Did Jesus Exist? with Richard Carrier and me on Unbelievable?

Premier Christian Radio's Unbelievable? with Justin Brierly today featured a discussion about the historicity of Jesus with Richard Carrier and me. You can listen here:

Unbelievable? Did Jesus Exist?  Richard Carrier vs. Mark Goodacre

Richard Carrier is the world's foremost proponent of the "mythicist" view of Jesus - that he never actually existed as a historical person. He explains his theory that St. Paul only ever spoke of Jesus in the spiritual realm and that the Gospels are "extended parables". Mark Goodacre is NT professor at Duke University. He contends that Carrier's mythicist view is extrememly far fetched and the evidence for the historical Jesus is beyond reasonable doubt.

How would Jesus have proved his own existence?

I like to dabble in the discussions on Jesus' existence from time to time, all the more so since I had a stab at putting together my own thoughts in NT Pod 47: Did Jesus Exist? last year.  James McGrath continues to keep the issue alive in his blog and his latest post Mythicism Around the Blogosphere provides links to recent activity.  I particularly enjoyed Loren Rosson's post on The Existence of Jesus and Doug Chaplin's Inventing the Mythical Jesus. Of course a lot of the discussion comes on the back of the new book by Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, which I was lucky enough to read and comment on in manuscript.

If I were in facetious mood, I would say: If only people were as interested in things that really matter, like the existence of Q!   I must admit that the question of the existence of Jesus strikes me as an extraordinary one.  Are there any other ancient figures about whom we torture ourselves in this way?  In my podcast on the topic, I said that in some respects it is a good question because it can keep us honest.  It pushes us to wrestle with the primary sources and to reflect on the nature of ancient history.  These are good things.  But good academic study is often a matter of asking good academic questions and it is not clear that the question "Did Jesus exist?" always produces the best academic discussions.

I am tempted to say that the problem with the question "Did Jesus exist?" is that it depends what we mean by "Jesus".  Where mythicism has popular appeal is in providing an antidote to fundamentalist Christianity and a particular version of a wonder-working superman. Most scholars don't believe in the fundamentalists' Jesus, practically by definition.  For those who do not know a lot about New Testament scholarship, mythicism can provide a refreshing one-stop shop for dealing with something they find problematic on other grounds.  I am not here talking about those who publish on mythicism as much as those who find their works appealing.

Even if we refine the question to "Did the historical Jesus exist?", we still don't have an easy time of it.  There are so many different reconstructions of the historical Jesus, each one only an approximation of what the historian can know on the basis of the extant sources.  There are lots of historical Jesuses that I do not believe in.  I don't believe in Crossan's historical Jesus because I don't believe in his sources.  I don't believe in Wright's historical Jesus because he believes all his sources.  I don't believe in Morton Smith's historical Jesus because he composed one of his sources.

And in this context, the word "exist" means what?  There's a kind of absurd reductionism in trying to load complex historical analysis of ancient source material into one natty little question.  I don't have any doubt whatsoever that the primary sources are, ultimately, witnessing to traditions some of which emerged in connection with Jesus of Nazareth but the really interesting work is not going to emerge from asking the question "Did Jesus exist?"

I wonder what Jesus would have made of the question?  How would he have established his own existence?  Herod the Tetrarch was rumoured to have worried that the figure they were calling Jesus might actually be John the Baptist risen from the dead.  John the Baptist is reported to have worried about who Jesus was too -- was he the coming one, or should they expect somebody else?  And according to the accounts of Jesus' arrest, they needed Judas to identify which one was Jesus, like Spartacus, or Brian.  

There is a delightful Roman joke that Mary Beard tells in her fantastic recent series Meet the Romans, here reported in The Guardian,

Beard tells me a Roman joke. "A guy meets another in the street and says: 'I thought you were dead.' The bloke says: 'Can't you see I'm alive?' The first replies: 'But the person who told me you were dead is more reliable than you.'" It slayed them in 4BC Rome. Beard takes the joke to have a serious point: "You realise that in Roman society, where there were no ID cards or passports, proving your existence required different criteria. The evidence of a reliable person was perhaps the strongest you had. It was very different from our society, but who's to say it was worse?"

I love this joke, and I like the lesson that Beard draws from it.  And it reminds us once again, as if we needed it, that doing ancient history is not like doing modern history.  The vast majority of ordinary punters made no impact on the archaeological record from antiquity.  Their impact, their "existence", if you like, can only be measured in so far as they influenced the memories of those who told their stories, and only in so far as those embellished, interpreted, creative memories ultimately found their way into the texts that managed to survive.

NT Pod 47: Did Jesus Exist?

The first episode of the NT Pod in 2011 came out last night and it is headed "Did Jesus exist?"  It is a short series of reflections on the so-called "mythicist" case with specific reference to two mythicists I have met, George Wells and Timothy Freke.  I first met Tim on Channel 4's Right to Reply, in 2001, when he had recorded a piece critical of the BBC's Son of God  (Jesus: The Complete Story in the USA).  His piece criticized the BBC for not tackling the mythicist case head-on, and the article also featured short critiques of the series from Tom Wright and Judith Lieu.  I was in the studio with Right to Reply presenter Roger Boulton, co-producer of Son of God Michael Wakelin and Timothy Freke.

I also reflect briefly on an earlier appearance on Right to Reply, back in 1984, when I was just 17.  I was responding to the series Jesus: The Evidence, which featured several scholars of interest -- Geza Vermes, Helmut Koester, Dennis Nineham, Morton Smith.  I was a precocious schoolboy and I recorded my little piece in the "video box" in Charlotte Street in London and was amazed when they decided to include it in the programme the next day.  The video clip is long since lost (thank goodness), but the series itself survives in several scratchy Youtube versions, which I have blogged about on several occasions (previous blog posts on this series here).  It looks peculiarly dated for something not that old, but it retains a real fascination for me.  As far as I know, it is the only series ever to provide mini-reconstructions of the life of Rudolf Bultmann.

Anyway, the first episode of Jesus: The Evidence featured George Wells (Youtube excerpt of the Wells segement here) and I discuss that in the latest podcast.  Twenty years later, I got to meet George Wells in London when he graciously came along to listen at a lecture series day in London which I shared with John Barton and John Muddiman.  I greatly enjoyed our chat.

Wading into an area like Jesus mythicism is, of course, a risky business, but I think it is worthwhile, not least because it is something that can keep Historical Jesus scholars honest.  I think it helps us to reflect too on the nature of ancient history.  This episode came about because I am about to begin teaching my course on the Historical Jesus this week, and it's a topic that will be in my thinking.

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