Bible Books

46

Some people, but not very many, ask whether Jesus ever lived. Thomas L. Thompson, of the University of Copenhagen, is one of them.

At first, it seems to be a ridiculous question, but over time, as scholars find more and more of the New Testament to be late and legendary, this question is becoming increasingly difficult to answer.

Most of what we know about Jesus comes from four ancient theological biographies: the Gospels. Many secular scholars believe that the greater part of John’s gospel is fictional.^a The other three Gospels are variations of but one original, the Gospel of Mark. As we analyze the narratives in Mark’s gospel and remove the legendary material, such as stories of Jesus’ Elisha-like feeding of thousands of people with a few loaves and fishes, the voice from heaven at his baptism, his Transfiguration, his cursing of a fig tree and so forth, not a great deal is left. Of what is left, some argue that Mark has contrived the itinerary of the disciples’ journeys with Jesus and the settings for their conversations, and that he has invented the scenes of Jesus’ encounters with various opponents in order to suit the purposes of his narrative. Academicians such as Burton Mack argue that most or all of Mark’s stories of Jesus’ trials and the events surrounding his execution were invented to accord with Hebrew Bible prophecy.

Matthew’s and Luke’s books have much of the same narrative as Mark’s, and thus provide little new biographical information. When their narratives do differ from Mark’s in major ways, secular scholarship often does not trust them. Their very different birth narratives and accounts of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances, for example, are dismissed as legendary.

Very few scholars, secular or not, would go the whole way and conclude that no New Testament accounts are reliable in regard to Jesus, but the number of accounts generally conceded to be reliable seems to shrink every year. This does not, in itself, of course, demonstrate that Jesus never lived, but it does mean that an attempt to argue for such a conclusion would not be prima facie absurd.

As for Jesus’ sayings, most secular scholars conclude that the early Christian communities invented many of them. The recently discovered Gospel of Thomas, which is held by many scholars to be independent of the New Testament and so to be a valuable source for the sayings of Jesus, is nevertheless, by all estimates, filled with “sayings of Jesus” that he did not say. Many scholars conclude that most of Jesus’ sayings that are found in John’s gospel were produced by Christians toward the end of the first century.

If we know that Christians of the first century invented narratives and constructed legends and fashioned sayings and produced stories for Jesus that do not stand up to scrutiny by secular scholarship as historically reliable material, could it be that we can go all the way, from “much of it was invented” to “all of it was invented”? Were these theological biographies complete fictions created to give life to a man who never lived?

Some will answer “yes.” Earl Doherty, author of The Jesus Puzzle (1999), concluded that there never was a historical Jesus. 47Rather, there was a Christian cult based on belief in a dying and rising savior who lived only on the mythological level. Jesus was a crucified celestial being who became “human” not by the divine process of incarnation but by the literary efforts of the author of Mark’s gospel. Doherty noted that the earliest known Christian texts, the letters of Paul, take a thoroughly mythological view of Jesus and have no interest in discussing Jesus’ supposed life, career, miracles, sayings and so forth. For Paul, Jesus is a new Adam, a Second Creation, God’s Son, a crucified savior who rose from the dead but not, so far as Doherty can discover, an actual historical person within Paul’s letters. Doherty concludes that the historical Jesus never was.

Thomas Thompson’s new book, The Messiah Myth, is in line with such speculation, but the book is so confusingly written that one rarely has any idea what the purpose of his arguments is supposed to be. The jacket flap announces the conclusion that “the Jesus of the Gospels never existed … like King David before him, the Jesus of the Bible is an amalgamation of themes from Near Eastern mythology and traditions of kingship and divinity.” Few such clear statements appear in the book itself, although Thompson does assert that “the assumptions that (1) the gospels are about a Jesus of history and (2) expectations that have a role within a story’s plot were also expectations about Jesus and early Judaism, as we will see, are not justified.”

Without significant argumentation Thompson dismisses both the Q hypothesis^b and the view that the Gospel of Thomas has any value. Of Q he writes that it “is an artificial and questionable construct, entirely dependent on a studied neglect of written sources ready at hand.” So much for thousands of pages of academic debate and over a century of critical New Testament scholarship. He offers no theory of his own regarding the causal textual relationship of the Synoptic Gospels; one is left thinking that he believes they are three entirely independent books.

Throughout his discussion of Jesus (the book concentrates on Jesus but also includes a lengthy discussion of the nonexistence of David, which, as a Jesus scholar, I will not attempt to address here), Thompson selects a few sayings from the corpus attributed to Jesus and then, drawing from the entire Hebrew Bible, isolates passages similar to the sayings he selected. For example, he goes on at considerable length to show that patterns of reversal of fortune, for example, “blessed are the poor for yours is the kingdom of God,” fit into a greater pattern of a “song for a poor man” that goes back at least a millennium in Israelite and Egyptian and other societies of ancient times. But is this news? Surely countless preachers have cited the same passages from Isaiah and from the New Testament as Thompson does in order to show that Jesus’ views were in accord with views of the prophets. But this does not constitute an argument against Jesus’ existence.

Thompson’s prose is often very awkward; I can make nothing of sentences such as this one about Matthew 10:32–42: “Jesus’ dislocated response to the disciples’ implied thoughts of peace betray Matthew’s reader’s response to Elisha’s request to be allowed to kiss his father and mother farewell, before following Elijah …” He makes sweeping claims without sufficiently backing them up: “The gospel stories of miracles and healing … are lightly veiled revisions of the Elijah and Elisha tales from 1-2 Kings.” And sometimes he is just plain incomprehensible: “The widely accepted argument that the sayings of Jesus can be sharply separated and distinguished from stories and sayings presenting Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet is simply wrong.” On occasion he seems to believe that a text means only what it might have meant in times before it was written: “Rather than assuming that this [motif found in Mark’s gospel] expresses expectations of Jews in the first century or a self-understanding of a historical Jesus, one should understand what such language implies in the earlier traditions from which it is drawn.” He mentions Jesus’ “cleansing of 48Jerusalem”; just what he means by this is difficult to discern.

After examining the types of sayings attributed to Jesus, including those about reversal of social fortune and about becoming like children, Thompson concludes that the ideas reflected in these sayings have an extensive prior history in ancient societies and so, as regards Jesus, “We may be dealing with a narrative figure, whose function is to illustrate universal or eternal values.” But it will come as absolutely no surprise to any informed person that ideas expressed in Jesus’ sayings often reflect the culture in which he lived and so often echo prophetic principles from the Hebrew Bible. Who doubts that Jesus’ sayings sometimes reflect principles held by the prophets? Why such observations lead Thompson to conclude that Jesus never lived is beyond me to fathom. If there is a coherent case to be made in this regard, the awkwardness of Thompson’s prose obscures it.

If one is interested in an exciting, clearly written and well-informed argument against the historicity of Jesus, one is well advised to turn to Earl Doherty’s The Jesus Puzzle and to leave The Messiah Myth on the shelf. Thompson fails to offer any significant explanation of why authors of the first century would have invented a Galilean messiah figure and called him Jesus. In the absence of any coherent rationale for their creating a fictional Jesus, the view that Jesus really did live remains the best explanation for the creation of the Gospels about him.

Some people, but not very many, ask whether Jesus ever lived. Thomas L. Thompson, of the University of Copenhagen, is one of them.
At first, it seems to be a ridiculous question, but over time, as scholars find more and more of the New Testament to be late and legendary, this question is becoming increasingly difficult to answer.