By Thomas Verenna
April DeConick was goodly enough to continue this conversation on her blog (and we’re all thankful she did). But I want to start out by making it clear that April has not represented my position correctly. Even when she quotes it in block-quote format, she seems to have missed my words completely. This is a serious problem because we will continue to talk past each other.
I will take each of April’s bullet points (what she falsely labels as “Tom’s points”) one at a time. We will determine, at the end of this article, if “mythers” (I do hope she is not being derogatory here) are “drawing from their methods conclusions that force the methods beyond what they can actually tell us”.
First, I never asked the question April posits: “The gospel narratives were written “to tell a good story” not to record “history”, so isn’t there reason to doubt Jesus’ historicity?“ I would never phrase a question in this manner because it does not adequately represent my position. In fact, the statement I made was the following:
“[Mythicists examine] Gospel genre (if the Gospels weren’t written for the purpose of “telling what happened” but rather “telling a good story” there clearly is reason to doubt the historicity of Jesus Christ).”
The difference between the two statements is mere context. In April’s question (which she falsely labels as one of my points) there is no mention or discussion of my precursor example, that of Genre. In fact she doesn’t even deal with that in any manner. So I would not disagree with her assessment that “the mere fact that the story is constructed is not evidence for the non-existence of Jesus.” That would be a logically sound criticism against me if I were making such a case. Thankfully, however, my point was not about the story simply being constructed—rather, it was about authorial intent. If the author had never intended to write a history of events surrounding a historical Jesus but instead was writing a Jewish novel reminiscent of the book of Tobit, for example (and only as an example), the question of historicity would not even be considered. (Nobody wonders if Tobit existed historically)
Genre plays an important role here considering that the debate over what genre the Gospel of Mark constitutes alone is still hotly debated. It has shifted from Greco-Roman biography (Charles Talbert), to a genre that came about ex nihilo (as “Gospel”–Bultmann), to something akin to Greek Romance Novels (Mary Ann Tolbert), to Jewish Novel (Michael Vines), to origin tradition akin to the Hebrew Bible (Thomas L. Thompson), to Homeric Hypertext (Dennis MacDonald), and so on. The debate can be settled, but first all presuppositions need to fall away (this includes those associated with certain branches of mythicism and historicism). Part of the problem is that the assumption is assumed a priori that Jesus lived and the Gospels authors thought that he lived. When that assumption is removed, the Gospels can be looked at in a different way. In what way will depend on that investigation—however, the answer to Genre can never be assumed from another assumption. That is what historicists have been doing and what needs to stop happening.
It all comes down to authorial intent. Can it be shown that the Gospel authors knew of a historical Jesus? Were they writing from a perspective of a Christian or a Jew interpreting scripture? The only way to discover answers is to ask the question without the shades of bias and judge the exegetical content on its own grounds. If it can be shown the Gospel of Mark is not about a preaching messianic figure in the first century, but instead about a literal Jesus Christ (the ‘anointed savior’) who is derived not from the “vagaries of memory” (as Crossan would put it) but from reading and interpreting scripture, there clearly is reason to question the grounds of historicity. April may not like that fact, but her opinion is as irrelevant as mine is. What matters are the answers and what they can tell us. And once more (I don’t know how many times I can stress this), you can’t know the answer unless you first ask the relevant questions.
On April’s second bullet point; she italicizes a statement she assumed I was making; that being “The authors of the gospels used narrative models to construct their stories.“ However this is not what I wrote. What I did write was the following:
“[Mythicists examine] intertextuality (the models used by the authors of the Gospels to create narrative—and how much of the Gospel can be traced back to models).”
The difference is, once again, in the context. April seems to think I am trying to suggest that because the authors used models that there could not have been a Jesus. She then borders on the absurd when she writes that “[a]ll it can tell us is that the early Christians were part of the Greco-Roman educational system, and used models known to them to write Jesus’ story.” It’s absurd in two ways. First, I can say the same thing about Tobit. Clearly the author of Tobit was a part of the Greco-Roman educational system, and he very clearly used models (as Dennis MacDonald and George Nicklesburg aptly show). Does that mean that we should throw our hands up in the sky and say “Well, we just can’t know if Tobit existed historically or not.” Hopefully the reader would laugh at me for even suggesting that.
It’s an additionally absurd statement because it has little to do with what I actually wrote. In my original statement, I was dealing specifically with model use in relation to intertextuality; that being how the author created narrative not how the author used “narrative models to construct their stories” as April puts it. The Gospels are narrative. The difference is in how the author intended his reader to interpret them. Intertextuality is not just about the model use of the author—it is about how the author uses model to create a narrative in a semiotic manner.
I’ll bring this down to earth more with an example. We can all agree that Lucian’s Philopseudes is a fiction novel. We know because Lucian tells us plainly. But Lucian does not create his story full-cloth. His narrative is ripe with intertextual references that a full-knowing reader (ala Joseph Pucci) would understand. In a scene where Eucrates tells Lucian’s protagonist (or perhaps his antagonist?) Tychiades about the apparition of his dead wife, for example, he brings up the fact that she was mad that her one sandal had not been burned with her at her funeral. Some have suggested that this scene is an adjusted form from Herodotus’ story of Periander, where he had to burn all the clothes of the women in Corinth to appease his former wife’s spirit. However the general theme here is more Homeric—it’s about the lack of a proper burial. The fact is, Lucian is letting his readers know where he is getting his narrative from. He has purposefully concocted his story to allow for the reader. This is intertextuality in action. It is not just about filling in gaps of a known historical event; it is about intentionally using model to create a narrative as a whole for a purpose other than writing history. The fact that this happens in the Gospels is not what I was contending (clearly Mark tells us right off the bat that he is interpreting scripture and not historical events—it is not inferred but explicitly stated).
How much this happens and whether or not the whole of the Gospel of Mark, for instance, was written with the intent of being read in a similar fashion as Lucian’s Philopseudes is something that needs to be brought into question. It is here where the investigation lies. When I specifically wrote “and how much of the Gospel can be traced back to models” I was referring directly to this sort of study. If all of the Gospel of Mark is written from models in a semiotic way, the Gospel is not simply “Jesus’ story”, as April insists. Indeed, when April asks “would we expect otherwise?” she misses the point all together. “What we expect” is exactly what needs to be brought into question and consideration. What would the readers of Mark have expected? What did the readers of Tobit expect?
April thirdly says that
“It doesn’t matter a hoot whether the early Christians thought Jesus to be a real human being or an angel or a god. They in fact thought all these things, and what these represent are theological interpretations. They may be interpretations laid on an historical figure just as well as not. This argument cannot tell us whether or not Jesus existed.”
The problem here is that April would rather throw up her hands in defeat than find out “what this argument can tell us”—as it were. The questions have never been investigated, so there is no knowing what the evidence will reveal when examined in an unbiased manner. Saying “so what?” is exactly the attitude that will stunt all historical questions. Imagine if scholars stopped asking questions? Well, April would not have much to publish on. Worse yet, it allows for evangelicals to erroneously continue to suggest the answer to these questions constitutes the sum of “because it happened”. These are society’s memories we’re dealing with and it is our duty to treat these questions responsibly. Being intellectually lazy about them is not the way scholars should be handling them.
But lets step back a second. It will be important, once again, to revise April’s context. I never once said that “the original Christian sect expected a spiritual savior.“ My words were far more precise.
“[Mythicists examine] Jewish socio-cultural studies in the Hellenistic and Roman periods (did the Jews of the original “Christian” sect expect a historical savior or a spiritual one?”
Notice the difference? I made the distinction between spiritual and historical for a reason. If it could be determined that that early proto-Christians (like Paul) thought their Jesus was crucified on a heavenly plane (the “Jerusalem above”) instead of a hill outside Jerusalem on earth that would be a pretty big deal. Paul, assuming he wrote the letters and is accurately dated to the middle of the first century, is our earliest known source to the origin of Christian tradition. If he did not know of any historical Jesus, that would turn the idea of a historical core to the Gospels on its head, would it not? It would at the very least make a noticeable dent.
April is right that early Christians thought all sorts of things, but they thought these things over an extended period of time and continue to think all sorts of things today, too (the revival of the Gnostic movement in America is one example of this). The point is not about what Marcion thought, or what Origin or Justin Martyr thought, or what the Mandeans, the Manichaens, or the Cathars thought, nor Ted Haggard or Rick Warren; its about what the original Christians (whoever they were) thought. I explicitly stated that the focus of one of the Mythicist investigations was the original Christians, not the ones who came later. Certainly this question alone will spawn dozens more questions (who were these first Christians? Do we have any record of them? Where did they originate from? Did Paul convert into this sect or did he convert into a different sect derived from a later religious meme?). But these questions would never be asked, let alone known, if we all had April’s same cavalier attitude.
April finishes up with more apathy.
“Religious trends change quickly over time. So what. Some do. Some don’t. And in each case, these should be tracked and evaluated. This tracking would tell us a lot about early Christian construction of their religion, but Jesus’ existence? Come on.“
She derives another ad hoc argument from thin air and talks past me. My original point was thus:
“[Mythicists examine] religious-meme change (how quickly did religious trends change and how much could they have changed over that period of time—for example, euhemerizing a legendary figure of Jesus into a historical setting).”
Where did I ever say “religious trends change quickly”? The whole point of this particular examination is to see how quickly these memes change and how often! I think it can be argued conclusively and persuasively that Paul did not know of a historical Jesus—that he only knew of a spiritual being that revealed himself to him. The “tracking” of this change (from a spiritual Jesus to a euhemerized Jesus) is exactly what Mythicists investigate and what the Jesus Project should inquire about (i.e. is there a reason to doubt Paul’s knowledge of a historical Jesus? Etc…). If April is going to continually ignore vital questions, misrepresent valid points of investigation, this project will never get on its feet. Instead, we will be grid-locked in a never ending blogersation talking past each other in an ad hoc war.
I have to ask April to carefully read the articles she wants to openly discuss publicly. If she is going to attack a position, she should at least know more about it first. Mythicists, as I have shown, are not coming up with conclusions beyond what the evidence can tell us. That is an illusion of some scholars who still have not yet read the arguments—apparently, not even those arguments they are directly addressing. Instead, mythicists are dealing with the evidence, asking questions that have been grossly ignored or taken for granted. I do not think that any of the mythicists taking part in the Jesus project are working towards the goal where we can definitively say that Jesus did not exist. It may be that the investigation (as a whole) concludes this (or at least, that there is room to doubt historicity), but that is the community (not mythicists alone). As G.A. Wells put it, “whatever the final upshot of the debate may be, there are good reasons for at least doubting [the historical Jesus].” That is all, I think, mythicists really want. I don’t think that is asking more than the evidence can give. In fact, I think that is what the evidence suggests.
