Early Christianity: How Much Do We Really Know?

There's the question of the historical Jesus, enthusiastically discussed by more and ever more laymen, and left undiscussed by Biblical scholars and Christian theologians scholars who still almost unanimously insist that the matter has been thoroughly investigated (When? Where?) and that it's certain Jesus existed, and Shut up!

Then there's the entire excitement surrounding Constantine the Great, the inaccuracies about him which are so popular: It's still so often said that he made Christianity Rome's official religion -- he did not. It's said that he (often: he and the Pope) wrote or re-wrote or edited the New Testament at the Council of Nicea. Nope: the Pope wasn't there; the Pope and Constantine had many more reasons to be enemies than to be allies; nobody altered the Bible or discussed what should or shouldn't be in it at Nicea; and there's no evidence that Constantine gave a rat's ass one way or the other about what was in it.

Here's a question which might deserve much more study than it has generally received so far: would Constantine have involved himself with Christianity at all if his mother, the empress Helena, had not been a Christian? I put it to you: which seems more plausible: that a Roman Emperor who, all who have studied his life agree, was a particularly savvy politician, that this Emperor gave some support to Christianity because, at a crucial battle in his struggle to solidify his control of the Empire, he saw a cross in the sky along with words telling him that with this sign he would conquer -- or that he gave some support to Christianity because his mother was a Christian and had a lot of influence on him?

The story of the cross and the words in the sky, and a lot of other nonsense, comes from Eusebius, who unfortunately is our most important single surviving source of the history of Christianity up until Constantine in general, and of biographical information about Constantine in particular. I say unfortunately because Eusebius' pants were on fire. I say unfortunately because the truth was not in him.

Some apologists and conservative historians will attack me for doubting the veracity of Eusebius, but that's okay. I'm in very, very good company: Edward Gibbon's multi-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire



has been praised as a groundbreaking work of genius, still unsurpassed in many ways two and a half centuries after its first publication -- because that's exactly what it is. It has also been vehemently condemned from the time it first appeared uo until the present day -- because Gibbon was clearly (although not quite explicitly) an atheist, and because he dared to question the accuracy of the historical accounts given by people like Eusebius.

A century after Gibbon, Jacob Burckhardt, another historian of great genius, enjoying the greater freedom of expression given to us all by courageous pioneers of freethinking like Hobbes and Spinoza and Hume and Gibbon and Voltaire, found no reason to hide his great annoyance with Eusebius, who had so thoroughly hidden and blurred the history which he, Burckhardt, was working so hard to find. Burckhardt came right out and called Eusebius a liar. and of course, the same people who disliked Gibbon also attacked Burckhardt, for the same reasons.

But lo and behold great wonders, O ye nations: as time passes, Gibbon and Burckhardt look more and more reasonable, as Eusebius, whose veracity was even attacked by other Christian historians as early as the 5th century, looks more and more like a teller of tall tales and less and less like the historian he called himself, and for which he was mostly taken from his time to Gibbon's.

And this man, Eusebius, is pretty much the founder of Christian historicism, the foundation upon which much of the history written over the course of the next millenium in Christendom, was based. Gibbon and Burckhardt and anyone else who cared about investigating history properly were quite right to be annoyed. Such a shaky foundation has produced a lot of spectacularly shaky results, and continues to do so today, although, as I said, Eusebius' falsehoods are finally beginning to be exposed and undone.

So I would say, to those who dislike Christianity and its continued omnipresence and power: don't blame Constantine above all others. If it hadn't been for his mother, he might never have given any support to Christianity. He might have continued Diocletian's persecution of it, and you and I might never have heard of Christianity. But far more, blame Eusebius, who took Constantine's support of Christianity and said that it was a conversion to Christianity, although Constantine never withdrew his support for the pagan religions. Blame Eusebius for intensifying the Christian disregard for reality and reason. Blame Eusebius for spreading the idea that Christianity had conquered Rome, decades before it actually did. Reality and reason and historical accuracy were defeated first, and then the Empire followed.

Tacitus On Nero's Persecution Of Christians

Sometimes something's right in front of you for a long time before you notice it. I think I may (finally) have come across a reason to doubt Tacitus' account, in book 15, paragraph 44 of his Annals of how Nero blamed the great fire in Rome in AD 64 on the Christians, who were generally disliked, in order to divert suspicion from himself:

"Sed non ope humana, non largitionibus principis aut deum placamentis decedebat infamia, quin iussum incendium crederetur. ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos et quaesitissimis poenis adfecit, quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Christianos appellabat. auctor nominis eius Christus Tibero imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat; repressaque in praesens exitiablilis superstitio rursum erumpebat, non modo per Iudaeam, originem eius mali, sed per urbem etiam, quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebranturque"

People eager to establish that Jesus existed -- too eager, in my humble opinion -- point to that passage, by Tacitus, who not only was not a Christian but disliked Christians, as evidence that he existed. Other people, who actually want to investigate the matter as opposed to declaring it settled, more reasonably characterize the passage as evidence of the existence of Christians, in Rome, during Nero's reign.

That's how I'd always thought of the passage. I wasn't convinced by arguments that the passage is a later Christian interpolation, or that "Christus" is a misprint and should read "Chrestus," some other guy, not Jesus. [PS, 5. August 2015: My bad, "Chrestus" appears in Suetonius' biography of Claudius, not in Tacitus.]

And I'm still not convinced by those arguments, I still find it reasonable to believe that the passage above is reasonably close to how Tacitus wrote it, (The oldest manuscripts we now have containing the passage are from the 15th century, so reasonably close is as close as we're going to get unless and until some much older evidence of Tecaitus' text appears.) and I still see no reason to presume that Tacitus was referring to anyone other than Christians.

And Tacitus has a very good reputation, entirely well-deserved, I think, for being a careful and accurate historian.

But we should never assume that it's certain that any assertion made by any historian is accurate, without looking into the matter a bit for ourselves. What had been staring me in the face for a long time concerning this passage in Tacitus, one of the most closely-inspected and thoroughly-discussed texts concerning the question of Jesus' historicity, without my noticing it, are the following reasons to wonder whether Tacitus may have been mistaken:

Tacitus was about 8 years old in AD 63 when the great fire occurred, and most likely he was not in Rome at the time. In all likelihood there is nothing first-hand about his account of the fire, which was written after AD 100, and maybe as late as 125 or later. Also, many scholars have conjectured that, meticulous and scrupulous as he was, he may have been prejudiced against Nero, and eager to make him look worse than he was. This prejudice may have coincided with a desire on the part of the Christians -- a perennial desire on their part -- to cast themselves in the role of victims. Also, the Christians may have wanted to exaggerate the size and early date of their presence in Rome. I'm picturing Tacitus eagerly taking dictation while a Christian witness eagerly exaggerates things: "Tortured and killed all of you he could find in the most cruel ways he could think of, did he?! Tell me more!"

What really makes me stop and think is that after AD 100, perhaps after 125, writing for an audience many of whom lived in the city of Rome, Tacitus describes who Christians were and where they came from and who their first leader, Christ, had been, and how Christ had died -- in short, he seems to have assumed that his readers hadn't heard of Christians. Does it make sense that in 100 or 125 practically no one in Rome knew who Christians were, while back in the year 64 they were so widely known and disliked that they suggested themselves as natural scapegoats for a disaster?

I'm not sure it does make sense. Perhaps not as much sense as the possibility that Tacitus is an early example of someone taken in by a Christian falsification of history.

There Is A Grave Crisis In New Testament Studies

This is a fine collection of links to information about the New Testament. It may not be the best one there is, but it's the best I know of. It gives you access to a lot of first-rate scholarship.

However, if you surf over there and begin to look around, it may disturb you that the scholars linked there seldom if ever mention that anyone has ever doubted that Jesus existed.

Let me repeat that: it's not just that they all are convinced that Jesus existed: they seem unwilling to acknowledge that anyone has ever doubted it. This is more than a minor problem; it's downright neurotic. And the few exceptions, when mainline New Testament scholars do address the question, they do so neurotically. Well, they do not actually address the question so much as beg it, and they usually seem to verbally abuse anyone who asks it. There have been plenty of books published on the subject, but very very few written by people with tenure in one of the relevant fields. One of these few books, of course, is Bart Ehrman's misleadingly-titled Did Jesus Exist?which is just out in paperback. A title much more indicative of its contents would have been Jesus Definitely Existed And Anyone Who Doubts It Is A Big Poopy-Haid If Not Downright Insane.

I know that I keep harping about the question of the historical Jesus in this blog, and complaining about the way that academics duck the question. But that is only half of the crisis I'm alluding to. The other half is that many, many other people are also disappointed in these scholars' response, and/or lack of response, to this question, and many of them have concluded that these scholars are not to be trusted about anything.

Which is incorrect. When it comes to just about any topic having to do with Christianity from around AD 50 to the present, the academics are the go-to guys and gals. But large numbers of people, large and quickly-growing, I am afraid, are being turned off by the scholars' poor performance, and/or refusal to perform at all, on that one question: did Jesus exist?

They behave completely differently, these very same professors, when you ask about other people. They'll tell you that the stories of Abraham are legends and that there's no more reason to think of him as real as there would be with Zeus. With few exceptions, they'll tell you much the same about Moses. Most of them believe there was a David, but they'll be perfectly glad to tell you why, and they won't imply that you're a simpleton or a lunatic for asking. Totally different deal with Jesus.

And so non-scholars are turning to other non-scholars for answers. And what they're getting from the non-scholars is at best a summary of some of the finest scholarship of the 19th century, and usually they're getting books much worse than that best. People who would never think of shunning the academic community when it comes to climatology, or evolution, or extra-terrestrial life, are shunning Biblical scholars, not just when it comes to whether or not Jesus existed, where it's perfectly reasonable to shun them, but also on the history, not just of Christianity, but also of Judaism, and to a large extent, ancient history in general.

Even professors in some of those other fields, even world-class professors like Dawkins, are getting a Bizarro-World, History-Channel-worthy education in ancient history. Believe me, general public: you need to overlook the one question about Jesus and realize that otherwise, these people actually are the experts. I stand by my opinion of Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist? but his books which contain footnotes are the good stuff. As is the stuff referred to in those footnotes. I'm talking about Epp and Speyer and Rice and Holmes and Koester and Pagels and co. I'm talking about peer-reviewed stuff by people highly fluent in the relevant ancient languages and highly-skilled in the relevant methods. It's a weird situation. The historical-Jesus question is a huge elephant standing and pooping in their faculty lounge and they're just not dealing with it, and that's very bad -- but otherwise they perfectly resemble competent scholars.