The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (73 page)

The Arguments

Strauss

In his
Life of Jesus Critically Examined
(1835), David Strauss pointed out that we could not take the gospels as historical biographies; that was not their primary function. The early Christians wanted to win converts to their cause “through the propagation of a synthetic religious myth.” /p>

Strauss’s main thesis is that the stories in the New Testament were the result of the messianic expectations of the Jewish people.

The evangelists made Jesus say and do what they expected—from their knowledge of the Old Testament—that the Messiah would say and do; and many passages that in fact make no reference to the Messiah were nevertheless taken as messianic prophecies. Thus, “then shall the eyes of the blind be opened” (Isa. 35) expresses the joy of Jewish exiles in Babylon at the prospect of release from captivity, but was understood by the evangelists as prophesying that the Messiah would cure blindness, which they accordingly make Jesus do.

Bauer

Bauer went a step further and contended that the early Christians fashioned Jesus Christ from the portraits of the prophets found in the Old Testament. Jesus never existed, and Christianity arose in the middle of the first century from a fusion of Judaic and Greco-Roman ideas. Bauer argues, for example, that the Christian use of the Greek term “Logos” ultimately derives from Philo, the Stoics, and Heraclitus. For Philo, the Logos was the creative power that orders the world and the intermediary through whom men knew God. Of course, in St. John’s Gospel, the Logos is equated with God, who becomes incarnate in Jesus Christ.

As for other classical influences on Christianity, as early as the fourth century, anti-Christian writers were pointing out the striking resemblances of the life of Jesus to the life of Apollonius of Tyana, a neo-Pythagorean teacher who was born just before the Christian era. He led a wandering and ascetic life, claimed miraculous powers, and was in constant danger of his life during the reigns of Roman emperors Nero and Domitian. His followers referred to him as the son of God; they also claimed he was resurrected before their very eyes and that he ascended into heaven.

The mystery cult of Mithras was first established in the Roman world in the first half of the first century B.C. This cult developed secret rites and rituals and stages of initiation through which the god’s devotees had to pass. Mithraic mysteries also showed striking similarities to the Christian Baptism and the Eucharist.

The early Christians attribute words and sayings to Jesus that in reality only reflect the experience, convictions, and hopes of the Christian community. For example, Mark 1.14–15: “Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God. And saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.” Christ never spoke these words,

They were merely an expression of the earliest Christian community’s conviction that the time was ripe for the appearance of Christianity and the diffusion of its beliefs about spiritual salvation. But in time, attempts were made to find historical indications—from the ancient days recorded in the Old Testament to imperial times—that progressive preparations for the age of salvation were apparent. Each new generation has regarded its own time as the time when the ancient promises will be fulfilled. The first Christians believed, from their knowledge of the Old Testament, that before the Savior came Elijah would return to earth. Once they had come to see the historical John the Baptist as Elijah returned, they would naturally believe that the Savior had followed soon after; and eventually a story would be constructed in which this “savior” is made to call John by the name “Elijah.” (Mark 9.13)

Wrede

Acknowledging his debt to Bauer, Wilhelm Wrede, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, showed that Mark’s gospel “was saturated with the theological beliefs of the early Christian community. Rather than a biography, the gospel was a reading back into Jesus’s life, the faith and hope of the early Church that Jesus was the Messiah and Son of God.”

Kalthoff

Albert Kalthoff, also writing at the beginning of this century, argued that we could explain the origins of Christianity without having to posit a historical founder. Christianity arose by spontaneous combustion when “the inflammable materials, religious and social, that had collected together in the Roman empire, came into contact with Jewish messianic expectations.” “From the socio-religious standpoint the figure of the Christ was the sublimated religious expression for the sum of the social and ethical forces that were at work in a certain period.”

Non-Christian Evidence

Despite the fact that there were approximately sixty historians active during the first century in the Roman world, there is remarkably little corroboration of the Christian story of Jesus outside the Christian traditions. What there is, is very inconclusive and unhelpful—Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, the Younger Pliny.

The Gospels

It is now recognized that the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were not written by the disciples of Jesus. They are not eyewitness accounts, and they were written by unknown authors some forty to eighty years after the supposed crucifixion of Christ. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are usually called the synoptic Gospels because of the common subject matter and similarity of phrasing to be found in them. Mark is considered the earliest of the three and was probably used by the other two as their source. It now seems highly unlikely that any of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were ever spoken by a historical figure. As Hoffmann concludes,

It is difficult even to speak of an “historical” Jesus, given the proportions and immediacy of the myth-making process that characterises the earliest days of the Jesus cult. Whether or not there was an historical founder (and such is not needed, as the mystery religions testify, for the success of a cult and a coherent story about its “founder”), scholars now count it a certainty that the Gospels are compilations of “traditions” cherished by the early Christians rather than historical annals.

The Sanhedrin trial, the trial before Pilate, and the main factors in the Passion story all pose serious problems, and we cannot take them as historical events; rather they were “created” by the early Christians’ own theological convictions. As Nineham says, much of what we find in Mark may well be “deduction from Old Testament prophecy about what ‘must have’ happened when the Messiah came.”

The Epistles of Paul

The letters of Paul were written before Mark’s Gospel, and yet rather surprisingly they do not mention many of the details of Jesus’s life that we find in the Gospels: no allusions to Jesus’s parents, or to the Virgin Birth, or to Jesus’s place of birth; there is no mention of John the Baptist, Judas, nor of Peter’s denial of his master. As G. A. Wells points out, “they give no indication of the time or place of Jesus’s earthly existence. They never refer to his trial before a Roman official nor to Jerusalem as the place of his execution. They mention none of the miracles he is supposed to have worked.” Even when certain doctrines attributed to Jesus in the Gospels would have been of obvious use to Paul in his doctrinal disputes, there is no mention of them.

The early post-Pauline letters, written before A.D. 90, also fail to give any convincing historical details. It is only with the later post-Pauline letters, written between A.D. 90 and 110, do we get those details from the Gospels with which we are familiar. Consequently, Wells concludes:

Since, then, these later epistles do give biographical references to Jesus, it cannot be argued that epistles writers generally were disinterested in his biography, and it becomes necessary to explain why only the earlier ones (and not only Paul) give the historical Jesus such short shrift. The change in the manner of referring to him after A.D. 90 becomes intelligible if we accept that his earthly life in first-century Palestine was invented late in the first century. But it remains very puzzling if we take his existence then for historical fact.

The Dale of Mark’s Gospel

When and why did the biography of Jesus with which we are familiar first develop? The details of Jesus’s life first appear in Mark, which is considered the earliest gospel and most New Testament scholars date it ca. A.D. 70. But G. A. Wells insists that it was written ca. A.D. 90, when “Palestinian Christianity had been overwhelmed by the Jewish War with Rome, and the gentile Christians who then first linked Jesus with Pilate, and first gave his life altogether a real historical setting, could have had only very imperfect knowledge of what had really happened in Palestine c. A.D. 30.” The Christian apologists invented the historical setting and details of the life of Jesus in order to meet the challenge of Docetism that denied the humanity of Jesus, to serve as an antidote to the proliferation of myths in Christian circles, to establish the reality of the resurrection, and generally to answer the questions raised by the early contacts of the Christians with a hostile, skeptical world.

The Rise of Islam and the Origins of Christianity

In Chapter 3 we saw the theories on the rise of Islam of a new generation of Islamic scholars. We are now in position to appreciate the resemblance of these theories to the theories presented above on the origins of Christianity. We noted earlier how Goldziher dismissed a vast amount of the hadith or traditions about the life of the Prophet as spurious. Goldziher considered by far the greater part of the hadith as the result of the religious, historical, and social development of Islam during the first two centuries. The hadith was useless as a basis for any scientific history and could only serve as a reflection of the tendencies of the early Muslim community. In the foregoing sections, we noted how the early Christians attributed words and sayings to Jesus that in reality only reflected the experience, convictions, and hopes of the Christian community.

Just as we find that the early Christians fabricated details of the life of Jesus in order to answer doctrinal points, so we find that Arab storytellers invented biographical material about Muhammad in order to explain difficult passages in the Koran.

Let us compare Schacht’s comments on the traditions in the legal context and what we said of Wrede’s judgment on Mark’s Gospel. Traditions were formulated polemically in order to rebut a contrary doctrine or practice; doctrines in this polemical atmosphere were frequently projected back to higher authorities: “Traditions from Successors [to the Prophet] become traditions from Companions [of the Prophet], and Traditions from Companions become Traditions from the Prophet.” Details from the life of the Prophet were invented to support legal doctrines.

As discussed earlier, Wrede showed that Mark’s Gospel was full of the early Christian community’s beliefs and hopes rather than being the actual story of Jesus.

Both religions in their early days, as they came into contact and conflict with a hostile community with a religious tradition of its own, developed and defended their doctrinal positions by inventing biographical details of their founders that they then projected back onto an invented Arabian or Palestinian point of origin. Where Christianity arose from a fusion of Judaic and Greco-Roman ideas, Islam arose from Talmudic Judaic, Syriac Christian, and indirectly, Greco-Roman ideas.

As Morton Smith put it “the first-century [Christian] churches had no fixed body of gospels, let alone a New Testament.” Similarly, it is now clear that the definitive text of the Koran still had not been achieved as late as the ninth century.

Judgment Day

Central to the Islamic creed is the doctrine of the Last Day. Several terms are used in the Koran to indicate this most awesome of days: Day of Standing Up, Day of Separation, Day of Reckoning, Day of Awakening, Day of Judgment, the Encompassing Day, or simply and ominously the hour. The ultimate source of Muhammad’s notions of the Last Day was Syriac Christianity. These accounts obviously gripped his imagination, for the Koran is full of graphic descriptions of this day: this event will be marked by the sounding of the trumpet, the splitting asunder of the heavens, the reduction of the mountains to dust, the darkening of the sky, the boiling over of the seas, the opening of the graves when men and Jinn will be called to account. These beings will then have their deeds weighed in the Balance, will be judged by God, and then either assigned to everlasting bliss in Paradise, or consigned to everlasting torment and torture in Hell. The terrors of the Last Day are emphasized over and over again, especially in the later Meccan passages. Men and women will be restored to life, that is, there will be an actual resurrection of the physical body.

We know that this notion of the resurrection of the body was alien to Arabian thought, for many Meccan pagans scoffed at this manifestly absurd idea. The pagan philosophers in their polemics against the Christians also asked pertinent questions: “How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come? What was rotten cannot become fresh again, nor scattered limbs be reunited, nor what was consumed be restored…. Men swallowed by the sea, men torn and devoured by wild beasts, cannot be given back by the earth.”

All doctrines of personal survival, personal immortality, and personal resurrection confront the obvious observation that all men and women die, are buried or cremated, and even if buried their bodies eventually decompose—what is rotten cannot become fresh again.

The Muslim doctrine is committed to the physical survival of the body: “That is their reward for that they disbelieved in our signs, and said, ‘What! when we are bones and rubbish, shall we then be raised up a new creation?’ Could they not see that God who created the heavens and the earth is able to create the like of them, and to set for them an appointed time; there is no doubt therein, yet the wrong-doers refuse to accept it, save ungratefully!” (sura 17.100).