

Prolegomena to a Dispassionate Plea for the Historicity of Jesus the Galilean







By Fernando Bermejo-Rubio

Departamento de Filosofía

UNED (Madrid)

December 2013

Although a minority in the field of New Testament scholarship, some authors maintain the idea that Jesus the Galilean did not exist. This is what has been called a “mythicist” position. As is well known, the debate among these scholars and those clinging to the idea that Jesus really existed is not infrequently heated and even riddled with disparaging comments about the other side. In this brief paper I am going to establish my own position in a very elementary way, thereby trying to tackle this issue in a rather irenic and respectful attitude.

To start with, let me make some preliminary –and perhaps not superfluous– comments. Firstly, given that the discussion related to the historical figure of Jesus is often conditioned by extra-epistemic factors (it is usually dictated by religious/theological commitments, sometimes by antireligious ones), let me say that I have no vested interest in the matter. In this issue, nothing essential is at stake for me. I am not a faith-based scholar, and I am not intellectually or emotionally committed to the existence of Jesus the Galilean. If someone could provide compelling reasons to make me draw the conclusion that Jesus did (probably) not exist, that would not be a personal tragedy. In fact, I would even be greatly amused by such an outcome.

Secondly, I freely confess a deep sympathy towards proponents of the idea that Jesus did not exist (the so-called “mythicists”). On the one hand, they are a minority, and I am prone to take seriously into account minorities’ views (too often I have realized that common opinion, including in the field of Jesus scholarship, is based on wrong assumptions, and I myself maintain some views on the historical Jesus –and on the history of research– which are in a minority). On the other hand, I share with the proponents of that idea a deep distrust towards the available sources: the Canonical Gospels are indeed extremely biased sources, and their accounts are too often scarcely credible. Some years ago I examined Bruno Bauer’s works in order to understand why he had reached his hyper-sceptical view on the historicity of Jesus; although I came to the conclusion that his position was not solidly based, I surmised that what led him to his final view was the fact that he run out of patience with the exegetical prestidigitation carried out in prevailing scholarship. I can easily understand that someone is frustrated not only with the inconsistencies and implausible contents of the Christian sources, but also with the innumerable attempts of so many modern scholars, specially believers, to downplay and tone down the inconsistencies of the unreliable accounts, because I am irritated too with all those unscientific procedures (what Johannes Weiss already called, at the end of the 19 th century, the “Umdeutungskunst” or “art of the reinterpretation” of the exegetes).

I also think that mythicists are right over the claim that some material which is often used as supporting the historicity of Jesus is not helpful for that aim. For instance, even if the Testimonium Flavianum were partially authentic, one should be cautious about its value as independent attestation for the issue of the historicity of Jesus: given that Josephus was writing towards the end of the first century, he could have been directly or indirectly reflecting Christian claims that in turn reflected the Gospels or the traditions immediately behind them. And I agree that the Jesus (or rather the Jesuses) proclaimed by the evangelists and their present heirs –preachers and theologians– did never exist.

Thirdly, I do not aim at persuading anyone of Jesus’ historicity, just as I do not aim at dissuading anyone from believing that Jesus was the Son of God. It is not only that I do not have a vocation as a preacher. There are indeed people for whom the (non-)historicity of Jesus seems to be a kind of dogma (they argue for it with a fury and sharpness which make me suspect of hidden agendas). But I am not interested in fundamentalist believers, because I do not particularly like banging my head against a brick wall. As a historian with a philosophical leaning (or, if you prefer, as a philosopher with a historical leaning) I am simply interested in arguing about what is more probable historically, and if possible, I prefer to argue along with reasonable people who pay real attention to sound arguments. In the reconstruction of the past we are, of course, often facing a question of probability. And I think that the (by far) most probable thing is that a single identifiable person named Jesus lies at the root of the Gospel tradition.

Once said this, let us come to my basic arguments.

1) I find the sentence “The main rational argument against death penalty is that there is no rational argument in its favor”, sometimes (apocryphally?) attributed to the German jurist Paul Bockelmann, to be basically right. I have carefully examined the arguments in favor of capital punishment, and I have found all them ultimately flawed. Irrespective of the authenticity of the attribution, I would say something similar regarding Jesus: one of my main arguments against the non-historicity of Jesus is that –after having analyzed sine ira et studio quite a few works of the proponents of the idea, since Bauer to the very present– I have found no compelling arguments in its favor. And –although this, of course, is not an argument– I am not alone in this judgment: I know quite a few agnostic and atheist scholars in Europe who do not harbor serious doubts about Jesus’ historicity.

2) The legendary, haggadic and anachronistic material in the Gospels (suffused with the faith of the early Church and probably written from forty to seventy years after the events narrated) is indeed very abundant. This poses the question whether everything in these writings is to be reduced to myth and legend (a possibility that, a priori, should not be discarded). But if one takes the trouble of painstakingly going through the texts, one finds a core of material that does not seem to have been concocted or shaped according to the mold of older stories. I refer to evidence which is characterized by the following features: a) it is quite plausibly ascribed to the period in which Jesus is supposed to have lived, and faithfully reflects the socio-political, religious and historical circumstances of that period; b) it is convergent and consistent, being enough to get a rough portrait of a person; c) it does not fit well –in fact, it ultimately debunks– the exalted image of the figure conveyed by the evangelists themselves (that material depicts a limited, understandable man from Galilee, with several brothers and sisters, firmly rooted in his own time and place). The best and most natural explanation for this material is that it corresponds to a historical figure, all the more so because the figure which is thereby reconstructed corresponds to a quite concrete, individualized person. This was clearly expressed by Alfred Loisy a century ago in his criticism of the ideas of Arthur Drews: the Jesus who can be critically reconstructed out of the Gospels is unmistakably a Jew of his age, and at the same time it is a person with his own personality.

3) A basic rule of method in scientific research is that (all things being equal: the ceteris paribus clause must be respected) the simplest explanation that also covers the largest amount of data is to be preferred. I think this rule can be applied precisely in our case. The explanation that an all too-human being named Jesus did indeed exist as a first-century Galilean Jew, that his unexpected failure triggered among his followers a considerable reinterpretation of his fate and that, despite the inflating and divinizing process which was carried out by them, traces of his historic personality and activities remain embedded in our biased sources is, in my opinion, by far the simplest and most cogent explanation for the whole available evidence. Far from it, the alternative hypotheses contrived to oppose this solution happen to be somewhat convoluted – and not infrequently far-fetched, often requiring further auxiliary hypotheses and implausible conjectures. Once more, Loisy’s concise formulation deserves being cited: “we can explain Jesus, (but) we cannot explain those people who would have invented him”. If you prefer, this sentence could be slightly nuanced: “we can easily explain Jesus, we cannot so easily explain those people who would have invented him”.

I could add more arguments, but I have a word limit, and –at least for the moment– this is enough. Furthermore, those who deem these arguments to be sound will not probably need many more, whilst those who will deny their compelling force will not surely be convinced by any other reason I could provide.

Let me finish with a brief remark. Precisely because I am quite aware of the extent to which the Canonical Gospels are the result of a process of doctoring the historical figure of Jesus – a process which has had wide-ranging distorting effects –, I think I can better understand at least one of the reasons which lead some scholars (and also other readers) to deem these sources as desperately unhelpful and to remove them completely from the available evidence to recover a historical being. I think, however, that this is not only an unwarranted conclusion, but also a tragic mistake, because the critical energy of several intelligent people –as many “mythicists” undoubtedly are– devoted to “prove” the non-existence of Jesus seems to be both misguided and wasteful. In my opinion those scholars opt to cut the Gordian knot, instead of tackling the –by far harder– task of disentangling it. In this way, and despite the insights of some of their works, they leave the problem of the Gospels unresolved, the nature of their distortions ultimately untouched, and the embarrassing history these biased sources try to veil unfortunately unrecovered.

Notes