I’ve been learning so much about Paul this year. Things that never ever occurred to me as a believer, and which I’ve never heard any believer address, are, like a lot of things, common knowledge to the biblical scholarship community. (Well, – the basis of a common knowledge upon which debate rages as to the details and ramifications, but… you get the point. Nothing is unanimous in scholarship.)
I’m fascinated by what I’m becoming aware of about the differences between Paul’s Christianity, ie that which became dominant, and some other early versions. It’s an interesting matter of context. Of course, as atheists, we are often accused of taking the scriptures out of context and misrepresenting them or misinterpreting them. Well, if what I’ve been reading has any merit, and it apparently does, it turns out I’m guilty as charged, and have been ever since I was a believer, and even before that.
The context within which Paul wrote many all of his epistles, is one in which vastly different versions of Jesus-belief were fighting for supremacy. Particularly, a fight was raging over whether a Gentile needed to become a Jew, and partake in all the Jewish rituals and ‘initiations’ (those pertaining to foreskins and sharp implements, for example, to put it bluntly,… OUCH!) before he could be saved in Jesus. Paul said no, faith alone was adequate without “works”. Yes, the faith/works debate, (in which the book of James has long been seen to take a contradictory view to that of Paul) is more about whether you can keep your foreskin and eat certain meats, than whether you can earn your way into heaven by being nice. It’s an argument about how Jewishly you need to act. THAT’s what was meant by ‘works’. We know that, because degrees of adherence to the Jewish laws and traditions was one of the main things that separated the early sects.
Paul was apparently having a hard time convincing his followers to accept his view and reject the views of other groups, such as that which later came to be known as the Ebionites; who were WAY Jewish and kept all the customs and laws alive. Who else? Well,… yes, the Ebionites, whom you probably have not heard, and… Peter, James the brother of Jesus, and the other original 11 Apostles, whom you might have; who, it seems, didn’t quite see things the same way that Paul did. There was a very long and very heated dispute between them. I’ve found recently that reading Paul’s letters with that context in mind really has them making a lot more sense. They are suddenly about something real: a historically verified battle of ideas that we know took place. I’ve had The letter to the Galatians, particularly, really jump off the page at me, reading it through the lens of a proper historical context.
Here are some wonderful excerpts from a book I’ve been reading this year, Bart Ehrman’s “Lost Christianities”. (Interesting, and telling, that my spell-checker doesn’t recognize the second word of that title).
According to Paul, a person is made right with God only by faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection, not by following any of the deeds prescribed by the Jewish Law. And this applies to both Jews and Gentiles. Since Jesus alone is the way of salvation, then anyone who tries to follow the Law in order to be right with God has misunderstood the gospel and probably lost his or her salvation (Gal 1:6-9, 5:4)…
…Paul fired off a white hot anger letter in response to his “Judaizing” opponents in Galatia, in which he went on the attack against these “false teachers”, who, in his judgement, had corrupted the true gospel of Christ and stood accursed before God. This letter, of course, made it into the new Testament, and so most people simply take it at face value: Paul’s opponents were corrupters of the gospel and accursed by God…. One of our greatest losses is a written response from one of them. But if any such reply was made, it has disappeared for ever. One should always bear in mind that in this very letter of Galatians Paul indicates that he confronted Peter over just such issues (Gal. 2:11-14). He disagreed, that is, even with Jesus’ closest disciple on the matter. What would Peter have said in response? Regrettably, once again, we can never know, since all we have is Paul’s version.
At the same time, whereas only Paul’s account all his confrontation with Peter and the Judaizing missionaries of Galatia survives, at one time numerous positions were represented… A close reading of our surviving sources shows that one of our Gospels, at least, appears to represent an alternative point of view.
… Matthew’s Gospel is frequently thought of as the most Jewish of the Gospels of the New Testament. This account of Jesus’ life and death goes to extraordinary lengths to highlight the Jewishness of Jesus…. [eg, its opening genealogy]. Time and again it quotes the Jewish scriptures to show that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish God in fulfillment of the Jewish scriptures.
[Ehrman quotes, in full, Matthew's (5:17-20) record of Jesus insisting that the Jewish law be kept... "Not the smallest letter or the smallest stroke of a letter will pass away from the Law until all has taken place." Nothing comparable exists in any of the other (less “Jewish”) gospels.]
For Matthew, the entire Jewish Law needs to be kept, down to the smallest letter. The Pharisees, in fact, are blamed not for keeping the Law but for not keeping it well enough. It is worth noting that in this Gospel, when a rich man comes up to Jesus and asks him how to have eternal life, Jesus tells him that if he wants to live eternally he must keep the commandments of the Law (19:17). One might wonder: if the same person approached Paul with the same question 20 years later, what would he have said? Would he have told him to keep the Law? His own writings give a clear answer: decidedly not. (cf. Rom 3:10; Gal 2:15-16).
Ehrman, Bart. 2003 “Lost Christianities”, Oxford University Press. p98-99
How fascinating, that even within the early Christian writings that survived and came to be considered canonical, there is evidence of serious dissent and disagreement. More fascinating, though, is that it is between Paul and Peter, (and perhaps the author or later ‘editor’ of Matthew, too), and that there were such differing, and conflicting ideas about the person and teaching of Jesus. Can you imagine how Peter and the apostles must have felt, being ‘upstaged’, as it was, by some late-comer who never even MET the person they’d followed around for years and were devoting their lives to?
It turns out that the Scriptures themselves, in the case of Paul’s epistles at least, were largely attempts to argue a case in contrast to a very specific “heresy” which is now largely gone, and has been these past 1600 years or so. Amazing to think that the heretics that Paul’s version of Christianity eventually triumphed over were Jesus’ apostles, no less.
They never taught me this in church. Has it been put on the curriculum since I left?
[I’ll be writing more about this. I’ve just started another book, a brand new one hot off the press, called “Jesus and Paul”, by James Tabor, of UNC (Charlotte) . It is almost unputdownable. It is especially interesting in the ways that it slightly deviates from the ideas of Ehrman and others I’ve read and heard on this topic. Wonderful! I have no idea why this fascinates me so much, but oh, how it does.]
I used to read and understand the New Testament as being God’s timeless word and instruction for my own faith. I used to meditate deeply upon passages and even upon the individual words, poring over them meticulously, allowing (I thought) the Holy Spirit to help supernaturally reveal their deeper meanings to me – prayerfully hoping to allow those words to transform me from the inside out into someone fit to partake in the task of furthering God’s kingdom. It turns out, rather, that it was mainly an angry and frustrated Paul venting over a very specific and contemporaneous theological dispute to do with Jewish rituals and foreskins; and boasting that he knew Jesus better than everyone else, because he’d seen him in visions. (The man could very well have been a diagnosable nut-case, but that’s another story.)
Perhaps people who read Paul’s epistles the way I used to ought to be aware of the CONTEXT in which those epistles were written, and not take them OUT OF IT!
45 comments
Skip to comment form ↓
Nuytsia
December 20, 2012 at 1:29 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Well that’s a bit spooky. I’ve just been listening to an old episode (53) of the Reasonable Doubts podcast that talks about this very issue.
I remember writing about Paul for a school many, many years ago. Wish I’d known about all this. It would have made my report far more interesting.
Kilian Hekhuis
December 20, 2012 at 1:43 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Well, since Jesus never existed, and therefore his apostles never existed either, and since Paul’s letters were written by different authors (though the bulk of them may be by a single one), we’re not exactly discussing history. Nothing “amazing” here.
latsot
December 20, 2012 at 2:34 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Kilian Hekhuis:
Kind of harsh. NSC was talking about material that’s new to him and would likely be news to a lot of Christians. The main thing I take from this post is that learning is cool and can give us a new perspective. From which, of course, more learning can occur. Win twotime, that’s amazing enough for me.
The historical perspective can still be useful even in fiction. We interpret Shakespeare in the light of history, for example. The worry is that the documents themselves are being used as a partial source of historical context. Care is needed. But to say that these documents (the bible in particular but Shakespeare’s works too) are not permissible as historical evidence seems foolish. Fiction can help us understand history and vice versa.
NSC’s admission that he might have had it wrong as both a believer and an unbeliever is an interesting one and worthy of some thought, I think.
Nathair
December 20, 2012 at 2:46 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
This is a “Paging Richard Carrier” moment if ever I saw one.
wholething
December 20, 2012 at 3:25 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
I have been looking a Galatians for the last month or so. I’m beginning to think Mark was familiar with that epistle. We find “abba, Father” and “love your neighbor as yourself” in both. (James also has “love your neighbor as yourself” from Leviticus, so that epistle might be in response to Paul.) Peter, James and John are the mentioned prominently in Galatians 1 and 2 and they are the only disciples to have large roles in Mark with personalities that could have come from Galatians. Mark seems to have used Paul’s side of the argument in Mark 7:19, about abolishing the food laws, which makes the Galatians argument strange as Peter and James should have agreed with Paul, if it had actually happened.
IIRC, Ehrman laments that we don’t have Peter’s response but Paul doesn’t claim to have won the argument and, letting Barnabas referee, Paul tells us he was led astray.
As to why Paul’s version won out, he may have had a bigger footprint outside of Judaea. After the destruction of Jerusalem, the base of Paul’s opponents’ credibility would have been destoyed by the omen.
Paul never said that James was the brother of Jesus. Galatians 1:19 says “James, the brother of the Lord”. Paul used that form of the wrod for brother a dozen times, always in the metaphorical sense. If we look at all the forms of the word for “brother” in the Epistles, we find it about 200 times. The only uses for a literal sibling are Romans 16:15, where Paul is greeting someone’s sister, and in 1 John 3:16, about Cain killing his brother. Every other use is metaphorical.
We find the plural of the phrase “brothers of the Lord” in 1 Corinthians 9:5 in a list. A similar list is found in 1 Corinthians 15 where the “brothers of the Lord” corresponds to the Twelve (or the 500 or all of them). For these reasons, we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Paul meant a literal brother of the Lord.
In 2 Corinthians 11, Paul is again defending his credibility as an apostle as he is in Galatians and 1 Corinthians 9. He uses the term “super-apostles”. It seems to me that Paul may be casting aspersions, denigrating the Jerusalem bunch, using Doug Pirahna’s weapon – sarcasm, when using phrases like “brother of the Lord” and “super-apostles”. He seems to think they look at him condescendingly.
Shiresh
December 20, 2012 at 3:38 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
“Well, since Jesus never existed, and therefore his apostles never existed either, and since Paul’s letters were written by different authors (though the bulk of them may be by a single one), we’re not exactly discussing history. Nothing “amazing” here.”
So Kilian Hekhuis, you’re saying that Ehrman’s book is complete bullshit, and this article is nonsense from someone who credulously eat up a false history?
And that this paragraph:
“Paul was apparently having a hard time convincing his followers to accept his view and reject the views of other groups, such as that which later came to be known as the Ebionites; who were WAY Jewish and kept all the customs and laws alive. Who else? Well,… yes, the Ebionites, whom you probably have not heard, and… Peter, James the brother of Jesus, and the other original 11 Apostles, whom you might have; who, it seems, didn’t quite see things the same way that Paul did.”
Is ridiculous made up fantasy on the part of Ehrman and NonStampCollector?
Kilian Hekhuis
December 20, 2012 at 3:43 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
latsot: Perhaps, but NSC was presenting all this as historical fact, while it’s not, not even close. It’d be like dicussing that although the general opinion is that Little Red Riding Hood was eaten by the wolf, there used to be a dissident view that she escaped in time through the chimney.
Kilian Hekhuis
December 20, 2012 at 3:50 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
I’m with Richard Carrier as far as Ehrman goes. This article makes it clear that NSC thinks that Ehrman’s work is historical fact, while Ehrman is a very bad scholar.
NSC is paraphrasing Ehrman, I don’t think he made it up. I have already stated my opinion of Ehrman.
latsot
December 20, 2012 at 3:59 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Kilian Hekhuis:
“Perhaps, but NSC was presenting all this as historical fact,”
I think you might need to read just a little bit more carefully.
NSC states clearly that he’s becoming more familiar with some interpretations of scripture that were made in the light of historical analysis. He wasn’t presenting one single thing as historical fact, he was saying that if we look at what people wrote at the time in terms of the historical context – which we might argue about – then we might have a better understanding of some aspects of how these bad ideas developed.
Sorry to patronise you, but sweiously, read the article again.
MM
December 20, 2012 at 4:05 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Maybe this was in the post and I missed it, but the key issue that seems to be missing is the gentiles, which is where Paul’s ministry was focused. My understanding (admittedly unscholarly and dulled by years of atheism) is that the nature of Paul’s admonishment to Peter and the traditionalists wasn’t due strictly to their Judaizing, it was that they were attempting to Judaize gentile Christian converts. Paul’s view was that Jesus fulfilled Jewish law and established a new covenant based on faith, and it was this covenant that the gentiles were part of. The old Jewish laws were strictly between God and Jews, and were essentially made obsolete by the Crucifixion. Peter and his ilk had a hard time letting the Jewish traditions go and were forcing the minutiae of Jewish law, like meat preparation, onto gentiles…so it wasn’t so much “heresy” as it was the traditionalists conflating the old traditions with the new covenant and trying to make gentiles adhere to that as well.
trazan
December 20, 2012 at 4:16 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
(Bah, stupid html tags not doing what they say on the tin!)
Ehrman believes in the historicity of Jesus. I won’t bother reading him. Link to Richard Carrier critique: freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/667/ Dr Carrier seems not to be a very friendly person, so I don’t read much of him. jesusneverexisted.com has articles on the impossible Paul figure. The whole site is worth a read, I haven’t bought the book.
From Elaine Pagels “The Gnostic Gospels” I got the idea that the doctrines that gave the stronger organization eventually won out. The doctrine where you were able to continue eating the food you were used to and not having to cut your privates, might have had it easier to gain gentile followers.
Raging Bee
December 20, 2012 at 4:22 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Ehrman quotes, in full, Matthew’s (5:17-20) record of Jesus insisting that the Jewish law be kept…
I’m no scholar, but I really don’t think Jesus was talking about JEWISH laws here at all. The preceding 16 verses of this chapter were all the “Blessed are…for they shall have…” stuff. That’s not Jewish law he’s talking about, it’s the law of how God’s Universe works, and what happens to certain people as a consequence of their actions or desires. Jesus wasn’t saying everyone had to obey Jewish law, he was saying that God’s overall plan for the Universe was not changing with his arrival on Earth, and would not change until everything had run its God-given course to the pre-ordained end.
And I suspect he was saying all that in response to lots of people thinking Jesus was more revolutionary than he intended to be, and he had to make vague assurances like this to keep the movement he had inspired from going off the rails and maybe causing a civil war (something many people were justly afraid of at the time).
Maybe i”m just dumb, but this point seems ridiculously obvious to me: Jesus was NOT telling people they had to obey every sub-clause of Jewish law. He explicitly said otherwise on many other occasions.
BradC
December 20, 2012 at 4:31 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Other commenters have already alluded to this, but another idea growing in popularity is the idea that Paul believed Jesus died and was resurrected in a celestial realm, and never actually existed on earth. Lots of confusing verses in his epistles make more sense in this light.
The best (current) publication that explains this view is Earl Doherty’s book “Jesus Puzzle”.
Richard Carrier is currently working on a more scholarly support of this view, should be out next year.
A nice short summary of the support for this view by Adam Lee in this article:
http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/camel.html
BradC
December 20, 2012 at 4:40 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Oops, we were talking about Paul, but I quoted Hebrews. Follow the ebonmuse link to see lots of examples from Paul’s epistles.
wholething
December 20, 2012 at 4:49 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
@ 12 Raging Bee
It makes more sense if you skip the idea that the gospel writers knew anything about Jesus. Matthew is reading Q. Burton Mack discusses the Q as having three layers. Q1 is some random non-religious aphorisms. Q2 has some Christian flavor with curses and damnations, so they think it may have been added during the Roman War with Jerusalem. Q3 are the apocalyptic verses added after the war. Mack thinks they all came from Jesus but other scholars point out that Q1 doesn’t sound like it came from the same group that added Q2 and Q3. Some think there is some narrative in Q but that may have been in the later stages.
wholething
December 20, 2012 at 5:07 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
@ 10 trazan
Don’t forget to use the close HTML tag with a forward slash. For example, [i]Italics[/i] or [a href="yourURL"]Title of Page[/a], but with less than and greater than signs in place of the square brackets.
I have read a dozen of Ehrman’s books and held his position on the historicity of Jesus until earlier this year. I read Carrier’s commentary and their back and forth but read Did Jesus Exist? with an open mind. It was when I got to the discussion of 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 where Ehrman said Doherty was like all the mythicists who appealed to interpolation for any inconvenient verses. It was an obvious ad hominem and he didn’t address the argument. It was then I decided to read Doherty’s Jesus Myth. He only cited two interpolations.
The 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 can only be said to support a first century Jesus if the wrath of God refers to the destruction of Jerusalem. If it doesn’t then it would seem to refer to an event in the undefined, mystic past. If it does refer to the destruction, then it has to be an interpolation because the letter was written before the destruction. Many scholars reject the passage from verse 13 through 16 for textual reason having nothing to do with mythicism. For example, verse 1:10 implies the wrath had not yet come so having the wrath of God already coming in verse 16 sounds like an interpolated margin note. Ehrman had used 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15 to support the idea that Paul didn’t like the Jews in another book, so he may have just been defensive.
The other interpolation cited by Doherty is 1 Timothy 6:13 which mentions Jesus testifying before Pilate. Nevermind that this is largely considered to be pseudographical, that verse is internally inconsistent with 3:16 which says “seen by angels” which implies not seen by men and “was preached” instead of the active verb “preached”.
So the Epistle Jesus is not a teacher or leader. They have no quotes or even anecdotes from the epistles supposedly written by his companions. He seems to have been from the mystic past, the way the Greeks looked at their myths.
BradC
December 20, 2012 at 6:46 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Richard Carrier just posted a good discussion, talking almost exclusively about the writings of Paul in this context.
(He recently had a debate on this issue, which he reviews)
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/2839/
Les
December 21, 2012 at 2:09 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Robert Eisenman’s book ‘James the Brother of Jesus’ (Penguin 1998) is also very informative on this subject
John Morales
December 21, 2012 at 7:58 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Raging Bee:
Maybe i”m just dumb, but this point seems ridiculously obvious to me: Jesus was NOT said to be telling people they had to obey every sub-clause of Jewish law. He was said to be explicitly saying otherwise on many other occasions.
(FTFY)
NonStampCollector
December 21, 2012 at 11:18 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
To RagingBee @12,
The fact that that passage is there, is viewed by some scholars, apparently, as evidence of later tampering with that particular gospel, by those who wanted to portray Jesus as being “Jewishy” like they were. There’s fantastic evidence for that sort of tampering going on. So I’m reading, anyway. People changing the texts, in their copies, to highlight and expand on the bits of Jesus that they wanted, and leave out the bits they didn’t want.
So, yeah. He probably never said that anyway. And even if he did, are you going to trust a 40-50 year old story? Would you believe the details of a speech given by JFK in 1962, given behind closed doors so to speak, no mic’s or journalists or cameras, — when the person telling you has a specific agenda? Not even worth considering.
Tsu Dho Nimh
December 21, 2012 at 5:42 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
It turns out that the Scriptures themselves, in the case of Paul’s epistles at least, were largely attempts to argue a case in contrast to a very specific “heresy” which is now largely gone
I always thought Paul sounded like an annoyed manager trying to keep the branch offices in line …
typecaster
December 22, 2012 at 7:07 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Personally, I find Ehrman very interesting on a number of topics, despite his views on the historicity of Jesus. And the critique by Carrier is specifically of Ehrman’s one book on that historicity, not of Ehrman’s work in general. In fact, he specifically says that Ehrman’s work prior to that latest one is excellent, and represents the generally accepted consensus view of current scholarship, so I wouldn’t dismiss all of his work out of hand, certainly not solely because of Carrier’s critiques. We shouldn’t forget that while mythicism is gaining strength in scholastic circles, it isn’t a slam dunk either way at the moment.
I guess that my bottom line is that I’m interested in a number of scholar’s views on aspects of first century history, and don’t take any of them as being either completely correct, or completely wrong. The important thing is their arguments, and the evidence backing them up.
Marcus Ranum
December 22, 2012 at 5:01 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
@#22 – looks like Markuze is back. The same message has been spammed on a bunch of other FTBs.
Tomas, doubter at large
December 23, 2012 at 12:50 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
@Nonstampcollector:
I find this all fascinating, and I look forward to your book suggestions.
What’s pretty crazy is how in 325 ACE there was a raging debate in Nicea on who exactly was this Jesus person. There were actually Christians who disagreed whether or not Jesus was a god or whatever. Apparently, the debate got so intense that Nicholas of Smyrna (later St. Nicholas, later Santa Claus) fist fought with someone he disagreed with. Hundreds of years after Paul, and Christians still couldn’t figured themselves out.
scenario
December 23, 2012 at 4:17 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
When did Christianity really start?
If the traditional view is true, Christianity started shortly after the death of Jesus in the mid 30′s.
If Jesus never existed, it could have started any time before Pauls letters were written in the early to mid 50′s. There is no evidence of the Christian church until close to the end of the century.
Since Saul/Paul was persecuiting the Christians before he convered, they must have existed prior to Paul’s conversion.
It would be really interesting if we could find some documentation of Christianities true roots.
raymoscow
December 23, 2012 at 11:12 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
It’s interesting (as much as such things can be) to read the synoptic gospels as if you have never read Paul. You get a completely different view of ‘salvation’. According to synoptic Jesus, salvation was about doing good things with good intentions, and ‘faith’ in himself had nothing to do with it.
And it’s quite obvious the Paul (read or pseudo) never read the gospels or anything like them, although there is some shared tradition about the eucharist story.
GJohn of course gets into all that saving faith stuff, but it apparently came much later.
Nathanael
December 24, 2012 at 7:20 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Christianity as we know it today is “Pauline”, i.e. post-Paul. (Whoever the heck Paul was.) There are all these interesting hints in the surviving texts of big fights among the people who considered themselves followers of “Jesus” from before then, but it’s very hard to get a clear picture of the fights. One thing is clear: *none of them had very large followings*. That’s why we don’t have solid third-party records. Only later were there enough Christians for us to start having meaningful third-party records.
It’s interesting to compare this situation to the gazillion small religions founded in upstate NY in the early 19th century in the “Burned-over district”. Because far more people were literate then than in 0-200s Rome, we have a lot more evidence of the early fights, but we still have pretty vague records of the early days of many of them, even the Mormons. The surviving groups get studied more than the ones which died out, but their descendants also have a strong incentive to doctor the records, and indeed the Utah Mormons and the modern Christian Scientists have deliberately scrubbed their texts to remove parts found inconvenient by later leaders…
Imagine that situation in the Roman Levant. Karen Armstrong made a pretty solid case that that was exactly the situation which was present: new sects being founded all the time, mostly with pretty small followings, competing for attention. Actually, this sort of world is demonstrated well in _Monty Python’s Life of Brian_, possibly the best-researched popular movie ever made about the early Christian period…
naturalcynic
December 24, 2012 at 11:31 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
raymoscow:<blockquoteAnd it’s quite obvious the Paul (read or pseudo) never read the gospels or anything like them, although there is some shared tradition about the eucharist story. There’s good reason for this – all of the Gospels were written later [70-100] than the Epistles [before 70]. The Q document, from which the Synoptic Gospels ere based, would have existed, but there could have been other documents that Paul [and others]may have based the letters on.
nathaniel:
But either the sandal or the gourd MUST be the correct version. snicker
DukeRevolution
December 26, 2012 at 10:04 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
I, too, come from a background of devout faith in Christ. I also used to pore over the Word, even spending two sleepless nights in tearful prayer for wisdom and serenity.
So when someone I’m talking to find out that I am an apostate, they immediately declare to me that my faith was never “real” to begin with, that I was a “false convert.” I don’t know about my fellow apostates, but I find this insulting to my integrity and intelligence.
Stacy
December 27, 2012 at 2:49 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
That’s a ridiculous assertion. Carrier certainly doesn’t think he’s a bad scholar; he just disagrees with him on the question of historicity.
Ehrman is well worth reading, especially his earlier books.
BTW, a tangential point: Paul is often pointed to as a big misogynist, but the misogyny in the Pauline epistles may all have come from insertions and forgeries. Paul himself may well have been an egalitarian:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Apostle_and_women#Theory_of_an_egalitarianism
Bruce Gorton
December 28, 2012 at 12:57 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Funnily enough I always sort of read Paul that way. Admittedly this may be because I always had the impression that he was a power-hungry tosser.
Reginald Selkirk
December 28, 2012 at 2:17 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
The closest would probably be this:
otrame
December 29, 2012 at 4:24 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Back in the early 14th century, when I was a 15-year-old member of the choir, I told my friends, “They never quote Jesus. They only quote Paul. They aren’t really Christians, they’re Paulists.”
I still think so.
Gregory in Seattle
December 29, 2012 at 7:17 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
@Kilian Hekhuis – It is extremely unlikely that the New Testament is historically accurate. That is not to say that the person they reference did not exist. Many of the stories about George Washington, such as the cherry tree incident, are patently false: that doesn’t mean that George Washington was made-up. Folklore hero John Henry almost certainly existed,even though his strength and stamina were greatly exaggerated after his death in order to tell a tale about the human spirit. John Chapman most certainly was a real person, but you would be hard-pressed to support most of the stories told about Johnny Appleseed.
The Jesus stories, without a doubt, have an actual religious/political leader at their core. This person probably went by the name of Yeheshua. His theology probably belonged to either the radical end of the Pharisee sect or the conservative end of the Essene sect, and his politics probably put him in opposition to the Roman overlords but not into the territory of open rebellion. This put him in a very large minority of Judean men in first century Jerusalem; even his name was a very common pseudonym among the politically discontent, as Joshua (the name from Hebrew without going first through Greek) was the successor of Moses and the brilliant general who conquered the Canaanites to take the Promised Land. Most likely, one of these many wanna-be messiahs gained some fame, and his followers exaggerated their stories to make him stand out from the crowd. Later storytellers may very well have brought in unrelated stories :”Oh, that was OUR Yeheshua, not some other one.” But there is still one actual person underneath all the layers of legend.
John Morales
December 29, 2012 at 8:10 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Gregory in Seattle:
Your certitude is touching, but not universal.
wholething
December 29, 2012 at 2:54 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
@Gregory in Seattle
Yes, many legends start out as exaggerations of exaggerations but in Jesus’ case, it’s the exact opposite. It began as the most powerful conqueror the world would ever see and ends as merely a religious/political leader who bothered the Romans.
The Hebrews had a clear prophecy that David’s seed would sit on the throne forever. The Babylonians made this a failed prophecy. They added that was punishment for not following the Law. The Hebrews were following the Law and expected God to send someone to return the throne. They cherry-picked out-of-context verses to support this idea. When it seemed that God was taking his sweet time with this, they began to see the verses about suffering as telling them that Jesus had been crucified in the mythic past in a different realm by the archons of the age. We see these ideas written in the Epistles of the New Testament.
If Jesus had been around in the early first century, the Epistles should be the best evidence for that. Instead, they never mention a ministry, a teaching, a quote, or an anecdote, even in the letters alleged to be written by his companions. They talk about the crucifixion without any details, as if they believe it happened but they have no idea when or how. The few verses Christians tell us relate to the first century Jesus are illusions.
All of the other gospels follow Mark but nearly every passage in Mark can be traced to Old Testament verses, Homer’s Odyssey, and maybe some of Paul’s letters. There don’t seem to be any of the so-called “oral traditions”.
There were probably lots of religious/political leaders named Jesus and some of them may have been crucified but the New Testament isn’t about any of them, unless the trial before Pilate came from the tale of Jesus ben Ananias, who was questioned by Albinius and released as a madman. But he appears in Josephus just before the war.
johnhodges
December 30, 2012 at 11:07 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
I went through the four gospels to collect everything Jesus is reported to have said about what we should DO, all of his alleged ethical teachings. I wrote up my findings here:
http://www.atheistnexus.org/profiles/blogs/the-ethics-of-jesus
I don’t see, or feel, any necessity to dispute the existence of a historical Jesus. I find that debate beside the point.
The “synoptic” gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, present one picture of Jesus and his teachings, and the fourth gospel, John, presents a starkly different one. The synoptics present a Jesus who expected Judgment Day and the end of the world Real Soon Now, certainly within the lifetime of his contemporaries. Further, very few were to be saved when the Earth was destroyed; almost everyone would be going to a fiery Hell. It makes perfect sense that his ethical teachings, what he told his followers to DO, were radically unworldly. Abandon all your Earthly ambitions. Abandon your Earthly family and give your loyalty to your fellow believers. Sell everything you own and use the money to do good works. Avoid getting any Earthly reward for your good works. Follow the entire Law of Moses, follow the spirit of the Law as well as the letter. Overfulfill the Law, inside and out; not only abstain from killing but also from anger, not only abstain from adultery but also from lust. Love your enemies, Practice strict nonviolent pacifism. Do not judge others, that is not your job, Judgment Day will come soon enough. Concentrate on purifying your own character, strive to “Be perfect, even as your father in Heaven is perfect”. This was asking a lot.
The gospel of “John” was apparently written AFTER that generation HAD passed away. The apocalyptic prophecies are removed, all of the radically unworldly ethical teachings are removed; the writers of John did an Apocalypsectomy. Since John, organized Christianity has not been about following Jesus’ teachings, it has been about believing certain stories and creeds.
All this is evident from reading the texts; it really matters not at all if the texts were inspired by the experience of the writers listening to a real man named Jesus. The literary Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher, he expected the end of Earth soon, and told his followers to take radical action to prepare, to rack up as much credit as they could in the little time remaining, in the hope of being among the very few who would be saved. He was, apparently, wrong about that.
So there is no reason why we should bother disputing the exact origin of these texts.
Kilian Hekhuis
December 30, 2012 at 8:56 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
@Gregory in Seattle #34: “The Jesus stories, without a doubt” – I’m not sure why you have no doubts about something that happened so long ago. The fact that their are untrue stories about true people of course does not prove that untrue stories about anyone proves they’ve existed. That’s such a huge logic fallacy, it shouldn’t need explaining.
wholething
December 31, 2012 at 2:10 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
@ #37 johnhodges
That’s an interesting piece you wrote. But isn’t it important to differentiate the things Jesus actually said from those put into his mouth by others? You include the “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” but that story is not in the oldest versions of the Bible and seems to have been inserted later. Then the question becomes whether the gospels have any sayings that came from Jesus. The question of whether Jesus actually existed weighs heavily in the debate of which sayings are authentic. I pretty much agree with your final conclusion about John, but comparing the Synoptics shows me that they came from different groups with different views. It seems to me that Mark was written as a midrash to explain the destruction of Jerusalem. It was a fictional story about a fictional figure drawing on Old Testament verses, Homer’s Odyssey, the Q document, and some of Paul’s letters.
You compare Matthew 16:24 with Luke 14:27. It would be more appropriate to compare that Matthew verse with Luke 9:23, both of which were copied nearly verbatim from Mark 8:34. The Luke verse you cite should be compared with Matthew 10:37-38. Both of those correspond with Saying 55 in the Gospel of Thomas. Mark seems to have been familiar with the quotation but couldn’t reproduce it from memory.(Other verses in Mark make me suspect he wasn’t rich enough to have copies of the works he quotes so he works from memory, unlike Matthew and Luke.) Matthew and Luke didn’t recognize Mark’s version when they read it in another source.
You bring up Mark 7 where Jesus abolishes the food laws. Compare that with Galatians 2 where Peter is eating with the Gentiles as if what happens in Antioch stays in Antioch until agents from James arrive. Paul takes him to task over it. Paul’s argument is that Jesus’ sacrifice undoes the Law. Paul doesn’t give Peter’s argument nor does he claim to have won the argument. In fact, he admits that Barnabas was led astray by it. If Mark 7 had actually happened, wouldn’t Peter have agreed with Paul? We find Peter’s wishy-washyness over and over in Mark, as well as James and John wanting to sit at either hand of Jesus in heaven. They are mentioned in Galatians. We also see “Abba, father” and “Love your neighbor as yourself” in Galatians and Mark. That suggests that Mark was familiar with Galatians and based the main characters of the disciples in Mark on Galatians. Mark most likely took Paul’s argument and put it into Jesus’ mouth..
I have a few more things I may add when time allows.
Staffan Humlebo
January 20, 2013 at 5:26 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
“They never taught me this in church. Has it been put on the curriculum since I left?”
Yes I think so. I’ve been teaching New Testament courses for 35 years and I always prefer this version. Pauls authentic 7 letters are the only report about early messianic Jesus-faith.
And Paul never read any of the gospels, nor would have accepted their presentation, except for some quotes from Jesus that probably was orally transmitted fairly precise.
He would not have accepted a NT canon in which his letters were somehow contrasted to the Old Testament, since the Tora, prophets and wisdom books really were the Scriptures for him.
And I like the faith that Paul presents in his authentic letters: there is a risen Messias in us, we can live in Him, should we felt drawn to it. We really don’t need the misogynic and hierarchical history of the Church, we can perhaps mature into this fresh faith of the early house-gatherings Paul was a part of.
Kilian Hekhuis
January 21, 2013 at 7:47 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Regardless of the type of religion, religion is still based on false premeces. There is no god, so fresh or not, faith is uncalled for.
foo
January 28, 2013 at 2:38 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
“Particularly, a fight was raging over whether a Gentile needed to become a Jew, and partake in all the Jewish rituals and ‘initiations’ (those pertaining to foreskins and sharp implements, for example, to put it bluntly,… OUCH!) before he could be saved in Jesus. Paul said no, faith alone was adequate without “works”.”
This could be a premise for a short video: Someone says that you must have your foreskin cut off, and Paul, trying to protect his foreskin, says: no, no, no And, then, he decides to write his version of the Bible.
thatstrangeguy
February 5, 2013 at 10:59 am (UTC 0) Link to this comment
Why don’t you make a movie about Yahweh destroying sodom and Gomorrah and then Jesus getting spotted with a naked young boy just before he gets captured.
)) That was the point where I got completely convinced that there’s REALLY something wrong about that Holy Scripture… 
Black Ostrich Feather Hair Clip
February 16, 2013 at 5:29 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
I visited a lot of website but I conceive this one holds something special in it. “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.” by Mark Twain.
Cutler
April 5, 2013 at 6:25 pm (UTC 0) Link to this comment
For all you who say that Paul’s version is right pretty much are taking today’s Christians side. Same thing most Christians do. But when you do that you’re admitting that Gods morals change and he created new ways to be “saved”. Either that, or you’re saying what most of today’s Christians are saying in that God had separate laws and morals for Israel. But if so, then how could a loving God impose slavery, rape, kidnapping, and murder on other people just because they weren’t Jews? Didn’t God create and love every human? If he loves every human now and he never changes then that wouldn’t make sense. Step back from the denial and brainwashing for just a second like I had to do and recognize something about the Bible. Old Testament characters all said God told them laws to be considered righteous and saved.Then Jesus came and changed a few of these laws (Whom by the way, was God supposedly, and I thought God doesn’t change his morals). Then Paul comes along and says Jesus told him we no longer had to obey all the laws that God and Jesus had in the old days. And now today as our society finally recognized the wrongs of slavery and other topics no Bible prophet or Messiah ever talked out against, we see new laws and rituals that are either frowned upon or considered ok by today’s Christians. Basically supporting evidence that even the books of the Bible were written by humans that all changed their beliefs and laws based on what was moral and civil at the times they were written. You don’t see a pattern??? If God really wrote it all and he never changes his standards of righteousness, then modern day Christians should still be refraining from eating shrimp, working on Sabbath, and be ok with having slaves. The only law Jesus himself said should change would be sacrificing animals,since he made the ultimate, and turning the other cheek instead of eye for an eye. Well, and there’s a few others too that seem contradicting of what he (God) instructed in Old Testament, but still. The common denominator and main point I’m trying to relay here is society gets smarter, more humane, less paganistic, less barbaric, and more knowledgeable the further along we go. And so does the Bible and the Christian faith. So since God is never changing, wouldn’t that suggest that maybe, just maybe, God was made up by man???