So too it is completely implausible that when Jesus was put on trial at the end of his life, Pilate offered to release one of his two chief prisoners, Barabbas or Jesus, as was allegedly his custom at Passover (see Mark 15:6–15). We have no historical record of any such custom being carried out by Pilate or anyone else. And it defies imagination that the ruthless Pilate, not known for currying favor among the crowds, would be willing to release a violent and dangerous insurrectionist every year just because the crowds wanted him to do so. This scene, like the census, almost certainly didn’t happen. But that has little bearing on whether Jesus existed. It simply means that this alleged episode did not happen.
Back to our analogies. There are lots of stories about George Washington that may not have happened. Did he really cut down the cherry tree? Did he really have wooden teeth? Did he really stand in the prow of the boat as his troops crossed the Delaware? Did he really get sick after fleeing in his skivvies out the window of his lover’s house when her husband came home, and did he die as a result? Some of these things may have happened (well, not the cherry tree), some of them not. But whether they did or not has little bearing on whether Washington lived. He did live, and we can say some things about him with certainty. So too with Jesus.
Are All the Stories of the Gospels Filled with Legendary Material?
The legendary character of the Gospel accounts of Jesus are stressed by almost all mythicists, but by none with the rigor and passion of Robert Price, whose recent The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems echoes, in this respect, many of the themes and restates many of the conclusions that he reached in his earlier work, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man.7 I will address important aspects of Price’s case against the historical Jesus in the next chapter. For now I want to stress that his emphasis—hammered home page after page—that the Gospel accounts contain legendary material, when seen in a more balanced light, is only marginally relevant to the question of whether Jesus existed.
Price’s argument is sophisticated, and it is a little difficult to explain in lay terms the basic methodological point that forms its backbone. In part it relates to what I mentioned earlier when talking about the form critics, German authors from the beginning of the twentieth century like Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann. In their view, as we saw, communities shaped the traditions that they passed along about Jesus so that these traditions took specific “forms” depending on the context (the Sitz im Leben—the “situation in life”) in which they were being told. Stories of Jesus’s controversies over the Sabbath took one shape or form, stories of his miracles another form, and so on. One of the implications of this view is that early Christian communities told stories about Jesus only when these stories were relevant to their own communal life situations. Why tell stories that have no relevance? In the logic of Price’s argument, this is the first point: communities tell stories only when they advance their own self-interests in one way or another.
His second point comes from developments in scholarship that happened in the wake of form criticism, especially among the students of Rudolf Bultmann. These students wondered if there was any way to get behind the stories that had been molded and shaped in the early Christian communities, to see if any surviving traditions escaped the Christian storytellers’ influences. Suppose there existed stories about Jesus that show no signs of having been created by the communities that told them, stories, for example, that appear to stand at odds with what the early Christian communities would have wanted to say about Jesus. Traditions dissimilar to what Christians were saying about Jesus would not have been created or formulated by the early Christian storytellers. And so those traditions, if they existed, would involve stories that were told not simply because they were useful in the life situation (Sitz im Leben) of the communities in which they were passed along. Stories like that were probably told simply because they were stories about Jesus that really happened.
This is a standard principle used by scholars today to establish which of the stories in the Gospels almost certainly go back to the historical Jesus as opposed to being made up by later storytellers talking about his life in light of their community’s concerns and needs. The principle is called the “criterion of dissimilarity.” If there is a tradition that does not coincide with what we know about the concerns, interests, and agenda of the early Christian communities—or in fact stands at odds with these concerns—then that tradition is more likely to be authentic than a saying that does coincide with the community’s interests. (I will give some examples in a moment.)
Price’s modus operandi is to go through all the traditions of the Gospels and show that each and every story of Jesus can be shown to meet some need, concern, or interest of the early Christians, so there are no stories that can be shown to go back to a historical figure, Jesus. In other words, the first building block in every case trumps the second so that there are no historically accurate materials in the Gospels.
My own view is that this is completely wrong, for several reasons. For one thing, it is a misuse of the criterion of dissimilarity to use it to show what did not happen in the life of Jesus. The criterion is designed to be used as a positive guide to what Jesus really said and did and experienced, not as a negative criterion to show what he did not. That is to say, suppose Jesus in the Gospels predicts that he will go to Jerusalem and be crucified and then raised from the dead. Would this prediction pass the criterion of dissimilarity? Absolutely not! This is something that the community of Christians may well have wanted to put on Jesus’s lips. Since it does not pass the criterion, we cannot use this criterion to indicate that Jesus really made this prediction. But can we use it to say that he did not make the prediction? Once again, absolutely not! The criterion may make us suspicious of this or that tradition, but it cannot demonstrate on its own merits whether or not it is historical. In other words, by its very character the criterion does not and cannot indicate what Jesus did not do or say, only what he did do or say.
My second point is related. This criterion—and others we will consider in a later chapter—is designed to consider probabilities, not certainties. And, as Price himself acknowledges, this is all the historian can do: establish what probably happened in the past. To demand a criterion that yields certainty is to step outside historical research. All we can establish are probabilities. And there are a number of traditions about Jesus that easily pass the criterion of dissimilarity, making their historicity more probable than their nonhistoricity.
I need to add, as a third point, that the probabilities that one establishes by using one criterion can be strengthened by appealing to others. For example, we saw in earlier chapters that in addition to the surviving Gospels (seven from a hundred years of his death), there are multiple independent witnesses to the life of Jesus, including the many written and oral sources of the Gospels and a large number of other independent Christian writings. Suppose a tradition about Jesus is found in only one of these sources (the visit of the magi to Jesus, for example, found only in Matthew, or the parable of the Good Samaritan, found only in Luke). It is conceivable that the source “made up” that story. But what if you have the same or very similar stories in two independent witnesses? Then neither one of them could have made it up since they are independent, and it must then be earlier than both of them. What if a story or kind of story is found in a large number of sources? That kind of story is far more likely to be historically accurate than a story found in only one source. If you can find stories that are independently attested in multiple sources and that pass the criterion of dissimilarity, you can establish, then, a higher level of probability that you are dealing with a historical account. It may have legendary features, but the heart of the story may be historical.
Let me give three quick examples. We saw in an earlier chapter that it is highly improbable that the earliest Palestinian Jewish followers of Jesus would have made up the claim that the messiah was crucified. This passes the criterion of dissimilarity. And it is a claim f
ound multiply attested throughout our tradition (Mark, M, L, John, Paul, Josephus, Tacitus). Conclusion? If what we want are strong probabilities, this is a highly probable tradition. Jesus was crucified.
Something of far less significance, at least to most people, is the question of Jesus’s brothers. The independent sources of Mark, John, Paul, and Josephus all say that he had brothers, and in all but John, one of these brothers is named James. The stories in which Jesus’s brothers appear are not tendentious, promoting any particular Christian agenda. So the tradition that Jesus had brothers passes dissimilarity as well as multiple attestation. Conclusion: Jesus probably had brothers, one of whom was named James.
A final example, which will become more important later in this chapter. Jesus is said to have come from Nazareth in multiple sources (Mark, Q, John, L, M). And nowhere in any of these stories is there any hint that the author or his community has advanced its own interests in indicating Nazareth as Jesus’s hometown. In fact, just the opposite: the early Christians had to explain away the fact that Jesus came from Nazareth, as seen, for example, in John 1:45–46 and in the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke, which independently of one another try to show that even though Jesus came from Nazareth, he really was born in Bethlehem. And why the concern? Because the Old Testament prophet Micah said the savior would come from Bethlehem, not Nazareth (Micah 5:2). Moreover, John reflects a more general embarrassment about Nazareth (“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”). Nazareth was a little one-horse town (not even that; it was more like a one-dog town) that no one had ever even heard of, so far as we can tell, before Christianity. The savior of the world came from there? Not from Bethlehem? Or Jerusalem? Or Rome? How likely is that? And so we have a multiply attested tradition that passes the criterion of dissimilarity. Conclusion: Jesus probably came from Nazareth.
I have explained these criteria used by scholars in part to show why Price’s opposing views are problematic. Contrary to Price, we do indeed have several traditions that probably reflect the life of the historical Jesus. In later chapters I will show there are many more. But at this stage I want to conclude by making an even larger methodological point: the question of whether many, most, or all the traditions about Jesus have been colored by legend is for the most part irrelevant to the question of whether Jesus existed.
You could make the case that every person who talks about another person puts his or her own slant on the story. Every story includes bias. We are humans, not machines, and we slant things the way we see them, necessarily. What that means, though, is that almost everything we say about another person is tinted with legend (our biases). It was no different with Jesus. People who told stories about him tinted his life with legend. Sometimes the legend completely took over, and the stories told were legendary through and through, with no historical core. Other times a historical core was shaped by a legendary interest. But there were indeed some stories with historical cores, and a scholar’s ability to show that even these stories are shaped by legend does not have any bearing on the question of whether Jesus existed. For one thing, we have the cores themselves. Moreover, and this is my key point, the shaping of a story is not the same thing as the inventing of a story. You can shape a tradition about Jesus any way you want so that it looks highly legendary. But that has no bearing on the question of whether beneath the legendary shaping lies the core of the historical event.
And—another key point that I want to keep pressing—the evidence of the historical Jesus does not in the least depend exclusively on whether this, that, or the other Gospel story is historically accurate. It is based on other considerations, which I set out in the earlier chapters, including the witness of Paul and the speeches of Acts, which long predate the Gospels.
In short, the problems that the Gospels pose for scholars—the fact we do not have the original texts, that we do not know their actual authors, that they are full of discrepancies, that they contain nonhistorical, legendary materials—are not all that significant for the particular question we are posing, whether or not Jesus existed. These problems may seem significant (and altogether relevant). But when you dig deeper into the matter and think about it more closely, it is clear that they are not.
Claim 2: Nazareth Did Not Exist
ONE SUPPOSEDLY LEGENDARY FEATURE of the Gospels relates closely to what I have just argued and is in fact one of the more common claims found in the writings of the mythicists. It is that the alleged hometown of Jesus, Nazareth, in fact did not exist but is itself a myth (using the term as the mythicists do). The logic of this argument, which is sometimes advanced with considerable vehemence and force, appears to be that if Christians made up Jesus’s hometown, they probably made him up as well. I could dispose of this argument fairly easily by pointing out that it is irrelevant. If Jesus existed, as the evidence suggests, but Nazareth did not, as this assertion claims, then he merely came from somewhere else. Whether Barack Obama was born in the United States or not (for what it is worth, he was) is irrelevant to the question of whether he was born.
Since, however, this argument is so widely favored among mythicists, I want to explore it more deeply. It is not a new argument. All the way back in 1906 Schweitzer addressed it when discussing the mythicists of his own day.8 Among the modern advocates of the view are several we have already mentioned. Frank Zindler, for example, in a cleverly titled essay, “Where Jesus Never Walked,” tries to deconstruct on a fairly simple level the geographical places associated with Jesus, especially Nazareth. He claims that Mark’s Gospel never states that Jesus came from Nazareth. This flies in the face, of course, of Mark 1:9, which indicates that this is precisely where Jesus came from (“Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee”), but Zindler maintains that that verse was not originally part of Mark; it was inserted by a later scribe. Here again we see history being done according to convenience. If a text says precisely what you think it could not have said, then all you need to do is claim that originally it must have said something else.9
Zindler maintains that some early Christians understood Jesus to be the “branch” mentioned in Isaiah 11:1, who would come from the line of David as the messiah. The term branch in Hebrew (which does not have vowels) is spelled NZR, which is close (kind of close) to Nazareth. And so what happened, in Zindler’s view, is that later Christians who did not understand what it meant to call Jesus the NZR (branch) thought that the traditions that called him that were saying he was from a (nonexistent) town, Nazareth.
Zindler does not marshal any evidence for this view but simply asserts it. And he does not explain why Christians who did not know what NZR meant simply didn’t ask someone. Even more important, he doesn’t explain why they made up the name of a nonexistent town (in his view) to locate Jesus or how they went from “Jesus is the NZR” to “Jesus came from Nazareth.” The view seems completely implausible, especially given the fact, which we have seen, that multiple independent sources locate Jesus in Nazareth. Moreover, there is the additional evidence, which we will see momentarily, that Nazareth did in fact exist as a small Jewish town in the days of Jesus.
G. A. Wells advances a different argument to much the same end. In his view the key to understanding the nonexistence of Nazareth lies in the four occasions in which Mark indicates that Jesus was a “Nazarene” (1:24; 10:47; 14:67; 16:6). According to Wells, Mark misunderstood what this meant. What it originally meant was that Jesus belonged to a pre-Christian Jewish sect called the Nazarenes, who were similar to certain Old Testament figures (like strong-man Samson) called Nazirites, who took vows to be specially set apart for God (they couldn’t touch corpses, drink wine, or cut their hair). Mark didn’t know this, though, and wrongly assumed that the term Nazarene must have indicated Jesus’s place of origin, and so Mark made up “Nazareth” as his hometown.10
Once again one looks in vain for any evidence or clear logic to support this view. Why would Mark invent a town that didn’t exist to explain how Jesus could be a Nazarene, when what the term originall
y meant was that he was a Nazirite? Moreover, Mark must have known the Old Testament. He does quote it on a number of occasions. Why wouldn’t he know what a Nazirite was? And if the sectarians that Jesus associated with were Nazirites, why did they call themselves Nazarenes (a word that is not etymologically related)? Moreover, it should be stressed that there are multiple traditions about Nazareth (Mark, M, L, John). Nazareth was not invented by Mark.
One of the things that these two examples show is that modern scholars seem to have no clue what Nazarene means or where the name of the town Nazareth could have come from if it is not original. So how can we posit some kind of ancient Christian motivation to invent Nazareth if we have no idea what led Christians to do so or even what the root of the term really meant? The problem is compounded by the fact, already mentioned, that Nazareth did exist in the days of Jesus, in the location that Mark and the other Gospels suggest it did.
The most recent critic to dispute the existence of Nazareth is René Salm, who has devoted an entire book to the question, called The Myth of Nazareth.11 Salm sees this issue as highly significant and relevant to the question of the historicity of Jesus: “Upon that determination [that is, on the existence of Nazareth] depends a great deal, perhaps even the entire edifice of Christendom.”12 Like so many mythicists before him, Salm emphasizes what scholars have long known: Nazareth is never mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, in the writings of Josephus, or in the Talmud. It first shows up in the Gospels. Salm is also impressed by the fact that the early generations of Christians did not seek out the place but rather ignored it and seemed not to know where it was (this is actually hard to show; how would we know this about “every” early Christian, unless all of them left us writings and told us everything they knew and did?).
Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth Page 19