Jesus mythicism vs. Jesus historicity: an argument in favour of the latter

I seem to have had a few comments on here in recent weeks about the Jesus mythicism question (for those who are unfamiliar with the argument, this is the question of whether a real Jesus actually existed in the first place or whether Christianity started with a belief in some kind of celestial being). For the record, I’m on the ‘historical Jesus’ side of this particular debate, meaning that I believe that the whole thing did start with an actual Jewish preacher and founder of a Messianic cult. This is something I’d like to post a series of posts about at some point, but it’s a long way down my to-do list at the moment, so look out for those in about… 2030, maybe? However, one particular comment I got did catch my attention as raising an important point. I started writing a comment in reply, and realised it was actually long enough to be a post. So here we are.

 

 

Owlmirror wrote:

I have to admit, it is weird no matter which way things are supposed to have gone: How a Son/Christ who supposedly had no earthly incarnation could have suddenly gotten one in the specific time and place of Judea in the 30’s. Or the other way; how a Jesus who was presumably real and taught in the 30’s could be so easily ignored/erased by those who came later.

Which is an excellent point. If Jesus did exist, we have to explain how, within a relatively short time of his death, he was being spoken of as some kind of mythical semi-deity in the writings of some of his followers. If Jesus was a myth from the start, on the other hand, we have the reverse problem of having to explain how he then came to be written about and taught about as an actual person who walked the face of the earth and did normal (as well as miraculous) things. And this, as it happens, gets to the nub of why I believe in a historical Jesus; I’ve found other reasons as I looked into the topic more, but my initial reason is simply that I believe the former scenario is a lot easier to explain with the data we have than the latter. So, I want to explain why.

First, here are some key points to bear in mind:

  • We have four official accounts portraying Jesus as a real person, which have been established as having been written within a century (the earliest probably within a few decades) of the events alleged in them.
  • These accounts include quite a few things which were clearly quite awkward for their authors. Jesus was supposed to have been the Messiah – despite this being a Jewish title that referred to someone who would rule over the country in an era of peace and prosperity, which Jesus clearly hadn’t done. He apparently came from Nazareth – even though this was another big problem for his followers’ claims that he was the Messiah, requiring two of the gospel authors to make up complicated and contradictory accounts about how, despite having grown up in Nazareth, he had actually been born in Bethlehem. He was executed by the Romans for sedition – which would have made the cult widely unpopular and could have got them into real trouble (if you read the gospel accounts, you can see the writers coming out with some wildly implausible stuff intended to paint a picture of Pilate as really innocent in the matter and the Jews really being the ones to blame for the whole thing). And apparently, despite the gospels painting a very anti-Pharisaic picture, his teachings as portrayed were in fact rather typically Pharisaian (Maccoby, Revolution in Judea and The Mythmaker). So… these things all got included, and we need to ask why.
  • These accounts also show signs of getting increasingly fantastical over time, suggesting the stories are getting embroidered as they go along.
  • In the early years of the Church, the person who seems to have been doing more than anyone else to spread this new belief to Gentiles in far-flung places was someone who joined only after Jesus’s death, showed astonishingly little interest in finding out about the doctrines of this new group, thought it quite OK to spread teachings that he believed to have come to him through personal revelation rather than from others in the group, and clashed with the existing group over the things he was teaching, of which they didn’t approve at all. Which gives us a rather bizarre situation where this man has gone off at a complete tangent and is energetically spreading his version of this new belief, which ends up being extremely influential despite being quite different from what the original grou believed.
  • All this was happening within a society where the majority of the population came from cultures other than the minority culture from which Jesus supposedly came, whose beliefs, and hence their interpretation of stories and events, might be very different from that of the culture in which the beliefs originated. On top of that, it was a society with widespread beliefs in amazing happenings, including the possibility of gods visiting the earth in human form.

Against this background information, how does the above question look?

Firstly, let’s look at the hypothesis that Jesus was actually a historical person. How does the above evidence fit with this? Well… according to this theory Jesus creates a bit of a splash in his local area, gets killed, and his local followers reach the belief he’s miraculously risen from the dead and thus keep his cult alive. A few years later, along comes Paul of Tarsus, who appears to have converted dramatically to the faith but has in fact converted dramatically to his own rather peculiar version of it, which he then energetically preaches to other communities over the next several years. Meanwhile, the existing stories about Jesus are getting embroidered as they get passed on. Some of those stories are getting passed out to the groups of converts in other cities, and some of the theology that those converts hold is filtering back to the original Jerusalem community, and a lot of people are ending up with a mixture of ideas that’s moving away from what was originally intended.

By the time people get as far as writing the stories down, a few decades later, the stories they have to work with are a mishmash of things that actually happened, embroidered versions of things that actually happened, stories that people have made up out of whole cloth because they sound good, and some rather strange mythology around the whole thing. So that’s what gets written down. Some of the stuff is pretty awkward for them, but, because it goes back to things that did actually happen, it’s firmly embedded in the traditions and can’t just be erased or ignored, so the gospel authors include those bits but do what they can to sugar-coat them or explain them away. We end up with an odd mix of stories, many of which are clearly embroidered or mythicised but many others of which seem to be describing a historical Jesus. Which, as you have probably spotted, pretty much describes the NT.

So far, so good; the historical theory fits well with what we have. Now, time to look at the other hypothesis; the idea that Jesus was originally a myth about a celestial being, and the stories about him were historicised later. How does that fit with the evidence we’ve got?

Well, the epistles seem to fit reasonably well, purely as far as theology goes; the theological descriptions of the Lord in the epistles could plausibly fit with a group who believe in a spiritual leader somewhere up in the heavens. (Even then, there are a lot of lines that wouldn’t plausibly fit with this; the epistles do contain several lines about Jesus having existed according to the flesh, or being born of a woman, or being of the seed of David, or having brothers, one of whom Paul mentions meeting, all of which is rather difficult to reconcile with mythicism and requires some highly strained logic on the part of mythicists. But if we ignore all that – which mythicists do, on the whole, tend to prefer to do – and focus just on the theology, then that seems at first glance to fit.)

However, once we get to the gospels, things get a lot more difficult to explain. If the group at this stage believed that the person they held so dear was in fact a celestial being who had never visited this world as a human, how did we end up with multiple books telling detailed stories about his time living in this world as a human?

Of course, explanations exist. Earl Doherty, in The Jesus Puzzle, presents the first gospel as being written as a deliberate attempt to give a group an apparent historical founder that would appeal more to converts. Richard Carrier, in On the Historicity of Jesus, explains it as being an example of euhemerism, a practice of the time in which historicised stories were written about mythical beings. Adam Lee from the Daylight Atheism blog, in this essay, suggests the gospel writers might have been following the precedent of midrash, a rabbinical method for analysing verses from the Jewish scriptures and coming up with further explanations and illustrative stories about them. All these explanations have their problems, but I can certainly see how any of them could explain the existence of a few historicised stories about a Jesus who was originally thought to have lived, died, and risen on a heavenly plane only.

But what do we actually have? Multiple different books describing a historical Jesus. (While the gospels are not independent in terms of what information they give us, each one does nevertheless represent a different person sitting down and putting a lot of effort into writing a detailed and lengthy story.) Highly awkward claims – that the authors seem to be desperately trying to soft-pedal, but nonetheless include – that a specific and powerful public figure was responsible for the death of this founder. Further highly awkward claims that the revered founder was making claims that got him (rightly, under the prevailing Roman law) executed for sedition. Complicated and contradictory stories attempting to explain how a man from Nazareth was actually born in Bethlehem, when it would surely have been so much simpler to leave out the Nazareth claim and write Jesus as coming from Bethlehem in the first place.

What would lead people to make all this stuff up – all of it – from scratch? Not just embroidering or adding to existing stories about an existing person, but inventing all of the above, including the bits that clearly work against their purposes? So far, I have not heard an adequate explanation for this. Of the two theories, therefore, the theory that Jesus did actually exist – that, at the start of the story of Christianity, there was an actual Yeshu or Yeshua who preached and had a following and was executed by the Romans – fits the available data a lot better.

And that’s why I believe in a historical Jesus.

Gender dysphoria in children – replacing myth with fact. Part Two.

Quick background: This is a follow-on from the post I wrote in response to SkepDoc Harriet Hall’s sadly misleading post Gender Dysphoria in Children. In my reply, I challenged the myth that children with gender dysphoria are being pushed or rushed into transitioning at very young ages. In fact, international medical guidelines on the subject are clear that medical treatment for children with gender dysphoria should not be started prior to puberty (for more on recommended management of younger children with gender dysphoria, see Part One).

I’m writing Part Two because I realised there is a fairly obvious follow-up question that readers might have; while that’s all well and good, why are children starting medical treatment for gender dysphoria during puberty? After all, at this stage they’re still children. Surely, runs this line of argument, it would be better for them to wait until adulthood before any decision is made about medical therapy with its possible (or definite) long-term consequences? It’s an argument that sounds superficially logical and has convinced many people.

Unfortunately, there is a huge problem with it: Children’s bodies are not going to wait. When the decision arises as to whether a pubertal child with gender dysphoria should start medical treatment or not, the alternative to treatment is not going to be that everything remains comfortably in status quo for several more years while the child grows up. The alternative is going to be that the child goes through the significant biological changes that come with puberty.

For a child with persistent gender dysphoria, this is a very big problem. If you read Part One of this, you might remember the Steensma et al research study that looked at the differences between ‘desisters’ and ‘persisters’ with gender dysphoria, and found that the onset of pubertal changes had been a key point for the children they surveyed; while those changes improved the desisters’ feelings of gender dysphoria, they worsened the gender dysphoria symptoms for the persisters. A lot. Children who already felt uncomfortable and out of place with having a body whose gender didn’t match theirs were faced with that body developing much more specific features of that gender… and they found this quite a horrific sensation.

It was terrible, I constantly wanted to know whether I was already in puberty or not. I knew about the puberty blocking treatment and I wanted to be in time. I really did not want to have breasts, I felt like, if they would grow, I would remove them myself. I absolutely did not want them!

I noticed the Adam’s apple of my brother, and an uneasy feeling stole upon me. If I would get an Adam’s apple like his, I did not want to live.

When I was 13, I started to menstruate and my breasts started to grow. I hated it! If we would have had a train station in our town I would definitely have jumped in front of a train. I didn’t go to school anymore, lost my friends and became totally withdrawn.

As soon as puberty started, I could no longer be myself. A boy does not have breasts. As a child it didn’t matter that much, boys and girls don’t differ except that boys have a penis, and girls don’t. But the way I was changing was very wrong. I couldn’t hide it anymore.

At the time my breasts started to grow, I wanted to hide them. I always tried to wear loose shirts. I felt so insecure that I didn’t want other people to see me. So I frequently skipped school and they suspended me. Then I became even more withdrawn.

Before puberty started, I felt physically a boy, but when my breasts started growing, I felt more like a mutant.

(quotes from young people with persistent gender dysphoria in Steensma et al., ‘Desisting and persisting gender dysphoria after childhood: A qualitative follow-up study‘, Clin Child Psychol Psychiatry 2011; 16(4): 499 – 516)

(With regard to the suicidal impulses expressed by some of these patients; yes, this is a very real risk. Several studies have shown a very high rate of suicide attempts among transgender people, and many of these work. Transitioning, and general acceptance and support from others, have both been shown to decrease this risk significantly.)

Imagine, for a minute, that you read or hear a story about doctors at a gender identity clinic forcing a child to go through puberty in the gender that isn’t theirs, against that child’s wishes, even though the child was distressed about it to the point of suicidal unhappiness. We’d all be appalled at the thought. Well… that’s what children with gender dysphoria of this severity go through when made to experience puberty without medical treatment. Their body doesn’t match their gender identity; when they  go through puberty, they’re having to deal with their body becoming more and more obviously that of a gender that isn’t theirs.

As though that wasn’t bad enough, forcing children to endure the wrong puberty has long-term consequences as well; that child is now going forward into adulthood with physical changes that are much harder to reverse. If that child is a transgender girl (a child with the physical body of a boy, but with the internal gender identity of a girl), then she’s had to develop facial hair, stronger facial features, and a deep masculine-sounding voice. She’s going to be stuck with the choice between either having a lot of difficult (and expensive) procedures to reverse these, or spending her life looking and sounding noticeably male even once she starts taking hormone treatment to transition (with all the considerable social stigma and unpleasantness that this will cause her). If that child is a transgender boy who wants to transition physically, his eventual transition will have to include surgery to remove the breasts that could have been prevented from growing in the first place.

There are times in life when doing nothing is a decision. It might be a default decision rather than an active one, but it’s still a decision and it still has consequences. When a persistently transgender child has started puberty, is becoming frantic with the changes, is becoming ever more certain about their decision to transition, is faced with puberty still proceeding apace… then that’s one of those times. In such a situation, doing nothing – withholding medical treatment, insisting that the child has to endure all these changes for years more before being allowed to start treatment for them – is outright harmful to that child.

Of course, it’s also preferable for children not to be making a final decision about transition at that point. After all, we’re talking here about children who are in the early stages of puberty, hence in their early teens at most and in many cases younger than that. Whatever myths you might have heard about gender identity clinics, the professionals there are in fact fully aware that children might change their mind, and are not in any sort of hurry to rush a young child into anything irreversible or even difficult to reverse. So, when a child with persistent gender dysphoria is finding that the early changes of puberty are making the symptoms worse and not better, this presents a dilemma.

Here, therefore, is the management that the WPATH (the international) guidelines advise in such a situation:

When, and only when, a child has persistent and intense symptoms of gender identity issues that are getting worse rather than better with puberty, and other issues in the child’s life have been looked for and dealt with so that this isn’t a case of, say, a child making a poor decision due to severe depression or anxiety, and the child wishes to start treatment after a full discussion of the pros and cons with child and family… then doctors will start a type of treatment known as a puberty blocker. This does not cause any physical gender changes; as the name suggests, it blocks the hormones that cause pubertal changes, thus allowing doctors to hit the ‘pause’ button on the child’s puberty and give them a few extra years to make a decision about gender transition. During this time, the child should be under the care of a paediatric endocrinologist who monitors their response to the puberty blocker and is on the lookout for any side-effects.

If the child’s gender dysphoria persists, and remains at such a level that they wish to physically transition, the next step is hormonal transitioning; taking either testosterone or oestrogen, as the case might be, to bring about the bodily changes of the gender with which the child identifies. (At this point, most people do go on to transition – after all, by this stage you’re down to a subset of transgender children with severe and persistent problems – but it isn’t inevitable. Children who decide against transitioning can simply stop the puberty blockers and allow puberty to proceed normally.) While this is, of course, the point at which changes do start becoming irreversible, that still doesn’t happen straight away. This isn’t like waking up from surgery; the hormonally-induced body changes need to be there for some weeks before they gradually become irreversible, whereas if someone finds that the changes towards a different body are distressing then that reaction is going to be present from an early stage. So, even at this point, we’re still talking about having some leeway to stop things; you haven’t committed irreversibly to gender transition from the moment you swallow your first pill.

The decision about whether or not to transition hormonally is generally taken and implemented around the age of 16, though that’s not an absolute. Again, this is a compromise; the desirability of giving children as much time as feasible to make this decision has to be weighed against the distress of being in a wrong-gender body plus the psychosocial and sometimes physical ramifications of postponing puberty.

As for genital surgery, the guidelines advise that this should be postponed until adulthood. (They also advise waiting until the person has lived as the gender in question for at least twelve months.) It is worth noting here, by the way, that surgery is by no means an inevitable step of transitioning; it’s the one step that everyone who doesn’t know much about transgender treatment will focus on, but in fact many transgender people find that transitioning with the use of hormones is enough for them and that, once the rest of their body matches their inner gender identity, they can deal with having a wrong-gender set of genitals. Either way, it is recommended that this step not be taken prior to adulthood.

Now, hopefully it should be clear by now that the reason for this protocol is that so far it’s the best compromise that exists between the potential risks of treatment and the known risks of not treating an adolescent with severe gender dysphoria who is distressed by pubertal changes. Whatever myths you might have heard, no-one is recommending this because they are oblivious to the potential side-effects of medication or because they think that prescribing for a child is an ideal and sought-after situation. It isn’t. The ideal situation would be for everyone to be born into a body that matches their own inner gender, so that transgender problems wouldn’t exist. For that matter, the ideal situation would be for no child ever to have a condition serious enough to need medication; I don’t know of anyone who wouldn’t be delighted with that situation.

But that, of course, isn’t the situation we’ve got. We have the real world. Some children have serious, or potentially serious, medical conditions which do require treatment; not because medicating children is ideal, but because the consequences of not prescribing for a child with a serious problem can be worse. One such problem is severe gender dysphoria. We can leave children in such a situation to suffer the consequences of an untreated condition – knowing there is a high risk that those consequences will have a serious and significant impact on the child – or we can offer them treatment. It’s hard to believe that any of us would choose the former option were it any other medical condition involved. Why should we do so for children with gender dysphoria?

Gender dysphoria in children – replacing myth with fact, Part One

There is a widespread and pervasive myth that children are frequently being pushed into gender transition therapies. It’s a dangerous myth, because the pushback against it is contributing significantly to the problems that transgender youth have in actually getting appropriate, evidence-based support and therapy. Unfortunately, doctor and blogger Harriet Hall’s recent post Gender Dysphoria in Children appears to have been heavily influenced by this myth, with clumsily researched and pervasively scaremongering results.

There are a lot of highly misleading statements in the post that I’d like to debunk if possible. I’m realistic about my rate of blogging, however; if I get time to reply to other statements in her post then I will, but, for this post, I’m going to concentrate on the central myth here.

(Hat tip to FTB blogger Hj Hornbeck, who mentioned Hall’s post to FTB. His own reply to it is here, so do check that out as well, for a lot more information on the subject.)

I’m going to reply, here, to one particular quote from early in Hall’s post which is not in fact from Hall herself; it was a comment she found on this post. I chose this particular paragraph to reply to because I think it quite well encapsulates the groundless fears that swirl muddily around this topic. (Hall, unfortunately, seems to have chosen the quote so that she can echo these fears, rather than in order to examine them and see whether they’re actually justified.)

At about the age of 5, I was convinced I was a boy who had mistakenly been born in the body of a girl. This was in the 1950s, so there was never any discussion of my feelings, and obviously I never heard of “gender dysphoria.” By the time I was an adolescent, these feelings had disappeared. Parents who rush to allow children to “transition” when they are young may be harming their children more than if they just waited to see if the child still felt that way when they got a little older.

It’s not totally clear what this commenter thinks would have happened if she had attended one of today’s gender dysphoria clinics; in fact, I suspect the commenter isn’t clear herself on what she thinks would have happened. However, she does clearly have some kind of significant concern about the possibility that she would somehow have ended up rushing, or even being rushed, into an overly hasty decision to transition that would have then turned out to be the wrong decision for her. And this is the concern that normally comes up in these discussions.

So let’s look at what actually does happen.

Let’s imagine for a moment that gender identity and gender dysphoria research had been seventy years ahead of where it actually was, so that the guidelines and clinics we have today were available in the ’50s. Let’s imagine that this woman’s feelings about her gender, back when she was 5, had led to her referral to the kind of gender identity clinic that’s available to transgender people now, where she could have been assessed and managed under the guidelines that exist for children with gender dysphoria in the present day. What could we expect her experience there to be?

To answer this, I turned to the international guidelines on gender dysphoria management; the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care. They can be downloaded for free here; the sections which I drew on for this post are on pages 14 to 19. My other main source was the study Desisting and persisting gender dysphoria after childhood: A qualitative follow-up study (Steensma et al., Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2011; 16(4): 499 – 516). This is a key study on the topic of children who do lose their initial ‘wrong gender’ feelings after childhood, and factors that differentiate them from children with gender dysphoria that persists into adulthood. The abstract is available online at that link; the full study can also be downloaded for free there.

Based on the above information, here is what actually would have happened for this commenter if she’d visited a well-run modern-day gender identity clinic in her childhood.

First of all, she’d have had the chance to meet with supporting and non-judgemental professionals who would have explored her feelings about gender with her, without trying to push her one way or the other. They’d have taken a full and detailed look at what was going on in her life generally; at how her family life, her school life, and her social life were going, and whether there were problems there. They’d assess her for signs of mental health problems such as depression or anxiety, and, if such were found, treat them appropriately. They’d have provided support for her and her family, as well as pointing her in the direction of other resources that could help.

They’d have discussed whether or not she wanted to try any parts of what’s known as ‘social transitioning’ – living as one gender without making any physical changes. For example, she might want to try having clothes, haircuts or toys that were traditionally viewed as ‘for boys’, or maybe even move on to being called by a boy’s name and/or referred to as ‘he’ instead of ‘she’. If so, there would have been some careful discussion of what implications this might have in terms of how other people would react and treat her, and it would also have been made clear to her that this was an experiment, not the start of an irreversible journey; if she tried these changes and found that they made her more uncomfortable rather than less, it would be absolutely fine for her to reverse them at any point. She might have been offered the option of trying these changes only on holiday, where it would be easy for her to stop them without pushback from people who knew her. Of course, on discussion it might have emerged that she didn’t feel comfortable with trying any of these changes; that would also have been fine. The goal over this time would be to help her explore her feelings about her gender in ways that would be fully reversible should those feelings change.

It’s not clear from her comment when her beliefs about having the wrong-gender body faded, although clearly it was at some point between age 5 and when she hit puberty. If those feelings did persist over the next few years, the clinic would have been particularly on the lookout for how she reacted to the run-up to/early stages of puberty. This is because, in the Steensma et al study I linked to above, this showed up as the stage that differentiated persisters (those children whose gender dysphoria feelings continued) from desisters (those children who grew out of them). Desisters reported that, during this stage, they found themselves coming more to terms with their bodies, and that pubertal changes were, overall, a positive factor that helped reconcile them with the idea of being their birth gender. Persisters reported the exact opposite; their feelings of gender dysphoria became much stronger, and pubertal changes were extremely distressing for them.

This woman, of course, was clearly a desister. From her wording (‘By the time I was an adolescent, these feelings had disappeared’), it sounds as though, in her case, the initial feelings of gender dysphoria faded before she reached puberty. When that happened, her family would have been able simply to discharge her from the clinic.

That’s it. That’s what would have happened. That’s what happens to children today who are referred to gender identity clinics with feelings that turn out to be temporary; they get to talk those feelings over with supportive and non-judgemental medical professionals who also do their best to find out about any other problems in the child’s life that may need help, they’re supported in reversible ways of experimenting with gender identity if and only if they so wish, and they can stop follow-up whenever they feel the feelings have faded.

All this business about letting children wait a bit longer/not rushing them into transitioning/being aware they might feel differently as they get older? These are not mysterious extraordinary concepts that have somehow never occurred to the doctors who work in this field. These are fundamental principles of good care for children with gender dysphoria. This is what is already happening for children with gender dysphoria. So, when next you hear someone raising concern about how young children with gender dysphoria should be allowed to just wait a little longer, or whatever the concerned phrase is… then be aware that this is exactly what’s already happening.