"It
is no longer possible to dismiss the thesis that Jesus of
Nazerath never existed as the 'marginal indescretion of lay
amateurs... The direction of biblical criticism since Albert
Shweitzer's day has circled back with dizzying regulaity to the
implied question of Jesus's existence but has sought without
success to answer it"
R. Joseph Hoffman, Oxford University
(qtd. in Wells, Preface, xiii)
There is not a single contemporary witness to the life of Jesus, by either Christian or Pagan writers. Historically speaking, we can be sure of almost nothing regarding his life. Almost a whole generation seperates the date of Jesus' alleged death and the first accounts of his life.
Think about the implications of this for a moment: Jesus' fame, according to the New Testament accounts of his life, was spread throughout Syria, Galilee, Jerusalem, Idumea and beyond the Jordan, and... from Tyre and Sidon"(3:7-8). Great hordes of people are said to have followed him :
"great multitudes followed [Jesus] from Galilee, and from Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and beyond the Jordan" (4:25).
He causes huge commotions in the Holy city itself during the Passover festival, major events in his life are accompanied by earthquakes and eclipses, and yet, we do not have a -single- contemporary reference to this man ever existing, not from Christians or anyone else. The very earliest literary mention of him, apparently by anyone, anywhere, was a soldier named Paul, yet Paul makes it plain in his letters that he never saw, not once, the earthly Jesus, but rather only had a *vision* of him as he was crossing the desert on his way to Damascus. Even with Paul, however, we have no account of Jesus' life. What Paul says on the life of Jesus is sparse indeed-- other than asserting that Jesus was crucified and thereafter 'raised' (Gk. 'egeiro') to the 'right hand' of god, Paul says next to nothing about the life of Jesus, no parables, no stories, and no direct quotations of his words. He offers nothing even remotely resembling a 'biography' of Jesus.
In one way or another, all of the canonical accounts that we do have of Jesus' life do far too much to impugn their own historical credibility to be taken at face value. The four gospels, the only accounts of substance and detail, are especially unreliable.
"The evidence provided by the written gospels is hearsay evidence. Hearsay is second-hand evidence. In the case of the gospels, the evangelists are all reporting stories and sayings related to them by intermediate parties; none of them was an ear or eyewitness of the words and events he records... We dont even know who they were... the names assigned to the gospels are pious fictions" (Funk, 16).
The tradition of assigning the Apostolic names of 'Mark,' 'Matthew,' 'Luke,' and 'John' to the Gospels is a tradition dating to the mid to late second century, and is not indicative of who actually wrote them. In his "Historical Evidence for Jesus," G. A. Wells sums up the relevant facts in this regard:
"Papias (bishop of Heiropolis in Asia Minor about 140) is the first to mention written gospels by name (he named Matthew and Mark); but even then these names do not seem to have been universally known or accepted, for Justin Martyr (about 150) was well aquainted with the gospels, but he does not say how many there are, nor does he name them. Irenaeus (bishop of Lyons about 180) is the first to insist that the gospels are four in number and to name the authors of all four" (12).
Not only is it true that the Apostolic names assigned to the Gospels are fictions, it is also true that the four gospels are, in truth, not four gospels at all, but two. 'Matthew' and 'Luke' are by no means original works; they are rewrites of 'Mark,' which was itself written by someone who, even as the earliest church tradition acknowledges, was not an eyewitness to the life of Jesus; to 'Mark' they add wildly divergent scenarios of Jesus' birth and resurrection, which are not only at variance with each other, but with known known history as well.
Aside from adding to 'Mark,' they both evidence an apologetic agenda-- both do their best to correct errors of both history and theology which they find in 'Mark,' such as his stupendous ignorance of Palestinian geography, Jesus' misquoting the Ten Commandments, misquotations of scripture, and a variety of other things. The relationship of 'Matthew' and 'Luke' to their other source, the 'Q' sayings, is the same: both use the source word-for-word, but place the sayings in entirely different contexts. In sum, the three synoptics are all variations on 'Mark,' and 'Mark' was certainly not written an eyewitness to the life of Jesus. Therefore, insofar as 'Matthew' and 'Luke' stand at a yet further remove from 'Mark,' none of the synoptics constitutes an eyewitness account.
Which leaves us with the gospel attributed to 'John,' which, although anonymous, does claim to derive from an eyewitness. Sadly, however, the historical credibility of 'John' is even more widely, and reasonably, doubted than the synoptics, for a variety of reasons. Bishop Spong speaks for the majority of critical scholars when he says that the attribution of John to an apostles "is simply not supportable with facts... I know of no reputable scholar in the world today who would support the accuracy of the claim that this gospel was the work of that 'beloved disciple'" (Spong, 68).
The accounts which have come down to us in the canon give contradictory accounts of Jesus' life. Due to the contradictory accounts given by 'Matthew' and 'Luke,' no date for Jesus' birth can be ascertained within a margin of at least ten years [4BCE-Herod's death-6CE Cyrenius' census]; Due to the descrepencies between John and the synoptics, no date can be fixed for his death within a margin of three years. The accounts of Jesus resurrection are especially contradictory, which is suspicious in that "Mark," which was used as a source by both "Matthew" and "Luke," had no risen Jesus stories at all, but ended at 16:8 with an empty tomb.
In places where the claims demand that the evidence should be the strongest, it is often the weakest. When it comes to those events which, by their extraordinary nature, would demand the most solid evidence, such as the resurrection, it is often particularly contradictory.
Jesus's native tongue was Aramaic, and even if he knew Greek, he certainly did not speak it to his apostles, many of whom were uneducated fishermen. Yet, amazingly, there is not a single book in the entire New Testament which was not composed in Greek. Furthermore, most of the NT books reveal, through their citations of Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures, that the author's original language was also Greek, not Aramaic.
As for contemporary non-christian witnesses to the life of Jesus-- there quite simply isn't any-- not a single one. The fact is that out of Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, the Talmud, and the other 'witnesses' cited by apologists as evidence for his existence, not a single one of these authors was even alive before 37CE, when Jospehus was born! Tacitus was born 55CE, and Suetonius around 77CE, and the Talmud was compiled around 200CE.
What's more,
what 'evidence' these sources do produce are, in themselves,
extraordinarily flimsy: Josephus' 'Testimonium' is thought by
many scholars to be a complete fabrication; even conservative
scholars, who are not willing to admit that it is outright
forgery ackowledge that it has been "repeatedly interpolated,"
and that it certainly did not originally read the way it does now.
It is highly doubtful that Suetonius refers to Jesus at all-- he
refers to a person inciting Jews to riot in Rome, during the
reign of Claudius around 50CE, whom he calls 'Chrestus ('good'),'
NOT 'Christos' ('annointed')!! The fact that these are cited as
the 'best' instances of non- christian witnesses exposes the
exceptional weakness of the evidence. Furthermore, as E. P.
Sanders says, it appears that the few "Roman sources
that mention Jesus are all dependant on Christian reports" (qtd.
in Wells, 43).
An argument from silence is never determinative, but in this case
I believe it is telling. It is rather curious who doesn't
mention Jesus or Chritianity. Juvenal and Martial, both authors
who deride Jews and Judaism, make no mention of Jesus or of
Christianity. Nor does Dio Chrysostom, the widely-travelled
Plutarch, or Philo of Alexandria. Time and again, the writers who
we would expect to make some remark, even in passing, concerning
Jesus or the new religion are silent.
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