Who Was Jesus?

I don't know. And neither do you.

I do know something about this picture, though:

-- which appears near the headline of this article by Father James Martin, in which he purports to tell us about Jesus, interpreting passages from the Bible and, as usual, maintaining a 10-mile distance from anything he might know about the actual composition and transmission of the Bible. He's clearly not interested about any of that, any more than most of us would have any interest in his blathering on and on about his magical invisible friend.

So let's get back to that picture. It's a popular one. It's part of a mosaic in the Hagia Sophia museum in Istanbul, which was a church from the 6th century until 1453, when the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople and renamed the city Istanbul. From then until the 20th century the building was a mosque. After WWI the Ottoman Empire was dissolved, and Turkey became a secular republic, and the Hagia Sophia became a museum showing many Muslim artworks, and also many Christian artworks, some of which had been covered up or destroyed or partly destroyed during the building's Muslim period. "Hagia Sophia" means "St Sophia," which means "Holy Wisdom." This mosaic was partly destroyed, as you can see in this picture, which also, with the people in the foreground, gives you an idea of its size:

This mosaic is one of a genre which was popular in Byzantine art, known as a Deesis. The figure on the left is the Virgin Mary, and the figure on the right is John the Baptist. Mary and John are both raising their hands in a gesture asking for Jesus' mercy in dealing with mankind.

It is generally thought that this mosaic was made in 1261, when Orthodox Greeks regained control of Constantinople from Venetians and other Catholics, who had conquered the city in 1204, and had been plundering its artworks so energetically for 57 years that today it is much easier to find major works of Byzantine art in Western Europe than in Istanbul. The territory which Catholics controlled from 1204 to 1261, consisting of Constantinople and a few thousand square miles surrounding the city, is known as the Latin Empire. This Deesis mosaic is one of the major artistic celebrations of the restoration of Byzantine control of Constantinople.

If St Paul Killed Christians --

-- that is to say, if Saul of Tarsus, before his conversion to Christianity, when he renamed himself Paul, killed Christians --

* Why do we know the name of only one of his victims: Stephen, traditionally the first Christian martyr? Well, actually, in one New Testament passage Paul says only that he stood by and watched with approval as Stephen was killed, and in another he says that he imprisoned some other Christians, both men and women -- whose names are never mentioned. And neither are any of the names of any of the people who stoned Stephen, nor of any of the Sanhedrin who condemned him to death. There are no names whatsoever associated with Saul famous horrible persecution of Christians except for his own name and Stephen's.

* Why do we hear neither of Saul's co-persecutors attempting to kill or imprison him after his conversion, nor of any Christians objecting to his conversion because of his persecuting past, nor attempting to take revenge for that persecution -- nor, for that, matter, attempts at revenge by non-Christian relatives or friends of Saul's victims?

It could be that we learn none of these details in the New Testament or other early Christian writings simply because Paul and the author of Acts, Luke, most likely, had other things on their minds as they wrote. Or it could be that Paul invented Stephen -- and all other Christians before him, and Jesus, and St Peter and a few other things too -- without it ever occurring to him that 2000 thousand years later, the absence of certain details in his stories might seem odd to some weirdo who posts on the Internet and calls himself a monkey.

* How many un-life-like details like these have to be noticed and commented upon before the experts -- the supposed experts, the academic Biblical scholars and theologians -- acknowledge that it seems possible that the entire story of the origins of Christianity, including all the earliest accounts of Jesus, may be fictional, mythical?

As I've said again and again, I'm not claiming to have proven a damn thing here about the origins of Christianity. All that I, if not many if not most if not all of the people referred to as mythicists, am saying, is that it doesn't seem completely certain to me that Jesus existed, and that I would like to see the question discussed by the aforementioned supposed experts. And as I've said repeatedly, since that's all we're saying, it seems misleading to refer to us as mythicists. People with open minds, would seem to me to be a more accurate designation.

Historical Jesus Update (Sorry, Still Haven't Found Him)

This won't actually be much of an update for people actively following academic and extra-academic discussion of the Historical Jesus. So far as I can tell, there haven't been any bombshells on that front lately. (The Gospel of Jesus' Wife recently presented by Mary L King, prematurely rejected as a phony by the normally over-credulous public, is a bombshell, but, as Prof King pointed out to the mostly-not-listening public, it's a bombshell about a 2nd-century Christian sect and not about the HJ.)

The academic mainstream continues to convince me that most (not all!) mythicists are ill-informed amateurs at best. On the other hand, I continue not to be able to see their reasons for so confidently assuming that there was an Historical Jesus. Also on the other hand, surely there will eventually, finally, be significant numbers of academic specialists in the New Testament willing, eager, to discuss the question of Jesus' historicity, so that at last that discussion will take place among those best qualified to investigate it. Can't happen soon enough. (They, the mainstream, say it's already happened. They don't say when and where.)

Well, actually, it's worse than my not being able to see the academics' reasons for being certain that Jesus existed: I think those reason are becoming more and more clear to me, and they're flimsy.

For the moment let's take what appears to me to be an especially egregious example of flimsiness, which I will call the Unexpected Suffering Messiah Postulate: the academic mainstream, the historicists, say that the core story of the Gospels couldn't have been made up because the very idea of a suffering Messiah would have been very unexpected to 1st-century Jews.

If you just did a spit-take and shouted "WHAT?" at your computer screen: I'm right there with you. Either I'm a drooling pinhead, or mainstream New Testament Studies has taken the position that the unexpected, in myth, is somewhere between extremely improbable and impossible. I'm surprised that full-time mythicists don't call the tenured guys out more often and emphatically over this one. It's almost like saying that there's never been anything like originality in the history of the writing of myths, that only nonfiction is capable of surprising us. I'd say that nonfiction often surprises, and that myths do also, the originality and the ability to surprise, to come up with the unexpected, are in fact essential factors in almost all myths.

But hey, that's just me.

If unexpectedness were as rare as this historicist tentpole suggests, then the word "unexpected" would be fairly rare. I'd have to explain to you what it meant. but of course I don't, because we encounter the unexpected all the time, in myths among so many other places. If we don't encounter it in myths we tend to fall asleep. And not in a good way.

Christianity was full of the unexpected when it was new. If the only way you can explain that is by maintaining that it was full of truth, you can go play with Benny Hinn. Or James McGrath. I don't want to hang out with you. One of us is a drooling pinhead.

Attentive readers may have noticed that I haven't even gotten around to the point that some 1st-century Jews may indeed have expected a suffering Messiah.

New to me, although not necessarily to those interested in the inquiry into the Historical Jesus, is Dennis R McDonald's book The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark. MacDonald's thesis, somewhat startling in academia when this book was published in 2000, and perhaps somewhat less startling now, is that Mark borrows very heavily from the Iliad and the Odyssey. The parallels he points out are really quite striking, and number in the low three figures. MacDonald, who is currently John Wesley Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Claremont School of Theology and co-director of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at the Claremont Graduate University, mentions in passing that he takes for granted that although Mark borrowed very extensively from Homer, Jesus actually existed. Disappointingly, he does not mention why he takes this for granted. He doesn't seem to feel the need to explain why he takes it for granted.

I've said it many times before: I, and many other people who strike me as being quite intelligent and reasonable, even if none of us holds an advanced degree in "one of the relevant fields," just want to see the topic being discussed. They, the mainstream, say it's been discussed and laid to rest. Where? When?

As I said at the beginning of this post: nothing new on this front.

The 8th Of August, 2013: The Day I Formally Declared War On Stupid Atheists

Why the war? Why today? Well, because today was when I finally had heard someone say "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible" one too many times.

I'm waging this war on behalf of intelligent atheists, of course. To try to prevent our being identified with those morons saying things like "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible." Also to try to help reasonably-intelligent people not be sucked in by such incredibly stupid memes. I realize that some stupid people, both atheists and believers, will think that I'm not an atheist, because I'm harshly criticizing people who happen to be atheists. At least with this standard disclaimer in place I can say to them, "Hey, Chuckles. Go back and read the 2nd paragraph again, assuming you read that far yr 1st time through. Read it 3 times through if you have to. Move yr lips while you read if you have to."

To say that a lot of half-educated people are weighing in on the subject of the historicity of Jesus would be an insult to the half-educated. Given the lack of evidence other than the New Testament, and unless and until we can find other evidence, the debate over Jesus' historicity is very little other than a debate over how much history we can extract from the New Testament. I disagree with the scholars who say it's certain that Jesus existed, but they're much more serious than those who reject the New Testament as relevant to the question in that they are examining the existing evidence.

Imagine if paeleontologists unearthed a fossilized bone which appeared to have belonged to a previously-unknown species of dinosaur. And imagine if they said, "Well, since this bone appears to be from a species for which we have no other evidence, we're going to have to completely disregard it. Instead of studying it, let's grind it up into dust instead, and see if we can manage to get an ingredient for half-decent fertilizer or concrete out of it." Hopefully you are appalled by the very thought of paeleontologists behaving in such a manner. Hopefully no one will have to explain to you why that's no damn way to run a railroad. And hopefully you can see the similarity between palaeontologists acting like that, and people saying "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible."

In this Wrong Monkey blog post I addressed the currently-popular mistaken notion that we possess the works of many historians who were in -- or anywhere near -- Jerusalem during the supposed time of Jesus. The morons who may challenge you: "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible" may go on from there to challenge you to go through the works of the fifty or so non-Biblical historians in which all mention of Jesus is suspiciously absent. Which you can't do because the number of such historians who said anything at all about Jerusalem at that time is not fifty but zero, which in turn of course tells you that the person challenging you to do your homework doesn't know his own ass from a Boing 757. It tells you how far they are from being able to find, and/or from taking the trouble to find, anyone else who has a clue about the history of that time or place before proceeding to tell you what's what about that time and place. There's no substitute for reading the ancient texts themselves, but someone who tells you, "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible," immediately before or after saying, "We possess the works of over fifty historians who were in or around Jerusalem during Jesus' lifetime" is not only obviously unfamiliar with those ancient texts, but also might have serious difficulty recognizing anyone else who is familiar with someone who is familiar with those texts. "Fifty historians," my Aunt Fanny! Just for fun, see if you can get them to name 10 historians who lived in the 1st century. Lived anywhere, be it Spain or China or the city of Rome. Very likely most of the writers they manage to name won't have lived in the 1st century AD, and will have written poetry or drama or philosophy or treatises on mathematics or rhetoric or medicine or architecture or military strategy, and not one word which they may or may not have written on any historical subject will have survived.

Know your sources. Including the people saying "Prove that Jesus existed. And don't use the Bible." Know them, and know the distance between them and, oh, for instance, me. And get it through your heads, whether you're trying to prove Jesus' existence or disprove it, or if, like me, you're simply curious about the question whatever the answer might turn out to be, that, barring some new discovery, almost all of the evidence for or against is in the New Testament.

And also, if you want people to think you've read the Bible -- read it. Endlessly referring to the same half-dozen verses having to do with shellfish and genocide and Lot's daughters is no longer maintaining the illusion. And while you're at it, you chuckleheads, read an entire book or two by Mark Twain. Your name is legion, and your endless repetition of a half-dozen lines from Twain has become every bit as tedious as the endless repetition of a half-dozen lines from the Bible.

Just What Could You Build With All The Fragments Of The True Cross?

Archaeologists excavating a 7th-century church in Turkey have found a reliquary with a piece of the True Cross in it.

John Calvin, the loveable, cuddly 16th-century founder of Calvinism, is quoted as saying that the pieces of the True Cross added up to a large ship-load of wood, while Charles Rohault de Fleury, a 19th century archaeologist, said that they added up to about 1/3 of a cross the size of one Jesus might have been crucified on. Was Calvin really in a position to judge how much wood was in all the fragments of the True Cross? I really doubt it. Was he fervently opposed to Catholic practices such as the veneration of relics? Oh yes. (To this day Calvinist churches are notable for Minimalist decor.) Was Charles Rohault de Fleury an expert archaeologist who wouldn't make a statement like that about True Cross fragments without basing it on reliable data? I don't know. Was he a fervent defender of the Catholic Church? I don't know that either.

Was Fleury counting differently than Calvin, excluding many pieces of True Cross which Calvin included? Again, I don't know. Do many people today repeat Calvin's line, or something similar ("If you put all the pieces of the True Cross together you could build an Ark," for example), not based on any clear idea at all about the number and size of Cross relics, but because they are grinding an anti-Catholic ax? (Or an anti-Orthodox ax. Let's not forget that although in the 7th century the split between Catholic and Orthodox still far from complete, "Orthodox" is a far more accurate term to describe a 7th-century church in Turkey than "Catholic.") I have absolutely no doubt about that, nor do I doubt that many Catholic apologists would gladly quote Fleury's remark without having any more idea about Fleury's competence and possible bias than I do -- that is to say, no idea whatsoever.

Once again, I feel I am on the sidelines, on neither of the two sides bickering over the theological significance of some archaeological find. The theological debate doesn't particularly interest me, and the historical significance of the find, which interests me, doesn't seem to interest very many others.

Do I think that any of the relics venerated as pieces of the True Cross really once were pieces of the cross on which Jesus was crucified? Well, I'm not convinced that Jesus existed. If He did, and if He was crucified, wearing a crown of thorns, and stabbed in the side with a lance by a Roman soldier while He was on the Cross, then it seems to me that it is possible that the wood and thorns and iron venerated by some Christians as pieces of the True Cross and of the Crown of Thorn and of the Holy Lance are actually objects which touched Jesus -- possible, but extremely unlikely, because I know of no reports of anyone preserving relics thought to have been associated with Jesus earlier than Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great. And also because it would have been unusual for the Romans to have allowed Jesus' followers to have preserved the Cross or a part of it. (But it would have been unusual for them to have allowed Jesus' followers to remove his body from the Cross. Leaving the body there to rot away was a significant part of the horror and insult of that form of punishment. "Golgotha" means "place of skulls" because the remains of the victims of crucifixion were left there. And that is one of the many reasons why I have trouble believing the New Testament stories of Jesus.)

Nevertheless, a 7th-century artifact is interesting to me purely by virtue of its being as old as the 7th century. In this case, I would most likely find the reliquary much more interesting than the piece of wood within. Unless, that is, they date the piece of wood and it actually turns out to have come from a tree felled in the 1st century or earlier. (Did the Romans reuse one cross over and over?)

If they do actually date the wood, then as far as I know, that in itself would be newsworthy. As far as I know, Orthodox and Catholic authorities have allowed very few relics to be scientifically tested. The most famous exception has been the Shroud of Turin. That was subjected to carbon-14 dating and found to have been made in the 13th or 14th century. And ever since, the Catholic Church along with various crackpots and huckster authors and makers of silly documentaries and the so-called "History Channel" have being doing all they can to distract people from those carbon-14 test results and to discredit the scientists who performed those tests.

If traces of human blood are found on this wood, this 7th-century-or-older artifact found in Turkey, that in itself would not be significant in the search for the historical Jesus, because, sadly, crucifixions were still quite common in the 7th century.

They Come in Huge Throngs to Tell Us That They Don't Care

Another day, another flat assertion in Huffington Post that Jesus existed, that the question is settled except among kooks. Still, Kudos to Craig S Keener for giving a more straightforward title to his article than Bart Ehrman gave to his latest book.

Another huge load of readers' comments saying flatly that Jesus' existence or non-existence is completely unimportant, what matters are all the silly theological questions.

The supposed unimportance of whether or not Jesus existed is important enough to an amazing number of people for them to take the time to speak up about it.

Did they happen to notice that the article by Dr Keener also did not address anything supernatural? Although he sometimes writes on theological subjects, this particular article has a strictly historical orientation.

I started to participate in debates over whether or not Jesus existed only a couple of years ago. I had been raised in a Protestantism I found rather oppressive, became an atheist in the 1970's, before I was full grown, and although since then I have studied history with great interest, I tended to avoid Jesus as an historical subject.

That changed a couple of years ago, in part because so many people discuss whether or not Jesus existed. Discussions on this topic can be struck up all over the place. All in all I'd rather talk about Livy or Charlemagne, but it's much harder for an autodidact to find a group of people interested in one of them.

On the other hand, when there is a discussion going on started by an article written by an academic who studies Livy or Charlemagne or theoretical math or metallurgy or the history of soccer or horology, it's relatively rare for someone to pop in just to say, "I find the subject of your work to be unimportant." Can you see how that would be kind of jarring to people who just wanted to talk about Livy, because they're fascinated by Livy? (He was an ancient Roman historian, in case anyone's wondering who I'm talking about.)

For me, aside from a purely historical perspective -- as an atheist I do not actually participate in theological discussions so much as sneer at them and study them from an anthropological perspective and wonder how much longer people will continue to go for such deadly-dull hooey -- the question of the historicity of Jesus is very interesting to me because of what it reveals about Christianity's continuing influence over academic fields which supposedly these days are secularized and objective and dedicated to free and open inquiry. Because it seems to me that the view which continues to dominate -- well represented by Keener above -- is, "It's settled, even if you're completely secular it's settled, Jesus existed, period, move along folks, nothing to see here..." The dominant position is still an unwillingness to actually debate the question. If there were such willingness, then such an article as Keener's would address the positions of people like Robert Price and Thomas Thompson and the other actual bona fide, non-kooky academics [PS, 18. July 2016: Since writing this I've come to regard Price as kooky, and I still don't actually know Thompson well enough to have a legitimate opinion about whether or not he's kooky. Be that as it may, I'm still not at all convinced that Jesus existed.] who are not at all convinced that Jesus existed -- because while dominant, the view that it's settled is not nearly so unanimous among experts as Keener or Ehrman would have you believe. Typically, Keener doesn't even mention any of their names, but merely claims that are very few such people, and suggests, as have Ehrman and Crossan, to name but the most prominent two, that people who are not sure that Jesus existed are either nuts or have been led astray by nuts. They're avoiding a debate.

But hey, look at all the people who don't care one way or the other, so they say.

"Ve Haff Vays of Sreatening Your Tenure!"

John Dominic Crossanhas joined Bart Ehrmanin reminding us great unwashed types that the debate about Jesus' historical existence is over, and that the skeptics lost. In his latest screed for Huffington Post, Crossan refers in the first sentence to "the historical fact -- yes, fact -- that Pilate executed Jesus at Passover."

Are Ehrman and Crossan only talking to people like me who don't have PhD's, or are their pronouncements that this debate, which I can't find when it started within academia, although of course several prominent academics have been fired for trying to start it there -- Ah say Ah say are Ehrman and Crossan & Co only talking to us, or are their flat assertions that the debate is over thinly-veiled threats to their colleagues with PhD's and tenure or hopes of tenure, that trying to open the debate within mainstream academia will still, anno domini two thousand and frickin twelve, land the would-be opener quickly outside the mainstream where he or she will be ridiculed and compared to climate-change deniers? Richard Carrier thinks so. Carrier has a PhD, but he also has a big pair of brass balls, and if he cares about the tenure he's not going to get soon in a mainstream faculty, he hides it admirably well.

Not only do I not have a PhD, it's been at least fifteen years since I could remember what it had felt like to care about tenure, so Crossan and Ehrman aren't scaring me. I can very grudgingly understand that other people are cowardly pussies who always want to cover their asses. Hey, it's no secret. People are the way they are. But even cowards can gradually become embarrassed, and this shit is embarrassing. The claim that anybody who doesn't join in the chorus of "it's a fact, yes a fact that Jesus existed, there's no doubt among the educated and non-crazy" is like a climate-change denier is so desperately tired that people ought to be really embarrassed for not speaking up about it. Cowardliness vs this intense embarrassment. Eventually, surely, a few of the cowards will cease to be so cowardly. They'll trade job security for sleeping the sound sleep of the ballsy.

When meterologists and geologists are confronted by climate-change deniers, they don't refuse to discuss climate change, and they don't ask to see the deniers' credentials. They by Vishnu discuss climate change. They refer to data. Surely, by this year of two thousand and for crying out loud twelve, people like Ehrman and Crossan are beginning to make themselves irrelevant in intellectual debate, are beginning to more closely resemble televangelists in the public perception, by continuing to pretend that the question of Jesus' historical existence has been properly debated. Come out, all you people who know better! Trust me: having guts feels good. Point out that the emperors aren't wearing clothes.

I Accuse You, You Cowardly Closeted Academic Mythicists!

After writing a post yesterday in this blog responding to Bart Ehrman's emphatic expression of his lack of any doubt that Jesus existed, delivered with a healthy portion of disdain for all who do entertain such doubts, stating that their number currently includes not a single legitimate professor in a relevant field in the Western world, I was made aware that Richard Carrier had also responded to Ehrman's article. Carrier's response to Ehrman is much longer, more authoritative and detailed than mine, but we share a dislike of the way Ehrman attempts to declare the question closed of whether or not Jesus existed, and to discourage, and disparage, any further discussion of it. We both call Ehrman out for closed-mindedness.

Near the beginning of his blog post, Carrier makes the following remarkable statement:

I personally know a few professors who [...] feel this way: they do not touch this topic with a ten foot pole, precisely because they fear the kind of thing Ehrman is doing and threatening. They do not want to lose their jobs or career prospects and opportunities. They do not want to be ridiculed or marginalized.

So, Ehrman and Carrier are asserting two very different things: Ehrman says that no credible scholar believes that doubts of Jesus' existence are serious enough to be worth discussing, while Carrier maintains that such a discussion would be serious, but is squelched by professors' fears that they would hurt their careers by opening it.

They fear to be honest, because it might hurt their careers. If this is true, then in my opinion it ought to make very many people very angry. Generally speaking, in academia free and open discussion is supposedly prized. If a meteorologist or a geologist deliberately falsified their findings, or deliberately hindered open debate in their fields, or twisted their interpretation of data to give the appearance that they believed things which they did not believe, one thinks, it would much more likely be cause of damage to their careers than advancement. (Unless, of course, they were to leave academia altogether and work as shills for the petrochemical industry.) If what Carrier is saying is accurate, that in the faculties of New Testament studies and Christian theology one of the central questions, perhaps the most central question, is being systematically repressed, and that people's careers often depend on their consciously-dishonest complicity in that repression, yes, I think that ought to make people very angry indeed. What struck me most about Carrier's statement about professors willingly engaging in duplicity to cover their asses is how similar it is to statements made by Rudolf Augstein, founder and publisher of Der Spiegel for over half a century and its editor for almost that long, in his book Jesus Menschensohn and in interviews about that book: theologians and Biblical scholars, quite prominent ones, had told Augstein privately, so he said, that the party line of there being no doubt that Jesus was a real historical figure, as real as Julius Caesar or Otto von Bismarck, did not convince them. That they had doubts. Private doubts. But they kept their doubts private, and so the party line thrived, and dissenters continued to be relegated to outsider status and routinely mocked by the mainstream.

Well, it's Anno Domini MMXII. It's high time to end such medieval, Inquisition-style crap. It's time for these cowards to be outed. We trust them with the education of our young men and women. They're supposed to be role models. They're supposed to have more integrity than shills for the petrochemical industry. Biblical studies and theology continue to claim that they are fully modern academic disciplines and not medieval warrens of deceit. Richard Carrier, will you out these worms? Augstein died a decade ago, he can't do it, not unless something is found among his papers...

Of course, you cowardly little worms, this would all be so much more dignified if you would out yourselves. Think of Bruno Bauer. Think of Friedrich Nietzsche. Think of Karlheinz Deschner. Look at your own damned selves in your mirrors, if you can. Think of your children. Man and woman up. It's 2012, God damn it.

It's Settled! (Not!)

Bart Ehrman, James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has for a few years been very popular among atheists interested in the early history of Christianity, having written a few books for popular audiences on New Testament textual criticism, New Testament apocrypha and the rise of Christianity. He's been popular with the atheists in part because he's more open about his agnosticism than many other agnostic and atheist Biblical scholars and theologians, in part because of his talent for finding cameras making TV shows and documentaries and placing himself in front of them, and partly because he's generally an affable, likeable guy. But it appears that he just went and ticked off a large part of his audience, the part who didn't realize that he was firmly of the opinion that Jesus existed. The firmness of that opinion could be said to be the subject of Ehrman's newest book, Did Jesus Exist? I was never a big fan of Ehrman's, it always seemed to me that many atheists overestimated the distance between him and the theological-Biblical-historical mainstream and overlooked the sensationalism inherent in much of his work -- for example, the way he suggested to unwary lay readers in his book Lost Scriptures that New Testament apocrypha represented an entire alternate history of early Christianity, while greatly underplaying the dates of these apocryphal books from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and even 6th centuries. By the 6th century it's beginning to be a stretch to talk about "early" Christianity, whether established or alternative. Ehrman hyped this non-existent alternate universe much like History Channel likes to do.

Back to Ehrman's latest book, about the historical Jesus. Ehrman is firmly convinced that Jesus was a real man and not a fictional character. This is not a change for Ehrman, he's held that opinion all along, but it appears that many of his atheist fans who are not of the same opinion were not yet aware of this. Indications of shock and disappointment are widespread. But it's more than just Ehrman making his opinion on this matter book-length clear. What stings even more for those who so long ago were his adoring atheist fans is that Ehrman doesn't state it as an opinion but as a fact: "Jesus certainly existed."

I was surprised by this too. If Ehrman had merely said that he was firmly convinced, implying that reasonable people may hold different opinions on the matter but that it seemed clear to him, that would have been one thing. But in the manner of traditional Christian theology and New Testament scholarship, Ehrman states that there is no controversy, no uncertainty.

But it's not merely that Ehrman declares the discussion to be over: he states as well, on no firm basis whatsoever if you ask me, that no accredited professor in the Western World "who teaches New Testament or Early Christianity or even Classics" disagrees with him. That already puts Ehrman into no-true-Scotsman territory. But he doesn't stop there. He compares those who disagree with him and the theological mainstream with Holocaust deniers and birthers.

Ehrman is quite simply wrong when he states that it's certain that Jesus existed. That's the part that hurts his admirers so. But in the larger context the more serious problem is that Ehrman is right when he states that the vast majority of his academic discipline agrees with him. He's wrong when he claims that this virtual unanimity extends to all academics with any competence in any fields related to ancient history. Flat wrong. But when it comes to Christian theology and New Testament studies, he's right that they're almost all on his side. And they almost all state their opinion not as an opinion but as a certainty. and many of them, perhaps not all, also verbally abuse anyone with the temerity to actually want to discuss the matter as if it were not settled.

170 years ago the Prussian government withdrew Bruno Bauer's permission to teach in their universities because he published works stating his opinion that Jesus may have been every bit as much a mythical construct as Abraham. In those 170 years much has changed for the better in freedom of expression. But Bart Ehrman has made it very clear how far theology and Biblical studies continue, not only to lag behind that progress, but to stifle it. Academics in those fields are not inclined to discuss the historicity of Jesus, and many of them are perfectly willing to behave with crude, medieval contempt toward anyone who does.

No History Here, Just Wild Speculation. Plus My Own Thoughts

Over and over again in the writings of modern and contemporary theologians and Biblical scholars, one reads the assertions that neither Jesus nor his disciples could read or write any Greek, that maybe some of them could read some Hebrew, but that most likely the only language they were really fluent in was Aramaic.

You get this even from the most supposedly enlightened people in these specialties. The ones who freely admit that the chronology of the Gospels is very suspect and that there was no census bringing Joseph and his pregnant bride Mary to Bethlehem, and no Slaughter of the Innocents, that the story of the Slaughter of the Innocents is clearly borrowed from the equally-fictitious story from the infancy of Moses, who himself may never existed. These scholars do not believe in any miracles, neither walking on water nor Resurrection nor healing by laying on of hands, and they will tell you that Jesus probably never said most of the things the New Testament says he said, and even that some of the 12 Apostles may be fictitious. But it's certain, they say, that Jesus existed, and also certain that he couldn't read or speak Greek.

Finally, finally, these days you can be a Christian theologian or a New Testament scholar and say publicly that you're actually not certain that Jesus existed and still keep your job. And so some people in those fields are saying it, more than the few who said it before and were fired, and then, as if that weren't bad enough, ridiculed in unison by their former colleagues. The ridicule is still par for the course. But listen closely to the average theologian or Biblical scholar scornfully dismissing a black sheep who says it's not certain that Jesus existed, and see if the reaction extends beyond dismissal to any actual explanation of why doubt is ridiculous on this point. All I ever see is the peremptory dismissal.

Even from the ones who cast doubt on almost everything the Gospels say, one encounters this certainty that Jesus' existence is well-established historical fact. Uh, excuse me, established how exactly? What sources do we have besides those accounts you just finished trashing when it comes to their historical reliability? That's right -- none. But they -- the current academic mainstream -- don't stop at being certain he existed, they're currently also certain that he was preaching political revolution and socialism, and that he like his father was more of a day laborer than an actual skilled carpenter, and that the whole family was veryvery poor, and that Jesus neither wrote nor spoke Greek, and maybe not even Hebrew either.

Where did they get all this? Mostly from our increasing knowledge of what a typical 1st-century Jewish peasant living in a small town near Jerusalem was like. They've decided to agree that Jesus was a typical peasant. There's no logical reason to make these positive assumptions. There are only contemporary theological reasons. In short: they pulled all of that right out of their butts.

I say: we don't know. We don't know whether Jesus existed, and if he did, we don't know how much of the information in the Gospels is true, much less things not mentioned in the Gospels such as whether or not he could read and speak Greek.

If Jesus existed, then, it seems to me, contemporary theology is wrong. If he existed, then most likely the last thing he was was typical.

There is the story of Jesus' family coming to Jerusalem when he was 12, and Jesus going to the Temple and amazing the elders with his learning. There is no mention in the Gospels of what Jesus did between the ages of 12 and 30. There are mentions of a wealthy friend of his, Joseph of Arimathea. Maybe Jesus could read Hebrew quite well by age 12, and could talk about the Bible like a scholar. That's the sort of thing which would have amazed elders at the Temple. Maybe a rich man, such as Joseph of Aremathea, took an interest in this bright young lad and offered to educate him. That's the sort of thing which has happened to a few lucky bright poor children since long before Jesus' time. Maybe Jesus spent 18 years at Joseph's house, happily burrowing through mountains of codices and scrolls, learning Greeka and Latin as well as Hebrew.

I've often wondered about that conversation between Jesus and Pilate. Did they communicate through an interpreter? Or did Pilate know some Hebrew or Aramaic? Or did Jesus know some Greek or Hebrew?

Only lately I've begun to wonder whether people such as Pilate or Herod would have condescended to speak to a typical peasant or day-laborer at all. It's embarrassing that it took me so long to wonder about that. But if Jesus was not just a typical peon, but a highly-educated young man who for the last few years had returned to the milieu of his early childhood, an articulate fellow who spoke good Greek, and possibly even good Latin, in addition to his native Aramaic -- well, that sort of person would be much more likely to pique the interest of the governor of the entire province, and cause him to take a few minutes out of his busy day of plotting against other politicians and playing in his harem, wouldn't he?

What's that? You say that I'm speculating very freely here, extrapolating from very, very little concrete evidence? Why thank you, that would put me on a par with the leading Jesus scholars of our day. Except that I freely acknowledge that the picture I've just spun is only one of many possible versions of the beginning of Christianity, including the distinct possibility that Jesus never existed at all.