Reconciling History, not Science, is the True Challenge for Christianity

Facing history is hard. Christians usually just erase the parts they don’t like and hope for the best.

This guy, not Jesus

If Christians want to deny the truth about the history of their own religion and base their “faith” on soft stuff, that is their choice. However, there is a much better basis for being a follower of Jesus than accepting thousands of years of fluffy distortion. I will argue that the true history of the religion offers a better path to community, spirituality, and something like faith than the pack of lies pretty much all Christians believe. Before you get the new way to understand Christian history, however, you have to face the truth. Let’s start with some facts Christians should not be denied.

Some embarrassing details

The reason the authors of the gospels of Matthew, Luke and John added the detail that Jesus’ mother was a virgin at the time of her pregnancy was due to a mistranslation of the Hebrew of Isaiah 7 “maiden” (“almah”) to “virgin” (παρθένος “parthenos”) in the Septuagint Greek Bible written in Alexandria after the Greek conquest of Egypt. Mark doesn’t care about Jesus’ birth because Mark, or whoever wrote the gospel of Mark, like the Gnostics, thought Jesus was a man, not the son of God.

Something like a typo led to the story about Mary being a virgin. That’s all. If the authors of the New Testament are willing to invent a virgin giving birth based on a typo, you really have to take what they say with a grain of salt. A big one. I would not dismiss everything they say — not at all. Everything they say is worth considering. But salt: grain, big.

If you do textual analysis, let alone consider content and style, there is really no way the same person wrote the book called Romans also wrote the pastoral epistles. Certainly, there are forgeries in the bible.

The fact that folks managed to pull a fast one and get fakes into the canon is a good thing. For example, this quote: “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” Guess what? That’s a forgery. Paul of Tarsus never said it. Taking out the disputed Pauline letters make Paul a more interesting and sympathetic figure.

Considering sources from the Nag Hammadi library, other Gnostic texts recovered in Egypt, the defensive denials of the first generation of Church Fathers, looking at Christian religions outside of the Roman empire that existed for centuries, and even a careful reading of the works in the New Testament itself, clearly before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire after 300 CE there was no consensus on what it meant to be a follower of Jesus. Some followers, including perhaps the author of the gospel of Matthew in the New Testament, thought that to follow Jesus, you had to observe the laws of Moses. Other, perhaps including the author of the gospel of Mark, thought that Jesus was a man, not a god, who received a spark of the divine from the other side, a spark which he had inside of him for one year, that subsequently left him (“why have you forsaken me?”). Others believed that the god of the Old Testament was evil and that Jesus was the son of a god, but not the god of the Old Testament.

The only reason why the Trinity version won and became orthodox, the only reason we think of Jesus as the son of God of Abraham now, is that the orthodox version beat the other ways to follow Jesus with a club of power until they shut up or died. Raw official power helped one interpretation kill, torture and otherwise marginalize those who disagreed. There is no evidence that the version of Christianity we have now, including all Protestant, Orthodox, Coptic, Ethiopian and Catholic denominations, is closer to what Jesus taught or some kind of truth than the versions that disappeared.

Christianity is an expression of raw power

Speaking of power politics, the most important figure in the history of Christianity is the emperor, Constantine. If Christianity had not gained an official position in the empire around 300 CE, it is unlikely, at least in Western Europe, that the entire empire would have become Christian by the collapse of Roman power some 150 years later. Perhaps some other emperor might have introduced Christianity in Eastern Europe, as the empire existed in some form until the fall on the Constantinople in the 15th century, but the West would have remained predominantly pagan, with Christian and Jewish minorities, at least until the arrival of the Muslims in the eighth century.

Clearly, Christianity did not displace paganism because the religion was in any sense “better” or somehow was more satisfying to the human soul than other religions, such as Judaism, Zoroastrianism or Greco-Roman paganism. If the superiority of Christianity explains the dominance of the religion in the Roman empire from 300 CE onwards, then why were Christians still a minority or perhaps 5 to 10% in the Persian empire when the Muslim Arabs showed up in the seventh century? The emperor of Persia was never Christian and Christianity was never the official religion of Persia. Yet Christians were proselytizing and building in communities in the territory of the Persians for as long and as successfully as in Roman territory prior to Constantine in 300 CE.

In other words, we have a natural experiment going on. There were two empires side by side: Persia and Rome. From about 30 CE to 300 CE both did not have Christianity as an official religion. Both saw slow but steady growth in the Christian communities, maybe increasing about 4% a year. Both had substantial but minority populations of Christians in 300 CE, maybe 5, 10, 15% — hard to say, but some kind of minority. Then, after the officials in Rome go Christian and being Christian becomes advantageous and preferred, all of a sudden, Jews and Pagans flock to Christianity. Over the next 80 to 100 years, most of the Jews and maybe 95% of the Pagans convert to Christianity — but only in Roman territory. In Persia, nothing changes.

So you see why I say Constantine as the most important figure in the history of Christianity. He killed his mother and his children, among others, but he is the most important figure. Without Constantine, Christianity would have been a minority religion in a pagan world, like Judaism. As an unofficial religion, no one would have been able to enforce a rule about what being a “follower of Jesus” meant. Within the minority Christian communities living in Italy, North Africa, Asia Minor, there would have been circumcised Christians and followers of Jesus who thought Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, was evil, and no one would have been able to settle these disputes. When the Muslim armies showed up on the scene, conquering Spain, there is little doubt that Islam would have also gained a toe-hold in France and moved north.

Constantine has no real competition for the title “Christianity’s Key Figure.” Jesus as a man with a message matters little to the story of Christianity since we know little about Jesus. We do know with relative confidence that he existed. Given the nature of all the information we have about the ancient world, with few, scattered and never perfect sources, if we are to dismiss a personage from history with multiple attestations, including the four gospels of the New Testament, the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, other non-canonical gospels, we would have to throw out almost everything we know about ancient history. The sources for Jesus are better than the sources for Socrates, for example. We have three existing authors who refer to Socrates and at least five for Jesus.

Further, the deviations from the interpretations of the prophecies of the Old Testament for a Messiah strongly suggest that Jesus was a real person. For example, no one in the New Testament attempts to claim that Jesus’ death by crucifixion proves that Jesus fulfills the scripture as the Messiah. Repeatedly, certain authors attempt to refer to Old Testament passages to demonstrate the connect of Jesus to the prophets. Some of these attempts are quite lame and laughable. For example, the genealogies proving Jesus was a descendant of David through Joseph (his stepfather?) in the gospels of Luke and Matthew are not internally consistent, don’t make sense in terms of the amount of time between David and Jesus, and fail to note that the Davidic line goes cold in the Old Testament with Zerubbabel, at least 400 years before Jesus was born.

The point being: if the writers of the Old Testament (or whoever they got the story from) can come up with something like virgin birth or a crazy genealogy or some nonsensical story placing Jesus in Bethlehem to be born, they will go ahead and invent a story to link Jesus to Moses and the Old Testament. When they include details that don’t help them prove the prophetic power of Jesus we get the idea that Jesus must have been a real person. There is no other reason to mention Nazareth other than he really was from there.

Why do the followers of Jesus all agree he was crucified? Because he actually was. Why do they all agree that he was from Galilee and Nazareth? Because that is where he was actually born and raised and everyone knew that fact. Nazareth is such a podunk little town that it never appears at all in the Old Testament. Why include that detail for theological reasons?

Basically, the only stuff that seems real and factual and accurate in the New Testament as far as Jesus goes is the stuff that doesn’t belong there: Nazareth, cross, Kingdom of God, Son of Man. Everything else is theology and someone’s agenda. Someone believed in some idea and formed the story around that idea. Only Nazareth, the cross, the Kingdom and the Son required the early followers to invent ideas to fit the actual historical truth. In every other case, it was the other way around: the story serves the idea.

That’s pretty much all we know about Jesus, those four things. But that’s a hell of a lot for someone from his background who lived 2000 years ago. It’s not much, but it’s more than we know about 99.99% of the people of the ancient world, so you should be able to build a couple different and violently opposed religions on that information… and we have!

If you want to believe in the Trinity, or in heaven, or hell, or that a spark of the divine came from the other side into Jesus when John the Baptist baptized Jesus, or that he died and rose from the dead, or whatever you want to believe, you can believe whatever you want. Some of those things, like heaven, are not in the bible at all. All the interpretations are justifiable, at least until someone threatens to kill you unless you don’t shut up.

You can read the gospel of Mark and be a Gnostic. You can read the gospel of Matthew and be a Jewish Christian. You can read the gospel of John and think that Jesus was a jerk. There is no historical Jesus message to overrule whatever you want to do.

Jesus the man has as much influence on what Christians believe as Socrates does over the stock market. Jesus was an Aramaic-speaking, apocalyptic Israelite living under Greco-Roman rule who had some kind of message. We have no idea what Jesus taught. We know for sure that the authors of the bible included fake books in the collection and made stuff up to fit a typo rather than fixing the typo. So anyone who thinks they know what Jesus meant is fooling themselves. We know a little about what the anonymous authors of many books of the New Testament thought, but not much about Jesus.

Since we don’t know anything about him, he can’t be the key figure in the religion. He’s an object for other people to tack ideas on. He has no voice. The parables in the New Testament are often confusing and many are great. Jesus might or might not have said any of them.

We know more about Paul than we do about Jesus. First of all, we have Paul himself gives up references to his life and work. Some of these references are solid and refer to Roman officials who actually existed. Paul in his letters and to a lesser degree the events in the Book of Acts refers to places and names that match Roman sources.

Remember the story in Luke about a census in the time of Herod as the reason why Mary and Joseph had to go to Bethlehem? Because Joseph was from the House of David? If that were at all true, the sources would exist to confirm at least some of it. But it doesn’t even make vague sense. House of David? There was no active, acknowledged, House of David in Judea in the time of Caesar Augustus. Census? What census? Paul’s references to names, dates, and cities are not like that. His details check out.

Paul is absolutely the first theologian in the Christian tradition that we know about. He did found many churches. However, from his own letter to the Romans, it’s clear he did not found the church in Rome itself. Depending on how you read Paul’s apocalyptic message, depending on how you interpret Romans 11:11–31, you can argue that Paul considered himself part of Israel right up until the end. He did not intend to found a new religion, given that the world was about to end. Like Jesus, he was born, lived and died as a Jew.

So Paul did not create Christianity. Like Jesus, he is an important figure but neither can hold a candle to Constantine. What did Paul do? He was an able, successful and interesting promoter of a vision of how to follow Jesus. He did not set the stage for Christianity to become the world’s largest religion.

Why one church? Why not more?

The fact that the various books of the New Testament do not seem to be talking about the same religion is a good thing. If it were clear what the religion was or what it has to be, when values change to be something other than what was intended, you would have an inevitable clash which might mean the end of the religion entirely. In the actual case, there is nothing that can contract the New Testament more profoundly than itself.

The messy process through which writings were included and excluded in a canon, this convoluted process of popularity and official sanction, by committee and wide distribution, makes the New Testament a unique and fascinating collection of works. There is something quite communal, occasionally with a bit of democracy, cross-generational, about the collective nature of the New Testament. It is the expression of a community and an institution. If some fakes slipped through, all the better.

Constantine’s role as moving Christianity into a more clearly defined ideology and creating a solidly Christian culture was perhaps, to me, in some sense, a disaster for mankind. The Greco-Roman pagan world, like Hindu India, was an ethos: a web of culture, myth, philosophy, and culture from which “religion” cannot be isolated. When the Greco-Roman world crashed into the Egyptian ethos, there was no holy war. The Greeks adopted and adapted the Egyptian gods. If you were an atheist philosopher in Alexandria, you were still a Greco-Roman pagan, as the philosophers of the Upanishads in India only became religious in retrospect. An atheist Greco-Roman pagan and a follower of Isis had no real beef.

On the other hand, by creating a Christian world, Constantine and those that followed him incorporated some of that Greco-Roman tradition into what would become Medieval Europe. Without that Christian link, perhaps nothing of the ancient world would be left with any modern meaning, just as we know little to nothing about the civilizations of the Indus valley or Amazonia. By linking the past, present, and future this Christian world gave us some immortality.

What is left

A weird ancient book, a vague Greco-Roman holy man, some connection to the Hebrews, a sense of continuing community, something about a spark of the divine: there really isn’t that much left of Christianity when you look at the real history. But these fragments are a much better basis for building some kind of faith than a much more solid-seeming structure of lies. Admit there isn’t much to go on and that we’re winging the rest. Admit that perhaps “Christendom” as a world is both a link to the past and a wall dividing the world even today.

Christianity is a link to the ancient Hebrews and the Greco-Roman pagans. I like the Gnostics. The Gnostics lost the battle in 300 CE but one of their monks did bury a jar full of books. The work in that jar is as valid as the work in the New Testament and should be read in church. There is no right way to be a follower of Jesus. If there is, no one can prove it. Build your religion on that.