and we’ll talk about a couple of those later on. But
in other cases, when you look into some of these names, you find some problems. Let’s
just look at the three in bold.
Juvenal was an author of plays that were satires and comedies. In other words, he wrote
the ancient equivalent of MAD magazine.
Arrian wrote a history of Alexander the Great. Alexander lived 300 years before Jesus
walked the earth.
Valerius – he wrote a book of anecdotes for speakers. In other words, the equivalent to
one of those desktop calendars with funny sayings on them.
I think by now you get the picture. Most of these people just would not have mentioned
Jesus in their works in the first place, even if they did believe everything they heard about
them.
Slide 10
So now that we’ve briefly corrected some myths from the Christ myth, let’s get on to the
actual evidence for Jesus. Now you’re certainly thinking, “How about the Bible? That’s
evidence for Jesus, isn’t it?” Yes, it is, but there are a host of arguments and issues that
the Christ myth theorists have brought up against the Bible as a source for Jesus, and
there are so many of those that I need to address them in a separate teaching.
Slide 11
For now all I’m going to do is talk about non-Biblical references to Jesus in historical
documents, which we see listed here. In the time we have I’m just going to talk briefly
about the two historians in bold, what they say about Jesus, and some of the ways that the
Christ-myth theorists attempt to dispose of their references to Jesus as ahistorical or
useless. These two historians offer what is considered to be the most reliable and
complete references to Jesus that we have in secular documents.
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So let’s meet our two historians, starting with this happy face – Cornelius Tacitus. There
are a few facts about him – obviously, he lived starting about 30 years after Jesus died.
He wrote the A and the H, which cover the history of the Roman Emperors for several
years, including the first century. What did Tacitus say about Jesus? In his work the
Annals, Chapter 15, section 44, he mentions the great fire which burned in Rome in 66
AD, and how Nero reacted to it and to a rumor that he, himself, had started the fire:
Slide 13
Hence to suppress the rumor, he falsely charged with the guilt, and punished Christians,
who were hated for their enormities. Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death
by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius: but the pernicious
superstition, repressed for a time broke out again, not only through Judea, where the
mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also…
This is pretty solid stuff, especially when you consider that Tacitus is regarded as a
serious historian who seldom made mistakes and was known for doing his research. So
what can the Christ-mythers say about this? I don’t have time to run down all the
arguments, but here are a couple that serve as examples of how much the Christ-myth
theorists have to twist things to get rid of it.
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First of all, the mythers like to say that Tacitus’ testimony is too late to be useful. Tacitus
wrote this somewhere around 110 AD, about 80 years after Jesus lived. According to the
mythers, that’s not good enough. In fact, many will say that a record of Jesus must be by
a contemporary – someone who lived at the same time as Jesus – to be worth anything.
Nearly all recorded history was written to us by people who were not contemporaries of
the events they describe. This is not a rule of professional historians; it’s just a rule the
Christ-myther makes up to set the bar arbitrarily high and get rid of the evidence. Tacitus
wrote a great deal of his work about times before he was born – but historians don’t use
that to say that what he writes isn’t useful.
The second argument, and one that is very common, is that Tacitus made a mistake when
he referred to Pilate as a “procurator”. According to the mythers, because there is an
inscription that says Pilate was a “prefect” Tacitus gave him the wrong title. Therefore
he may have also messed up his research on Jesus.
Well, this one is much ado about nothing. A procurator was the Emperor’s financial agent
for the Empire. A prefect was the military head of a province. Why can’t Pilate have been
both? Sort of like George Bush is President and Commander in Chief. There are other
answers to this too, like maybe Tacitus called Pilate a “procurator” as a way of insulting
him, because it was less important to be a procurator than a prefect. But we don’t need to
go there. It’s simple enough and has enough evidence to say he held both titles.
Last one I’ll pick: “The Christians forged it!” According to the mythers, only Christians
oversaw the transmission of the works of Tacitus to the modern day – so they probably
added the reference to Jesus in at a later date.
At this point, folks, there’s not much you can say to someone this paranoid. You can
point out that the passage is written in exactly the style of Tacitus; they’ll just say that
proves the forger was very good at what he did. You can say that scholars who study
Tacitus think it is real; they’ll say all those scholars are either Christians or brainwashed.
This kind of stuff isn’t reasonable, so there can be no reasonable answer. But consider
this – back in the 19th century, there were people who claimed that all of Tacitus’ works
were forgeries created in the 15th century. There will always be nutty people around.
Slide 15
So that’s Tacitus, now let’s look at the other major reference to Jesus, and that’s the one
by Josephus. Here are a few facts about Josephus. You can see he lived closer to Jesus’
time than Tacitus, though mythers will still use that same objection about how he wasn’t
Jesus’ contemporary. That bit about him being a scoundrel relates to how he betrayed his
own people in a war against Rome. Josephus was Jewish, and he was taken prisoner by
the Romans in their war against the Jews between 67-73 AD. He decided to become the
Romans’ best buddy and tried to convince the Jews to surrender, which they did not.
Slide 16
What did Josephus say about Jesus? There are actually two references he makes, both in
the work called the Antiquities.. In Chapter 20, Josephus makes a side reference to Jesus
as “the so called Christ” who had a brother named James.
(Ananus) assembled a council of judges, and brought before it the brother of Jesus the
so-called Christ, whose name was James… (Antiquities 20.9.1)
Slide 17
In Chapter 18, Josephus says a lot more about Jesus, including referring to him as
crucified by Pilate and being the founder of the Christian movement.
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he
was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure.
He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ,
and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to
the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them
alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand
other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians so named from him
are not extinct at this day.
Now there are a few arguments the myth theorists make about these two references, but
in the time I have I will just talk about the big one, and that is the claim that these
passages are forgeries. This time, though, one might think that the mythers have the
beginning of a case. Let me show you another version of the this larger passage.
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If you open a copy of Josephus, you will find these phrases in bold included – or you may
find some kind of note indicating that these phrases are found in the text. What has
happened here is that it has been determined that yes, Christian scribes in this case did
add these phrases – because it is clear that Josephus was not a Christian, and only a
Christian would talk like this (read). We could if we had time go over each part of this
passage and explain why each part is or is not genuine, but if you want to know about
those details, you can read one of the references I’ll give at the end. We’ll just instead
give a summary, which is that the majority of scholars, including those who specialize in
Josephus, think that the passage is genuine aside from the parts in bold. And one of the
reasons is because we have found an Arabic translation of Jesus that does not include the
questionable phrases. Of course the mythers will make excuses for this such as that the
Arabs just scrubbed out the more obvious Christian phrases. But that again goes past
what is reasonable. And I might add that the mythers often forget about that shorter
reference – and there’s no scholar who thinks that that was ever tampered with.
Slide 19
Sum: Case for Jesus is as good as or better than that of many historical figures. This
shortcut to avoid dealing with other Christian claims is out of bounds. Further reading,
questions?