Historicity News: Changing Tides
This is the last of three posts covering news in the historicity-of-Jesus debate (for the first see Thallus et Alius and for the second see Notable Books). Here I will discuss two significant developments in the Jesus historicity/mythicism debate, and one more tangentially related.
The biggest news is that the renowned biblical historian and New Testament expert Thomas Brodie (author of The Birthing of the New Testament [2004] and Director of the Dominican Biblical Centre, in affiliation with the University of Limerick, Ireland) has just come out as a Jesus mythicist. He has a new book that explicitly argues that Jesus never historically existed: Thomas Brodie, Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: A Memoir of a Discovery (published by the respected academic press Sheffield-Phoenix). This is a huge development. His conclusion: “it is already possible and necessary to draw a conclusion: it is that, bluntly, Jesus did not exist as a historical individual.” Certainly I will review this book as soon as I receive a copy and get through it.
At the same time, Philip Davies, Emeritus Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield, England, published an article with the online journal The Bible and Interpretation, entitled “Did Jesus Exist?,” in response to Bart Ehrman’s book of the same title (which my more avid readers will know I tore up as a total hack job) and the opposing view represented in Thompson & Verenna’s Is This Not the Carpenter? and the subsequent mistreatment of Thompson over this. Davies affirms that he believes in the historicity of Jesus. But he is alarmed by Ehrman’s rhetoric and his implied threats against the professions of anyone who would dare question the historicity of Jesus, and the treatment of Thompson in particular (most chilling given how all this had happened to Thompson before, in the most appalling way: see my next news item below).
Davies writes:
Ehrman’s response to Thompson’s The Mythic Past shows (if it needed to be shown), not that the matter is beyond dispute, but that the whole idea of raising this question needs to be attacked, ad hominem, as something outrageous. This is precisely the tactic [the Old Testament] anti-minimalists tried twenty years ago: their targets were ‘amateurs’, ‘incompetent’, and could be ignored. The ‘amateurs’ are now all retired professors, while virtually everyone else in the field has become minimalist (if in most cases grudgingly and tacitly). So, as the saying goes, déjà vu all over again.
And then concludes:
I don’t think, however, that in another 20 years there will be a consensus that Jesus did not exist, or even possibly didn’t exist, but a recognition that his existence is not entirely certain would nudge Jesus scholarship towards academic respectability.
Davies defends Thompson’s work on this matter, and argues the whole debate should be taken seriously and not condemned as the work of amateurs. He acknowledges that in fact the evidence for historicity is rather weak and extremely problematic, and not at all cut-and-dried, and in no way warrants the kind of rhetoric coming from the likes of Ehrman. He says, in fact, that admitting it’s possible Jesus didn’t exist is the only way the field can maintain academic respectability.
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