Rudolf Augstein, who died a few years ago, was best known as the publisher and editor in chief of Der Spiegel, Germany's most influential news magazine. Augstein also wrote a huge bestseller, Jesus Menschensohn (Jesus Son of Man), first published in the 1970's, in which he both points out how the work of Biblical scholars has made room for doubts about whether Jesus existed at all, and accuses those scholars of saying different things to the public than what they say privately, or in academic writings which are so full of jargon that the general public can't understand them. Anyway, either Augstein misquotes Albert Schweitzer in this book, or Schweitzer was a mythicist (in the sense that Schweitzer was not entirely convinced that Jesus existed, which is how the term seems to be used by Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan); according to Augstein, Schweitzer, in his book Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, wrote:
"Das moderne Christentum muss von vornherein und immer mit der Möglichkeit einer eventuellen Preisgabe der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu rechnen." ("Modern Christianity, right from the beginning and always, must reckon with the possibility that the belief in the historicity of Jesus might eventually have to be abandoned.")
Crossan and Ehrman can't be unfamiliar with Schweitzer's book, can they? It's only just the most famous and standard work ever published in their field.
Ah, but they'll say that Bultmann settled it all, sometime after Schweitzer's magnum opus was published. Ask them where and when and how exactly Bultmann settled it all, and they'll get angry. And you won't get a sensible answer. You'll be told that it happened around the 1930's and to buzz off. You might well also be told that the sentence Augstein quoted from Schweitzer does not mean what it appears to mean.
Not that Crossan and Ehrman are any worse in this regard than most New Testament scholars. Maybe it's somewhat less cuckoo in some parts of Europe, because of popular books like Augstein's, and also because there might be more academic mythicists (defining mythicists as all the people who aren't entirely sure that Jesus existed, and say so right out loud in public) in Europe than in the US, although they're a minority over there as well. Apparently a poll of German adults in the 1990's found that 9% of them weren't sure that Jesus existed. Was that more or less than in the US?
Ah but of course there's always the confusion of the theological with the historical every time this topic is raised in public. Did those 9% mean that there never was a Jesus of Nazareth, that someone made him up, or just that Jesus wasn't the miracle-working, resurrected Son of God? In the debate I'm trying to have with people like Crossan and Ehrman -- trying, but they don't want to discuss it, they'd rather compare me to a conspiracy theorist or Holocaust denier -- approximately 100% of those on both side, both those who are sure that Jesus existed and those who aren't, believe that Jesus wasn't the miracle-working, resurrected Son of God. The stuff about God and the miracles, etc, all of that is a theological question. I'm talking about an historical one. If your answer is, "Sure, there was a dude named Jesus, but he wasn't the miracle-working, resurrected Son of God," then you're on Crossan's and Ehrman's side, and Schweitzer and Augstein and I are on the opposing side. Because we're not sure that there was a dude named Jesus who formed the basis of the New Testament stories even though he was completely non-magical. (I keep explaining the distinction between the theological and historical discussions over and over in this blog, because it seems that a very great many people see this historical discussion going on all over the place these days, and think it's the theological discussion. I have nothing against people having that theological discussion. It's just a different discussion than this one.)
It's cuckoo in part because it's the very same Biblical scholars such as Crossan and Ehrman, with their researches showing us how we have less and less reason to believe that the historical Jesus resembles the Jesus of the New Testament, who have led people to pose the perfectly reasonable question about whether Jesus existed at all. They've led us to that question, and now they're angry at us for asking it.
And in denial, apparently, about how Schweitzer asked the question 100 years ago. And about how David Friedrich Strauss practically came right out and asked it 180 years ago in his book Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (and was immediately asked to take a long, long vacation from his university post), even though Strauss' work has become much, much more popular and uncontroversial among Biblical scholars over the course of the past 180 years.
Showing posts with label rudolf augstein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rudolf augstein. Show all posts
Monday, July 20, 2015
Friday, March 23, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Inventing Jesus
Lately I've been obsessed with the theory that Christianity was actually begun, not by Jesus, but by St Paul, and that Jesus may actually be a fictional character created by Paul.
The earliest Christian writings are those of Paul, and not those of Jesus's disciples. That seems a little odd to me. But then, as far as that goes, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Who wrote them? And why don't people ask this more often?
Perhaps Christianity began with Paul's vision of Christ on the road to Damascus. This would mean, of course, that some details of Paul's earlier biography had to have been changed -- he could have persecuted heretics before then, but not Christians. This does not seem like a big difficulty to me, compared to all the miracles and coincidences and historical inaccuracies which Christian apologists now have to explain away if they wish to assign any historical credibility to the traditional New Testament.
It seems to me that the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in AD 70 and the expulsion of the Jews from their capital and holy city must have been a tremendously traumatic experience, especially for the more pious ones. And it is in traumatic times that people are most susceptible to myth. This natural susceptibility and the drastic disruption of historical records which must have accompanied the disaster of AD 70 seem to me to place the burden of proof on the topic of Jesus historicity more on the side of those who argue that He did exist, than generally seems to be the case in even the most serious discussions of early Christianity.
So, one thing I'm curious about is how many other people before me have wondered whether St Paul made it all up. It seems to me like a rather obvious possibility and one which would explain a lot which otherwise is mysterious, including the way Paul absolutely dominates early Christian theology.
I also wonder whether it is hard to be taken seriously among American biblical scholars if one questions Jesus's existence, and whether perhaps that theory is more widely accepted among the scholars, and perhaps even the churches, of countries other than my native USA.
One thing which makes me particularly dubious of Jesus' actual existence is how his biography seems to be cobbled together from Old Testament prophecy -- his supposedly being a descendant of David, being born in Bethlehem but living in Nazareth -- and borrowings from the biographies of others: as with Moses, an evil king supposedly had all male babies in the land killed in order to rid himself of a prophecied challenge to his rule. (I find it very hard to believe that either Pharaoh or Herod did any such thing. Attempting something like that is the sort of thing which gets kings overthrown and killed.) As with Mithras, Jesus was born to a virgin around the winter solstice. As with Dionysis, He returned from the dead in the spring as a savior. Take away the parts of the story of Jesus which are borrowed from other stories, and, it seems to me, little is left. This is more characteristic of fictional characters than of actual people.
The most prominent figure I know of who has expressed doubts about Jesus' existence is Rudolf Augstein, the publisher of the Spiegel, the most influential news magazine of postwar Germany. In 1972 he published a book entitled Jesus Menschensohn (Jesus Son of Man), which appeared in a revised version in 1999. The second-most famous would have to be Bruno Bauer, who is most famous for his feud with Karl Marx.
Atheists and agnostics -- and progressive Moslems and modern Pagans and what have you -- who are convinced that Jesus never existed -- for example, there is a www.jesusneverexisted.com -- these people I find just as unconvincing as the believers, and for very similar reasons. It's just a theory, I'm not convinced about anything one way or the other here. I'm not convinced that there wasn't actually a wandering preacher named Jesus who got himself crucified by Pilate. As far as that goes: there were lots of wandering preachers in Judea and Galilee and environs at that time, and Jesus was a very common name, and so, it seems quite possible to me that several different wandering preachers named Jesus could have gotten themselves crucified by Pilate, in which case the biographies of several of them could have contributed to the story of Jesus. On the other hand, if the story of Jesus is mythical, 100% mythical as opposed to being someone's actual biography with mythical elements added, then someone had to create that myth, no?
James George Frazer, in a footnote in volume IX, p. 412 of the unabridged version of The Golden Bough,
published in 1920, dismisses the notion that Jesus was not an historical figure, dismisses it in fact quite emphatically:
As my views on this subject appear to have been strangely misunderstood, I desire to point out explicitly that my theory assumes the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth as a great religious and moral teacher, who founded Christianity and was crucified at Jerusalem under the governorship of Pontius Pilate. The testimony of the Gospels, confirmed by the hostile evidence of Tactius (Annals, xv. 44) and the younger Pliny (Epist. x. 96), appears amply sufficient to establish these facts to the satisfaction of all unprejudiced enquirers. It is only the details of the life and death of Christ that remain, and will probably always remain, shrouded in the mists of uncertainty. The doubts which have been cast on the historical reality of Jesus are in my judgement unworthy of serious attention. Quite apart from the positive evidence of history and tradition, the origin of a great religious and moral reform is inexplicable without the personal existence of a great reformer. To dissolve the founder of Christianity into a myth, as some would do, is hardly less absurd than it would be to do the same for Mohammed, Luther, and Calvin. Such dissolving views are for the most part the dreams of students who know the great world chiefly through its pale reflection in books. These extravagances of skepticism have been well exposed by Professor C.F. Lehmann-Haupt in his Israel, seine Entwicklung im Rahmen der Weltgeschichte (Tubingen, 1911), pp. 275-285
-- but at least he acknowledges that the question has been raised. The makers of the PBS series From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians
do not. In fact, in the opening minutes of the program, the narration, written by Marilyn Mellowes, flatly states: "We know[...]" -- that he was born over 2,000 years ago, that he lived in Palestine, was baptized, became a preacher and was publicly executed. "It is a fact" that Jesus was a subject of the Roman Empire.
We know. It's a fact. Huh. Despite such quibbles, From Jesus to Christ is still the best documentary about early Christianity of which I know.
(I'm not familiar with Professor Lehmann-Haupt's book, not yet, but I include Frazer's reference to it in my quotation from The Golden Bough just in case anyone is interested.)
Frazer:
[...]the origin of a great religious and moral reform is inexplicable without the personal existence of a great reformer.
Well, I don't doubt the existence of St Paul.
The earliest Christian writings are those of Paul, and not those of Jesus's disciples. That seems a little odd to me. But then, as far as that goes, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Who wrote them? And why don't people ask this more often?
Perhaps Christianity began with Paul's vision of Christ on the road to Damascus. This would mean, of course, that some details of Paul's earlier biography had to have been changed -- he could have persecuted heretics before then, but not Christians. This does not seem like a big difficulty to me, compared to all the miracles and coincidences and historical inaccuracies which Christian apologists now have to explain away if they wish to assign any historical credibility to the traditional New Testament.
It seems to me that the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in AD 70 and the expulsion of the Jews from their capital and holy city must have been a tremendously traumatic experience, especially for the more pious ones. And it is in traumatic times that people are most susceptible to myth. This natural susceptibility and the drastic disruption of historical records which must have accompanied the disaster of AD 70 seem to me to place the burden of proof on the topic of Jesus historicity more on the side of those who argue that He did exist, than generally seems to be the case in even the most serious discussions of early Christianity.
So, one thing I'm curious about is how many other people before me have wondered whether St Paul made it all up. It seems to me like a rather obvious possibility and one which would explain a lot which otherwise is mysterious, including the way Paul absolutely dominates early Christian theology.
I also wonder whether it is hard to be taken seriously among American biblical scholars if one questions Jesus's existence, and whether perhaps that theory is more widely accepted among the scholars, and perhaps even the churches, of countries other than my native USA.
One thing which makes me particularly dubious of Jesus' actual existence is how his biography seems to be cobbled together from Old Testament prophecy -- his supposedly being a descendant of David, being born in Bethlehem but living in Nazareth -- and borrowings from the biographies of others: as with Moses, an evil king supposedly had all male babies in the land killed in order to rid himself of a prophecied challenge to his rule. (I find it very hard to believe that either Pharaoh or Herod did any such thing. Attempting something like that is the sort of thing which gets kings overthrown and killed.) As with Mithras, Jesus was born to a virgin around the winter solstice. As with Dionysis, He returned from the dead in the spring as a savior. Take away the parts of the story of Jesus which are borrowed from other stories, and, it seems to me, little is left. This is more characteristic of fictional characters than of actual people.
The most prominent figure I know of who has expressed doubts about Jesus' existence is Rudolf Augstein, the publisher of the Spiegel, the most influential news magazine of postwar Germany. In 1972 he published a book entitled Jesus Menschensohn (Jesus Son of Man), which appeared in a revised version in 1999. The second-most famous would have to be Bruno Bauer, who is most famous for his feud with Karl Marx.
Atheists and agnostics -- and progressive Moslems and modern Pagans and what have you -- who are convinced that Jesus never existed -- for example, there is a www.jesusneverexisted.com -- these people I find just as unconvincing as the believers, and for very similar reasons. It's just a theory, I'm not convinced about anything one way or the other here. I'm not convinced that there wasn't actually a wandering preacher named Jesus who got himself crucified by Pilate. As far as that goes: there were lots of wandering preachers in Judea and Galilee and environs at that time, and Jesus was a very common name, and so, it seems quite possible to me that several different wandering preachers named Jesus could have gotten themselves crucified by Pilate, in which case the biographies of several of them could have contributed to the story of Jesus. On the other hand, if the story of Jesus is mythical, 100% mythical as opposed to being someone's actual biography with mythical elements added, then someone had to create that myth, no?
James George Frazer, in a footnote in volume IX, p. 412 of the unabridged version of The Golden Bough,
published in 1920, dismisses the notion that Jesus was not an historical figure, dismisses it in fact quite emphatically:As my views on this subject appear to have been strangely misunderstood, I desire to point out explicitly that my theory assumes the historical reality of Jesus of Nazareth as a great religious and moral teacher, who founded Christianity and was crucified at Jerusalem under the governorship of Pontius Pilate. The testimony of the Gospels, confirmed by the hostile evidence of Tactius (Annals, xv. 44) and the younger Pliny (Epist. x. 96), appears amply sufficient to establish these facts to the satisfaction of all unprejudiced enquirers. It is only the details of the life and death of Christ that remain, and will probably always remain, shrouded in the mists of uncertainty. The doubts which have been cast on the historical reality of Jesus are in my judgement unworthy of serious attention. Quite apart from the positive evidence of history and tradition, the origin of a great religious and moral reform is inexplicable without the personal existence of a great reformer. To dissolve the founder of Christianity into a myth, as some would do, is hardly less absurd than it would be to do the same for Mohammed, Luther, and Calvin. Such dissolving views are for the most part the dreams of students who know the great world chiefly through its pale reflection in books. These extravagances of skepticism have been well exposed by Professor C.F. Lehmann-Haupt in his Israel, seine Entwicklung im Rahmen der Weltgeschichte (Tubingen, 1911), pp. 275-285
-- but at least he acknowledges that the question has been raised. The makers of the PBS series From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians
do not. In fact, in the opening minutes of the program, the narration, written by Marilyn Mellowes, flatly states: "We know[...]" -- that he was born over 2,000 years ago, that he lived in Palestine, was baptized, became a preacher and was publicly executed. "It is a fact" that Jesus was a subject of the Roman Empire.We know. It's a fact. Huh. Despite such quibbles, From Jesus to Christ is still the best documentary about early Christianity of which I know.
(I'm not familiar with Professor Lehmann-Haupt's book, not yet, but I include Frazer's reference to it in my quotation from The Golden Bough just in case anyone is interested.)
Frazer:
[...]the origin of a great religious and moral reform is inexplicable without the personal existence of a great reformer.
Well, I don't doubt the existence of St Paul.
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