geo wrote:I always wonder how the lack of evidence for Jesus should be interpreted. Given that Jesus was likely an itinerant street preacher, perhaps one of many, proclaiming the end of the world during this time, wouldn't we expect there to be little if any historical evidence for his existence? As Lady says, lots of people were crucified at this time. Do we have historical evidence for any of them?
I don’t by any means say the existence of Jesus Christ is impossible, only that it is wildly improbable on a dispassionate logical reading of the evidence of the evolution of the early church. On the balance of probabilities, the gradual construction of Jesus Christ as a fictional focus of faith and hope is far more plausible than the conventional idea that the New Testament has its seed in one genius founder who was crucified under Pilate.
There are so many angles on this material. If I may digress mildly as a way of exploring this question of the identity of Jesus, when I was at university, back in 1986, I sat in on a theology class offered by
Professor John McIntyre, who was visiting Sydney from the University of Edinburgh, on the topic of christology. He explained to us the concept of hypostasis, one of these weird obscure mind-bending theological words, which means that Jesus Christ was one person with two natures, a human nature as Jesus of Nazareth, and a divine nature as the eternal Christ. The hypostatic union is the one person of Jesus Christ in the traditional creed from the
council of Chalcedon. A review of McIntyre's book is
here., and his book is available on line at
The Shape of Christology. You would have to be keen to delve far into this material, but the concept of hypostasis is enough to illustrate that the concept of Jesus Christ is primarily mythic.
The question of the identity of Jesus Christ has been a central concern of mine since before I attended Professor McIntyre’s lectures. Perhaps my atheist attitude was too transparently dismissive for the theologians to cope with, but in any event, I used this Christological material as a basic framework in my own views on existential philosophy, exploring the ontological relation in the structure of human nature between our existence in the present moment and the eternity that surrounds us. In this sense, Jesus stands for the passing presence of material reality, while Christ stands for the enfolding aeons before and after making the history of the universe. A famous hymn, There's A Light Upon the Mountain, expresses the hypostatic union of christology in the line 'the suffering dying Jesus is the Christ upon the throne'. This use of ‘is’ supports the messianic ethics that the last shall be first, the stone the builder refused shall be head of the corner, the least important thing in the eyes of the world (Jesus) is the most important thing in the eyes of God (Christ).
Another way of understanding hypostasis is seeing Jesus Christ as a title, not a name. Jesus means savior, and Christ means anointed, so Christ Jesus, the form that Paul often uses, means anointed savior. It is rather hard to imagine Mr and Mrs Joseph and Mary Christ christening their son Jesus, giving him the name Jesus Christ, but that is the least of the implausibles in the historical account of Jesus Christ as a wandering apocalyptic. The title ‘anointed savior’ helps to illustrate how the idea of Jesus Christ was ‘in the air’ at the time, as a widespread expectation of an anointed savior naturally expressed itself as an expectation of a Jesus Christ. The anointing supposedly came from heaven, while the saving came from earth, uniting heaven and earth in a word of power. For one of the various Jesus figures to have been recognised in his lifetime as the Christ, and to be executed in Jerusalem as a pretender to the throne of Israel, seems to be the bare minimum. It really is incomprehensible how such a king could pass under the radar of history.
In the early church, and especially in the Epistles of Paul, probably written mid first century, the eternal Christ is central, and the historical Jesus is secondary, lacking any detail except the barest framework. The messianic vision was initially presented as a matter of eternal grace, a mystical vision lacking in the detail of a flesh and blood life, but crucially, with a presence in the world through the proclamation of the apostle as a source of transformative ethics.
As the story of Jesus developed political impetus as a focus for anti-Roman sentiment after the crushing defeat of the Jewish War, the church agenda required that this eternal anointed spiritual Christ figure, initially understood as the cosmic presence of God in the world, was not just a mythical spirit, but a real material person. And so flesh was gradually put on the spirit. The story became a lightning rod for heroism in the midst of defeat.
Hence we find the progressive manufacture of the myth of Jesus of Nazareth. Nazareth is not mentioned by Paul (and nor are Bethlehem or Jerusalem). Even with the first Gospel, Mark, Jesus is primarily a Nazarene, a term more akin to the Ebionite cult than the then non-existent town. No, there are just far too many such inconsistencies in the Gospels to accept that these myths have their origin in a single person.