HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
Is the Jesus Story a Myth?
Did a Man Named Jesus Ever Live?
Recently in my parish church, St. Peter’s in Morristown, New Jersey, I completed a seven week-lecture series on Matthew’s version of Jesus’ birth. In those lectures I pointed to the elements that demonstrate conclusively to me that Matthew did not intend for this story to be read literally. This was not biology, biography or history. The most cursory reading of this text reveals that he used exaggerated, mythical signs, such as a star to broadcast this event to the entire world and magi who followed that star, which traveled so slowly that they could keep up with it. It included the portrait of Jesus’ earthly father, a man named Joseph, who was patterned after the patriarch Joseph in the book of Genesis. Since this Joseph did not enter the story of Jesus until Matthew wrote in the middle years of the ninth decade it seem probable that Joseph was not a figure of history at all, but a literary character of Matthew’s own creation. When people hear these things for the first time, different as they are from the Sunday school version they learned as children, they begin to question the historical accuracy of the entire gospel record. They wonder if the story of Jesus is itself a literary concoction. Indeed this was the first question asked by a member of the class as soon as the lectures were concluded.
Judging by my mail that same question rises frequently in the minds of my readers. Recently, I received a whole packet of material from a man who identified himself as a “religious blogger.” In his letter, he suggested in a rather flattering way, that since I was clearly an “open religious leader,” I would surely be convinced of his thesis that a man named Jesus never lived, if I would just read the five excerpts from books that he had enclosed in his bulky envelope. He was quite sure that Jesus was a hoax.
I looked at his excerpts with interest. The fact is I had already read most of the books from which these excerpts had been culled and which, he proclaimed, “proved” his thesis that the Jesus story was made up, presumably by some religious charlatans who were eager to carry out some vast and profitable religious scheme. I found the arguments in these books, however, to be neither feasible nor believable. Since this question seems to be of some interest, however, I thought it wise to devote an entire column to looking at it. So today I want to examine the evidence for the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. How do we know that he ever lived? Could the entire Christ story simply be a fabrication, a composite of the mythologies of the ages? Serious questions like these, no matter how threatening, need to be seriously engaged.
The idea that Jesus might have been created to serve a less than admiral agenda is not new in Christian history. The “form-critical” approach to the Bible has broken open the claims of the literalists, allowing these possibilities to arise. For some the idea that Jesus was a myth is not far removed from the paranoia that so often surrounds startling public events such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 or the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. No matter how much evidence exists to debunk these conspiracy theories, they continue to attract a following of “true believers” in every generation. That in turn always seems to inspire someone either to write a book or to produce a motion picture based on “circumstantial evidence,” which they are convinced lends credibility to their conspiracy theories. These books and movies always purport to have the latest hot news or to be based on “newly-discovered” evidence. Though these books or movies have little intellectual creditability, still they continue to titillate the imaginations of this minority of susceptible people.
The most popular of the “Jesus is a myth” theories proposes that Jesus was a literary character, created out of Egyptian mythology. This theory has been abroad for at least a generation. It was given a boost by a book written by two Englishmen, namely, Timothy Frete and Peter Gandy, entitled The Jesus Mysteries. It was widely advertised with such “hot” headlines as: “Jesus Never Lived!” This argument was then taken over and repackaged by an Anglican priest in Canada named Tom Harpur and published under the title: The Pagan Christ. Both books clearly had their runs, but then faded when the hype died down. I have read both books. They are exciting and well written narratives, but the evidence on which they make their cases was and is scanty and fragile. I do not believe that these arguments can be sustained, but both of these books do point to a truth that Christianity has been slow to admit, namely that a great deal of mythology does surround the church’s traditional portrait of Jesus. Angels breaking through the midnight sky to sing to shepherds is clearly a myth, so is his having been born without a human father. Jesus the miracle worker or Jesus being transfigured on a mountaintop while he speaks with the long dead Moses and Elijah are surely non-literal narratives. Earthquakes that occur both at the moment of his death and at his rising from the dead are obviously embellishments added to the story. There is much mythological content in the gospels that has been wrapped around the Jesus of history. By pretending though the centuries that these things are literal, supernatural events occurring within time and space, the Christian Church has opened itself to the challenge that Jesus himself might also have been a mythological creation.
Historical evidence, however, argues strongly that there was something about this Jesus that was so powerful that it caused mythology to be developed around his life and then added to his memory. One obvious indicator of the presence of historical truth is found in the counter-intuitive nature of parts of the Jesus story.
Look first at the name by which Jesus was known in the gospels – “Jesus of Nazareth.” Mythological heroes would not have had their roots in a dirty, insignificant little village in rural Galilee. “Nothing good can come out of Nazareth,” it was said, but Jesus did. The Bethlehem birth story of Jesus was a later 9th decade attempt to give Jesus a more prominent place of origin! Nazareth thus has about it a historical ring of authenticity. If one is going to create a hero out of whole cloth one would not have him hail from Nazareth.
Second, the biblical record says that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. That fact clearly bothered the early Christians because it appeared to compromise Jesus’ priority over John and thus his claim to divinity. That is why there is such a deliberate effort in the gospels to downgrade John, reaching its crescendo in Luke’s gospel when the fetus of John the Baptist is made to salute the fetus of Jesus.
Third, the crucifixion story is told in every gospel. An executed Jew for whom messianic claims were being made was not part of Jewish expectations. This violation of the expected norm witnesses to the historicity of the crucifixion. Myths are not built on negative data.
Beyond these counter-intuitive pointers to historical reality, we next look at the time dimensions in the Christian story. The crucifixion is generally dated around the year 30 CE. The conversion of Paul is dated no earlier than one year and no later that six years after the crucifixion, which would mean that Paul’s conversion occurred between the years 31 and 36 CE. We have an authentic letter from Paul (Galatians) in which he describes autobiographically exactly what he did following his conversion. He tells us that first he went to Arabia for three years. When we add those years into our chronology, we arrive at somewhere between 34 to 39 CE. Then Paul says he went to Jerusalem where he visited “with Peter and James, the Lord’s brother.” So, four years at the earliest and nine years at the latest after his conversion, Paul is in touch with those who were intimately involved with the Jesus of history. Galatians was probably written in 51 CE or 21 years after the crucifixion. Four times in that epistle, Paul refers to Jesus as one who had been “crucified.” I submit to you that this is a time span far too short for a full blown conspiracy mythology to be developed. There, I believe, is a better way than invented mythology for us to understand the claims that are made for Jesus by his disciples in the gospels. Those claims were the products of the interpretation of Jesus in the synagogues using their scriptures, their liturgical practices and their messianic images. This processing work is what appears in the gospels when they are written 40-70 years after his crucifixion. While Paul’s authentic epistles are the work of a first generation Christian, the gospels are the products of the second and third generations of Christians, which is still too short a period of time for a full scale mythological, conspiratorial view of Jesus to have been developed. Memory is not detached from reality that quickly. I outlined in far greater detail than I can convey here the nature and content of the synagogue process that interpreted Jesus of Nazareth in what is still my favorite book: Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes.
So my conclusion is clear. Jesus was a figure of history, who lived between the years ca. 4 BCE and 30 CE. He was in fact crucified by the Romans under the rule of Pontius Pilate, who served as Procurator of Judea between 26 CE and 36 CE. Jesus was first interpreted in the synagogue by his followers, who wrapped the Jewish scriptures around him. As the years passed and Christianity began its journey out of its Jewish womb and into the Gentile-thinking world, other mythological images began to be applied to him. By 150 CE there were almost no Jews left in the Christian movement and so the followers of Jesus no longer recognized the Jewish background of the stories of Jesus because they were simply unaware of it. At that time Egyptian, Greek and Roman elements were added to the story. Those who suggest that there is no historical substance to the Jesus story simply do not understand the impact that this life had on the Jewish population. It is simply naïve to suggest that there is no person of history behind the images of the ages that we still tend to literalize.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Cynthia Mora of Middletown, Pa. asks:
Question:
“How do you stay healthy and do you think your study is related to your health?”
Answer:
Dear Cynthia,
Thank you for your question and your assumption that I am healthy! I am glad that you think it shows! I feel healthy, I am very active and I love life, but I am also aware that life moves unceasingly toward its inexorable end. My desire is to burn out still loving every minute of life that I am granted, rather than to rust out and limp somewhat pathetically toward the finish line. We do not always have that choice, but that is at least my desire.
I have a deep appreciation for both life and health. My father died at age 54, his father died at 54 and his brother died at 49. I did not grow up with expectations of longevity. My father, however, got no exercise, weighed 220 pounds on a 5’9” frame, smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and drank alcohol excessively. His father died in the post-World War I influenza epidemic and his brother died as the result of an automobile accident. So the lack of longevity in their cases had extenuating circumstances. I will be 83 years old in a few more months and am grateful for every year granted to me.
I have always enjoyed exercise. Earlier in my life it was golf; later, I turned to squash and tennis, because they took less time, and still later to jogging and hiking. I still do about four miles a day, mostly on my treadmill, which is in my study and library on the first floor of our home. That takes me between an hour and an hour and 15 minutes (it seems to take a little longer as I grow older). People tell me they stopped using their treadmill or exercise bike because it was so boring! Not so for me. Not only do I look out on our beautiful wooded backyard with our bird feeder attracting interesting varieties of birds each day, but I also have a DVD set up to engage my mind. On that DVD I take university courses through the good offices of the Teaching Company. I take every course I can get my hands on, but mostly on subjects with which I have no scholarly background like physics, astrophysics, biology and evolution. One of my daughters has a PhD in physics from Stanford and I like to be able to converse with her. I also have CD books on history, politics and biography in my reading program. I don’t usually read fiction, but I will take a university course on Shakespeare, the Victorian novel and even a series of lectures that serves to introduce me to someone’s conception of the fifty greatest novels in the English language. I take every philosophy course I can find and love putting together the forces that produced the great turning points in Western thought from Copernicus through Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein to someone like Stephen Hawking. I have also become a devotee of a professor at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, whom I have never met. His name is Robert Greenberg. He is a master teacher, perhaps the best I have ever heard. He is also a native of New Jersey! He has educated me in opera (I have just finished a study of Puccini’s Turandot), to say nothing of the life and works of J. S. Bach, the great symphonies of Beethoven, the piano concertos of Mozart and the works of such favorites of mine as Mahler and Dvorak. His introductory course entitled, “How to Listen to and Enjoy Great Music” was fantastic. What really serves to get me up early each morning to go to my treadmill is that I cannot wait to get back to my DVD or CD and my continuing education. Someday I hope to qualify as an educated man.
When that early and exciting first hour of the day is complete, I go immediately to my desk in the same room and then I begin my professional study. I focus on one major area at a time. At this moment it is Matthew’s gospel. Since the beginning of 2013, I have read six major commentaries on Matthew. My two favorites thus far are Michael Goulder’s Midrash and Lection in Matthew and Amy-Jill Levine’s book of essays on Matthew’s gospel from a Jewish and feminist perspective. I also spend some of that time each day preparing the lectures that I am privileged to deliver each year (normally between 100 and 125) and the sermons that I am invited to preach. Some of that time also goes to the preparation and writing of this weekly column and the question and answer feature that is associated with it. I do not normally come out of my study until about 11 a.m., when I go up for coffee, juice, a bagel and to read the New York Times, my favorite newspaper. By 1 p.m. I am ready to run the necessary errands to the grocer, the bank, the library, the barber and a variety of doctor and dentist appointments that seem to punctuate our lives. None of these doctor’s appointments are about serious health issues, but more about health maintenance. The fact is that I also enjoy the company of every one of my doctors. The afternoon is spent with correspondence, editing and reading books that I have agreed to review or to endorse.
About 5 p.m. I go to our kitchen to prepare dinner for my wife and me. I have become the chief cook in our family and we basically have only one meal a day together and that is in the evening. I find cooking a pleasure and a time of relaxation, but I am not above listening to a book on a CD being read to me as I cook (at this moment I am working though a series of 36 lectures on pre-Christian religion in those parts of the world around the Mediterranean Sea). Our diet is rather simple, we eat very little red meat, lots of vegetables and Christine, my very wonderful English wife, does not think that any meal is complete without a potato in some form. I also bake biscuits and make corn muffins regularly. We love salads and New Jersey corn and tomatoes when they are in season. We hardly ever have formal desserts unless we are entertaining and then I like to bake pies best of all. My favorite pies are combinations: apple-blackberry, strawberry-rhubarb and nectarine- raspberry. My favorite cakes are applesauce and pineapple upside down; both of which are made from recipes that once belonged to my mother.
Most evenings we eat together, watch the news on PBS and talk. We go out for dinner to or with friends perhaps twice a month. We specially love to have friends from our church over for dinner or Sunday brunch. St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Morristown is a very important community for both of us. We are away from home about 50% of the time speaking in some part of the United States or abroad, so all of these patterns get adapted, but not abandoned on these trips.
>From April to October, the New York Yankees draw me inexorably to the television screen each evening. Am I addicted to the Yankees? Well let me say that if I could see every game in the 162 game season I would. I find the time between the end of the World Series and the beginning of spring training to be an eternity! Earlier in my life, I was a radio play-by-play announcer, broadcasting for my listening audience football, basketball and baseball games. I was known as “the Voice of the Tigers” and was sponsored by “Wink, that Sassy Drink” and “Happy Dan, the TV Man.” These three sports are in my DNA, but baseball is by far number one.
The fact is I love my life, I love my family, I love my career, I love studying and writing and I love my church. Do those things increase my longevity? I do not know. I do know that these things make the years that I do have wonderful years.
I’ve probably told you more than you want to know, but I have enjoyed it and I thank you for asking.
~John Shelby Spong
Announcements
"It was fascinating for me...to explore the scriptures from these perspectives by journeying through the entire biblical landscape from Genesis to Revelation. That enabled me with both integrity and conviction to challenge the literal assumptions of the past and to open the biblical story to new levels of understanding that I believe are profoundly real." ~ Bishop John Shelby Spong
